KakaoTalk lets users turn the profile of someone who has died into a memorial account. Facebook, Instagram and other major social networks offer similar options to preserve a deceased user's account as a space for remembrance. Deciding what happens to the traces we leave online after death is no longer a question for the distant future.
"The Afterlife of Data," a newly released book, calls this shift the "post-mortal condition." The dead, once confined to cemeteries, now return to the daily lives of the living through social media accounts, photos stored on smartphones and records of online activity.
As humans settled into agricultural societies, they found ways to preserve the remains of their ancestors and coexist with the dead. The author argues that a similar transformation is under way in the digital age. By the mid-2060s, Facebook accounts belonging to the dead could outnumber those of the living, according to one projection. Posts and conversations from a person's lifetime remain, and artificial intelligence chatbots trained on a deceased person's records now allow conversations to continue after death. Death no longer means the disappearance of one's digital traces.
What draws the author's attention is how the persistence of memory has become a business opportunity. The book argues that social media companies maintain their bond with users by preserving the traces of the dead. Online platforms hold powerful commercial value precisely because they are places where people can find those they love, whether living or dead. It is a chilling warning that even mourning and remembrance can be absorbed into corporate revenue models.
That leaves a thorny problem: what to keep and what to erase. Records an individual wanted deleted while alive may become important historical material for later generations. Conversely, keeping private conversations and photographs in the name of preserving the record may run counter to the wishes of the deceased. The privacy of the dead can collide with the historical interests of future generations. Nor can the costs and environmental burden of storing all data in perpetuity be overlooked.
Who owns a digital legacy, and who holds the authority to decide what is preserved and what is deleted? Current technology and institutions are designed around the interests of the living, yet data outlasts generations. Handling digital remains ultimately comes down to deciding what past future generations will remember.
Deciding who manages and deletes a digital legacy, the book stresses, goes beyond simple data housekeeping and amounts to controlling the memory of future generations. It also raises the question of how society should govern records of the dead that have been left in the hands of companies.
Franz Kafka asked in his will that his works be destroyed, but his literary executor, Max Brod, defied him and published them instead. That choice profoundly shaped literary history, and it starkly illustrates how the wishes of the dead can clash with the values of those who come after. The book notes that this old dilemma has grown more complicated in the digital era. In an age when we do not disappear after death, the question of what to leave behind leads, in the end, to another: with what rights and responsibilities will we handle the memory of others? Priced at 19,000 won.