Passdown Project
Exploring how we "pass down" things to our children and grandchildren in an increasingly digital world
Passdown Project
Griefbots, Deadbots, Postmortem Avatars: on Responsible Applications of Generative AI in the Digital Afterlife Industry - Philosophy & Technology
Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińskalink.springer.com
How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.
Julian Barnes • The Sense of an Ending
We have more public information than ever, but what if there is also less transmission of more personal information between people—especially between generations. What is lost if our digital heirlooms become inaccessible to close relatives? What is lost if estates do not donate prominent people's cloud data to university archives?
Charlie Warzel • Confessions of an Information Hoarder
Similarly, I was foolish and didn’t upload my high-school, college, and pre-2013 photos, most of them digital, to the cloud. Thanks to a damaged hard drive and a lost computer, most of these photos are gone, creating a massive hole in my life. What does it mean that my digital likeness, save for some Facebook photos, begins so late? Are the... See more
Charlie Warzel • Confessions of an Information Hoarder
By continuing to pursue these lines of thought, we develop new ways of framing our interactions with the dead online, and may find pathways for breaking our calcified archival imaginaries and reimagine new ways of living with the data bodies we construct, inhabit, and inherit.
Sarah Wambold & Rem Moore: Only Loss
In recent years, there have been studies that designate digital hoarding as a subtype of psychological hoarding disorder. Much like physical hoarders, the subjects of these studies found it emotionally distressing to discard stored data, citing a fear of wasted potential for future use.