Grief in the Age of Digital Immortality

In 2012, in a desert in California, a dead man came back to life.

Fifteen years, seven weeks and three days after he was pronounced dead from five gunshot wounds, he appeared in front of a crowd of 80 000 people. He emerged shirtless, wearing Timberlands and showing off a THUG LIFE tattoo on his stomach. Tupac Shakur raised his arms and began to perform Hail Mary. Only it wasn’t him, it was a computer-generated holographic effect. Fans roared and the rapper’s mother, Afeni Shakur, was reportedly “absolutely positively thrilled.”

The idea of bringing people back from the dead has fascinated human beings for millennia. The Greeks believed that Orpheus was a musician and prophet who descended into the underworld of Hades in an attempt to bring his wife Eurydice back to life. A contemporary iteration is showcased in an episode of Black Mirror where a man lives on through a virtual avatar created from a lifetime’s worth of emails and social media posts. More to the point is the series Upload in which humans can upload their consciousness to a virtual afterlife of choice.

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Today, uploading, storing or transferring a person’s personality into a digital entity feels entirely possible. But this possibility alone is not enough to allay my misgivings about this quantum leap. I have written and presented publicly on my skepticism of Web 3 and the future of the metaverse elsewhere, and the ethics, psychology and values associated with digital immortality have been documented in great detail by some of the sharpest intellectuals of the 20th and 21st century.