Death Glitch: How Techno-solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond

by Tamara Kneese, Linda Jones (reader)

An accessible yet erudite deep dive into how platforms are remaking experiences of death
 
Since the internet’s earliest days, people have died and mourned online. In quiet corners of past iterations of the web, the dead linger. But attempts at preserving the data of the dead are often ill-fated, for websites and devices decay and die, just as people do. Death disrupts technologists’ plans for platforms. It reveals how digital production is always collaborative, undermining the entrepreneurial platform economy and highlighting the flaws of techno-solutionism.
 
Big Tech has authority not only over people’s lives but over their experiences of death as well. Ordinary users and workers, though, advocate for changes to tech companies’ policies around death. Drawing on internet histories along with interviews with founders of digital afterlife startups, caretakers of illness blogs, and transhumanist tinkerers, the technology scholar Tamara Kneese takes readers on a vibrant tour of the ways that platforms and people work together to care for digital remains. What happens when commercial platforms encounter the messiness of mortality?

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology, Politics, Philosophy, Sociology, Internet, Death

Audio CD

First published August 15, 2023

Reviews

[Char · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75☆

Interesting! It's very tempting to see technology as the solution to our mortality but Kneese shows that our technological solutions are not only prone to societal prejudice regarding race, gender, sexuality, and disability, but also to the short life spans of silicone valley startups, which do not support the reliability required in death care. Ultimately, managing the belongings of the dead is a kind of labour, and if we are ever going to resolve the thorny intersections of death and the internet, we need to consciously think about how we’re doing it and who’s doing it.

there are a lot of times when Kneese reiterates her point in many different ways which could be seen as repetitive, but i think that's just what i expect from informational philosophy books like this

[Alaina · Rating 3 out of 5]

the legacies of our dead loved ones often outlive their online traces; there's no such thing as Forever™️ on a centralized (really corporatized) internet. i enjoyed kneese's overview of how tech deals with the dead, from facebook memorials to illness blogs to headless smart houses. the subtitle, however, belies the book's lack of thesis, which disappointed me as i had hoped for a "where do we go from here?"–type conclusion.

[Danna DeKay · Rating 4 out of 5]

-How "death glitches" on digital platforms affect the grieving process and the management of deceased users' data
- Need for tech companies to consider death in their policy, intersection of tech/ethics/death
-Capitalism often fails to provide space or time for grieving, digital platforms have stepped in to fill that void
-Digital remains, communicative traces, and digital assets, public vs. private grief, discursive surfaces, and collective memory online

[Andra Vltavín · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting if academically repetitive. I appreciated the deep dive into the hubris of European, cisgender, and patriarchal startup owners as they confront death and the examination of what happens to our online presences once we are gone.

[Anna Suh · Rating 3 out of 5]

sacred/profane, material embodiment and the virtual, transcendence through scary mountain view/lds billionaires? no thanks