The Afterlife of Data

Carl OEhman

Format
Hardback
Publisher
The University of Chicago Press
Country
United States
Published
24 July 2024
Pages
200
ISBN
9780226828220

The Afterlife of Data

Carl OEhman

A short, thought-provoking book about what happens to our online identities after we die.

These days, so much of our lives takes place online-but what about our afterlives? Thanks to the digital trails that we leave behind, our identities can now be reconstructed after our death. In fact, AI technology is already enabling us to "interact" with the departed. Sooner than we think, the dead will outnumber the living on Facebook. In this thought-provoking book, Carl OEhman explores the increasingly urgent question of what we should do with all this data and whether our digital afterlives are really our own-and if not, who should have the right to decide what happens to our data.

The stakes could hardly be higher. In the next thirty years alone, about two billion people will die. Those of us who remain will inherit the digital remains of an entire generation of humanity-the first digital citizens. Whoever ends up controlling these archives will also effectively control future access to our collective digital past, and this power will have vast political consequences. The fate of our digital remains should be of concern to everyone-past, present, and future. Rising to these challenges, OEhman explains, will require a collective reshaping of our economic and technical systems to reflect more than just the monetary value of digital remains.

As we stand before a period of deep civilizational change, The Afterlife of Data will be an essential guide to understanding why and how we as a human race must gain control of our collective digital past-before it is too late.

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