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Digital Aferlife

This article about where the digital afterlife industry is headed makes for fascinating reading. We started watching Six Feet Under recently so it was particularly interesting for me to compare where we were some twenty years ago on this topic versus where we are now. The idea that our data is us has obvious merit but a lot depends on how expressive, honest and complete a person's written word is. I have been writing this blog for a very long time but the content was never intended to be a factual journal about me or anyone else who I have written about. There are enough breadcrumbs there for me to reconstruct the memory and relive the events that prompted the post but there is not much beyond that. I have my reasons for writing what I do, the people who feature in it serve as inspiration in some form. But what comes out in the form of a blog post could be quite far removed from facts, the timeline is almost always random and then there are any number of omissions. 

If a conversation with someone served an inspiration for a post, it could have been a random sentence in an hour long chat that struck a chord with me for equally random reason. If any of this data was used to construct an avatar of me in afterlife, it would likely say things that people who actually know me would find quite bizarre. I wrote about data poisoning some time ago and I thinking people have the best shot of creating their poison pills that will grant them agency in their afterlife by being the predominant source of data for the bot that seeks to be you in afterlife. I personally believe in the right of a person living or dead to be forgotten. While you are living, you can curate your data and your online presence even if you can't be fully forgotten. Now it seems like we need to start the curation of our digital remains well ahead of time to make sure we have our house in good order before dementia takes over. 

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