What Happens At The Intersection Of Life, Death, Legacy And Tech?

​"The phones in our pockets are the DeLoreans future humans will hack to understand the past."

What will the future think of us?

Will our efforts to be remembered work?

We record almost every part of our lives.

We’re constantly taking photos and sharing them on social, sms and cloud.

Never before have we captured and recorded so much so easily.

We share intimate moments with the world instantly.

Facebook, Insta, Twitter and yes, even TikTok are the vehicles to our vanity.

The phones in our pockets are the DeLoreans future humans will hack to understand the past.

Photos. Video. Audio. Thoughts. Our lives stored on multiple platforms.

But what happens to these assets when we’re all gone? All gone — everyone single one of us living right now.

What will our 15 minutes look like 150 years from now?

In the old days, photos and precious documents were kept in albums and shoe boxes.

When someone died, photos, old letters and postcards were either shared with relatives, destroyed or ended up at an estate sale.

Now, it’s complicated.

It involves passwords, platforms and clouds. Our overly documented lives are all online.

The intersection of life, death, legacy and tech is complex.

Although we can take steps to delete our digital footprint and take measures to manage our assets when we’re gone — what if we don’t get the chance?

Think pandemic 2.0.

Or what if we do get the chance to take measures, but hitting delete is still not enough. Is it ever really deleted? The digital trail remains.

The voyeurs of the future will have a field day.

Clumsily piecing together the fragments of our lives, attempting to connect us to long gone family and friends or mistakingly even to people we never knew.

The jigsaw of our digital lives is a complicated one. Maps, emails and documents to add a few more.

If they care enough, they may rely on AI or other tech to put us all back together.

But for all the tech they will have, how will the future capture the true emotion of our events?

What will the future think of the many moments that made our lives?

How will moments that mean so much to us today be interpreted tomorrow? Will those from the future understand and feel the moments the way we lived and captured them?

Will they be able to understand their significance?

• Blowing out candles on a birthday cake
• Wedding day
• First of anything
• Hanging out with friends
• A day at the beach
• Arm waving at a concert

Looking to the past provokes a confronting realisation.

How do WE empathise with the long gone people we see in black and white photos from 100 years ago?

Truth is we mostly don’t. The faded faces in photographs. Expressions of youthful hope. People with dreams and ambitions. They all seem foreign. So distant.

They were here too. They lived. They feared. They loved.

Yet, we’re detached from their existence. Our narcism makes it all about us. It’s a human thing to do.

Conveniently shying away from the fact that they are our future selves.

If we don’t consider those that lived before us, will the future remember us? Will they care that we lived? How we lived?

How will our future relatives perceive us?

Will our photos and digital footprint truthfully piece together the story of our lives?

Will our stories be told as we lived them or will our legacy be manipulated?

Will we be totally hacked when we’re dead — misrepresented, lied about, doctored and deep faked— our lives recreated to tell a different story?

Are our stories even real to begin with? We display life through a thousand filters, representing our best self, not our true self to the world.

Are we making it harder for the future to tell our story by giving only positive impressions? Are we creating a lie for tomorrow?

What if every digital trace of us is gone? Destroyed. Decimated.

If there’s no digital presence of us, no pictures, no voice recordings, no captured thoughts — is it like we never lived. Like we never happened. Like we were never here.

Like all the people before us.

Lost in cyberspace, lingering stars in the sky.

Who will look at our photos when we’re gone?

​What will the story of our lives tell?

Photo by sebastiaan stam on Unsplash