Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond

Big Tech has authority over peoples lives and experiences of death, but ordinary users and workers advocate for changes to tech companies' policies. Tamara Kneese's book explores how platforms and people work together to care for digital remains.

Format: Hardback
Length: 272 pages
Publication date: 10 October 2023
Publisher: Yale University Press

Since the internet's early days, people have died and grieved online. The dead linger in the quiet corners of earlier versions of the web. However, attempts to preserve the data of the dead are frequently unsuccessful, as websites and devices degrade and die, just as people do. Death disrupts technologists' plans for platforms. It demonstrates how digital production is always collaborative, undermining the entrepreneurial platform economy and highlighting the limitations of techno-solutionism.

Big Tech not only has power over people's lives but also over their experiences of death. However, regular users and workers advocate for changes to tech companies' policies around death. The technology scholar Tamara Kneese leads readers on a colorful tour of the ways that platforms and people work together to care for digital remains, drawing on internet histories and interviews with founders of digital afterlife startups, caretakers of illness blogs, and transhumanist tinkerers. What happens when commercial platforms encounter the messiness of mortality?

Weight: 432g
Dimension: 224 x 150 x 25 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780300248272