Welcome to the new books network. Hello everybody and welcome back to new books in science, technology, and society, a podcast channel on the new books network. I'm Jake, one of the hosts of the channel. Today, we'll be talking with Carl Erman, who is an assistant professor of political science at Uppsala University about his new book, The Afterlife of Data. What happens to your information when you die and why you should care? Carl, welcome to the show. Thank you. I was wondering if you could begin the interview by telling us a bit about yourself. Well, so I'm out of political science department, but ironically, I've actually never taken one single credit in political science. I'm a student, like I'm an interdisciplinary student of technology, so when I did my graduate studies at the University of Oxford, I was at this very interdisciplinary department called the Oxford Internet Institute, and I guess I was a sociologist when I came there, but I was kind of a philosopher when I left, and now I'm doing AI stuff basically. This book that we're going to talk about today, at least the empirical stuff and some of the philosophical analysis, is based on my doctoral elicitation that I did at the Oxford Internet Institute. Could you start the conversation by telling our listeners about death cultures before the Internet? So, I mean, whenever we talk about death cultures, it's important to recognize that which part of the world are we talking about? It's a very diverse thing, so we really shouldn't treat it as a monolith, but in order to give you some semblance of a comprehensive answer, death scholars usually talk about the era preceding the digital era as an era of hidden death, or an era of forbidden death. So modernity famously is the era when all of a sudden, the dead are to be hidden from society and from plain sight, like most modern people have either never seen a dead person, and they've definitely never seen a person die. Whereas if you go back only like 150 years, that's like everybody, like every kid you would run into on the streets would have seen a dead body, and quite possibly they would have seen somebody actually die as well, because death was more or less a public event, like when someone was about to die, you would gather the entire community, and they would be there with you in your house in your last moments. Whereas today, death is, or at least in modernity, death has been dealt with as this kind of medical event that is to be hidden in a hospital, is treated by experts, like medical experts rather than spiritual experts, and most importantly, when you die, you tend to be at least in Europe, you tend to be cremated, and then hidden somewhere outside of the city, that big cemetery, where the living can go, and they can leave. But if you compare this to the Middle Ages, for instance, when you would have a graveyard in the middle of the city, like all European churches, they're full of graves, they're like tombs inside that you're walking on tombs. So death used to be way more present, and then in modernity, all of a sudden, we must hide death, and my book is about how the internet completely disrupted this regime of hiding the dead in their legitimacy as members of society. What can we learn from previous technological disruptions before the advent of the internet? Yeah, so this is, I spent a great deal of the book, actually, the first chapter following upon the introduction is this historical overview of, I initially tended to write a history of how we've dealt with the dead, and I realized that since the dead are so entangled with religion, with culture, language, architecture, writing a history of the dead in society is kind of like writing a history of society. So I couldn't quite do that, but instead in the book, I'm focusing on four or five major disruptions of our relationship, technological disruptions, with our relationship with the dead. And the point that I'm trying to make in this chapter is that we tend to think about our after-lives, these technological disruptions of our after-lives as fundamental shifts. But I tried to show in this chapter that there's actually continuity. So let me give you an example here. In our nomadic origins, paleolithic man, there was very little interaction with or relationship to the dead. Somebody dies, you just keep on walking and you leave them behind perhaps like put them under a heap of sand or something, but essentially you keep on walking, you leave things behind. But once we moved into physical permanent structures and somebody dies, you can't just keep walking and they're certainly not going to walk away from you, so you've got to put them somewhere. You're suddenly faced with this question of what do we do with the dead? And interestingly, when I did research for this book, I realized that most Neolithic cultures, so like late stone age cultures, they dealt with this question by basically preserving the dead within the living space of their houses. So there would normally be like a top floor of those that were reserved for the living and then a ground floor that was reserved for your ancestors. But interestingly, you would keep the cranium of the dead inside your house and you would build them a new plaster phase and put in new like seashell eyes. So the dead would very much be like an active part of the community still. And then with time, this practice develops and rather than just like a cranium with some plaster on top of it, you start making statues and figurines of the dead. And then you still have the cranium inside the figurines. And you still have like a statue with the biological remains of the dead intact inside it. But then after a couple of thousands of years, you start disposing of that as well. And it's this gradual transition into only play. And then it's play in a grave and then it's language. And then you add layers of technology on top of it. But what I'm trying to show here is that it's actually continuity that these additional layers are also a kind of body. It's a kind of like informational body that is conceptually but also literally remains from this time when we used to preserve the dead literally inside our technologies. You mentioned language. How does language change our relationship with the dead as our technology evolved from clay or wax masks to the printing press? Yeah, so there are a couple of really interesting things that happened, of course, with mass produced printing but also later in modernity and transforming our relationship to the dead. And I mean, of course, what writing essentially does is that it makes the dead portable. So sure, like you can preserve the physical remains of a dead person, you can go visit our grave, you can have like symbolic representations of the dead such as like Stonehenge in the UK, for instance, that is thought to be a representation of the ancestors. And you can move Stonehenge, like in fact they did, the people that built it, moved it from Wales to Southern England. But like if you can preserve the dead within a book, if you're like an ancestral authority you can be derived from a piece of paper, then of course that's much more portable. It can be transported both across geographical distances, but also across temporal distances. So what happens then when not only can we preserve the authority and legitimacy of your like your ancestral authority within a book or an archive, but you can actually spread the words of the dead, like mass produce them. So one really interesting way in which this happens is, well, for instance, dead authorities like Jesus Christ or Muhammad the prophet, who like up until the printing press have been, their authority has basically been the authority of clergy. And now all of a sudden everybody can read the words of Jesus in their own Bible, which and then you have reformation and so forth in Europe. But so yeah, that's a really, that's like a boom of portability of the dead where all of a sudden someone who lived like 16, 1700 years ago can speak directly to the Christian population of Europe. And then like quickly following upon that you have photography and then the telegraph, which also fundamentally changes the presence of the dead in society. In one sense, it makes them so much more present, but it also introduces this new opportunity of hiding them, you know, sure, like you can transport a book to wherever you want, but unlike a monument or like, I don't know, the pyramids or a sepulcher, you can always like stick the book away in a dusty library, you can find them in a much different way than you could before. All of this begs the question, how has the internet changed everything? So like, we really should say that we're still like in the very early days of the internet. So we can't really draw any conclusive, any conclusive inferences about like, how did the internet change it? We also should be really careful in falling to this trap of technological determinism in viewing like, you know, society as some kind of dependent variable and then you have the internet as an independent variable that just comes in and changes stuff in society. And that's something that I'm really trying to push in the book that it's not that the internet is necessarily an active agent in transforming our relationship to the dead. It's rather if you make the comparison to these first houses when the Stone Age people were certainly faced with a question like, what do we do with the dead? It's a new type of question and you can answer that question in multiple different ways. Similarly, we are faced now with a question of what do we do with the digital dead? And I think a lot of people can identify with this on a personal level. Like your parent dies or like someone, like maybe your spouse dies and you're faced with this question. Okay, here's their Facebook account. What do I do with it? Should I preserve it? Should I memorialize it? Should I take it down? Should I save it maybe for this person's children or grandchildren to look at? And these are practically challenging questions of like, you know, how do I even get access? How do I know where a person's data is? But there are some morally challenging questions of what should I do? What am I obligated to do with data? What my book adds to that personal experience of what should I do is that it's not only an individual question, it's also a collective question. We're not only as individual consumers of these platforms asking what do we do with the dead, but we're also as a generation asking, what should we as a society do with the 2.2 billion of people who are expected to die in the next three decades alone? So it's a massive societal problem that we're faced with. Following up on the Facebook memorial posts in your book, you discuss these in the context of digital remains. As listeners may be unaware, what are digital remains? So digital remains is a concept that I and a couple of other philosophers have developed. There is this debate on like, how should we conceptualize data left behind by a dead person on the Internet? It's that time of the year. Your vacation is coming up. You can already hear the beach waves, feel the warm breeze, relax and think about work. You really, really wanted all to work out while you're away. Monday.com gives you and the team that peace of mind. When all work is on one platform and everyone's in sync, things just flow. Wherever you are, tap the banner to go to Monday.com. In the beginning, people talked about digital estates and digital legacies. But the thing is that like whenever we describe something that happens on our screens or in like the virtual world, we, in order to grasp it, we tend to connect it to physical objects that we already have like protocols for how to deal with. So like we talk about a desktop or a file on your computer. We talk about websites and these like sites and files and desktops, they refer to physical things that we know what they are. But like a website doesn't correspond to any actual site in the cyberspace. Your desktop doesn't correspond to any like physical little desk inside your computer. So these are just useful concepts and heuristics that we use to understand the internet. And digital remains is one of those because it brings with it certain moral protocols for understanding the ethical status of these data. So if you go back to what I said in the beginning that we should understand whatever a person leaves behind, including like even if it's clay, like that is comparable to the status of a body. So I'm saying that like what you leave behind on the web, we should think about that in terms of almost like a digital corpse. This is like really a development of a common argument within AI ethics or data ethics. That the relationship between you and your data is not just like, it's not analogous to your relationship to your physical possessions. It's not like your data is like your car. If someone steals it, it's like, oh, tough luck, but you can get another. It's rather like if someone illicitly accesses your data, they are illicitly accessing a part of you. It's like more like they're accessing your hand or your arm. And even if you think about it the other way around, if you think about like what are you, what defines the person that is you, you would probably like you would either go to roots. You would either say, well, what defines me is like my biological essence, my body. Okay, what is that? That's what defines what sets aside your body from other bodies is arguably your DNA. Okay, what's DNA? Well, this is a string of information. If you go the other way around and you say, okay, well, what defines me is rather a narrative. It's like I am unique because I'm the only person who has this narrative structure. What's the narrative? Well, that's also like a sequence of information, really. So it's a common argument in data ethics that you are your information. Your information is like your digital body. And I'm taking that argument and I'm taking it one step further saying, well, if you die then by implication, those data will be your digital corpse. In your book, you lay out the post-mortal condition. Before we get to the back half of the interview, what is the post-mortal condition? So what the post-mortal condition is really my concept to define this new era in our relationship to the dead that we find ourselves in. And of course, it's a play with the concept of the post-modern condition because, as I said before, in modernity, the dead are hidden. They have no political or social legitimacy, like if we try to hide the dead, basically. And what commences with the internet is the era after modernity because this policy becomes more or less impossible to uphold. So it's hinting at, of course, the post-modern condition. But secondly, and what I emphasize in the book is that it's a condition in the sense that it's not given how we respond to it. It conditions our responses. It forces us to ask certain questions. And we can answer those questions however we like. We can still try to uphold their regime of hiding the dead. We can still try to have some kind of digital cremation, like originally destroying a person's data upon their death. But we still have to face the moral implications of those choices. We still need to ask the question. And that is what the post-mortem condition denotes, that we are living in a time where all of a sudden we're as individuals and as a society we're faced with the dead and we're constantly faced with the dead in a way that we haven't been perhaps for thousands of years. And if listeners are thinking like, hang on a minute, like I've seen dead people once or twice on flicker through on social media, well it's not like they're always there. Well, I have two things to say. The one is that the population of the internet is still very young. Most of the people using the internet, either like social media or just the social web, you're still in our somewhere in between your teens and maybe up till 60, 70. But after that, penetration rates tend to drop in older demographics. But that's not going to be the case, is it in the next couple of decades? So increasingly, like our generation, we're going to have like a lifetime of data left behind, like more or less like everything you said, everything you clicked on, not just the photos that you upload, but as soon as you open any device, you're producing data about yourself. And that's all going to be there in a couple of decades when our generation starts dying off. And the second thing is we often don't actually know that we're interacting with digital remains because they're not always flagged that way. There are plenty of apps that would let you continue to be active on social media, even after your death, because in various ways, your presence is automated. But there are also increasingly apps that would turn your personality into an AI agency so that you can always log into this site and have a chat with your deceased grandparents based on their data. And also, we survive through our data also through the algorithms that they help train. So it may not necessarily be the case that your data is physically present, but your data may have trained algorithms that people will continue to interact with for decades, if not centuries. You mentioned that at every moment, people are generating data, should all of that data be saved? Well, it can't be saved. That's maybe the simple answer, like we can't preserve everything forever. It's pretty common both within the industry, but also like weirdly, sometimes within research that the internet is described as this kind of like ephemeral space beyond the material world. It's like what you do online is there forever, but it's not there forever, is it? It's there as long as somebody pays for their server space where it's stored. It's not like it's uploaded to some cloud that exists in the sky regardless of what we do with it. So we are going to be faced with a question both as individuals and as a society of which data do we save? Like, who's important to save for austerity? But and this has always been the case, like we always ask, like, what is important to save for austerity, but prior to the internet, this question was basically a question of, okay, we have limited resources. Who is important enough to be recorded because recording is expensive, whereas now recording is the default, like everything is recorded all the time. And rather than selective preservation, it's selective destruction. We are choosing whom and what to destroy. And this is like one of the great or bigger moral takeaways from the book that this should be a matter that we as a democratic society are concerned with. But as of current, we've outsourced this question of whom and what to preserve for austerity completely to the market. It's like a handful, even a handful of tech giants who are currently sitting on this massive archive of hundreds of millions of dead profiles. And they're going to be the people who answered the question of what is worth preserving. And unfortunately, like, they're not very good at taking multiple forms of value into account in those decisions. So the question of like, what is worth preserving for austerity becomes a question of what can we make money on? And that is a very dangerous development. Let's expand one. In the book, you argue that there may be value in saving all human generated data because it could offer a more complete historical record from a diverse set of individuals. However, market forces may not see that data as valuable and corporations who hold vast rows of data may choose to withdraw or alter access the data they hold. If that happens, what will happen to the data? Yeah, there are two dimensions of this. One is political and the other is economic. So the economic, and of course, they're connected. But the economic angle is that in a couple of decades when Facebook has, well, a couple of hundred of millions, maybe billions of disease profiles on their servers, those profiles still take up a load of servers space. So they're still a cost to the company. And now they're going to be faced with like, okay, so how do we justify that cost? And probably like some data is going to have to go. And when they decide what to delete and what to preserve, my hunch is that Northern European or West European and North American users, they're worth a lot because you can train algorithms based on their data, like their descendants are going to be important consumers, whereas African users and South Asian users, they're not going to be nearly as valuable. So what's going to happen with this amazing archive, like we're talking about the biggest archive of human behavior assembled in the history of our species, so it's an enormously valuable archive from like a scientific standpoint. But what's going to happen is probably like Africa is just going to be deleted. There isn't going to be a digital history on Africa and in the South Asia, which is quite tragic. The political side of this is that there may also be political principles as to not only which data are preserved, but who can access it. Whenever people ask me like, why should we care? Like why should we care who owns the data of the dead? Like we're going to be dead anyway. I usually use this as an example and I say, well, do you think that the #MeToo movement was an important event in Western history? They're like, yeah, it's a super important event, like it's going to be studied by generations of historians, that's like an important turning point in feminism and so on. Okay, but all of that data right now is owned by one person and that person is Elon Musk. So in a couple of decades, when historians are going to seek knowledge about this major historical event in the early 21st century, they're going to have to go to Elon first. And ask permission. So we're going to concentrate our knowledge of the past to like one or two people. And that is a very dangerous development. Even if we happen to think that these are like super moral heroes, which by the way, they aren't, but even if they were, it would be a very dangerous situation to put ourselves in. In the book, I make a reference to George Orwell's 1984, where in Orwell's days, like, you couldn't imagine a bigger behemoth of data than the state. So in Orwell's novel, it's the state that governs history at the Department of Truth and they own all archives and they can, anytime they want to, they can just change the past. Now, it turns out that states aren't actually the biggest hoarders of information, it's private companies. So we are approaching a very Orwellian future, as you said, it's not the evil party that's going to control the past, but rather like one or two or three firms. What should we do about all this, or in terms of the book, how do we live with the post-martial condition? Yeah, I mean, this is one of the most common questions I get from journalists. They're always like, so how do we solve it? Like, what's the answer then? And my editor, when I wrote the book was kind of like, yeah, there needs to be like an answer. And I realized that's how most books are structured. It's like, you know, you set up some problem and then you say, and here's how we solve it. And that's really kind of the side guys of our time, but there is a solution. Like, if we only do this, we mustn't pay the price. And that doesn't quite work for this problem, does it? And that's what I really like about the topic, that whatever we do, somebody's going to be unhappy. Like, they're always going to be losers. Like, if we preserve the data eternal, like for posterity, we just hoard historical data for future generations to know about their past. Like, the environmental cost of that is going to be enormous. Also, like, what happens to posthumous privacy, you probably don't want your grandchildren or future researchers just poking around in your data. At the same time, like, if we just destroy everything, what we're going to end up with is what researchers referred to as a digital dark ages of like a complete oblivion of the recent past. So we're going to know that, like, important things went down on social media, but we don't really know what they were, and we can't study them because we don't have access to the data. Meanwhile, like, even if it's really bad thing that these companies are completely controlling our past, we can't just turn the other way around and go like, okay, so maybe like UNESCO or some intergovernmental organization should just take over and be like custodians of the internet. I mean, that's equally dangerous. So what I'm saying is that we're going to have to settle upon compromises democratically. Like, there is no expert that can, like, descend from their university and be like, guys, I solved it. But we must talk about it. The right solution is the solution that we settle upon together. Now, that being said, there are, of course, a couple of like concrete things that we can do here now. Like, even as an individual, there are plenty of things that you can do to protect your data posthumously, to protect your future digital remains. Many, many social media networks actually let you choose a legacy contact. So someone that will quote unquote inherit or be the custodian of your profile, if you die. There are plenty of apps and services that you can use that will like clean the web from your data after you die and so on. But there are also important things that we can do together as a society. And I think the most important thing that we can do is to try to split power, to split the power over who controls the past. I mean, antitrust legislation is going to be a very important part of this. But you can also imagine setups similar to, for instance, UNESCO's World Heritage label. In the book, I think I make the comparison to the great pyramids of Egypt. Like, we all realize that this very, very important world heritage. We all have a stake in what happens to the pyramids. But they're on Egyptian territory and Egypt must be able to remain like a sovereign state. So what the UNESCO World Heritage label does is that it introduces a compromise in saying that UNESCO will help Egypt in being the custodians of the pyramids, restoring them whenever needed, doing research on them, if they would ever need to, you know, if there are ever any needs to to maintain the integrity of these artifacts, UNESCO will step in. Meanwhile, it is always respecting European or Egyptian sovereignty. Like, it's still Europe's soil. And similarly, we could imagine, like an organizational, like, UNESCO that would come in if say, Facebook or Google, we're about to delete some of their historical data, you could certainly have like, UNESCO stepping in being like, look, we can actually help you preserving this in a respectful manner that will serve humanity in the future. Carl, this has been a wonderful conversation. If people want to learn more about you, your work, or this book specifically, where can they go? Well, if you go Google, my name, it's like, it's probably going to be one of the first things showing up. There may, there has been a lot of media coverage on this book and my research. So you may have to scroll through some of that. But generally, I tend to say that just Googling called on or the afterlife of data. But that usually does it. The book can be bought at, well, anywhere where you buy books, it's unlike most books written by academics, it's actually really cheap. It's like $20 or something. The University of Chicago Press who published a book said that they wanted a zero barrier price. So I think that every once in a while, there's a book written by an academic that like, your average reader will actually enjoy and think is interesting. And I suppose they think that this is one of those books. I'd agree. It was a pleasure to read. No, thank you. Thanks again for coming on the show. Of course. Cheers. [Music]
