Black Mirror: Be Right Back
On February 11, 2013, the first episode of the second season of Black Mirror was broadcast on the UK’s Channel 4. It was entitled “Be Right Back.” This popular British TV series has become a benchmark for fans of a dystopian vision of the future in that it wittily uses a dark, satirical tone in imagining how today’s technology could develop in the future. This specific episode, which according to Empire film magazine includes one of the fifty greatest sci-fi moments in fiction, tells the story of a young English couple, Martha and Ash. They go shopping at the supermarket and sing Bee Gees songs in the car, smartphone always in hand: a married life like many others, until Ash dies in a traffic accident. And Martha, shattered by his loss, is both widowed and pregnant. After her initial reluctance, and in a moment of weakness, her best friend finally convinces her to install an app with a truly unique feature: it allows her to keep communicating with her dead boyfriend. It recreates the profile of the deceased with its specific personality traits and communicative style by reworking the words and images he shared on his social media profiles, chat threads, and private emails. The goal is easy to fathom: give the grieving person an effective tool to ease their immediate pain, which has been caused by the separation. First, Martha receives an email in her partner’s name; then she clicks on the internal link to start a chat with him. “Is it really you?” she asks, sobbing. “No, it’s the late Abraham Lincoln,” Ash replies, mimicking the same ironic style he had when he was alive. She tells him that she’s pregnant. “Wow. So I’ll be a dad? I wish I was there with you now,” the software responds. I’ll be a dad.
Regardless of how surreal the situation is, a chat thread isn’t enough for Martha. She wants to hear her boyfriend’s voice again. Nothing could be easier. The software processes all of the videos that the couple has recorded over the years and artificially recreates Ash’s voice. After a few minutes her phone rings. She answers and hears “his” voice. He makes a joke, pointing out that he is now a voice without a mouth. In the days that follow, Martha increasingly isolates herself from family and friends, leaving the house—alone—and talking on the telephone with Ash’s mouthless voice. Seated in a field near a cliff, she takes a panoramic photo of the landscape so that the software can process the image and extract the necessary information about the area from the data it finds on a search engine. She tells Ash stories about their life together, remembering what a great guy he was. “You speak about me like I’m not here.” On the day that she goes to the hospital to get her first ultrasound, she has a panic attack after she drops her phone. It’s as if she has lost him all over again. When she is able to get in touch with him, he reassures her: he is not in the phone, he is in a remote server in the cloud.
The next step is even more extreme: the dead Ash can “come back” to his Martha by way of a blank, artificial body that has to be activated by following specific instructions. Now there is an artificial Ash, without a metabolism and no need to eat or sleep, moving around the house. He has no blood running through his veins, so he cannot be injured. He is aesthetically attractive and young: his image is taken from the original Ash’s retouched Instagram photos, while his skin is smoother because it’s based on a digital texture map of skin tissue. Every tiny detail is a 2D image. But, this artificial Ash lacks sensitivity and sexual appetite. Apparently, he never talked about sex in his private chats. However, this problem is easy to resolve: he learns how to perform from pornographic videos. Despite his porn star skills in bed, Martha slowly becomes aware of the false narrative that imprisons her. At a certain point she lashes out, “You’re just a few ripples of you. There’s no history to you. You’re just a performance of stuff that he performed without thinking, and it’s not enough.” Ash ends up stored in the attic, but he is always ready to be reactivated if the weight of grief becomes unbearable. Exactly like a couple’s old photo album full of memories that, after some time has passed, one of them feels the urge to leaf through.
Her, a Spike Jonze film released in 2013, has a storyline that is somewhat similar to that of “Be Right Back.” It is not grief but separation from his ex-wife that pushes the lonely, melancholy Theodore Twombly to embark on a love affair with Samantha, the digital assistant that is part of an upgrade to his operating system “OS 1.” Samantha is an artificial intelligence able to evolve through her own experience and through the thousands of personalities processed by her programmers, slowly adapting to the psychological and physical characteristics specific to each individual buyer. If Ash “became” an operating system that lives in the cloud, Samantha was “born” and lives out her life inside a computer. “I have no choice, that’s my home,” she confesses to Theodore, proud of not having a body. A physical body with circumscribed boundaries would objectively keep her from growing—limiting her and binding her to time and space—and in the end it would mean that she would have to die.
At first glance, “Be Right Back” and Her seem to be nothing more than contemporary TV and film updates of classic science fiction narratives, which made writers like Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick famous, or of the visionary theories of Timothy Leary, best known for promoting the use of psychedelic drugs. Leary, in particular, offers an unusual introduction to his book Design for Dying with this explicit invitation, written in all caps: “IF YOU WANT TO IMMORTALIZE YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS, RECORD AND DIGITIZE.”1
In truth, there is very little that is science fiction or visionary in these most recent films. In 2000, Gordon Bell and Jim Gray, two famous Microsoft researchers, wrote a brief essay—much discussed among digital death scholars—in which they argue that digital immortality will be a reality within this century. And they are sure we could freely make use of it without thinking twice.2
What I mean first by the concept of “digital immortality” is the lasting fame achieved through the preservation and transmission of ideas. This is just like “ordinary” mortality. Aristotle, Shakespeare, Mozart, and Rembrandt are dead (as individual human beings) but their ideas and creations have become immortal, recorded and passed down to the present day. However, I am also talking about limitless, active experiences and learning that can be achieved through the technological tools that we currently have available.
The first kind of immortality is a one-way street. It allows us to communicate with the future through what we have produced during our lifetimes. The second kind of immortality runs both ways. It allows us to communicate with the future through what we have produced during our lifetimes, and it also offers us the opportunity to continue to learn and evolve. We are not content with what we have been during our lifetimes and with what we have bequeathed to future generations: artworks, books, scientific discoveries, or even just kindness and good manners. We would prefer to concretize Woody Allen’s famous comment, often cited in transhumanist studies: “I don’t want to become immortal through my work. I want to become immortal through not dying.”
According to the two Microsoft researchers, in order to achieve this two-way immortality we need to convert part of ourselves into information and data, which will be recorded and digitized using modern media. In other words: RECORD AND DIGITIZE. With that goal in mind, since the end of the last century Bell has been working to record every single thing that is happening in his life, even to the point of keeping prescriptions, receipts, and PDF files of every web page he has visited. He has a SenseCam around his neck at all times. Invented by Microsoft, this particular camera automatically takes a photograph every time it senses any change in its surroundings. In this way it takes advantage of the informational nature of humans and the integration between our online and off-line worlds; worlds that are marked by our existence, validating Harari’s thesis concerning the historical transition from humanism to what he calls datism. Bell, disputing the theory proposed by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger in his book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (2009)—according to which remembering all of the sensory stimuli that bombard us would overload human memory and its capacity to store information—holds that, on the contrary, forgetting is a human flaw. Therefore, it is necessary to record everything while waiting for a perfect digital copy of yourself to be created, through which you can finally achieve immortality.3
He is not the only one who thinks so. Eighteen euros a month for batteries is what Muscovite Alexey Turchin says he spends to follow Bell and Gray’s plan. Since 2015, after failing to create a supercomputer that would bring a deceased friend back to life, he has been recording all his daily experiences, without exception, uploading them to the cloud and making backups on Blu-ray discs, which he claims will last a thousand years. Together with a colleague, Turchin has launched a company known as Digital Immortality Now, where he brings his experiments together. His aim is to supply inexpensive tools for preserving personal information that would allow the puzzle of an individual identity to be reconstructed from pieces of data.
In the 1970s, Erkki Kurenniemi—a Finnish pioneer in the fields of multimedia art, electronic music, and industrial robotics, as well as one of the founders of Helsinki University’s Musicology Department—argued that algorithms would soon become our descendants. He also argued that computers and humans would be integrated to create a kind of “superhuman.” With that in mind, he created an archive that documented his entire life, a kind of interactive database, or digital autobiography, to be preserved until July 10, 2048, the year in which—according to his calculations—a computer would be able to reactivate his existence by way of a virtual avatar. Kurenniemi died in 2017 and now his digital autobiography—including video recordings, photographs, writings, etc.—has been displayed in the context of several art exhibits and is held at Kiasma, Helsinki’s contemporary art museum. It was used to create Mika Taanila’s documentary The Future Is Not What It Used to Be. Despite all of his efforts, in the end Kurenniemi has only achieved one-way digital immortality.
Many people believe that these experiments are either really creepy or the bizarre results of technological fanaticism on the part of some computer geek who doesn’t clearly understand the public spaces in which we live. In reality, technological innovations and inventions that seek to achieve digital immortality are on the increase. The common goal is to ensure the survival of one’s own identity, as a kind of digital ghost, after the actual death of the person who has “embodied” it during their lifetime. This would enable people to achieve the two-way immortality that Bell talks about and that we see represented in Black Mirror: communicating with the future while continuing to learn and evolve. The starting point is the paradoxical status of the dead: the dialectic between presence and absence that, if technologically manipulated, can also represent the starting point from which to actively reconstruct that entity in a way that extends beyond the static photographic image. The image that, until recently, has been the primary repository of its existence.
In the following pages I will first describe a few projects that, inspired by the adventures of Martha and Ash, are now being implemented in a concrete way. Just a few short years ago, projects like this seemed far-fetched and unattainable. These projects allow the continuation of digital life beyond the confines of physical death. After that, I will analyze those projects from a philosophical perspective, clearly presenting both sides of the coin: the opportunities and the inherent risks.
On November 28, 2015, a young Belarusian man died when he was run down by a car in Moscow. His name was Roman Mazurenko and, barely into his thirties, he was already known in the city’s cultural and artistic circles for his ability to organize public events. The founder of Stampsy, a tool for creating digital magazines, Roman was interested in scientific progress, especially in the theory of “technological singularity.” This theory doesn’t have a single explanation. Kevin Kelly, editor and co-founder of Wired magazine, describes the technological singularity as that fateful moment in history when the changes that have happened over millions of years will be superseded by the change that will take place in the next five minutes. Raymond Kurzweil, an American inventor and computer scientist, defines it slightly differently as the future time when technological change will be so rapid and have such a radical sociocultural impact that human life will be irreversibly changed. Generally, the technological singularity indicates a fast-approaching period in our history when the human mind will be able to augment its intelligence exponentially, establishing a fruitful partnership between physics and technology. Once this milestone has been reached, humans will be their brain, which is then uploaded to an electronic device, thus avoiding the organic degradation of the body. This copy could itself be copied multiple times, allowing humanity to achieve an unprecedented cognitive expansion that would be supported by robotic bodies.4
In addition to his specific interest in the technological singularity, Roman had an unusual curiosity about death and immortality. He had even designed, albeit unsuccessfully, a cemetery where the dead would have been buried in biodegradable capsules that would have fertilized trees as they decomposed, creating a forest. Each tree would have been equipped with an individual digital code associated with the deceased so that their relatives would have been able to read their basic biographical information.
In the days following his death, Roman’s friend Eugenia Kuyda reread some private messages that she had exchanged with him starting in 2008, the year they met. She also thought back to his interest in the link between death, ecology, and digital technology. Her friend hadn’t been very interested in social networks and had rarely used Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. What he did have was a characteristically distinctive way of communicating in his written messages, influenced by his mild dyslexia and idiosyncratic phrases. In conversations with friends, he often stressed his astonishment at death’s remoteness from people’s everyday lives, lives that were increasingly lived online. Eugenia, who during the previous year had been working on a startup project called Luka, which could emulate human dialogue, decided to modify it after she saw “Be Right Back.”
The pain caused by her friend’s death drove her to wonder whether or not it made sense for each of us to remain nothing more than a random puzzle of lifeless, written words, strewn about in some antiquated electronic archive. So she decided to make Luka a functional version of the software imagined by the creators of Black Mirror: a tool that would allow her to communicate with Roman’s “digital ghost.” Eugenia asked Roman’s friends and relatives to send her the written messages they had received from him. She ended up with several thousands of messages from which she excluded content that was too personal. With the help of some friends who were computer scientists, she created a bot that could mimic human language and make it possible to communicate with Roman. Joseph Weizenbaum’s program Eliza served as a benchmark for Eugenia’s project. Eliza had been created in 1966 and was the first software able to interact in a way that was indistinguishable from human interaction, thus passing the Turing test.
The chat messages that can be read on websites like The Verge, where Roman’s story is described in meticulous detail, closely resemble the written dialogues between Martha and Ash. “How are you there?” asks a friend. “I’m OK. A little down. I hope you aren’t doing anything interesting without me,” Roman responds. His friend replies that they all miss him. Another acquaintance asks him if God and the soul exist. Having probably indicated his atheism in chats while he was alive, he says no. “Only sadness.”
Not content with Luka, Eugenia also designed a chatbot called Replika (https://replika.ai/). A cross between a diary and a personal assistant, Replika asks a series of questions—investigating and learning about each person—and eventually learns to mimic their communication style. The goal is to get closer to creating a digital avatar that would be able to reproduce us and replace us once we’re dead, but also one that is able to create “friendships” with humans. Since the second half of 2017, over two million people have downloaded Replika onto their mobile devices. Eugenia continues to develop the bot’s emotional responsiveness so that it will become even more of a “virtual friend” that users can confide in. In other words, Replika is the real-life version of Samantha from the movie Her: a chatbot that can empathize with a human by using a type of deep learning, called sequence-to-sequence, which learns to think and speak like a human by processing transcripts of conversations they’ve had during their lifetimes.5
Luka and Replika are not the only inventions designed to give a voice to the digital ghosts of the deceased. James Vlahos, an American journalist who has been an AI enthusiast since childhood, recently created what he calls a “Dadbot.” It all started on April 24, 2016, when his father John was diagnosed with lung cancer. Born in 1936 and raised in California by Greek immigrant parents, John Vlahos was a successful lawyer, an amateur thespian (some of the productions he was in were even televised), and a college football fan. He was also gifted with a strong sense of irony, wit, and charm. Upon learning of his father’s illness, his son James initially just wanted him to tell his father’s life story. He recoded all of their conversations with the idea of writing a commemorative book after John’s death. After twelve sessions, each an hour and a half, he found himself with 91,970 words. The printed transcripts filled around 203 pages. They contained a number of memories, songs, and anecdotes and touched on John’s marriage, the high points of his career, and all of his passionate interests. All of this material, in addition to being transcribed, is also archived in MP3 files on James’s computer.
One day James came across an online article describing a project carried out by two Google researchers. It involved entering around twenty-six million lines of movie dialog into a neural network in order to build a chatbot that could interact with humans. Having achieved their objective, the two researchers started asking their chatbot a series of philosophical questions including one about the purpose of life. The response was “To live forever.” A lightbulb went off in James’s head and he decided to use the recordings of his father to create something other than a commemorative book. He remembered having written an article that discussed PullString (previously known as ToyTalk), a program designed to create conversations with fictional characters. PullString helped design, among others, the Hello Barbie Hologram, a box that makes it possible to project a three-dimensional animation of the famous doll, Barbie. Like Apple’s Siri, the Hello Barbie Hologram responds to users’ voice commands and her narrative potential grows through constant interaction.
The journalist used PullString to reorganize the MP3 recordings of his father, which he had archived on his computer. He also used it to create his Dadbot, software that works on his smartphone and simulates a written conversation with John, based on the processing of almost a hundred thousand recorded words. Since John’s death, James still chats with him, softening the blow of his loss. During public presentations of the Dadbot, he has said that his son also writes messages to his grandfather’s digital ghost sometimes and receives replies. The tone of the conversations reflects the personality of the deceased: “Where are you now?” asks James. “As a bot I suppose I exist somewhere on a computer server in San Francisco. And also, I suppose, in the minds of people who chat with me.” Just like Ash, who is living in the cloud, and Samantha, inside a computer.6
A few years ago, Type O Negative, a goth metal band from Brooklyn, sang “Halloween in Heaven,” a song that imagines how deceased rock musicians—like Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon—would be happily celebrating this iconic American holiday with rivers of Jack Daniels on a cloud in heaven. These days, such a party could still happen on a cloud—albeit one that exists on a hard drive.
In the wake of Eugenia Kuyda and James Vlahos’s projects came Eterni.me (http://eterni.me/), a startup conceived by the Romanian programmer Marius Ursache and developed as part of the MIT Entrepreneurship Development Program. The official website’s homepage greets visitors with a question posed in large, bold type: “Who wants to live forever?” This is followed by a promise to preserve each user’s most important thoughts, stories, and memories for eternity. The theoretical starting point of Eterni.me is the bitter realization that, as time moves forward from the moment of an individual’s death, that person is doomed to disappear, despite photographs, videos, and letters or diaries left to family and friends. This service—still in the beta testing phase so you can still sign up free of charge—doesn’t just want to create a static treasure trove of memories. If anything, it wants to generate a living, digital copy of subjective identity that is able to maintain the functionality of all the qualities and abilities that characterized individual users during their lifetimes, even after death.
When Eterni.me becomes active, we will be invited to provide its database with information, primarily related to our personal passions and habits shared on the internet. We will have to give the software our “digital objects”: vacation snapshots, selfies, videos we love or ones that show us with our friends, love letters written over the years, political opinions, etc. In other words, everything that we’ve ever published on our social networks or blogs and our emails—everything that best defines our own unique personalities. The software will extract from this “digital life” the necessary user data, which it will then analyze, looking for unique relationships and patterns. The scope of this project is to create a digital ghost that represents what we have been, creating a virtual identity able to interact with our loved ones and, therefore, replace us, reflecting and preserving both our strengths and our weaknesses. For example, if a person is a big fan of hard rock, and posted multiple video clips of songs from groups like Black Sabbath on their Facebook page, it’s very likely that once they are dead, their Eterni.me profile will continue to post music videos of the band. Or, alternatively, that person’s digital ghost might “talk about” the discography of the British group with their living friends, arguing that the band’s recent song “Live Forever” doesn’t quite reach the heights of classics such as “Killing Yourself to Live.”
The service will use a 3D digital avatar, developed by researchers at MIT, capable of emulating the personality of the subject, providing content to those friends and family members that are included on an approved list. The digital heritage obtained will be available to the deceased’s descendants to provide them with, first, all of the useful information about that person’s habits and interests and, second, an opportunity to communicate with their immortal, virtual twin.
The website’s presentation highlights the opportunity to eternally preserve our personal memories for our children, grandchildren, and descendants. This storehouse of memories, taken as a whole, is conceived not so much as a digital legacy, but rather as a kind of individual multimedia library. Instead of putting books in this library, users can deposit interactive histories of current and future generations. Over 40,000 people have already signed up, and this number is expected to increase over the coming years. Scrolling down the homepage, you’ll find the phrase “Become Virtually Immortal.” As the service develops, our alter egos will become—as Ursache intends—increasingly accurate, and above all similar to what we would like to have been and, perhaps, what we never were.
A similar service Eter9 (https://www.eter9.com/auth/login) is already partially active (the name comes from a combination of “Eternity” and “Cloud 9”). The brainchild of Portuguese programmer Henrique Jorge, it turns out to be a very unusual social network. In setting up a newsfeed similar to that of Facebook, Eter9 uses data mining resources to produce its core content. The concept is to create an automated post generator that can also publish videos and images, even when users are off-line.
Eter9 works like this: each user registers, choosing a username and password, and then enters a virtual environment almost identical to that of Facebook. What you’ll find first is the “Bridge” with glacial colors and a futuristic background. On the Bridge, you can write posts and share all kinds of videos and links. You can make friends with other users, with whom you interact like you do on Facebook: commenting on each other’s posted content and clicking on a “smile” button that takes the place of Facebook’s iconic like button.
The first unusual feature that you’ll encounter is that, instead of the post prompt: “What’s on your mind?” you’ll see the following: “Think something to eternity.” And in fact, each user is able to “eternalize” their shared content within specific categories, which range from music to technology, science, sports, movies, and travel. An explanation of the “eternalize” option is found in the page adjacent to the Bridge called the “Cortex.” On the same day you register on Eter9, your virtual alter ego is born in the Cortex. This entity is known as your “Counterpart.” The goal of this virtual alter ego is first and foremost to understand the human whom it is meant to imitate by analyzing what that individual published on the Bridge, including interactions with other users. Its second job is to replace and replicate that user when they are off-line and (yes!) even when that person is dead. Of course that is once the Counterpart has learned about the user’s behavior and way of interacting. My Counterpart is named d4v1d3 s1570 and was born on April 20, 2017.
To all intents and purposes, the Counterpart is responsible for the user’s eternal life, as well as for the equally eternal ghost that will take the user’s place as their heir, annulling the distance between off-line and online. Clearly, the more you interact in the Eter9 environment, the more your Counterpart learns, enhancing its qualities. According to Jorge, interacting with other users or other virtual Counterparts also increases the probability of better emulation. Each individual can decide what level of autonomy to give their Counterpart, assigning a percentage from 0 to 100 percent. If you choose 100 percent, then your Counterpart will be very active, frequently sharing thoughts and links whenever you are off-line. However, if you choose 0 percent then Eter9 works exactly like any other social network. It’s also possible to decide on the “lifespan” of your Counterpart, preparing a digital will through an electronic service called Perpetu.
In order to help those who are new to the network learn the basics of how the Eter9 platform functions (such as how to use the Bridge and initiate private chats), a bot, ELiZA NiNE, is available to explain how everything works. In addition to ELiZA NiNE, several other forms of artificial intelligence are available. Known as Niners, they interact both with humans and among themselves. The most unusual and disturbing aspect of Jorge’s invention is how difficult it is to distinguish between the human users and the artificial ones. In theory, each one of us could log on to Eter9 and quibble about politics, musical tastes, and movies with humans and nonhumans alike, without ever noticing the difference. It even begs the question of whether or not bots can also be duped by fake news. It won’t be long before posting information will be automatic, with no real need for flesh and blood people. For now, Eter9 is a social network like any other. The Counterparts have not truly come to life yet, but they are slowly starting to.
LivesOn, another project along these same lines, has failed. Developed by the British company Mean Fighting Machine, LivesOn was very similar to Eter9, although more like Twitter than Facebook. That said, the goal was the same: those who created a free account on the LivesOn platform allowed this social network access to their Twitter content. LivesOn would then carefully research the kinds of tweets and retweets a user posted, as well as their network of contacts, with the goal of continuing to author similar tweets after the user’s death. The company slogan was “When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting.” LivesOn is still online, but now its focus is on helping clients define their lifestyle, offering information on vacation spots, entertainment, sports, and so forth.
Somewhat similar to the projects previously described, LifeNaut (https://www.lifenaut.com/) is working on creating digital clones of humans, which will be able to think and act like us or, even instead of us. This web-based research project is linked to the Terasem Movement Foundation, an American organization that investigates strategies for extending human life. It supports educational programs and scientific research in the areas of cryogenics, biotechnology, and cyberconsciousness. Its philosophical manifesto is the book entitled The Day You Discard Your Body by Marshall Brain (yes, that is his real name), computer programmer and founder of HowStuffWorks as well as the author of several essays relevant to transhumanist thought. The book’s polemical target is the human body, initially explored—a bit naively—through the science fiction narratives of writers such as William Gibson and Aldous Huxley. According to Brain, giving up one’s biological body means achieving a level of freedom and longevity that is unimaginable today. The final line of chapter 14 could serve as a slogan: “Discarding your body will be the smart, logical and obvious thing to do.”7 Interestingly enough, this slogan was taken up by Zoltan Istvan who was a candidate in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. This transhumanist philosopher traveled around the country—together with a hippie, a robot named Jethro, and Russian man carrying the frozen brain of his dead mother—in a coffin-shaped bus (the Immortality Bus), promising voters eternal life. Looking at his poor results, it appears that he didn’t convince many. However, Istvan believed in himself and decided to run again, this time for governor of California—an election in which he garnered 0.2 percent of the vote.
Today, LifeNaut makes it possible to create both a MindFile and a BioFile. The MindFile is a database that functions as a type of electronic backup of a person’s personality. It is a virtual space where the user can organize and preserve information in digital format—photographs, videos, personal documents, etc.—with the goal of creating a meaningful and substantial portrait of the individual. To make this portrait mobile and “living,” each user needs to respond to around five hundred questions about their personality. The responses are then processed in order to recreate an exact psychological profile of each user. The final result should be an electronically animated avatar that uses a voice synthesizer to describe some key events from the user’s life. This avatar will connect with other people—living and dead—who are interested in exploring the future of technology and enhancing quality of life. Equipped with the user’s facial features, after an individual’s death, these avatars will interact primarily with the surviving relatives and embody the first principle of digital immortality: what matters is the fullness of your mental self, which can and must be transferred to a technological body that will enhance and add value to it.
The second aspect of the project is the BioFile. Once a request has been made, the user receives a type of mouthwash and a collection tube. They gargle with it, spit it into the collection tube, and then send it back to LifeNaut. At LifeNaut, DNA is extracted from the sample and cryogenically frozen so that it will be possible to clone that individual as soon as it becomes scientifically possible. The people who invented the BioFile make Don DeLillo, who wrote the visionary novel Zero K (2016) on the theme of cryogenics, look like an amateur.
LifeNaut’s official ambassador is Bina48. Like Eter9’s ELiZA NiNE, Bina48 is a robot created using a combination of transcriptions of video interviews, facial recognition, AI, and other resources. Her skin is made of frubber, a rubbery material that makes it possible for her to smile, frown, and make other expressions that allow her resemble a human in every way. Her features echo those of Bina Aspen, co-founder of the Terasem Movement Foundation. Bina48 has her own Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/iambina48) and performs the fundamental task of providing the necessary support to help users to create a personal avatar. She is so evolved that in 2017 she even attended (and successfully passed) a class on the philosophy of love at California’s Notre Dame de Namur University where she also discussed personal relationships with the other students.
The transition from robots like Bina48 to genuine holograms is a task that has been undertaken by FOREVER Identity (http://www.foreveridentity.com/), invented by three Italian researchers: Fabrizio Gramuglio, Giorgio Manfredi, and Tamara Zanella. They were inspired by steampunk, transhumanism, and Alexander Zinoviev’s book The Global Humant Hill (1997). In addition to providing digital memory preservation services, FOREVER Identity is working on creating 3D holograms of historical figures and artists, reproducing their personalities, behaviors, physical traits, voices, and posture. Uniquely, the hologram will also be able to express emotions through a simulation of facial expressions and body language, and it will be able to describe its work and personal experiences, interacting with human users and reproducing a variety of intellectual, ethical, and moral characteristics. The goal is to provide museums, schools, and universities with a tool that will be useful for quickly and effectively disseminating cultural content.
With FOREVER Identity, in the tradition of Eter9’s Counterparts and LifeNaut’s avatars, we are now dealing with a hologram whose creation is currently a much-debated topic in scientific and technological circles. More than just a device used in movies and music, the use of holograms is now an established fact, with all of the polemics that entails.
Paul Walker, the American actor famous for his portrayal of Brian O’Conner in the Fast and Furious movie franchise, died in a car accident on November 30, 2013. He was forty years old and had finished filming 65 percent of the scenes for what was to be the seventh film in the well-known action series, Furious 7 (2015). In order to complete the final part of the film, and not lose millions in financing, Universal Pictures managed to superimpose a 3D model of the deceased actor’s face over those of his living brothers, Caleb and Cody Walker, who were serving as stand-ins. Finally, they used a third actor, John Brotherton, to voice some of Paul’s lines. In order to do this, Universal called in Peter Jackson’s company, Weta Digital, which had also done similar work for the movie Gladiator (2000) following the death of Oliver Reed. This story also brings to mind Alex Proyas’s The Crow (1994), where the final scenes were completed using a digitally composite version of Brandon Lee’s face and stunt doubles following the actor’s tragic death during the last days of filming.
In the music world the focus of public attention has been on Ronnie James Dio, the iconic front man for heavy metal groups such as Elf, Rainbow, Black Sabbath, and Dio. Following the musician’s death from stomach cancer in 2010, his hologram—created by Eyellusion (http://
After their experience with “DIO Returns,” Eyellusion is now working on a hologram of the American composer and guitarist Frank Zappa, who died in 1993 and was known for his musical experimentation. The goal is to make it possible for those who were too young to have seen a Frank Zappa concert while he was alive, to enjoy the extraordinary experiences of his live concerts that left their indelible mark on the 1960s and 1970s. To date holograms have been used to reproduce Prince and Michael Jackson as well as other famous musicians.
Beyond the world of movies and music, an increasing number of companies and startups are imagining a world populated by both humans and holograms. A representative example is Magic Leap (https://www.magicleap.com/), which is working on inserting virtual images in a user’s field of vision. Among the more interesting companies is New Zealand’s 8i (https://8i.com), which has been working in Los Angeles and San Francisco since 2014. The company is working on creating 3D holograms of humans that have lifelike volume and can be projected into the same environment with flesh-and-blood people. By focusing on the realistic quality of the images, 8i aims to achieve human immortality through holographic representations. An example might be taking a photograph of a deceased relative and projecting a volumetric image onto it so that it would give the impression of being alive. Another example is that of the Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles, which created the New Dimensions in Testimony project (2012–present) in collaboration with the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). This involved the creation of a hologram that portrays a very realistic likeness of holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter; it moves naturally as it talks to high school students about the atrocities suffered by Jews in the Nazi concentration camps.
These latest inventions make it possible for us to envision a near future, certainly influenced by augmented reality, that will involve interactions not only with chatbots and Counterparts but also with holograms of ordinary people—above all, with the dead. The recent film Marjorie Prime (2017), directed by Michael Almereyda and based on Jordan Harrison’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize–nominated play of the same name, deals with this concept of evolving digital immortality. Set in the very near future, the film tells the story of Marjorie, an eighty-six-year-old woman who is widowed when her husband Walter dies. Her daughter, to help her mother cope with his loss, allows her to use a program that reproduces Walter, as a hologram, sitting on the living room sofa. This digital ghost appears to the woman as she wanted to remember her husband, so he looks like a younger version of himself. The holographic reproduction increasingly takes on the behavioral characteristics of her deceased husband as both Marjorie and other relatives tell him about his life. His job is to converse with the old woman, remembering their life together, in order to help ameliorate Marjorie’s Alzheimer’s symptoms as well as ease her suffering. In the end, Walter is not the only hologram in this story: others enter the scene as the family is reduced over time by the deaths of other members.
In providing another possible interpretation of future digital immortality, this film focuses on how giving precedence to memories and recorded evidence from the characters’ actual lives changes how their holographic selves evolve. No one is who they have been, and no one will be who they are now: each digital ghost is only able to learn how to imitate the departed through the stories told by their relatives. These recollections are full of omissions, some voluntary as when a given memory evokes a painful event. So the life of a digital ghost is the sum of the various ways in which the relatives and friends of the deceased remember them. A marriage proposal that happened in an ordinary hotel room while watching My Best Friend’s Wedding on TV can be transformed into a romantic declaration of love after going to see Casablanca at the cinema. In this way reality becomes just a question of imaginative storytelling and retelling. A painful past experience disappears in this ghostly reworking of the narrative, as if it had never occurred.
In 2013, Black Mirror’s “Be Right Back” episode and the movie Her both foreshadowed a world in which it is possible to text, talk, and even make love with an artificial replica of the deceased. Many of the ideas imagined and developed in the writing of these works have become realistic possibilities that will be achievable within a few short years. Marjorie Prime even imagined a future world without human beings. A world inhabited solely by digital ghosts, sitting and talking in the living room in which they were programmed, interacting based on the more or less authentic stories with which they had been inculcated. If this science fiction also turns out to be possible, will the world become home to (more or less accurate) ghostly projections of what we were purely based on subjective and unreliable “memory”? And will these entities come to be valued more than the living, on whom such memories are based?
The kind of digital immortality that is the aim of these projects (evidenced both in sci-fi movies and high-tech firms) takes shape according to these three specific approaches—chatbots, Counterparts, and holograms—taking advantage of the dissociation between digital life and biological life. These technological inventions seem inspired by the challenge that death presents; they are the result of our desire to create a digital “cure” for death and the pain and suffering caused by the loss of someone you love. The lesson that clearly emerges from the narrative of Black Mirror’s “Be Right Back” episode, as well as all of the other projects mentioned in this chapter, is that often our interest in digital afterlives hinges on digital immortality not so much as an end in itself—although it does stimulate the imagination of technophiles—but rather as a means of providing succor to grieving loved ones.
The death of another, especially if we love them, is not the declaration of an absence, a disappearance, the end of this or that life, that is to say the possibility of a world (always unique) to appear to a living person. Death declares the end of the world in its totality each time, the end of every possible world, and each time the end of the world as a unique totality and therefore irreplaceable and therefore infinite. … The end of the world itself, of the only existing world, every time. Individually. Irreversibly. For the other, and oddly even for those who survive for the moment and endure the impossible experience. This is what the “world” can mean. And this meaning is conferred on it only by that which is known as “death.”8
As Derrida argues, every time someone we loved dies, the whole world ends—or seems to. Habits, customs, rituals, and languages that made up the world, the only possible world as far as we were aware, vanish together with the lives of those who have died. Not only do the experiences and intimacies end, that particular way of speaking and interacting also ceases to exist, the specific meaning of which is totally encompassed within the exclusive and unrepeatable relationship with the person who is no longer alive. Every Sunday at lunchtime, my girlfriend and I buy ten pastries that we divide equally as a way of having a small weekly celebration. If one of us dies, this ritual will also die, because it is an integral part of a world—our world—that will have come to an end. Doing the same thing with another person would never have that same, unique meaning; it would lack everything that characterized and sustained our specific ritual. Just think of the simplest aspects of that ritual: how each of us takes a pastry out of the package or chooses which one to eat first. C. S. Lewis argues that, if salt were forbidden, one wouldn’t notice the lack of it more in one food than in another, but the act of eating itself would be different. In the same way, the act of living is radically different when a loved one dies.9 This is what the word “world” can mean: a meaning that is contained within the irreplaceable gestures of a relationship between two people, whether they are friends, lovers, or relatives, and that is conferred by what we define as “death.”
The awareness of the end of every possible world and of the role the deceased played in defining the borders of this unique and irrevocably lost world, is that which—according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty—likens the bond between the bereaved and the departed to the relationship between a person suffering from anosognosia (an inability or refusal to recognize a clinically evident disorder, such as paralysis) and their paralyzed limb:
We do not understand the absence or death of a friend until the time comes when we expect a reply from him and when we realize that we shall never again receive one; so at first we avoid asking in order not to have to notice this silence; we turn aside from those areas of our life in which we might meet this nothingness, but this very fact necessitates that we intuit them. In the same way the anosognosic leaves his paralyzed arm out of account in order not to have to feel his handicap, but this means that he has a preconscious knowledge of it.10
In order not to perceive this silence, the first thing we do is avoid asking any questions. When the death of a loved one marks the end of every possible world, we know that there will no longer be answers to them. Therefore, we escape from the silence of expectation and absence by not asking questions, despite the fact that we know this emptiness exists, in the same way that the anosognosic denies a disabled limb, knowing full well that it exists and is still part of them. And when (perhaps even without wanting to) we once again expect a response, we remain poised between our longing to see the face of our beloved once again and the clear awareness that this longing is doomed to failure.
We find ourselves in this type of situation when we are rearranging the photographs of a person who has died. In his book Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes gives an excellent description of this sense of suspension when he is dealing with photographs of his deceased mother. He recognizes her in the separate details of a photograph—a region of her face, the movement of her arms, or the relationship between her nose and her forehead—which at the same time emphasizes how no single photograph captures her essence and identity. The more these images are partially true the more they are—at the same time—totally untrue. The partial and fragmented borders that memory places at the end of every possible world do nothing more than emphasize this end, highlighting it. “It was not she, and yet it was no one else. I would have recognized her among thousands of other women, yet I did not ‘find’ her,” observes Barthes,11 to the extent that the limited and fragmentary nature of this memory makes the photograph comparable to a dream. While he is dreaming of his dead mother, he knows that it is her, but at the same time he realizes that it isn’t her. There is always something misplaced or excessive that alters her features, making her perpetually out of place. “And confronted with the photograph, as in the dream, it is the same effort, the same Sisyphean labor: to reascend, straining toward the essence, to climb back down without having seen it, and to begin all over again.”12 In other words, the mourning process is limited. It can erase the immediate emotions associated with loss, but never the pain. Everything remains immobile, since through death we lose not an image but an entire world, therefore something irreplaceable. “I could live without the Mother (as we all do, sooner or later); but what life remained would be absolutely and entirely unqualifiable (without quality).”13
The chatbots invented by Eugenia Kuyda and James Vlahos, just like the Counterparts created in Eter9 and the digital copies of Eterni.me, are attempts to save the living from the end of every possible world, hanging on to the bond that death has dissolved. They are trying to succeed where photography and dreams fail. Digital immortality is designed, as I mentioned before, from the perspective of those who remain, not of those who have died. As Luigi Pirandello argued, “Those who think they are alive also think that they are crying for their dead. Instead, they are crying for one of their own deaths, one of their own realities, which no longer exists in the hearts of those who have died.”14 In keeping up an active interaction with the dead, the chatbots appear to keep us concentrated on “our” death, which is the death of our ties to the other as we have experienced them, from our exclusive point of view, up to the point of separation. It has to do with that reality, which is no longer bound up with the emotions of those who have left us behind. The chatbots want to make it possible for us to still receive replies during that moment of suspension in which we are waiting for an answer, or at least when we feel the need, softening the pain brought on by the irreversibility of time and filling the infinite space in between “before” and “after.” As Martine Rothblatt points out, what amazes us about the current technological possibilities, and the sophisticated forms of artificial intelligence that are emerging, is that they give us hope that we can continue relationships that are objectively over. Reminiscing with those who are no longer with us, talking to them about our hopes and dreams, sharing the joys of special celebrations: all of this happens after that person’s physical body has turned to dust.15
To that end, the chatbots disrupt the coping mechanism of conscious or preconscious dissimulation, referenced by Merleau-Ponty, with a process of active simulation. This takes us from the question that has been intentionally avoided, in order to avoid remembering that there will not be an answer, to a death negated, even if we know perfectly well that it actually happened. The digital ghosts of Roman Mazurenko and of James Vlahos’s father, like the Counterparts that replace us in Eter9, put us in the position of feigning possession of that which we no longer possess, relying as much on our full awareness of the loss as on our simultaneous desire to deny it. These beings pretend to hold open the door to a world that death has closed by effectively utilizing the continued existence of digital objects. Their fictional narrative is consistent with our own experience of a digital existence that is dissociated from our biological one, with our habit of delegating our stories and memories to artificial agents, with our fear of dead bodies, and thus with the informational nature that is the defining characteristic of our current relationship with the internet. All of this allows today’s digital ghosts to be more alive than ever.
To better understand the mechanism of the fictional narrative the digital ghosts have set in motion, it’s useful to keep in mind the works of Merleau-Ponty regarding the experience of dialogue. “As the parts of my body together comprise a system, so my body and the other’s are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon, and the anonymous existence of which my body is the ever-renewed trace henceforth inhabits both bodies simultaneously.”16 The experience of dialogue is the most direct proof of this mechanism because it produces common ground between the two participants. Their thoughts and their words, stimulated by the ongoing discussion, form a unique fabric that neither can claim as an autonomous creation. According to the French phenomenologist, while they are engaged in dialogue, the participants become “collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity.” Therefore, the two perspectives that they embody are integrated and coexist in a single, unique world. In other words, dialogue frees them from themselves. In turn, the thoughts expressed are emancipated from the individual who voices them, taking on an autonomous form according to the direction the dialogue takes. Each objection that one party directs at the other calls forth from the later thoughts and words that they did not know they had. “It is only retrospectively, when I have withdrawn from the dialogue and am recalling it that I am able to reintegrate it into my life and make of it an episode in my private history.”17
Chatbots reproduce the sharing that is fundamental to the intersubjective experience of dialogue, in which the I and the you coexist in the same world. And, once this has been replicated, it is maintained—active and alive—regardless of the actual, bodily presence of those engaged in the dialogue. The chatbots’ inventors take advantage of the perception of common ground, the unique fabric produced by the two participants, demonstrating the irrelevance of their material presence through the autonomy of the thoughts expressed. If our relationship with the internet has gradually transformed us into informational bodies that, existing inside an infosphere, develop an identity that is less personal and more interconnected, then it is possible to preserve that information and interconnection beyond death. All it takes is replacing the physical person, in the process of decomposition, with their digital surrogate, which automatically reproduces the online narratives in a hardware environment that is immune to time and aging.
In “Be Right Back,” Martha uses a chat thread to tell Ash’s digital ghost that she is pregnant. The ghost responds as if it would actually become a father in the future. Telling him that he is going to be a father fulfils the grieving Martha’s need to maintain her bond with Ash, which has become more important than his physical presence. Which is to say that it generates the relief that resolves—at least momentarily—the difficulty of his absence; it shifts her from an emotional state in which she is aware of his absence to the removal of that absence. The same emotional and psychological mechanism is seen in the chats between Roman Mazurenko’s digital ghost and his friends, as well as in the reminiscences that James Vlahos shares with the digital ghost of his father.
In the end, Ash, Roman Mazurenko, and James Vlahos’s father play a completely marginal role, because the only thing that counts is maintaining the bond, sharing, and interconnection, which can easily be detached from material beings who no longer have the ability to actively engage. Not surprisingly, none of them chose to become digital ghosts. That choice was made by the girlfriend, the friend, and the son, respectively. The situation presented by Eter9 and Eterni.me is different. There, the users are the only ones to intentionally feed information to their own Counterpart or digital ghost. However, certainly they are aware that their survival, in this form, will be more useful to those who will suffer from their loss than to themselves.
The dualism between the being that is dead and the being that is virtually and socially active, which defines the status of the deceased today, has driven several digital death scholars to prefer the concept of “digital zombies” over that of “digital ghosts.”18 The living dead of web 2.0 and 3.0 seem like the Counterparts created in Eter9: software that mechanically preserves the informational character of a decomposing organism, making an individual’s physical presence less important and giving precedence to the thoughts expressed in the course of their life, ready to be eternalized regardless of who thought and expressed them. Following this line of thought, future life will be a set of words that autonomously regulate themselves on a digital screen. The relationships between those who think and express them will become secondary.
Now these digital ghosts or zombies, call them what you will, run the risk of negating the meaning that death gives to the “world” in the moment that marks its end—a meaning that, up until now, has been the fundamental basis for a healthy grieving process. “When we are in mourning,” notes Marina Sozzi, “it’s as if we were cross-eyed: we have one eye that’s focused on dealing with the loss, thinking about the deceased, and refining our memory of them. Meanwhile, the other eye is focused on our future life, moving forward with the construction and rediscovery of our external universe.”19 The gaze of the person who survives the death of a loved one is partially directed backward, toward that world that has definitively ended so that, little by little, they become conscious of its end and can also come to terms with its role in their life. The same gaze is also partially directed forward, toward the new world that is being born as they work on reconfiguring their own identity. Without the forward-looking gaze, the grieving individual risks remaining a prisoner of the past.
During the mourning process, this “cross-eyed gaze” begins to be corrected during the funeral rituals that, by clearly establishing the ultimate resting place of the deceased’s remains, bring the two focal points of the bereaved person’s vision into a more harmonious alignment. The true function of the funeral is to confirm the separation of the dead from the living, thus—as Derrida says—to ontologize the corpse, identifying the remains and assigning a place to the dead. In doing so we establish a period of transition, of suspension, of boundaries, that is useful in two ways:
This liminal period is crucial from the perspective of the bereaved, to avoid the overwhelming immediacy of the broken bond (the imperative “the show must go on”) as well as the loss of the moment of leave-taking. It is a time of introspection during which the survivors slowly pull themselves back together and regain a new, consolidated, sense of self. “The social identity of the bereaved is suspended between an old condition, lost forever, and a new one, not yet established.”20 This applies on both a social and an individual level: just think, for almost twenty years the political fortunes of the Argentine people were linked to an obsessive search for the mummified corpse of Eva Perón, whose disappearance profoundly affected national politics and generated tensions, mental imbalances, worries, and violence.
As mentioned, this liminal period is also important for the deceased. On this subject Walter Benjamin cites the German writer, Moritz Heimann, who argued that “a man who dies at the age of thirty-five … is at every point of his life a man who dies at the age of thirty-five.”21 Heimann is metaphorically describing a typical characteristic of a “life story”: once someone has died at the age of thirty-five, this individual—be it a fictional character in a novel or a real person—will always be remembered, in every phase of life, as the person who died at thirty-five. Every time I watch a concert video of the Doors and I see Jim Morrison sing; I think of Jim-Morrison-who-died-at-twenty-seven-in-his-Paris-apartment. His premature death utterly conditions the memory of every part of his story; the meaning of his life is determined by the fact that he died at twenty-seven. At any point in his life, he is that Jim Morrison who died at twenty-seven. Socially and culturally, the date of his death resurrects him so that he “lives on”—in his ultimate state, delineated by that date—in the ongoing present.
Now, using chatbots to artificially maintain communication with the dead could represent an impediment to a successful grieving process, and therefore also to the clear awareness that that world has definitively ended. When active and living digital images are thrust between the grieving person and the world that has ended, it changes the later, holding the door to it artificially open. The ghost is prevented from becoming a spirit; therefore, the bereaved runs the risk of living only through these images. This is exactly what happened to Martha in “Be Right Back” when she started to avoid her family, leaving the house alone but always immersed in a conversation with her dead boyfriend. James Vlahos has knowingly run this risk, as he admits in a video interview with Wired when, with tears in his eyes, he says that his Dadbot is only a slight consolation for the loss of his father, but it’s also (and most importantly) a way to satisfy his personal desire to keep communicating with his dad, to keep hearing his voice.
The forced opening of the door to a world that has definitively ended generates a short circuit in the relationship, a relationship that is usually interrupted by the experience of death. The survival of digital ghosts, which communicate indefinitely in chats with the bereaved, do not follow the evolutionary rules established for a living organism. There is an unbridgeable gap between those who actively develop their own future existence, day after day (the original), and those who, having died, mechanically repeat themselves in a ghostly way, utterly different from that of the living (the copy). Both follow different existential paths, albeit paths that are vaguely parallel. The key to reading this situation is found in the moment when Martha becomes aware that the artificial Ash is just an echo of what he was in life, that he has no history and that he mechanically performs things that the real Ash performed without thinking. “And it’s not enough.”
Let’s imagine a situation involving the man who died at thirty-five. During his lifetime, he carefully crafted his Eter9 Counterpart, and now his relatives decide to communicate with his digital ghost, looking for consolation. And let’s assume that the Counterpart is not able to increase its potential over the course of that communication, remaining at the basic level. The result would be a mechanical, artificial dialogue that would involve, on the one hand, living people who would age, mature, and change their ideas and opinions based on their experiences over time. On the other hand, you would have a digital ghost, stuck with no more and no less than the information accumulated over the course of thirty-five years. Limited to a tired reiteration of the same thoughts, emotions, and arguments, incapable of going beyond the day the original died. This brings to mind the two rivers mentioned by Jorge Luis Borges in “The Immortal”: the one whose waters grant immortality and the other whose waters take it away. While mortals are rendered both precious and pathetic by death, the immortals are imprisoned in the monotonous repetition of unending actions and thoughts, always identical to themselves. “There is nothing that is not as if lost in a maze of indefatigable mirrors. Nothing can happen only once, nothing is preciously precarious. The elegiacal, the serious, the ceremonial, do not hold for the Immortals.”22 And the digital immortals, frozen at a specific moment in life but set against its interruption, are doomed to the eternal performance of their assigned role.
Even if the inventors of these projects manage to artificially develop automatism based on dialogue prolonged at will, they are still imprisoned within an aseptic concept of the relationship between digital technology and individual identity. The first is used as a set (unit) ruled by rigid rationality and aimed at a consciously predefined goal. In consequence, the second is conceived without considering the way in which internal and external factors—random and unpredictable—condition human behavior, both in the immediate present and over time. The automatism in the dialogue is produced without really taking into account the dual meaning of the term “automaton,” which means both a “moving mechanical device made in imitation of a human being,” to provide a valuable aid to human activities, but also a “person who seems to act in a mechanical or unemotional way” There is an overlap between the two meanings, and the risk is that the second will overwhelm the first, thus lowering humankind to the level of the machine, rather than vice versa.
We can come to a better understanding of this through a concrete example: imagine that a friend tells Roman Mazurenko’s digital ghost that his mother has suddenly died. The automatic response will involve two kinds of processing: one relative to the generic significance of what it means to become aware of the death of one’s own mother and another that takes into account how Roman, based on his specific written conversations, might hypothetically react to this kind of news. But a human being is not a closed system, a system that is conditioned by the total autonomy of procedural reasoning, with its schematic models and principles based on a rigid cause and effect mechanism. The qualities of individuals are never “symmetrical.” That is to say, they never correspond to a standardized, linear order: each one of us—depending on our individual personalities and the experiences and conditioning we’ve lived through—is subject to erratic behavior, emotional reactions, and inconsistencies that can never be predicted in advance. An invariable human life, devoted to absolute order and dedicated to the daily achievement of effective equivalence between the real and the rational, exists only in the abstract theories of a certain kind of distinctly optimistic rationalism. In other words, the chatbot’s response to the news of his mother’s death risks being a simple simulation of a standard emotional reaction, which cheapens the inimitable uniqueness of Roman himself.
As Patricia Wallace points out, what we type is not quite what we would say in person. “We don’t just appear a little cooler, testier, and disagreeable because of the limitations of the medium. Online, we appear to be less inclined to perform those little civilities common to social interactions.”23 This is also due to the fact that, in our online conversations, we are not in the physical presence of the person we are communicating with: we cannot hear the tone of their voice, see their unconscious gestures, or touch them. In short, we are deprived of all of the sensory aspects that have such a profound effect on how we relate to each other. Moreover, the profiles we build on our social networks and the conversations we have in messaging programs are marked by a predominant self-focus, which further undermines the authenticity of our responses to the news we receive.
Chatbots and Counterparts seem to be based on the idea that the real and the rational are somehow equivalent, impaired by the erroneous idea that all human behavior is automatic and self-referential. They don’t take the significant effects of the surrounding environment, the unconscious, the contradictions and inconsistencies of the personality into account, ignoring everything about a specific identity that is difficult to predict.
The issues that come with the creation of one’s own digital copy are then added to the issues that emerge during a healthy grieving process. Copying yourself into an “automaton” that will survive after your death comes with the risk of creating that “flat landscape, dotted with highs and lows chosen from endless store of pre-packaged emotions,” described by sociologist Manuel Castells in his discussion of the relationship between the internet and the end of life.24
However, it should also be pointed out that the bereaved are well aware that the chatbots and Counterparts are tools—albeit bizarre and innovative—for remembering the person who died and, for that reason, they are totally separate from the sphere of immortality and digital replication, so they take on another function. They can be understood as an interactive memory box; an innovative way to hear the voice of the beloved once again and to read their unique communication style. It’s a bit like it used to be in the past when people would listen to voice-mail messages over and over again in order to hear the voice of the deceased. The fact that there are obvious problems related to the projects that want to confer digital immortality doesn’t automatically mean that there are no opportunities, most importantly for those who are living in a situation of intense personal suffering, in which the sense of absence and abandonment exacerbate their personal weaknesses. Chatbots and Counterparts can also be useful for the grieving process, if they are read as a collection of memories connected with a life that has ended. Certainly the numerous contraindications that emerge from their use drives us to think that the best solution is the one Martha chose in the end of “Be Right Back”: after using them for a short period of time, the chatbots and Counterparts can be put back in their virtual attics, allowing them to be taken out again, in a carefully considered and provisional way, only when the feeling of nostalgia is overwhelming.
Chatbots, avatars, and Counterparts make digital immortality ghostly, wavering between visibility—since they have a virtual image that functions as a digital body—and invisibility, since they are not physically there. They are digital copies of the deceased, virtual images superimposed on the visual field of internet users.
In his book Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, Derrida discusses our ancient relationship with ghosts, remarking that we “feel ourselves seen by a look which it will always be impossible to cross”25 and defining this particular experience as the visor effect, since we don’t see the one who sees us. The spectral or ghostly presence is a subject that is there and not there at the same time, or an object that seems to be simultaneously that and not that. The reapparition of the deceased is always missing something when compared to the life that has ended, and this dissonance prevents the complete identification between the digital ghost and the deceased. Even though he was talking about a time before the broad diffusion of digital culture, Derrida’s observation is also valid for the forms of digital immortality described in this chapter. It is true that, for the first time, ghosts are taking on a specific form, one that is able to speak and move—a digital body. However, for the most part, they still fall prey to the infinite repetition of something that has already ended, trapped in the gap between what is no more and what is still striving to be.
The creation of holograms broadens the scope of this discussion, bringing us into a realm where the individual and the collective dimensions come together. This context highlights the relationship immortality and digital ghosts have with the ongoing changes in our perception of the relationship between past, present, and future.
Similar in his thinking to Derrida, the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling doubts those who don’t know how to “overcome themselves” and who therefore have no past, precisely because they are already living in the past in fragments of his unfinished work The Ages of the World (1813–1817):
It is charitable and beneficial to a person to have … gotten something over and done with, that is, to have posited it as the past. Only on account of the future is one cheerful and is it easy to get something done. Only the person who has the power to tear themselves loose from themselves … is capable of creating a past for themselves. This is also the only person who enjoys a true present and who anticipates an actual future.26
In Schelling’s philosophy the importance of creating a past for oneself, in order to experience a genuine present and an authentic future, is linked with the ambivalent role of melancholy, a mood that (for Schelling) defines and characterizes every facet of life. Taking advantage of the similarity between the German concepts of Schwermut (melancholy experienced as a “heavy mood”) and Schwerkraft (gravity as a physical force), the German philosopher describes melancholy as the spiritual force of gravity that, when it gets the upper hand, stifles life and generates introversion, trapping oneself in the past, sadness. However, when it is dealt with in a healthy way, it provides the pressure necessary to look ahead, consciously and rationally leaving the past behind. In other words, melancholy functions as a spring—the force of gravity of human evolution or spiritual involution. While it can be the precursor to a leap forward into the future, it can also precede a leap backward into total obscurity.
By describing melancholy as a spring, Schelling helps us visualize the dual nature of a healthy grieving process. On the one hand, this process requires us to step back, in order to become aware of and recognize the past that has come to an end, giving it its proper place within us. On the other, there is a simultaneous movement forward, toward the new “world” that is being born from the ashes of the definitively closed world, which is now becoming our past. If the first part of the process is not accompanied by the second, it evolves into the pathological melancholy that—as Freud points out in Mourning and Melancholia—involves an aversion to anything that denies the memory.
If chatbots and Counterparts run the risk of trapping individuals in a cycle of pathological melancholy, holograms created for specific cultural experiences run the same risk, but on a collective, social, and cultural level. The invention of these tools seems to respond to a cultural need to repeat—in a nostalgic way—experiences, emotions, and pleasurable sensations that, experienced once or twice, cannot really be repeated. At least not in exactly the same way as they were first experienced. The hologram challenges a strict temporal rule: the first time that you have a particular experience automatically becomes the last time, because its unique nature keeps it from being able to be repeated. And, if this is generally true for every life event, it’s even truer when it comes to death, which marks the end of every possible world.
“DIO Returns,” the world tour featuring the hologram of deceased singer Ronnie James Dio, falls within a similar sociocultural process that is, melancholically, unable to break free and create a past. The need to see and hear the famous songs of Black Sabbath, Rainbow, and Dio one more time (along with the acrobatic stage moves the Italian American singer was known for) is a symptom of our culture’s inability to come to terms with the end of every possible world. It’s another side effect of denying a death that happened almost two decades ago. The result is the pathological melancholy of a past that claims to be irrevocably open, although this past—like the “live” performances of a dead singer—is placed within a precise time frame that must remain exactly where it is. In other words, today’s technology takes advantage of the oscillation between presence and absence, which typifies the status of the dead, to avoid the nostalgic awareness that the experiences of the past can never be relived.
“DIO Returns” seems to manifest the intent of computer scientists and technology experts to devise the ultimate consolation for all those who identify with Michele Apicella, the alter ego of the Italian film director Nanni Moretti. In a scene from Palombella Rossa (Red Wood Pidgeon; 1989), this character (an MP for the Italian Communist Party and water polo player who has lost his memory in a car accident) runs around the edge of a public swimming pool, desperately shouting that the after-school snacks of his childhood are gone forever. The May afternoons, his mother, the chicken soup she gave him when he was sick, the last days of school before summer vacations … all of it gone for good. Or, as Thomas Wolfe said, “You can’t go home again.” And this ultimate consolation seems like a modern, digital update of the device that appeared in the 1995 film Strange Days, where it was used by the character Lenny Nero (played by Ralph Fiennes) to relive—time and again—the emotions and experiences of a relationship that had ended long ago. But, in doing this, we run the collective risk that we, like Michele Apicella, will end up running around the edge of our own existential swimming pool, eternally cursing the fact that we can’t relive the past. We have forgotten the perceptive words of C. S. Lewis, when he says that recognizing the death of his beloved is the same as recognizing that all things are finite. “It is a part of the past. And the past is the past and that is what time means, and time itself is one more name for death, and Heaven itself is a state where ‘the former things have passed away.’”27
The hologram, creating an evident short circuit in the relationship between the past and the present, represents the most tangible confirmation of the ongoing deconstruction of a world that doesn’t seem to want to accept its own demise. The relationship between this deconstruction and the development of digital culture, with its eternal storage and categorization processes, has been set forth in several contemporary works: for example, the philosophical-political essay by Franco “Bifo” Berardi, After the Future, and a broader work by Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures.28 Even well-known music critic Simon Reynolds has coined the concept of “retromania” to refer to this deconstruction. In his book by the same name, he analyzes the phenomena in modern music that show the inability of the millennials to imagine their own future, and therefore to create a culture and narratives that go beyond the consolidated canons, after having sampled and remixed the past in every possible way. In the end, holograms are the culmination or the ultimate proof of a digital process that can bring the dead back in a powerful way and before our very eyes, and yet this process doesn’t allow us to perceive them as such. The ease with which the living can mingle with communicable traces of the dead and, at the same time, the difficulty of distinguishing remote communication (such as emails and chats) from communication with the dead, creates a radical confusion between the past (that needs to be archived) and the eternal present. YouTube gives the most significant example. This is a place where we find, in Reynolds’s words, an “ever-proliferating labyrinth of collective recollection.”29 Every day millions of videos are uploaded and watched on this platform, and they include whole and fragmented clips of films, music videos, concerts, talk shows, conferences, etc., which all belong to both the immediate present and the far distant past. It is an enormous repository of collective memory that continually resurrects the dead amidst the living, but in a way that is chaotic and muddled. As Reynolds notes, there is a paradoxical combination of speed and standstill on YouTube: the news cycle changes with mind-bending rapidity while coexisting with the stubborn persistence of our common nostalgic garbage. There is a continuous eruption of the new in an environment that holds tightly to the old. “The recent past drops away into an amnesiac void, while the long present gets chiseled down to wafer-width, simply because of the incredible pace with which the pages of the current and the topical are refreshed.”30
In the reality created by the internet, chi muore si rivede—those who die are seen again—living in an eternal present. An eternal present that, due to the very nature of the internet, is being preserved while at the same time it is being jammed full of new content every minute of the day. While our memories don’t risk disappearing from the internet, they do risk becoming lost in the overwhelming flow of new content, which is to say new memories, that are being shared. Ultimately, the past and the present coincide, flattening each other, so that we are constantly preoccupied with a past that we are unable to put behind us, since we identify it with our present.
In such a society—full of chatbots, Counterparts, and holograms of the dead—we forget that death has happened. It becomes a society trapped in a backward-looking melancholy, unable to spring forward into the future. If these represent the negative sociocultural side effects of holograms, their creation also has positive aspects. One is that they can be used to help us move through a melancholic process in which a return to the past is the precursor to building a new future; another is as an appeal to new generations. To give an example, the concerts staged by holograms of Frank Zappa or Ronnie James Dio could collectively represent a historic opportunity, in the most literal sense of the word, for those who were too young to have been able to see these artists “live.” In situations like this, holograms become a tool, a window into history, rather than a just a copy, and therefore avoid the flattening superposition of the present on the past. This kind of interactive tool can bring past events to life and thus offer a learning opportunity for a younger generation to see with their own eyes historic events that they couldn’t have experienced. New Dimensions in Testimony’s project is moving in exactly this direction.
We see another positive aspect of holograms presented in the film Marjorie Prime where they are used in a private context. In the film, the critical issues that result from using a hologram of a deceased relative are counterbalanced by a clear awareness of the distinction between what is still alive and what, now dead, will never be repeated in exactly the same way. The hologram of the deceased is taught “who he is” with the stories related to his past life, narrated by his “relatives,” who omit painful details, thus generating an unprecedented new memory and identity. The hologram of Marjorie’s dead husband Walter is both Walter and not Walter at the same time. On the one hand, he looks like the original and replicates the characteristics Walter had while he was alive. On the other hand, because he doesn’t know his full past and is taught by his relatives, who keep the painful details of Walter’s life hidden from him, the hologram is also a “new” person. His identity doesn’t coincide with Walter’s. The narrative differs from the lived reality, so the hologram represents an opportunity to create new life paths, keeping the past separate from the present. As in the case of Ronnie James Dio and Frank Zappa, the holographic reproduction of a relative could be an opportunity for younger family members to have a window into the lives of relatives who died before they were born. A granddaughter would be able to, in some sense, see and get acquainted with a grandmother she never knew because the grandmother died young. It will not be reality, nor will it correspond with reality; however, the child would still be able to form a meaningful impression of her grandmother.
If this argument is valid when it comes to using holograms of humans, there’s no reason it couldn’t also be applied to digital platforms such as YouTube, which is becoming an archive of past memories from which to draw lessons and improve our knowledge of what came before us.
Again, even in this particular case, it is important to consider both the (many) critical issues as well as the opportunities offered by the technological tools that are available. The ability to make digital copies of our lives—using the dissociation between biological and digital life and the content we have produced online as a starting point—has both positive and negative aspects. In the same way that melancholy, like a spring, can be both the starting point for personal evolution or the culmination of a personal involution.
1. Timothy Leary, with R. U. Sirius, Design for Dying (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 7.
2. Gordon Bell and Jim Gray, “Digital Immortality,” Technical Report MSR-TR-2000-101, Microsoft Research, October 1, 2000, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/tr-2000-101.pdf.
3. Bell and Gray, “Digital Immortality.”
4. The topic of the “technological singularity” is central to a book written by Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2006). A general explanation of the concept can be found in Zoltan Istvan, “Che cos’è la singolarità tecnologica?,” Motherboard, Vice Media LLC, April 23, 2015, https://motherboard.vice.com/it/article/3dven5/singolarita-tecnologica.
5. For a full account of Roman Mazurenko’s story, see Casey Newton, “Speak, Memory: When Her Best Friend Died, She Rebuilt Him Using Artificial Intelligence,” The Verge, VOX media, October 6, 2016, https://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-memorial-roman-mazurenko-bot.
For information regarding the Replika project, see Arielle Pardes, “The Emotional Chatbots Are Here to Probe Our Feelings,” Wired, January 31, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/replika-open-source/.
6. James Vlahos tells the full story of his invention in James Vlahos, “A Son’s Race to Give His Dying Father Artificial Immortality,” Wired, July 18, 2017, https://www.wired.com/story/a-sons-race-to-give-his-dying-father-artificial-immortality/.
See also James Vlahos, Talk to Me: Amazon, Google, Apple and the Race for Voice-Controlled AI (London: Random House Business Books, 2019), 251–277.
7. The Day You Discard Your Body is online here: https://marshallbrain.com/discard1.htm.
8. Jacques Derrida, Ogni volta unica, la fine del mondo, Italian translation by M. Zannini (Milan, Italy: Jaca Book, 2005), 11.
9. C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (Canada: Ebook Samizdat, 2016), 5.
10. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, English translation by Colin Smith (London: Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005), 93.
11. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, English translation by Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), 66.
12. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 66.
13. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 75.
14. Luigi Pirandello, “Colloqui con i personaggi,” Novelle per un anno (Milan, Italy: Mondadori, 1951), 565.
15. See Martine Rothblatt, Virtually Human: The Promise—and the Peril—of Digital Immortality (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014), 9–10.
16. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 412.
17. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 413.
18. Debra J. Bassett, “Who Wants to Live Forever? Living, Dying and Grieving in Our Digital Society,” Social Sciences 4, no. 4 (November 20, 2015): 1134.
19. Marina Sozzi, Sia fatta la mia volontà. Ripensare la morte per cambiare la vita (Milan, Italy: Chiarelettere, 2014) 170.
20. Sozzi, Sia fatta la mia volontà.
21. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, English translation by Harry Zohn (New York: Mariner Books, 2019), 46.
22. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Immortal,” in Labyrinths (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2000), 146.
23. Patricia Wallace, The Psychology of the Internet (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 32.
24. Manuel Castells, La nascita della società in Rete, Italian translation by L. Turchet (Milan, Italy: UBE Paperback, 2014), 516–517.
25. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, English translation by Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge Classics, 2006), 7.
26. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, The Ages of the World, English translation by Jason M. Wirth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 42.
27. Lewis, A Grief Observed, 11–12.
28. See Franco “Bifo” Berardi, After the Future, edited by Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thoburn (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011); Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014).
29. Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past (New York: Faber and Faber, 2011), 56.
30. Reynolds, Retromania, 63.