Post-dead Apocalypse

Digital ghosts, online specters and the dead-alive haunting the hallways of the internet.

Joyce Vincent: a 38 year-old British woman, was found dead in her apartment in 2006.  Apparently no one noticed her death for three years. The bills were paid, set to autopay.  The rent was drafted every month, the heat was on, electricity going and the occasional noise coming from the apartment was blamed on the TV.  The odd smell permeating the corridors of the building was thought to be coming from the trash bins.  Despite being dead for all those years, Vincent’s online self continued to ‘live’ as if nothing was out of the ordinary. She was, up to the point of the discovery of her body, in fact, undead, shedding her human earthly body that the digital avatars no longer needed.

In 2014, the five-year-old corpse of Pia Farrenkopf, a Michigan woman, was found in her home.  In a similar scene to Vincent’s, the woman’s bills were on autopay and neighbors assumed everything was fine because they knew she traveled a lot, kept to herself, and her yard was maintained.  As it turned out, one of Farrenkopf’s neighbors cut her lawn while she was away but never went to check inside her home.  What he would’ve found was a rotting corpse but also an online self that was quite alive and well.  It appears that to prevent the eternal return of the ghosts of the past, the undead or post-dead, the online self must be ‘killed’ - either financially, by draining the bank account, or by actually deleting every trace of it from cyberspace.  It is an act of disappearance that is increasingly harder to do as the digital realm subsumes all that currently exists into itself. Letting the cyber-self continue to live online is a much simpler alternative to taking time erasing every last trace of it. The digital realm is and continues to be filled with all kinds of specters of our former selves.

As humanity enters new stages of technological development it appears that its ghosts follow. They continue to propagate and haunt to corridors of the internet and with each passing upgrade, new versions of the undead are generated. New ways of capturing human endeavor seems to have a way of also capturing specters or remnants of the real world and transferring them into the constructed world. Vincent and Farrenkopf are only two such instances of the dead coming back as undead or non-dead but within different digital worlds. Perhaps the word ‘undead’ ought to be augmented or changed to ‘post-dead,’ suggesting a different ontology. Whereas the ‘undead’ were once living and rose from the dead, as the famous quote ‘when there is no longer room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth’ suggests, the term ‘post-dead’ proposes that a part of a particular subject dies while another continues living. The distinction is subtle, and yes, the two terms could perhaps be interchangeable because they both suggest life-despite-death. 

There are literally millions of names, accounts, screen names, aliases, personalities, personas, and avatars online, in that semi-lawful/lawless, completely full and completely void space of the internet.  When we’re alive, another self also exists, simultaneously and more or less independently, online.  When we open up a bank account, buy a car or apply for a mortgage, ship boxes by UPS, file a formal complaint, get a job, etc., or, in fact, if we do any sort of activity online that isn’t totally anonymous and requires our network or online ‘presence,’ this other self becomes more pronounced, fleshed out.  It also becomes the subject of surveillance, trafficking, solicitation, sale and resale, and other unsavory operations. We feed and fill our online selves with attributes and data as we would our real selves.  We open Instagram and Facebook accounts and become real to millions of others instantly.  We do not even have to be a real person, all that is required is that we exist online as one.

As in the real world in which we live, occupy space and interact with our environment, our online selves do something similar.  They interact with the environment of cyberspace and those beings/entities/‘life-forms’ that occupy it.  While we work or sleep, our online selves can interact and be interacted with, without our participation. Credit scores can be pinged, criminal records can be accessed, accounts may be hacked and information stolen, people can post to our Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts, identities can be stolen, appropriated, or conjured up out of thin air, money can be withdrawn from bank accounts. Dead people continue to receive messages, photos, season’s greetings and birthday wishes as if they were still alive. Yet the opposite can also happen. JP Morgan Chase once declared a Florida woman deceased.  This had ruinous consequences for her credit score and caused serious strain for the woman to prove she was still alive.  In another instance a veteran had to prove over four times to the US Veteran’s Affairs office that he was not dead. The VA stopped paying his pension benefits, claiming he was dead.  In each situation, each person was rendered post-dead, a ghost. 

Gerald Cotton died in 2019 and with him went $190 million locked away in QuadrigaCX crypto exchange to which he held a password.  When he died the password died with him as did the access that numerous clients had to their money. There are theories as to what actually happened to Cotton.  If he’s really dead, then his undead self is now the owner of a lot of cash, strapped in crypto currencies and it’s going to take more than a military force to extract that money from this reanimated corpse.  It is also entirely plausible that Cotton faked his death to get his hands on the cash.  In either scenario, we are dealing with essentially a similar premise.  Cotton is dead and undead at the same time, even if he is actually alive elsewhere, while QuadrigaCX still controls the assets.

One can see that with the rise of technology and the internet that humanity has created the conditions under which the existence of the post-dead is now very real, as if the ‘death drive’ (an organism’s drive toward self-annihilation) postulated by Freud a century ago is becoming tangible, because it is now measurable.  AI, automation and robotization, these are real problems and consequences of too much doing and not enough thinking; but the post-dead problem goes beyond even this speculative possibility. There are just too many variables.  It is as if a synthetic evolution is occurring in cyberspace, despite humanity’s ability to control or act upon it.  The undead may not exist in the real world, but we have most certainly ‘created’ them online and then brought them into this world as ghosts.

As for what other kinds of post-dead ghosts continue to haunt the technosphere there is the story of the little boy whose father died when he was six years old. When the boy was four, his father bought an Xbox. The father liked to play RalliSport Challenge and then to beat his own racing record within the game. After his father’s passing, the Xbox remained unplayed for ten years. When the boy was sixteen he fired up the Xbox again and immediately noticed his father’s old records and began to race against his father’s ghost. He’d get better and better, but each time he’d get close to beating his father’s time, he’d let his father’s ghost car pass, because passing him would have meant that his father’s memory ghost would be erased. This move in effect enclosed his father’s ghost in a perpetual cycle of repetition, the way that a real ghost is to be said to endlessly repeat a specific action in the ‘real’ world. There are thousands, if not millions of these kinds of ghosts, haunting the world of technology, unable to be released from their digital prisons as they are said to haunt the real world.

The memory of the boy’s dead father is tied directly to the console. There is the direct memory that exists within the mind, but there is also the memory that is literally coded into the game, a virtual ghost. These ghostly digital remnants are an interesting phenomenon explored by the late Mark Fisher in his theory of hauntology. It is a theory that posits a kind of eternal return, a haunting of the old within the new, music, art, politics, social issues, architecture, literature. None of these are exempt from the real and ephemeral ghosts that haunt the hallways of culture and civilization. Interestingly, the digital world is in the process of raising the dead, quite literally, through the accretion of code and memory and these spectres tend to exist almost entirely in this constructed space, which is an iteration of the real world of objects and subjects. The more real the digital world becomes and the more time humanity devotes to spending within it, the more real the ghosts and apparitions will become, the more power will be given over to them, with the distinct possibility that at some later time these ghosts will become sentient beings and will be able to wield power of humans, albeit only within the digital realm. It is here that the speculative world of hauntology is in direct contact with the empirical world of science.

In the world of analog, the ghost is a remnant of analog reality. To some this meant that ghosts could be captured on various analog devices, tapes, video cameras, radios, and specific devices were created just for this purpose, such as the Ghost Box. Analog ghosts have had a way to reproduce themselves through technology for as long as technology has existed. Whether these machines actually caught any real ghosts is beside the point. The point seems to be, that much like in analog technology, within the digital space it may be much easier to produce ghosts and retain them. Consider the Google Maps ghosts. These are real people caught by Google Street car, often near their homes, gardening, washing their vehicles, or doing any of the mundane things that people do and then ‘discovered’ by their surviving family members. Because of privacy issues, Google blurs out their faces, making the person into something that already resembles an apparition. One could say that in this instance these cannot be counted as ghosts, because what about all the millions of family photos that have been taken since time immemorial? The major difference is that the Google ghosts exist within a space that is in some ways already a ‘real’ space, a version of the real world, with the hope that one day virtual reality will supplant the simple street view we have today so that we may be able to experience the digital world as though it were real. It is now possible to enter into this space and feel as though one is enmeshed in it and to explore it. The explorer is then confronted with the notion that one is experiencing a kind of alternate reality. It is a reality that is very much like the real world, just frozen in time. And by extension the explorer bumps into others, some very much alive, others very much dead. Because the digital realm is very good at storing information, this world will continue to be and to expand as a repository for new forms of ghosts. But the digital realm is capable not only of trapping ghosts, it is producing ghosts through deepfakes, anti-aging software, artificial intelligence, as was the case with the Korean mother who got to meet her deceased daughter through the use of VR. There are now thousands of digital ‘humans’ populating the internet, ones that were created using nothing but digital fragments, ones and zeroes, ghosts literally conjured up out of nothing. The dystopian vision of machines taking over the world is now more real than ever, except the world that is being taken over is the interior world of the internet.