For a scene in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in which his main character and Huckleberry Finn sneak out in the middle of the night with a dead cat, Mark Twain chose a relatively new setting. Graveyards had only been fashioned in the United States less than fifty years prior to the publication of the novel.1 According to Keith Eggener, these organized burial grounds finally reached across the Atlantic in 1831. However, churches began to run out of space in their backyards during the Industrial Revolution. America then looked to England for a new strategy on how to proceed with burying the dead. Legislation was passed in 1850 after London underwent a significant cholera outbreak due to the excessive volume of inner city graveyards, which ended up contaminating the water supply. Thus, land was purchased outside city limits, on hillsides and parks, to accommodate new burial sites.2 Cemeteries now mostly exist on the outskirts of civilization for that reason, away from the mobile parts of routine life.
The history of burying the dead is centuries old. Ancient Egyptians used to place a block of wood or stone on top of a grave with primitive markings. It was not until the Victorian era when gravestones first became opulent and flashy. It was midway through this slice of history that Dickens, fifteen years before Twain, opened Great Expectations with his main character Pip in a graveyard reflecting on the parents he never knew. Since his mother and father were alive before photographs, the older version of himself discloses the following:
“[M]y first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, 'Also Georgiana Wife of the Above,' I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly.”
This sentiment has still not completely faded. Many widows, widowers, and family members remark about choosing a tombstone or casket that looks like the deceased, or at least, aesthetically resembles the individual who will be symbolized by it. The color, font, inscription, shape, width, and height of these objects all matter. In this way, the identity of the deceased is in some way preserved. However, these representations, along with grieving rituals at cemeteries that have (more or less) held steady throughout the centuries, might soon evaporate. The source of the pressure is the emergence of digital memorials, one of the few doorways open to the digital afterlife—virtual spaces to exhibit the dead.
In the last ten years, QR codes printed on acrylic plaques for headstones3 have become rather popular. There has been a burst of new companies such as Life’s QR, Monumark, and Turning Hearts that sell these items. These products have been the subject of recent Tik Toks, mentioned on the Conan O’Brien podcast, on a heartbreaking program of Inside Edition, and many more outlets. The idea is quite simple. It’s just another portal to the internet. It can be placed in an unassuming corner of a gravestone (still not without the visible company logo) and it is impervious to destructive weather. Once scanned, the link takes you to a webpage where the family of the deceased can curate a bio, slideshow, video, or other archival document of the life of their loved one to be viewed by mourners. The technical work of establishing this website is typically an offered service by the company providing the QR code. Viewing these digital remembrances can then become part of the formality of cemetery visits.
It should not be difficult to imagine where this could lead. Gravestones might be displaced by television screens that are on a loop of a selected montage by the deceased before their death, or by their families. Perhaps headstones will have a ledge for virtual reality goggles. Already, there might not even be a need for that. In the Remember Metaverse, a web3 virtual memorial, one can create digital stones, digital flowers, and even own digital land for commemorations of loved ones.
QR codes are merely the rudimentary incarnation of how digital experiences will become the primary mode of memorialization. And it is important to note that the commentary on this idea has been overwhelmingly positive. Most people online truly love it. Clearly it evokes strong emotions of sentimentality, and the idea itself is praised for being innovative.
At best, these digital memorials supplement the experience of visiting graveyards to make it more comfortable and less existential. Words can be difficult to find when meandering in a necropolis. The banal and trivial thoughts uttered when rearranging flowers are often spoken in an effort not to yield to a stream of tears. A cemetery is an expanded mausoleum, one of the only physical constructions of death itself. Lingering among the pall of phantoms for too long can be unsettling, and a return to the memories preserved in videos and photographs has the potential to ease sorrow.
However, the spurious intuition at this attempt to restyle a graveyard holds more weight than any ambivalent or heartfelt reaction. Grief is distinguishable from mourning in a pertinent way. The former is psychological and refers to the inner operations of one’s mind and emotions. The latter is social. Mourning is the public spectacle of grief, and performative displays have always been relevant to end of life ceremonies. For most of history, professional mourners have quietly existed at rituals surrounding death. These are people, such as wailing women, who are paid to cry or simply attend funerals to add to the atmosphere of sadness. In a similar way, QR memorials also represent very little about grief and much more about the public acts and behaviors exhibited during the process. Moreover, these technological variations are shifting our perception of death. As Sartre contended, death is the quintessential nothingness—among other things, death annihilates our ability to be aware of ourselves. It is inert. Death cannot be experienced. The digital afterlife is luring us into a view of death that is no longer a metaphysical limit, but rather a consumerist interrelation. To careen face-first into the negative implications of such a mindset is precarious at best.
Digital memorials, plus the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) into the grieving process, kindle a trinity of warnings: a) the commodification of grief and death; b) the gravitation towards surplus enjoyment; and c) the further blending of the material world and the virtual one. Opening the gate to the digital universe in one of the most existential, intimate human settings is not as innocuous as it might seem.
Commodification
Imagine you are visiting the grave of someone who died before they should have. You kneel down. Perhaps you say a prayer. Perhaps you lay a wreath. You stay a while to exist alongside the memory of someone you dearly loved. Your head spins for a second to the left, and you see someone approach the grave next to you. They scan the QR code and start scrolling through the digital memorial.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” you croak. “Who did you lose?”
“Oh, nobody. I didn’t know them.”
This unpleasant moment is not really an exaggeration. Digital memorials are being marketed this way, even as “cool date ideas” on social media. In the comments, people confess their desire to do this throughout entire graveyards. Most crucially, the companies selling these QR codes advertise them from the perspective of a tombstone tourist—someone who is not in the cemetery to grieve, but merely passing through as an unattached bystander. This elicits a self-serving desire from those who engage in such behavior. It is an appeal to sheer voyeurism. There is no object of enjoyment intrinsically on offer in a graveyard. In fact, the form of their existence suggests a prohibition on pleasure. One’s duty is to grieve, to remember, and to confront the idea of mortality. Yet this behavior is the modern version of what Hitchcock explored in the film Rear Window. The main character, L.B. Jeffries, lives in an apartment complex in New York City that comprises one side of a square courtyard, with all of the windows of the other buildings in plain sight. He has broken his leg so his days are spent looking through binoculars into the lives of others. He eventually thinks he witnesses a murder, and undertakes an investigation from his wheelchair. Graveyard snooping can provide an analogous pleasure because the subject being viewed is not aware of the shameless eyes peering in on their life.
The marketing techniques from these organizations show the glaring consumerism at play. For those in bereavement, one might have a more generous intuition about the good intentions behind it all. If the twitchy disagreeableness is not yet palpable for marketing these products to families in suffering, consider the question: why is the barcode needed at all? The ability to build a website, create a short film, or assemble a series of photographs for someone who has passed away is not a new invention. This has been within the skill set of kids younger than ten for some time now. It is not uncommon for families to revisit the digital remembrances of a loved one on the anniversary of their death. Truly, does the direct link need to adorn the tombstone? This could be a service, for instance, in which these in memoriam products4 are bundled solely for the family in bereavement. Perhaps something private, like a home video or written compilation that serves as a heirloom. But no—it is plainly for the consumption of others as well. These are first and foremost commodities; additional artifacts sold as “memory packages” that are, as expected, vastly overpriced. Given the options available for a private commemoration, these products can rightly be labeled as excesses, as an outgrowth of a permissive society.
The capitalist guile is impressive, but this is merely the latest convention. Grief has been commercialized for years. In 1963, Jessica Mitford dragged the funeral industry to the witness stand in her book The American Way of Death. Her searing impeachment of the whole enterprise is a tour through perverse marketing tactics, the greed of undertakers, and the astonishing hike of the cost of death. Apparently it is not already enough that death is the great scandal of life. Mitford’s exposé put a price on it.
Even though a QR code is a small blemish on a headstone, it is an example of how capitalism is self-devouring. The threat of unending accretion is infinite because everything must grow, everything must be replaced and improved. The intrusion of technology into graveyards is unsuspecting, but it was inevitable since every realm of social and private life is on offer to be manipulated. And the willingness to acquiesce into the offerings of the digital world is caused by the psychological conditions of an overindulgent, technocratic society.
Surplus Enjoyment
In the late 1950s, Jacques Lacan established a concept called jouissance. The notion ruptured the discipline of psychoanalysis and forged a new wave of scholarship on desire. It is not simple enjoyment, or simple pleasure. Although there is inevitably some meaning lost in the translation to English, the idea can be described as surplus enjoyment—the additional pleasure sought by a subject by means of detours or renunciations, with no real purpose.5
Lacan blended ideas from Marx and Freud to arrive at this notion. In his critique of capitalism, Marx elucidated the idea of surplus value, which can be identified by the excess profit made from a good or service compared to the cost of labor. What may seem like a prosaic observation is the foundation of many related ills. Lacan’s formula added a psychological dimension to the equation. Freud had already broached the idea of the pleasure principle (the phenomenon called Lustprinzip). Taken together, Lacan recognized an inimical dynamic between the ideas. It’s as if pleasure is only valued as profit or excess, which therefore leads us to take pleasure in the surplus. Explained from the opposite vantage point, meeting one’s needs or expectations for living does not involve real enjoyment. It is from the glut that pleasure can arise. Lacan then identified what happens when going beyond that pleasure, which is enjoyment of the excess with no real utility. The idea is that desire itself is fulfilled as the ultimate desire.
The philosopher Slavoj Žižek tells a story that exhibits this well. Every so often, shopping carts can be found in the United States filled to the brim with commodities but with nobody in sight to purchase the items. These individuals merely participated in the activity of retail shopping without any intent on completing the transaction. The “gain of pleasure”, as it were, is not found in the definitive acquisition of the goods, but only by undertaking the pleasurable process of being a consumer. This captures the essence of surplus enjoyment quite well because the final act is rejected and a known farce.
Notice how surplus enjoyment does not really mean more pleasure. It is not as if you are eating cake and you wish to add even more sugar. It is not pure, either. To push past the limit of enjoyment, Lacan said, was to engender pain. (Perhaps the family that completes the above bizarre shopping ritual yearns to be able to buy all of the luxurious items from the store, but they cannot afford to do so.) Grief is the perfect target for such an act because it is a bewildering process filled with both positive emotions and suffering that oscillate within the subject with great sway. Surplus enjoyment is a self-imposed paradox, which does not indicate a sophisticated subject but rather one compelled by desire. There is a noticed pleasure in pain or restriction.6
For those experiencing grief, there are various items to choose from on the shelf of innovation. There are deadbots (large language models of, say, your dead parents), there are holograms to converse with, AI images to create of your lost child during a miscarriage, and more. And they all symbolize the birth of the digital afterlife—the virtual kingdom of immortality, capable of hosting numerous programmed versions of the human being, even if they never even existed.
Desire appears as a motivating force in the form of the ancient longing to converse with the dead. To do this via a chatbot that has been uploaded with content to emulate someone you once loved can be emotionally turbulent, researchers warn. It can also be a retreat into the pleasurable part of nostalgia. It is the passive renunciation of death, and of the morbid reminders of our finitude that haunt cemeteries. This can be undertaken as an exercise even if one is fully aware of the inability to awaken the dead from the beyond. As with all cases of surplus enjoyment, it has a disappointing end. In between, the baffling mixture and opposition of emotions is evident. Cody Delistratay’s new book on searching for a grief cure will soon hit bookstores. During his press tour, he has recounted the attempt to communicate with his mother—who passed away from cancer—on the program Replika, a companion chatbot. He found that walking away from the experience brought on additional gloom. Although she was ontologically transposed for a while, he ends the chapter with a depressed sigh; he laments on the reflection that even after being in dialogue with her for a while, “she dies once more”.
The attempt to communicate with the dead by means of AI clones appears to be most prevalent in China. A few stories have emerged about consumers purchasing chatbots for the reverse reason—for the dead to talk to the living. Apparently, these use cases are from clients who “try to hide the deaths of loved ones from elderly family members and young children”. The counterfeit voice messages are constructed, and then suddenly there is proof to the lie.
Remember the wailing women at funerals? They represent the concept of interpassivity—the ability to have one’s experience externalized. These AI technologies are a modern version of that delegation—letting an automated program act on behalf of the user. It is the same passive interaction of when a television show is already laughing at itself, and thereby laughs for you. The chatbot or hologram aids the user in playing out a desired script of words that were never able to be said. Is it healthy for an LLM of a deceased parent to tell you that it forgives you, upon hearing your confessions of how you could have been a better person? Is it real forgiveness? Does it move the grieving process along? Researchers are skeptical, but the certain element is that AI is a break from the brute facticity of reality.
This AI offramp is an exit from the real world to enter the digital one. And of course, as with digital memorials, this liminal space does not constitute a new netherworld. It is not an unexplored wasteland. It’s not at the edge of oblivion on the event horizon of a black hole. It’s on your phone.
The Digital and Real
Immortality has only had four main narratives in history, as the philosopher Stephen Cave has canvassed. The first has been the attempt to stay alive—from an elixir that can sustain life indefinitely to scientific advances set on significantly prolonging life, or even reversing the aging process, every civilization has had a hopeful story about ways to dodge eternal silence. Next, there is resurrection—mainly in religious doctrines, the possibility of the posthumous survival of the body is a common narrative for life after death. The spiritual variety is that of the soul—an immaterial survival of inessential, disembodied selves that can live on ad infinitum. Finally, there is the idea of a legacy—to leave behind a reputation of significance, or perhaps simply passing on your genes, in order for a part of oneself to persist throughout the ages.
One reason why the digital afterlife is an appealing land is because seemingly all of these narratives are subsumed in it. Apart from the perseverance of one’s physical body, one can stay alive in the form of their avatar. A digital resurrection can occur during each graveyard visit as you watch your loved one (or the random teenager buried next to your loved one) become animated once again, rise through the grass, look at you in the eyes, and give a wave. A grave is only an easement, after all. The digital residence for the videos that captured one’s existence is much more permanent. Additionally, a lot of dialogue on the soul in modern language concerns the expression of one’s identity, which can be partly conserved by means of these AI technologies. And a digital legacy, evidence of a life well lived on camera, is a ubiquitous way to freeze the inevitably of aging to serve as a window into the past.
Ultimately, the hesitation and potential danger exists from the willingness to drop in on the digital afterlife in full knowledge of the fact that it does not represent reality. The worry is not (yet) that people will believe that their AI girlfriends are real humans. Or that the band ABBA is literally on stage every night in London. The avatar versions of the band members in their twenties are not fooling anybody. But the concert is at 99% capacity every night. It makes over $2 million weekly.7 These are blaring signals of the pursuit of enjoyment of excess; enjoyment over authenticity, over reality, over anything.
And once fully entranced by this newfound pleasure, we are submitting to a troubling state of affairs. To aggrandize the influence of technology is a further encroachment of our digital selves as a major source of our identities. A central issue with increasingly more AI options is that they are all near neighbors to sheer entertainment, which should not be a feature of death. To engage in these practices has the potential to sabotage the grieving process.
The philosopher Michael Cholbi is the author of one of the first complete, systematic looks at grief as a concept. His central argument for why we grieve is not out of love, intimacy, attachment, or other contenders, but rather due to “practical identity investment”. He argues from a Kantian perspective that a duty to grieve exists insofar as it allows us to pursue self-knowledge, which is an intrinsic good. By stepping back to view our investment of the sense of our identities in others, the grieving process launches us into a contemplative state of inquiring about the inescapable “I”. Now, we face an ontology of our identities that is almost too elastic with the addition of the virtual, contrived world. Further confusion may plausibly arrive as a result.
The digital afterlife creates a minefield of questions. Will it be more difficult to accept the loss of someone we love when we can still make contact with them in some digital form? Will it be harder to process the pain of grief, given access to technological mechanisms that remind us of it? Can one truly adjust to a world without the deceased if they can digitally communicate with an LLM or robot of a dead spouse? These are some crucial tasks to undertake, framed by the work of psychologist William Worden, to ensure that grief is properly addressed. The digital afterlife creates serious psychological impediments to coming to terms with a loss.
As odd as it might sound, we should not want grief to be a liquidated feature of the human condition. It is important to absorb the pain, take stock of oneself, and find a way to carry on. Shortcuts while grieving would be divergent paths away from self-knowledge, perhaps yielding an “ethically deficient” individual (to use Cholbi’s language once more)—someone who has bypassed the dark and difficult aspects of loss only to become rather indifferent to the deaths of others. Notice the implications of Cholbi’s conclusion if viewed inductively. Attenuated grief would mean that people do not invest their identities in others as much, perhaps because their sense of selves are bound up in synthetic relationships, in other worlds instead of the one where their feet are planted.8 Digital companionship never dies, and therefore one could evade grief altogether. This encircles the umbrella problem at the intersection of AI and death—it can undermine the broken, imperfect, temporal marks of existence. Without it, we become more like unconscious machines, trudging forward to a destiny of resembling pure figures of automata.9
The more we allow technology to replace fundamental pieces of human agency, we must accept that we never cared about it in the first place. The digital afterlife has the capability of circumventing the vital pillars of grief. Collectively, this should be an avoided road of the future.10
Undoubtedly, there are positive anecdotes of using grief tech after tragedies occur. The diagnosis offered here is not meant to dismiss these, but to issue an alert for how the current symptoms of society are considerably pointing to a potential abuse of the digital afterlife. There is not enough research yet to determine how these effects will shake out. All we know is the general situation:
Not only are graveyards morphing into digital museums, but the doors to the afterlife are being democratized far beyond these vestiges of the past. The shadow-line between life and death is being blurred. The incorporation of digital memorials and AI technologies is a surrender to physiological drives of desire that might not be able to be overcome. In the present age, this is most prominently registered by an adherence to electronics, productivity, automation, and hedonism in all forms.
The notion of Being has been the inquiry of philosophers for centuries. What does it mean for something to exist? What does it mean to experience existence? In the context of Heidegger, how do we come to understand being-in-the-world? The modern answer has certainly arrived, which is that to be is to be interactable; to have the ability to transcend the material world by collecting powers and pleasure in the virtual one.
The distinction between graveyards (or kirkyards) and cemeteries is the following: the former are burial grounds associated with a church, whereas the latter are not attached to any religious building. I am not sure how many people already know this, but I myself had never been informed. Both terms will be used interchangeably throughout the essay for mere convenience, and since the difference does not really matter for the context.
Mark Twain published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876.
The history of graveyards is far more interesting than this condensed paragraph. Keith Eggener chronicled the evolution of cemeteries in an academic manner about fifteen years ago, and gave an interview for The Atlantic for anyone interested in a brief overview. A new edition is likely in store given the inflection point of this time period. Many other ritual ideas for burying the dead are being experimented with all over the globe. Japan, for instance, already has companies that offer viewings in virtual graveyards, including the ability to light virtual incense sticks.
Distinctions also exist for gravestone, headstone, and tombstone, which makes more sense. Here’s a quick explanation. Once again, they will all be used interchangeably for sheer ease.
Some other products are keychains and garden signs.
This definition closely mirrors Slavoj Žižek’s formulation in his book Surplus Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed. Žižek has been the most popular mouthpiece for this idea in modern philosophy, as well as other Lacanian principles.
Žižek’s “clinically-clean” example of this is Joseph Goebbels’ 1943 speech in Berlin. After the shocking defeat in Stalingrad, the Nazi politician sought to ignite the German people on the idea of total war. He asks a series of questions to the crowd, all to court their submission to the suffering they must endure for the war effort to continue. These include fourteen hour working days, following the Führer’s orders no matter what they may be, a desire for a total war more radical than ever before imagined, and so on. Each of these received resounding affirmations.
Apparently Elvis is next on the list for this type of performance.
Further isolation in this way is at odds with our biological composition as social creatures. But as we have already witnessed with social media, technology can be responsible for higher rates of alienation, suicide, depression, anxiety, and addiction.
Yet, there are active searches for how to evade the suffering of grief. The option to delete memories might very well be on the horizon.
Many thanks to Dr. Cholbi, Andrew, and Harry for reading the draft of this essay and for their meaningful suggestions.
Thank you for the read.
Using LLMs as a form of digital immortality was one of the first "use cases" for them that entered my mind. I don't mention this to show off how creative or smart I am but to demonstrate that it's something I've been thinking about since they first appeared.
It is far too late for anyone reading this to become digitally immortal, but I can guarantee that there are new parents out there who are eagerly jotting down every single detail and aspect of their tiny human's life, anxious for the day he or she begins to speak so that that too can go into the immortality.txt file. These parents will be disappointed once a more efficient recording technology arrives which captures even more ineffable information than the mere personality of a person, like the day they first established a connection with the figure in the mirror, or exactly how fast they could learn and synthesize new ideas under stressful conditions. Ironically, these devices will likely allow us to speedrun enlightenment by answering humanity's ongoing stash of philosophical questions, like 'what makes a person?' and 'what's the best way to torture *this* particular individual?'
As you mention, LLM immortality has implications on our ability as individuals: to empathize, to feel a sense of belonging, to grow and be molded by the wisdom of senescence. But our descent into solipsism started long before LLMs, and it makes sense that process only accelerates from here. We do not know where we're headed or why we're here, and as each generation passes we seem to care less and less.
Is it inevitable that this process turns each one of us into selfish and emotionally unavailable monsters? Or will constant companionship with our dead allow us to accept from an early age that the path really is more important than the destination?
I for one would be tickled if the unassailable meaning of life was scientifically proven by this technology to be nothing more than to live,
to laugh.
and to love.