An end-game for our virtual selves...

“We spend so much of our life online, but what happens to our virtual selves when we die? Do they disappear too, or do we become ghosts in the machine?”

I first wrote these words back in 2012 while I was working as an editor for a communications agency in Brussels. The thought came to me after a very reliable stringer went completely off the radar. At first, I thought he’d ditched us because my boss sent back some articles he’d written bleeding with corrections and comments from a rather picky client.

I knew he was having some kind of difficulty at home and perhaps even financial problems, so I persevered for his sake and sent a follow-up email about a big haul of stories coming up. He never passed up work!

No response on the first day, which was out of character. Three or four days passed without word. Maybe he was more miffed about the client’s rebuke than I thought. I let it pass. But after two weeks I knew something was clearly wrong.

So I tried to call him on his mobile. No answer. I tried his old landline – his elderly mother’s house, I recall. Again nothing. This was more than a hump. Something else was going on. It was time to start investigating.

I checked his work web-page and LinkedIn. Nothing unusual there – some activity the previous month. This seemed about right; men of a certain age don’t post that much, from experience. I consulted colleagues and we all agreed the only way to get to the bottom of this was to Google his name + ‘obituary’. Morbid as it seems, it was the only possible explanation…

Sure enough, thanks to his unique-sounding name, one of the first hits was a note in a local newspaper that our ‘remote’ colleague of more than five years had passed away. No mention of how, only that the family expressed its gratitude to a certain hospice, which may or may not suggest he had been ill for some time. And when I think about the declining standard of his work, it made more sense.

But the way this happened, or at least the way his ‘virtual’ community (distant friends, colleagues and employers) had to learn of his death is what troubles me about relationships that have only ever existed online… in the ‘know-ware land’. We build up friendships or professional closeness over the years without any physical foundations or recourse, if that is the right way to express it.

I didn’t know his family, or even if he had one. I had that old landline when he first started working for us, but that was superseded by email/LinkedIn and so on. So, once his mobile phone apparently expired or the battery ran out, that was it. His mother, wife, son, or whoever was close to him simply didn’t think to post a note to his network of virtual friends and colleagues.

Even if they did think of it, it’s unlikely they had the passwords to access and close his social networking tools. I know this because I continued to get surreal messages about ‘updates’ to his profile a long time after he'd passed away, like some kind of digital wraith. Disturbing. What or who was still interacting with him? In this case I believe someone he'd invited to join his network finally got round to accepting it… maybe a year later.

As the number of sites that require logins keeps growing by the day, it seems, everything from garden-variety e-commerce and e-government sites to streaming platforms, the task of closing all chapters (virtual and physical) of our lives when our time is up is becoming more and more complex.

Digital legacies

Think about how this all affects our family, friends and colleagues (virtual and real)! Not having a post-game plan in case we get knocked over by a bus tomorrow is unfair to them. At least when we owned CDs and other real physical assets there is an accepted protocol, with or without a will and last testament. If uncontested, your stuff would be handed over to the nearest and dearest. But with digital legacies we’re not even sure we own them, let alone whether we have a plan for how to pass them down to next of kin.

Perhaps the smart, discrete, respectful thing to do is to prepare an exit plan from the virtual world as much as we are primed to do so for the physical world. For example, we should note down the main platforms we engage in and how family or friends can access them, to manage any so-called digital assets and data we leave behind. The more trusting souls may prefer to use digital wallets and password management systems designed to help with such things (see Wired’s review of these). Others may stick to old-school written lists secreted away until they’re needed.

Then it only seems prudent and smart to make a note somewhere official (and importantly, accessible) so a trusted person or the executor has instructions or enough information to be able to shut down online accounts which otherwise eerily live on as ghosts in the machine after we pass.

A version of this story appeared many years ago on Chronikler, an award-winning blog which seeks to shed an alternative light on contemporary events and ideas. The problem won’t go away by itself so it seemed like a good idea to resurrect this story for Know-Ware Land.