The proliferation and dissemination of the internet changed the way we communicate with other human beings and machines, how we interpret reality, and what it means to be human. The Posthuman reflects this intimate relationship we have with online technology. The transhuman has human autonomy and freedom and is not shaped by biology but by experiences and aspirations. These ideals can be established through the development of technology that allows humans to reshape material existence. Transhumanists believe that the only universal feature of mankind is the procuring, processing, and distribution of information to extend humanists’ goals of freedom and autonomy. The body is therefore a hindrance to post-human species.
Informational technologies create the process of identity construction by allowing the subject to rearrange patterns of information to create a different sense of “self”, a self-constructed from stored informational patterns, as a result, there is the transformation of the experience of the limitations of the body.53 Identity on the internet is a process of identity construction where people present to be something they are not.
The insertion of the subject into cyberspace has “the potential to transform the relation of the subject towards its sense of embodiment.” Heidegger argues that “only the representable is “the goal of human existence.” When existence is reduced to what is represented, there is nothing to be further asked, therefore the Transhumanist idea of the Posthuman fails to recognize that positioning the human as the representable informational body, limits the frame of what can be revealed, the representable technology.
There is no freedom, autonomy, or being, as Transhumanists claim, all is conceded in its self-created immortality. Death is a singular and irreplaceable aspect of every human being. “Irreplaceability is therefore conferred, deluded, given or can be said by death…it is from the site of death as a place of my irreplaceability, that is, of my singularity, that I feel called to responsibility. In this sense, only a mortal can be responsible.”
Waters suggests that human indenting cannot be reduced to the mental faculties of each person in isolation but through relationships with others. Therefore, digital traces are inadequate at representing who we are fully because they are static and isolated and have no relation to others. Meisel and others disagree. If the dead can communicate online, they have personhood, then they have a technologically mediated status, being in the online world. However, this relationship communication relies on the living to live on and communicate with posthumous personas, such as chatbots.
Hayles argues that there is an absent understanding of the human with changing conceptions of subjectivity made by new information technologies. The posthuman networked self creates the post-mortem subject related to Heidegger’s Self, an absent Dasein, “but the posthuman does not mean the end of humanity. Onishi suggests that by uncovering the digital self, there is an absence of the human, technology reveals human mortality’s ineffability, a mortality that prevents the human from being reducible to representational terms. In Heidegger’s terms, is an authentic post-human existence possible? Can the postmodern, networked subject described by Hayles and Carlson, enjoy an authentic existence while living wired, cybernetic lives?
Placing death and bereavement in the posthumanist context, the digital is an extension of the deceased, and technology is the source for the reconfiguration of the human. Digital remains contain the essence of the deceased person, digital remains are ephemeral, extensions of the body. Belk suggests the self extends beyond the body through interactions between humans and technology.
Affective technology like smartphones, is connected to the emotional lives of users and is thought to embody the apparatgeist of the user, connecting and extending the physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual aspects of the self. The term was introduced by Katz and Aarhus “as a way to capture and categorize a novel way of thinking about how humans, when alive, invest their technology with meaning and use devices and machines to pursue social and symbolic routes.”
Pitsillides and Jefferies argue that the posthumous approach is a new way to think about the role of the dead in society and that the dead have “the agency they still have through memory, things they leave behind, social networks, spaces, paths, digital or otherwise.” From a posthumanist perspective, user-driven engagement is changing practices related to loss and grieving. Digital remains are seen to contain the essence of the deceased embodied in the digital device. From a phenomenological perspective, existence does not have to be biological, existence can be virtual.
Fuchs believes that we experience the dead in an enduring and material way and a tangible sense of “presence-in-a sense..moving through spaces we share with the dead.” Riley suggests that we animate the dead into the living, two temporalities, the past embedded with the present, creating a new relationship between the living and the dead.
Could this new relationship create a new identity or essence of the dead? Pitsillides suggests that agency is imported through actants, extending their legacy and shifting the role of the dead online. However, in the case of digital photography, Diane argues that it lacks indexicality because it records reality differently. Digital photography does not bring back the past but constructs it from the perspective of the present.
Savin-Baden states that the digital afterlife is a virtual space where digital remains, in the form of human information, assets, legacies, and digital remains reside to create a persistent digital presence. Could virtual humans and digital immortals have agency? Messed, Nansen, and others argue that digital media can extend personhood through persistent online presence on social media and death tech and legacy platforms, and therefore, identity does
not end with physical death. The dead can communicate online, creating a digital personhood, a technologically mediated status. The digital afterlife is not a simulacrum for ongoing relations or representation, it is an ongoing form of relation, relationship communication, that relies on the living to continue communication, maintaining agency and meaning. These interactions are ontological, not representative. The online persona is performed through the networked data of text messages, photos, and videos.
There is a motivation for commercial platforms to push for the preservation of posthumous personhood to prevent the loss of data and the continuation of the self that is supported by commercial interests. Lambert argues that social networks and vernacular posthumous engagement, assist in the formation of personhood. Immortality is symbolic in networked media, the boundary between the living and the dead is blurred. If the persona of the dead is present in the communication networks of the living, they should be considered as having agency.
Can personhood extend to post-death in the digital afterlife? Personhood can be extended, according to Meese and others, who state that human-computer interaction (HCI) with a chatbot or avatar is central to the development of posthumous personhood. However, according to Hallam and Hockey, the virtual afterlife on social networks can de-centre personhood, when the spaces of the living and the dead are crossed. The living and the dead become indistinguishable.
Fisher argues that mixed reality increases social and spatial presence in HCI and that interactive posthumous personas, created by big tech are not accurate representations of a person’s personality, rather they are a constructed performance created from our constructed selves on social media platforms. Fisher warns that if we use only social data to create a posthumous persona, we risk losing the history and memory of who the deceased was. Does this mean essence can not be created in the digital afterlife?
Jandric and others suggest that human consciousness or essence transferred to another entity would break continuity. But Steinhart suggests that “after you die, you can remain as something else,” within a thing that carries information about the deceased’s life, “remaining is a matter of degree; you remain more in things that carry more information about your life,” such as online data in the digital afterlife. The dead also remain in physical objects but the difference is that your dead grandmother’s table doesn’t communicate within a two-way dialogue.
The embodiment of the deceased can refer to a physical object or a digital entity. Heidegger distinguishes between objects and things, an object becomes a thing when it no longer serves its purpose, like an unused mobile phone. Pitsillides asks if an AI bot is an object or a thing when digital platforms and mobile phones contain the deceased and these things become objects of memorial and are used to contain the deceased. Does this mean that social media sites and AI personas have agency? Steinhart suggests that the deceased digital persona or ghost is an embodied conversational agent or chatbot, “after you die, your ghost remains in large systems of files stored in digital media. Your ghost is physical, your ghost face looks like you and talks like you.
Ferrando suggests that with AI, there is a restructuring of the human when the physical world no longer represents the primary space of social interactions, and therefore agency includes the non-human because the digital world shapes the human world as much as the human shapes the digital. Furthermore, he argues that digital traces are tangible objects but with limitations because the digital trace has lost the translation of the original meaning, that of the physical human.
Who decides which traces should be selected of the dead? Are they representative of the deceased? In my work, I have selected active social images from my Facebook page, family photographs from my childhood, studio self-portrait photographs, and video stills to represent different aspects of my life. However, does this random selection best represent my true essence? Immortality can be deconstructed or destabilized. Derrida argues that such stabilizations of meaning have political, practical, and economic implications which we can relate to death tech companies that provide goods and services to consumers.
Does this destabilize the concept of identity and what it means to be human in the digital world when our digital traces are inadequate? Malabou asks if identity depends upon a person retaining memories of themselves when considering identity as the sole and restricted possession of a single individual. Walter and others disagree and argue that human identity cannot be reduced to the mental faculties of each person in isolation, but through relationships with others. Therefore, are digital traces inadequate at representing who we are because they are static images presented in isolation on digital devices, and have no relation to the memories of others? In my work, I am not pictured with family or friends, I am presented in isolation.
Can an AI essence be recreated in isolation from others in a bot or avatar? Walters argues that “representing an individual’s life in whatever form is only part of who and what they are or were,” and we can not capture “their essential or original self.” Deconstructing identity online may distort a person’s life or fail to capture their impact on others. Simondon suggests that we continue to learn because of our engagement in the world and with others. Our identity and relationship with others is not stable but forever changing. Our identity evolves when we interact with the world around us.82 Distributed agency brings together the human and the nonhuman.
Are these changes to our digital identity problematic, when different versions of our online selves are represented by a single digital trace in the form of a bot or avatar? If we are in a process of permanent development in relationship to the world and others, then why would we freeze-frame a person’s life, digitally? However, in my work with AI technology, specifically, Generative AI, we can create new content, new dialogue, perhaps a new identity, and by extension, a new essence. When we become an AI human, are we constantly becoming?
Ginger Liu is the founder of Hollywood’s Ginger Media & Entertainment, a PhD researcher in artificial intelligence and visual arts media, and an entrepreneur, author, writer, artist photographer, and filmmaker. Listen to the Podcast — The Digital Afterlife of Grief.
