This is you on social media

This is you on social media

There’s been lots of talk recently about the prospect of using a person’s online social history to “recreate” a version of them after death, a la Zoe Graystone. While the concept of uploading a person (their memories, personality traits, etc) to a computer is a promising, yet tentative, possibility, the whole idea of trying to recreate someone from their online profiles and blog scares the shit out of me; what kind of monstrous chimera will be created?


Consider what you’ve posted online in the last month. Do those one-liners, that angry blog post about the telemarketer, and a photo of a kitten in a firemans hat really help to describe your image of Self? Your friends and family may understand your online life in context to your offline life, but any algorithm attempting to build a virtual representation of you — one capable of keeping your personality alive once you’re gone — won’t be able to tell the difference between that off-color joke about the Aboriginal in the sportscar and your heart-felt tirade against racism. Your avatar may end up a self-hating, racist with a zoophilic fetish for kittens in uniform.

Let’s not even begin to include your search engine data; every search you perform is stored somewhere — that’s right, every time you’ve typed something dodgy into a search engine (jokingly or not), it may be stored in a way that is personally identifiable and could be used to generate your online avatar. I had to Google ‘sex with animals’ so that I could find ‘zoophilic.’ How is that gonna look to my great-grandchildren?

So, don’t get caught up in the wave of excitement regarding the potential for leaving an immortal version of yourself online after you die, gleaned from a lifetime of tweets and status updates, because your clone may turn out to be a slavering, depraved shadow of your current self.

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