Technological Ghosts

“I’m not real. I’m just like you. You don’t exist in this society. If you did, your people wouldn’t be seeking equal rights. You’re not real... so we’re both myths... I come to you as the myth.” - Sun-Ra

We are all creating the digital ghosts of ourselves that will remain long after we are gone. Each picture taken, email sent, voicemail left, and other digital imprints create the non-organic matter that will form into an amalgamated form of you whether you want it or not. Even the most private and luddite among us cannot escape the apparitional legacy of our technology consumption. Those devices that end up in junk drawers, the shelves of your garage, the bookshelf, your glovebox, and of course the closets, will represent a sense of “us” as a snapshot in time. The audiophile represented by the record player and high end speakers. The aspiring videographer which their myriad of GoPros, external drives, and camera bodies. The athlete augmented and tracked by their heart rate monitors, gps watches, and smart scales. Nearly every persona imaginable cannot escape this digitization of their human experiences.

All of the above is mostly a discussion about the tactile material representation of who we are. It’s the digital memories that live on within these decaying electronic corpses themselves that is the deeper conversation. By extension its the data residing remotely on the cloud infrastructure they are connected to that is also up for debate. This data will become the permanent reincarnation of our souls ad infinitum. In a way, making everyone immortal similar to the lives of the greats who lived prior to arrival of digital memory; instead remembered or forgotten because of the decisions of historians who memorialized our collective records. Some of this digital legacy is yours, but more and more the “rights” to them belong to some tech firm and survive on, sitting on servers in clouds you will never see above your head. Freedoms we so easily signed away when eager to post to our media streams because of the fear of missing out.

I first thought about the idea of digital ghosts while listening to a podcast in which one of the guests on the show mentioned getting a voicemail from a deceased family member after that person died. The message had apparently been delayed by cellular network issues. That eery idea got me thinking about digital ghosts. The pictures, text messages, voicemails, documents, and more that could theoretically live on in perpetuity. I started to look around our house hunting down the sarcophaguses of the digital echos we have created. As I have been cultivating a minimalist practice over the years, I had already whittled down what little remained to a few devices. An external hard drive here and one or two other insignificant devices were all I could find.

Browsing through them I encountered laughs, sadness, and sad moments of life as I scrolled through the archives of our lives. A broader philosophical question came to me during that search. The question I began to ponder was how, where, and when do I want the digital embodiment of my life’s experiences represented? Do I even have a say or was that conversation closed when I posted my first bit of content to some service at the beginning of my internet journey? These and other questions are what we consumers of technological tools and services rarely ask. I am sure these are debates that many of the developers of these machines and applications rarely consider when building them.

This search and the Pandemic have motivated my to try and be more intentional about the digital decisions I am making. Every time I pick up a device I am trying to consider what to post, when, and towards which audience. This constant debate has me wondering if this careful consideration gets in the way of enjoying the the use of technology as-is. Do we spend too much time pontificating on how each post will represent us in the future? There is a balance in all of this, though I am not sure where that line resides or if it is more of gray area. What’s more, I wonder if people are capturing enough or too little information for if and when the day comes that we can transfer consciousness and experience to another version of ourselves like in the movie Swan Song. It’s all scary, compelling, and empowering to thing about the technological ghosts of who we are, because we can in some ways see them in real time.