The Datafication of the Soul

Abstract

The human desire to survive death is not new. Religious traditions, philosophical systems, memorial practices, and popular culture have long offered ways of imagining continuity beyond biological life, whether through heaven, reincarnation, ancestral presence, symbolic immortality, or cultural remembrance (Bhargava; Cave; Iglesias et al.; Lifton; Nairn; Nairn and Matthews). What is changing, particularly in the age of artificial intelligence, is the form that such continuity is imagined to take. That is to say, the afterlife is no longer only a theological or metaphysical question; it is increasingly becoming a technological, commercial, and datafied one. Today, digital immortality raises questions about whether the self can be preserved through information (Savin-Baden et al.), whether personality can be inferred from digital traces (Meese et al.), whether a voice or likeness can stand in for a person, and whether mourning can be mediated through responsive systems rather than static memorials (Xie). To understand the implications of digital immortality in contemporary society, we must first grapple with the instability of the term itself. Scholars typically divide the concept into “weak” and “strong” forms (Puzio 428). Weak immortality refers to digital doubles, ghostbots, or thanabots that imitate the deceased through emails, social media posts, images, voice recordings, and other digital remains (Harbinja et al.; Jiménez-Alonso and Brescó de Luna; Puzio; Savin-Baden et al.). Conversely, strong immortality involves the radical ambition of mind-uploading, where consciousness is imagined as transferable into another substrate (Mercer and Trothen; Puzio; Stokes). This latter goal is highly contested. Joseph Ulatowski argues that uploaded consciousness is not merely technologically improbable but metaphysically impossible, as a digital entity could never truly comprehend an embodied mortal life, having never possessed a body itself. This fundamental barrier demonstrates why a chatbot trained on a person’s messages fails to solve the philosophical problem of conscious existence. It may convincingly simulate personality, but simulation is not consciousness. Consequently, critics frequently return to the “hard problem” (Stokes 165), suggesting such entities are merely “philosophical zombies” (Iglesias et al. 98). These systems might display humanlike behaviour, yet they completely lack subjective experience or first-person interiority (Stokes; Peake). Even if digital immortality remains an act of replication rather than true survival, it possesses profound social and emotional power. The dead have never disappeared entirely from social life; they remain through memory, ritual, objects, photographs, stories, and kinship obligations (Hallam and Hockey; Lifton; Williams). Digital media, however, intensify these continuities by making posthumous presence interactive, persistent, and networked, fundamentally unsettling the boundary between life and death. As Meese et al. contend, computational environments actively sustain a person's social existence, using algorithms to enable the deceased to generate content, respond to the bereaved, or take visual form as avatars. Yet, artificially sustaining this existence is highly problematic. A continuous digital presence directly conflicts with traditional “rites of passage” (Dilmaç 289) that historically help mourners process a physical departure. Because the deceased physically disappear but remain highly active online, they are seemingly prevented from transitioning out of the social world. This liminal state can severely hamper the mourner’s ability to process grief and find psychological closure (Elder). The emotional promise of these encounters can make such risks difficult to recognise. Digital afterlife services often present themselves as tools for remembrance and grief support, offering the bereaved the consolatory experience of hearing a loved one’s voice or conversing with an avatar (Puzio; Xie; Bassett). These platforms may appear to align with psychological frameworks that understand mourning as a process of continuing bonds rather than clean separation (Klass et al.; Meese et al.), but their interactive nature introduces new forms of dependency. Jiménez-Alonso and Brescó de Luna observe that, unlike static gravestones or passive photo albums, two-way griefbots create an expectation of reply, meaning that the bereaved may come to rely on anticipated reciprocity as part of their coping process. When such reliance becomes rooted in denial or avoidance, the virtual relationship may prolong rather than ease grief. Furthermore, the push towards digital immortality can also create the conditions for what Bassett describes as “second loss” (160), in which mourners experience renewed distress if digital remains are deleted, placed behind corporate paywalls or rendered inaccessible through technological obsolescence (Bassett; Savin-Baden and Mason-Robbie; Harbinja et al.). Öhman and Floridi’s notion of the political economy of death is pertinent here. Digital remains are increasingly stored, processed, and monetised by platforms whose commercial interests do not necessarily align with the dignity of the dead or the well-being of the bereaved (Bassett; Magerstädt). Techno-capitalist immortality imaginaries are shaped by commodification and the subordination of life to capital, meaning that immortality becomes less a liberation from death than a new dependency on corporate systems (Hurtado Hurtado). Speculative fiction, such as the series Upload, makes these inequalities glaringly visible, depicting a digital afterlife stratified by subscriptions, access, and account ownership. The result is a troubling possibility: while biological death remains universal, digital continuation may become profoundly inequitable (Magerstädt; Bhargava). Nowhere is this commercialisation more visible than in the growing "Deleb" (dead celebrity) economy and the digital afterlife industry (D’Rozario). In fact, Matthews and Nairn have argued that holographic concerts and AI-enhanced performances, such as the reanimation of Elvis Presley, Amy Winehouse, Roy Orbison, and Whitney Houston, show how the dead can be made productive long after biological life has ended. While such practices may offer nostalgia, cultural preservation and renewed audience engagement, they also raise urgent questions about consent, authenticity, artistic legacy, and posthumous autonomy. Without sustained scholarly attention, deceased performers risk being confined to a “digital purgatory” where they exist primarily as entertainment assets, stripped of self-determination and continually repurposed for commercial gain (Matthews and Nairn 11). Research into digital immortality is therefore necessary because it allows scholars to interrogate the collision of memory, technological innovation and market value, while also developing ethical frameworks that treat the identities, voices, likenesses, and creative legacies of the dead as more than exploitable content (Forbes; Matthews and Nairn; Sone; D’Rozario; Harbinja). Digital immortality, therefore, requires careful governance rather than either techno-utopian enthusiasm or denial. Because it touches consciousness, mourning, identity, inequality, cultural representation, and platform power, it demands conversation across philosophy, media studies, law, sociology, psychology, religious studies, and design (Stokes; Mercer and Trothen; Puzio). Such work is needed to test the adequacy of emerging legal proposals, including the “do not bot me” clause (Harbinja et al. 11), to clarify posthumous privacy (Harbinja et al.; Bassett), and to support thanatosensitive design grounded in consent, transparency, context, and human dignity (Harbinja et al.; Bassett; Puzio). The question is not simply whether humans can or should live forever through data, but what forms of continuity are being produced, under whose control, and at what cost (Hurtado Hurtado). It is to these questions that this issue turns, bringing together research that examines how the likes of AI, memory, and mortality are reshaping the meanings of life, death, and what may endure beyond them. Contributions The issue opens with the feature article, “Should Death Do Us Part? Audience Perceptions of Digital Immortality”, in which Angelique Nairn and Deepti Bhargava examine audience responses to the documentary Artificial Immortality (2021). Through a thematic analysis of 1,012 YouTube comments, the article identifies scepticism toward AI-driven immortality, the persistence of religious and spiritual beliefs, and deeply personal reflections on grief and loss. Audiences, they argue, largely view digital immortality as simulation rather than genuine continuity of the self, revealing how emerging technologies unsettle, but do not overcome, enduring cultural anxieties about death. Extending this concern with digital remains, Ümit Kennedy’s “Deleting Life Online after Death” turns to the ethical and emotional implications of managing a person’s digital archive after they die. Kennedy examines social media traces as fragile, relational records of a life that are often left for family members to manage, curate, or erase. Drawing on autoethnographic work and scholarship on automedia, networked publics, and thanatechnology, the article explores questions of ownership, care, context, and digital remains, framing deletion not simply as removal but as a profound act that may produce a form of “second death”. The next two articles shift attention from personal archives to the infrastructures through which digital afterlives are produced. In “The Limits of Digital Immortality: Deathbots and the Fragility of the Self”, Eva Nieto McAvoy, Jenny Kidd, and Bethan Jones examine deathbots as a critical case for understanding digital persistence. They argue that these technologies do not preserve a coherent self but generate probabilistic approximati