By the end of the century, many of us will rest alongside each other in the world’s biggest “virtual graveyard.” The number of dead people on Facebook is expected to outnumber living members of the social network by 2098, a statistician claimed earlier this year. Although our profiles may not have the same grandeur of some of the great Victorian cemeteries like Highgate, thanks to our strong interest in online and social networks our digital legacy - whether that’s goodbye messages via social networks or avatars fuelled by artificial intelligence (AI) - has never been so in vogue.

 

Each of the social networks has different rules regarding what happens to your account after you die. While Facebook gives its users the option of having their account permanently deleted once they die, last year it launched its Legacy Contact feature, enabling users to elect someone to manage their “memorialised” account after they have passed away.

“Memorial pages are a place to remember and honour those we’ve lost,” says Jasmine Probst, content strategy manager on the Facebook Memorialisation team. “When a person passes away, their account can become a memorial of their life, friendships and experiences. For a while we offered basic memorialisation, which meant an account could be viewed but couldn’t be managed by anyone. [But] by talking to people who’ve experienced loss, we realised there is more we can do to support those who are grieving and those who want more of a say in what happens to their account after death.”

 

Beyond the rules of each of the social networks, there are other ways to manage your digital assets - and help you communicate with your family and friends online long after you’ve died.

Set up by James Norris more than four years ago after he watched a video of comedian and presenter Bob Monkhouse posthumously starring in an advert for prostate cancer, social enterprise Dead Social enables people to schedule posts after they have passed away.

 

“Instead of your last post saying ‘I’m just having a coffee’, you can send your own goodbye messages on Facebook and Twitter,” says Norris. Users can choose text or video posts and assign a digital executor to press the button and send the message once they’ve died. Around 11,000 people have signed up to Dead Social, which has stopped taking new registrations until the end of the year as it goes through a revamp.

 

London-based artist and funeral blogger Joanna Shears, 33, is one of those signed up to Dead Social, which she describes as an “incredible tool”.

 

“It gives me my chance to say goodbye to friends and voice my feelings about life,” she says. “The messages are deeply personal and let the recipients know how much I loved them.”

 

Norris says as we spend more of our lives online, organising what happens to your digital assets has become increasingly important. “People aren’t writing wills and it can cause emotional problems - every month there’s multiple stories about someone locked out of their family member’s account or a problem with a social network.”

 

Privacy issues

 

The digital afterlife is in fact fraught with issues linked to privacy rules and regulations and questions about who owns what.

 

Online assets are viewed as an increasingly important subject and many solicitors now include a clause about them in new wills.

 

“Customers can include a clause in the will bequeathing digital assets to a named beneficiary and expressing the wish the beneficiary deals with those assets in accordance with a letter of wishes which can be put alongside the will,” says Kate Maybury, senior associate of trusts, wills and estates at Raworths solicitors. For example, they could give instructions for their Facebook profile to be memorialised or for their Twitter account to be deleted.

 

Virtual eternity

 

Is a Facebook message declaring your death enough? Some start-ups certainly don’t think so as they dream up ways we can live on virtually.

 

Take Eternime. Using AI, Eternime collects your thoughts, stories and memories and creates an avatar that looks and converses in your manner. As you chat with the avatar for the remainder of your life, they’re able to learn more about you and your personality.
 

“In the beginning the avatar is limited because it knows very little about you but by talking to it a few times per week for the rest of your life, the avatar will collect a lot of information about you,” explains Marius Ursache, founder and chief executive of Eternime. “The more information the avatar can access, the smarter it will become, until it will be able to reply to most of the things people would ask you in the future. The avatar will become your digital alter-ego, chat to other people, even long after you pass away, be your personal assistant, confidant and who knows what else? The possibilities are endless.” The site has yet to go live but 33,000 people have already signed up.

 

In a similar way, social network Eter9 uses AI to analyse your posts and comments to learn about your personality in order to create a virtual counterpart that will publish, comment and interact for you on the network following your death. Eter9 founder Henrique Jorge says it enables users to have a “virtual extension of yourself alive forever”.

 

Jorge says the avatars are clever. “For example, if the user posts some videos and music about a particular band in a specific time of his life, his counterpart won’t post about that band for the eternity. It will have learnt about him during his life, so it collates all the information gathered and will post according to his patterns.”

 

Currently in beta, Eter9 has attracted 50,000 users. So far Jorge hopes to integrate Eter9 with other social networks in the future.

 

“As time passes, evolution is inevitable and AI is, of course, part of it,” says Jorge. “It’s potential is impressive, but it’s up to us decide how far it can go. As long as we control the machines we create in order to help us, only good results will come. Our world is becoming more and more technological and digital. Digital afterlife is inevitable; in fact, I think it’s already happening: every action you take in the cyberspace remains there even after you pass away.”

But isn’t having an avatar chat to your family and friends years after you’ve died a bit creepy? “We are very aware of the emotionality that is attached to the topic of death or to that of robot clones or avatars,” replies Ursache. “For us it is really important to emphasise that we do not want to preserve the banalities of the life of a person, but would much more like to create a legacy that allows your great-grandchildren to interact with their great-grandfather - and beyond.”

 

While living on as an avatar certainly sounds fun, it flags up many issues. Can an avatar really replicate your own true thoughts and style of messages across social media? What happens to all the data that’s collected once you’ve died? (Eter9 insists the information is only stored in its system servers and is not transmitted to third-party websites). One area that could throw up all sorts of problems is if the family of the bereaved are unhappy with the posts of an avatar. Will family warfare continue even long after you’ve passed away when your avatar, knowing you disliked your family, spouts out less than complimentary posts about your siblings?

 

Scanning through Instagram, perhaps many of my generation will be known long after we die for being avocado-obsessives and fans of coffee boards with not-so-funny slogans. Maybe it’s time to get cleaning up our cringeworthy Facebook and Instagram posts - or asking our avatars to do that for us.