A short thought-provoking book about what happens to our online identities after we die. These
days so much of our lives takes place online--but what about our afterlives? Thanks to the
digital trails that we leave behind our identities can now be reconstructed after our death.
In fact AI technology is already enabling us to "interact" with the departed. Sooner than we
think the dead will outnumber the living on Facebook. In this thought-provoking book Carl
Öhman explores the increasingly urgent question of what we should do with all this data and
whether our digital afterlives are really our own--and if not who should have the right to
decide what happens to our data. The stakes could hardly be higher. In the next thirty years
alone about two billion people will die. Those of us who remain will inherit the digital
remains of an entire generation of humanity--the first digital citizens. Whoever ends up
controlling these archives will also effectively control future access to our collective
digital past and this power will have vast political consequences. The fate of our digital
remains should be of concern to everyone--past present and future. Rising to these challenges
Öhman explains will require a collective reshaping of our economic and technical systems to
reflect more than just the monetary value of digital remains. As we stand before a period of
deep civilizational change The Afterlife of Data will be an essential guide to understanding
why and how we as a human race must gain control of our collective digital past--before it is
too late.
