Over the decades, platforms have grappled with the problem of retaining and caring for the data of the dead. Digital remains are complex inheritances, because they depend on the longevity and commercial viability of corporate platforms and proprietary systems. Consider how the remains of the dead might well encompass everything from email, blog, and social media accounts to the ambient forms of metadata that track individuals and their networks. All this—when users die or platform infrastructures break down—becomes digital remains.
Commercial platforms can provide the scaffolding for sacred communion with the dead. But such relationships depend on the whims of platform owners and the design decisions of technologists.
For mourners, losing access to a dead loved one’s accounts can be devastating. And such losses can be emotionally significant to entire online communities, even aside from an individual’s close friends and family.
There is also the question of collective historical memory and the politics of the archive. As historians of computing have argued, the web itself is difficult to preserve. Think about experiences with the early web. What traces are there? What isn’t captured by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine or other digital archives? Remarkably, the first web page, created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, is not preserved.
In general, not everything attached to the web can be preserved, including unspoken practices or the feeling of using a particular feature. This means that users have to take responsibility for their own preservation and must take screenshots and maintain hard drives across obsolete systems. This requires a great deal of maintenance labor. But even that labor cannot ensure that data will be saved and accessible as formats change or devices and their permissions stop working.
Such issues reveal the collective nature of digital production, which requires the reproduction of specific practices and expertise. A single person’s emails, tweets, or posts in early web forums are part of an entire ecosystem. And care for these remains can be emotionally taxing for others.
As I found by interviewing digital caretakers for my book, there is often a disconnect between what people think they want others to do after they die and what mourners really want to do. Physical caregiving for a loved one intersects with digital housekeeping, from the deletion of spam emails to payments for domain names, or, in some cases, uploading a final goodbye post on behalf of a terminally ill blogger spouse before they take their last breath.