Digital Taboo n.43

Time and mortality are two ideas very tightly hung to one another, and associated to many more; in fact I could go on for hours citing the propositions and hypotheses o a whole army of philosophers, poets, painters, and other mundane people, but I do not have the resources to do so, meaning:

1. I am not that educated.
2. I do not have nearly enough ice-cream, cigarettes, pizza and booze to slip my mental capacities down such a slope.

However, what I would like to point out is the paradoxical incosistency between the greatest invention since the slinky (the internet, not menthol cigarettes...) and the notion of death as far as focus and mere occurence are concerned. Sure you do get the occasional death registrar or the 'in memory of' site or blog, but death is not very much mentioned and dealt with on and over the internet as it is in real life. I am not of course referring to stupid people arranging suicide packs over obscure IRC channels, but rather to what happens to the content (especially personal rather than let's say a corporate database) after the content makers die. The reason behind this is of course obvious and attributed to the relative short history of the web and more particular of the web 2.0, where the median age of the content creators is probably half the median age of the whole bloody population, a statistical figure heavily endorsed by fifteen year olds singing up for social networks more often than they gets zits. In other words, most of us fuckers projecting ourselves on the internet have still a long way before nature takes it course and pulls the shut down lever on our egotistical brains. Consequently no-one has looked into the matter.
Nonetheless this is something that really worries me, and it is something web enterpneurs should really look into. So far as I know there a few obscure services that provide the creation of a will online, but I do not know of any single service that will take care of your 'digital and online stuff' after you have ceased to be. You may think that something like that should be trivial if not completely unimportant, but in fact it is not. Being the self-centered bastard (hold on a second.... you do not blog by any chance, do you?) that I usually entertain myself with, I will give my own personal example. I have 3 distinct, non-work related email accounts, 1 blogger account, 1 facebook account, 2 mini-sites lost in cyberspace, a good number of documents uploaded on Google documents (this post, as many other was prepared there), I am looking into the possibility of creating a flickr account, 1 e-banking account, half a wordpress account (don't ask), and of course numerous files on various hard drives which I can tag as 'personal' (and no, by 'personal' I do not mean photoshoped pictures of my member), not to mention my user&password registration with many other less important to my everyday life sites. Now, given the rates at which:

1. The popularity of social networks and user created e-content grows
2. My ego grows
3. I drink, smoke and not exercise

I am pretty sure by the time maggots will be having good old fashioned maggot sex in my eyesocket I will have left a right mess in cyberspace, devastatingly contributing to it's entropy, not to mention the zettabytes of files in hard drives I will own by then including legal copies of music and movies made to protect the physical medium from normal tear and wear. Of course I never really cared about tidiness and stuff, and why should I care when my skull will be the equivalent of Studio 52 for lower organic forms? Well obviously I wont, but still I do not want to be a burden to others, and most importantly I do want control over what I pass on to the next generation. It is right about now that I can see that face on your ... face, that 'what is there to pass on digitally?' face, very similar to the 'how do we play poker again?' face. Well in my case, I guess there will not be much worth, but imagine if someone would be a CG artist for 50 years, or a writer blogging every so often. In those cases there is definitely a lot to pass on to to your beloved ones just so they can admire your memory even more while they go on prostituting themselves in order to pay off debts after your latest attempt at 'Most Porn Sites Subscribed To'.
The major difficulty that arises in handling such material is that it is actually ... immaterial! Everything we pass on after we pass on is in material form in one way or another (money, land, dirty underwear, cheap chinese pottery), apart of course from names and honory titles. Naturally, there are other immaterial notions that can be included in a will, like a poem or something cheap and posy like that, but still, it will not be the words that are left, but a piece of paper holding their material projection (this philosophical sentence just seriously kicked ass). So, to put it bluntly, we do not have much experience in how to handle with immaterial content, since it either lies in the form of a hard drive that can hold a ludicrous array of diverse formats in extremely small size but in exterior form says nothing of its content (unless it is labelled 'Naughty, Very Naughty'), or even worse in the form of hundreds of remote servers. Not that easy to make that chest of valuables, is it now?
Let us however first distinguish between local content (hard drives and shit) and net content (blogging and shit) and deal with them separately. One obvious step towards truncating the discussion would be to adopt the notion that by the day we become dust in the wind (did you know that right now you are probably inhaling one of the oxygen atoms last inhaled by Julius Ceasar?), all of us will have uploaded content and files of any kind and format on personal and low cost if not free high capacity ftp servers of one sort or another. Another way would be to stop reading; that would really truncate things. On the other hand however, there are binary data, like that homocurious porn, we would like deleted from our computers when we provide the heating for a nuclear family for approximately 5 hours. We will be probably be needing something sort of a software butler, something like a purposeful virus, which will erase all the uneccesary and embarassing to the downright illegal, and neatly store all the parts that we want left over and retained in a folder aptly named 'My life and various Minesweeper high scores'. Now, there are a couple of technical details that are difficult. Most crucially, how is the computer to know you had one Viagra pill too many and managed even to screw up your bionic (it's the future baby!) heart? Will the executor (the dude that carries out the actions of your will, not a creep carrying a large axe) have your password and activate the software? Will there be a chip somewhere in your body transmitting the news to your computer and to some 'digital death' net service that will take care of all the rest? Who knows? But with this note, I am able to bridge of to the next paragraph covering the net content. Oh, I am good...
Handling the net content should not be as bad. Basically all you need is a service hosting all your usernames and passwords you have for every other net (or not) service you used to have (you are dead, remember?). After it receives (in one way or another) the devastating news it sobs for about three picoseconds, then scourges the net and retrieves all the content you wanted to bequeath to the fools you loved, and at the same terminates the services in one quick quantum leap. Of course this means that thousands of sites and services will have to incorporate a functional plugin between your 'Digital Will' service and their databases, and it has to be done seamlessly, safely and universally. The last thing you want while your ashes pollute the beards of your friends Big Lebowski style, is to have Redmond's mydeathspace.com conflicting with Google's Documents or facebook failing to comply with your whims once again (and thus trivially amuse you even when you have lost that ability). I guess there would be the need for a new scripting language, something like Java, only called Lava or something like that, and with less updates.
Of course not all that is not useful to your death state should be destroyed. For example if I had a son, and he had a son, and he was so kind as to give my first name to his son, and I managed to stay alive while my grandson gets his own email address (probably at the age of 3), then there we would have a small issue, because my primary email is [firstname] . [lastname] [at] [gmail.com]. So what the hell is his email going to be? [firstname junior] . [lastname] [at] [gmail.com]? That is really cheesy... Nonetheless, I have to admit that I like to amuse myself thinking what my MSN (or Live or whatever the fuck they wanna call it these days) Messenger offline status will read when I am dead:


Jason X-( Snorting half of Perou with Richard Pryor while listening to some Miles Davis >:-)

P.S. 1 Speaking of the greatest comedian ever, in one my previous posts i really fucked up the whole Richard Pryor joke. First of, although in reality one of the most popular warnings was the 'four minute' one, Pryor purposefully mentioned a one hour or a half hour (i cant remember, imagine that!) warning so that he would actually had time to find the broad and do her. I guess us whiteys feel four minutes is good enough...Secondly, the punchline was not 'I would cum and go at the same time'; that one is from his father-dying-while-fucking story. The punchline with the bomb warning had something to do with 'blow' or something like that. I am not too eager to listen to my collection right now looking for it, although I am sure my grand-grandchildren will sort the mess out. Eventually.
P.S. 2 I would like to thank the genius behind xckd for keeping me entertained while spending my night miserably failing to produce a bug free code for my thesis and giving me some inspiration for the above bullcrap.