"What happens to the account when a person dies?" In the first few decades of the digital age, this sentence was mostly just a hell joke among young people. Because we haven’t yet had time to experience the mass generational death of our digital denizens, but that’s about to change now.As the digital age progresses, one day, the number of accounts with deceased heads on the Internet will exceed the total number of living accounts.
According to predictions from the Oxford Internet Institute, Facebook's qualitative turning point will arrive in 2070, when the proportion of Facebook accounts living and dead will be reversed, with population hubs such as India and Africa being the main sources of dead accounts.
Considering China's demographic structure, our day will only come earlier, not later.
The experience of the past few years has proven time and time again that any tiny variable on the scale of all mankind will cause an all-round upheaval in social consciousness and even economic structure.
Besides, this is death.
It was difficult for ordinary people 50 years ago to imagine the changes that the Internet would bring to human society, and it is difficult for us now to imagine the impact of the first large-scale intergenerational death in the digital world.
Although it’s unclear what the future holds, some are already beginning to seriously consider digital afterlife.
Gao Yunlong, a staff member of the China Wills Library, received a special post-90s girl this year and received some "thinking shock" from young people:
“Do you have any savings to inherit?”
"No."
"Do you own property?"
"No."
"Are you married?"
"No."
"Do you have children?"
"No."
"Then what are you here for?"
"I want to designate my friends to inherit my social account in a hundred years."
The girl attaches great importance to feelings. All the records of her interactions with friends are kept intact in her social account. Her wish is that if she dies in the future, she can entrust a friend to be the "manager" of her account to help notify other friends and give them a copy of each other's communication records in the account so that they can miss her.
That's right, one group of people are still worried about "cannot afford to die" in the real cemetery, while another group of people have begun to worry about death in another world.
"Life Deletion Office"
There is a surge in the number of young people who are concerned about digital inheritance. Last year, the China Will Database alone handled 458 digital inheritance cases, and this phenomenon continues this year.
In their wills, the top five most mentioned are WeChat, QQ, Alipay, online game accounts and virtual currency.
There are not only instructions about real money and silver, but also many expectations about "spiritual wealth".
Last year, a piece of news about “Internet coffins” became a hot search topic on Weibo.
Someone has designed an "imaginary idea" - a special coffin-shaped USB flash drive. This USB flash drive allows the deceased to pre-process his or her Internet account before death, including automatically publishing obituaries, deleting data and hosting passwords after death.
This feature has made many netizens eager to put the product on crowdfunding immediately.
It also makes the method of death in the digital age come out of the circle again.
For most young people, death is still a distant topic, let alone "death in the digital age", which is an experience that has never been experienced in the entire history of mankind.
Thinking about it in the simplest and most intuitive way, dealing with digital affairs is nothing more than dividing valuable things and deleting things that you don’t want others to know. It’s just like real life, there’s nothing complicated about it.
But can everything really go as smoothly as we think?
Unfortunately, it cannot.
The first thing to bear the brunt is a big problem that is often overlooked: the vast majority of our virtual accounts are not really owned by us.
Open the lengthy privacy terms of those Internet platforms, and you will find that although we consume in games and purchase music in iTunes, the vast majority of virtual accounts are only "lent" by the platform to users, and the final ownership still belongs to the platform.
For example, Douyin's user service agreement clearly states that users only obtain "the right permission to legally use Douyin." Once the account is not logged in for more than 6 months, this permission may be withdrawn at any time.
Strictly speaking, we have never owned these accounts, so there is no inheritance or transfer.
This is undoubtedly an annoying overbearing clause, but no one can refuse it, because without checking this string of book titles, we will not be able to log in to any indispensable platform.
The result of holding your nose and choosing to agree is that when the account owner dies, all interpretation rights about the account belong to the platform. Only the platform, not the account owner's relatives and friends, has the power of life and death of the account.
Sometimes decisions aren't even based on rules, just the private judgment of a few people.
A staff member of a large domestic game company revealed that the decision to retain or retain the accounts of certain "big bosses" is "all decided by the top leaders."
"Life Deletion Office"
As a result, the incident of American soldier Justin happened over and over again in 2004 - the young man died accidentally during the line of duty. His father requested Yahoo for his son's email password, hoping to obtain letters and photos in his son's email to express his condolences, but Yahoo refused on the grounds of protecting the privacy of the deceased.
In the end, the old father took Yahoo to court, and the court ruled that Yahoo could not allow the old father to inherit his son's account, but it must burn the mailbox contents into a CD and hand it to the other party.
In other words, if the platform does not want to be "mercy", we may neither be able to arrange the ownership of our own "digital heritage" nor allow the designated digital heritage executor to complete the subsequent processing of the digital heritage.
Perhaps this "unfairness" can exist for a long time because our understanding of "digital postmortem" has gone astray.
"Except for the provisions of the Civil Code, there is still a lack of relevant provisions for the protection of property rights of digital heritage. It relies more on the rules of each Internet platform, but most of their rules are biased towards their own platforms."
Lawyer Chen Kai, head of China Will Database, pointed out: "This should be improved. Internet platforms use their own rules and clauses to exclude users' rights and interests, or expand the boundaries of their interference with users' property rights, which has also caused some troubles for users."
In news reports, it is often seen that the parties concerned raised questions, and through some mediation or coordination, the Internet platform finally provided convenience.
"But according to the rules, Internet platforms can refuse it. In fact, there is no very clear guarantee for the rights and interests of users."
In other words, the Internet society is advancing too fast, and the human legal version has not had time to be updated.
Many aspects of digital heritage are still in a murky zone.
"Life Deletion Office"
From a platform perspective, the cold-blooded rules seem very "reasonable".
Redundant accounts will bring huge storage costs. For platforms that sell book, video and audio copyrights, the "No. 1 Forever" heirloom account is a devastating blow to sustainable operations.
As Ghost in the Machine points out: “If our digital possessions were anything like our physical possessions, we would all look like extreme hoarders.”
The platform controls the deceased's account, which can be "cremated" when necessary to control costs, or the data can be used as a profit-making resource.
However, it may be a mistake in itself to simply refer to digital posthumous events as “digital heritage”.
Because according to the definition of the Civil Code, inheritance is the legal personal property left behind when a natural person dies.
This means that regardless of reality or virtuality, personal legal property is personal inheritance, but the skin that carries our soul is not included in the category of "inheritance".
By analogy, the total number of digital traces left after the death of a natural person is more appropriately called "digital remains" than "digital heritage" because it contains not only property, but also identity, memory and connection, and has more "personality attributes."
"Black Mirror"
In fact, it is difficult to tell whether our generation lives in reality or on the Internet.
According to the "Statistical Report on China's Internet Development", as of June last year, the number of Chinese Internet users reached 1.051 billion, and the average person spent 29.5 hours online per week. In other words, more than half of China's Internet users spent at least 1.23 days in the digital world out of seven days a week.
The virtual world is no longer a game world that can be easily escaped. It truly occupies an increasingly important part of our lives, and we are becoming the first generation of humans to live in two worlds at the same time.
So when the real brain with 200 billion neurons operating crazily at the same time stops working, what will be left behind will be two corpses: one in reality and one in the Internet.
The balances in WeChat wallet and Alipay are like the assets carried by the digital body, virtual currencies and game skins, like the gold and jewelry worn by the body.
And stripping away these "external belongings", there are still some things that don't seem so "valuable": such as your browsing history, cookies, fingerprints, photos, memos, and every message in your circle of friends.
They are like the sacred clay in Nuwa's hands, forming everyone's "body" in the virtual world.
Among them, those we publish and disseminate publicly are clothing and appearance that everyone can see.
What is hidden behind the layers of codes and vests and has never been shown to anyone is the internal organs and bones of this body.
"Life Deletion Office"
So when we face "digital posthumous affairs", the discussion has always been about two things - digital heritage and digital remains.
However, everyone is born for the first time, and everyone dies for the first time. Death in the digital age is still a rather immature topic.
In our limited experience, it is difficult to find a comparable precedent. Most companies and individuals still rely on simple intuition to deal with problems.
Therefore, in the early years, "digital heritage" was always confused with "digital remains", creating scenes of contradictions in human nature:
The platform believes that the family members should not inherit this "legacy," while the family members believe that the platform is robbing their loved ones of their precious "remains."
"Life Deletion Office"
So, what is right and wrong between a "rational" company and an "emotional" family?
In 2018, an article published in Nature magazine by digital ethics researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute may provide a new explanation from another perspective.
Researchers pointed out that the most important thing that major global companies should refer to when it comes to policies related to "digital posthumous affairs" is the "International Council of Museums' Code of Professional Ethics."
The document is a guide for the management of human remains in archaeological exhibitions and a framework for regulating the commercial use of organic human remains, emphasizing that human remains must be handled in accordance with their inviolable "human dignity."
In human terms, it is recommended to treat "digital remains" with reference to the attitude towards mummies.
It can be studied and utilized, but the principle of respect must be followed, and business must also preserve room for human nature.
"Black Mirror"
Fortunately, while "legislation" is still loading for the time being, lawsuits and court decisions over the years have begun to guide large companies to choose "human nature."
At present, many large platforms are using more graceful deceased processing solutions to avoid conflicts and frictions.
Some companies, such as Bilibili and Weibo, choose to set up the deceased's account as a "memorial account". After verification with the immediate family, the account will automatically be converted to an unchangeable protection status.
Some companies, notably Apple, Facebook and Google, allow users to designate estate contacts who can access, delete or manage their account data after death.
Tencent has even patented a patent called "Information Processing Method and Related Devices in Inheritance and Transfer of Digital Asset Certificates", which allows users to transfer relevant digital assets to their heirs after their death.
In other words, although there is no clear progress in legislation, relying on social self-renewal and industry self-discipline, as long as relevant legally valid wills are made in advance or an estate executor is set up on the platform, then our digital affairs are still guaranteed.
"Black Mirror"
But maybe, when you see this, you will also have a question:
Are our “digital remains” worth the trouble? Wouldn't it be better to let it disappear naturally?
So my friend, you have underestimated the value of this "stinky skin".
"I don't think there's any need to delete it, and there's no need to give anyone the password. If it's dead, it's dead."
When chatting about the topic of "digital heritage", most of my friends are very helpful.
Weibo user @无read initiated a poll of thousands of people on Weibo, and the results were generally similar - 53% of people wanted digital heritage to be preserved permanently, and 47% wanted to delete it immediately.
But maybe that’s just because we don’t yet know what amazing rewards it means to get a “digital corpse.”
In fact, the value of "digital remains" is far more than ordinary people can imagine.
No matter from a personal or public perspective.
In the first episode of the second season of the British drama "Black Mirror", "I'll Be Right Back", a scene was described - the wife lost her husband and was unable to get out of the shadows, so she handed over all her husband's "digital relics" to the technology company that made the artificial man. The technology company analyzed the data and sent her back an incomparably restored husband.
As a standard anti-technological utopia drama, this story of course ends in tragedy. Gradually, the wife discovers that her husband, whose digital traces have been restored, is not "real" enough after all, and eventually abandons him in the attic like a rag doll.
"Black Mirror"
But you may not know that similar patents have long been in the arsenal of big technology companies. Microsoft already has a mature patent in 2017 that can use social data of specific people to create conversational bots.
And it is said that the effect of this technology is quite good, and it is even more powerful when combined with 2D, 3D and other AI image technologies. But in the end, due to ethical pressure, I decided to hide it.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg in the use of "digital remains". Behind it, there is already a brand new "digital afterlife industry."
What is the digital afterlife industry? Simply put, it uses your "digital traces" to bring you back to the world.
Like those holographic performances that bring deceased singers back to the stage.
Let’s briefly list a few of these companies to give you a feel:
HereAfter, which provides interactive memories in the voices of loved ones;
MyWishes, which sends scheduled messages to loved ones after death;
Hanson Robotics, which makes a robot bust that can talk to humans based on the "memories, feelings and beliefs" of deceased women;
Google has obtained a patent for cloning a person’s “psychological attributes”;
SoulMachines, which makes “digital twins”;
Uneeq is even more outrageous. It wants to create a real-life version of "San Junipero" and cram countless resurrected digital people together to "recreate human activities on an infinite scale."
"Black Mirror"
This may seem fanciful, but it’s actually not entirely difficult to implement. Sometimes it’s hard for us to imagine how rich the information we inadvertently leave on the Internet is.
Nothing explains this feeling better than a documentary called "I Love Alaska." It is a short film composed entirely of "search history".
The search records come from an American information leak, and from the records of the searcher named #711391, we can clearly outline the image of a Texas housewife who dreams of escaping from her family, getting rid of sexual frustration, skin diseases, and pursuing love:
[Can’t sleep with a snoring husband]
[How to sleep with a snoring husband]
[The noisy bird in the yard]
【How to kill noisy birds】
[Can liver problems cause acne?]
[How to leave a good impression on someone online when you meet them for the first time]
[Never admit to having an extramarital affair]
…
Among the many more victims of this information breach, we can even pinpoint a person’s true identity through a simple search of their records.
And a "digital body" that contains all digital traces of the deceased can obviously bring much more than search records. Just like a large model in a black box, we are not sure what it will collide with, but we are sure that it will definitely collide with something.
In fact, just like donating physical remains, some people are now starting to donate "digital remains."
Donors authorize some museums and libraries that collect contemporary digital materials to obtain their own digital traces, volunteering to become "archaeological relics" in the future, or donate "remains" to non-profit research institutions to become "general teachers" of the cyber world.
And this kind of donation is extremely necessary, especially in the medical field.
Jon Cornwall, a senior lecturer at the Medical Early Learning Center at the University of Otago in New Zealand, pointed out that almost all of people's medical data are now archived in electronic form, and the large amount of medical data collected throughout their lives will help various medical studies if donated to research teams.
"It could help answer a range of public health questions that require data on people's long-term health, such as how working in a specific industry affects the aging process or how exposure to pollutants affects how we develop."
And no system is willing to provide this proactively.
"Life Deletion Office"
From another perspective, "digital corpses", like real "corpses", can speak for the dead.
Dissecting a "digital corpse" can obtain a lot of precious information that only a "forensic doctor" can master.
Many previous lawsuits between family members and Internet companies stemmed from this demand - after a loved one committed suicide or was murdered, the family needed their social accounts to find out whose bullying caused the loved one to commit suicide, and who was hiding murderous intentions against their loved ones.
All in all, "digital remains" are definitely a rich mine that has been ignored for a long time. Whether to leave it and in what form is a decision we have to make before we are alive.
Many young people don’t want their “daily crazy” social accounts to be exposed in front of their parents or loved ones.
But it is undeniable that sudden loss always makes people want to hold on to something.
In Otsuchi Town, Japan, there is a white phone booth overlooking the Pacific Ocean. There is a retro black dial phone in the phone booth, but it is not connected to the power supply and the phone line.
This is the famous "phone booth in the wind". In the 311 earthquake, one tenth of the people in Otsuchi Town lost their lives. Since then, this lonely phone booth has always welcomed visitors who call, and they whisper in the phone booth, as if someone is really listening on the other side.
They are residents who have lost their loved ones in the disaster. Their long and unresolved pain is dissipated in the cold sea breeze with the help of a phone receiver that has no response.
And our social accounts that are no longer active may also become "phone booths in the wind" for our loved ones and friends.
This is also the basis for the existence of the digital afterlife industry. It is a service that exists for the living.
If you are determined not to become the material for "technological spiritual conjuring", then I'm afraid you should make arrangements as early as possible.
Of course, the current digital afterlife industry is far from mature, and few such companies can survive 3 years. But at the same time, new companies are constantly being registered, because the number of digital cemeteries will only increase in the future and will not decrease.
At this time, in our prime of life, we may always feel that the sigh of death is still far away, but please never forget the motto of Kevin Kelly, the author of "Out of Control":
"The future is already here, it's just not popular yet."