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Nyah. I'm 51 years old and buried my parents. Death is real and probably closer than I imagine. Perhaps it's the productization of death? I received this news
by DanielBMarkham 10y ago
Nyah. I'm 51 years old and buried my parents. Death is real and probably closer than I imagine.
Perhaps it's the productization of death?
I received this news as a retweet in my Twitter feed. Next to it was a bit.ly link about Configuration Management tools, the announcement of a speaker at a conference, and a famous quote from Einstein.
Right now on HN it's #4. Next to it is a blog post about tools and frameworks and a post about a PostgreSQL extension. The response to Pieter's tweet is lengthy and very kind. It would be a privilege to hear those thoughts in my own life before I leave. But the thoughts will still keep coming, probably long after he's gone.
I met a nice lady three years ago. She was a "social media consultant" in the local area, which basically consisted of teaching small business owners how to navigate the web. We met for lunch several times when I was in town.
Soon, though, she learned she had stage 4 lung cancer. I had lunch with her one more time. I'll never forget how weary she looked.
She held on for almost a year, then she passed.
For many weeks after that, however, Facebook was full of her many friends offering their condolences. Facebook would remind me that she liked certain things as a way to sell me on things. Every so often people would think of her and post on her wall. These posts appeared in my feed.
Last week I finally had to unfriend her. She was dead. But it didn't stop the computerized social network that Facebook to stop trying to monetize as much of her presence as they could. Even if somebody had set her account to deceased, Facebook will always own some part of her existence.
It feels like turning a tender, emotional, precious thing into a bucket of bits. I find that repugnant.
- throwanem 10y agoIt is precisely that.
- meric 10y agoSome of her consciousness lives through your memories and mirror neurons. Not just in the bucket of bits. Thanks for sharing.
- throwanem 10y agoThis use of 'just' is curious. It suggests that some degree of a person's consciousness inheres in their Facebook account. Is this intentional? If so, will you explain how you arrive at that conclusion?
- sabmalik 10y agoI am in 2 minds about this. Part of me agrees with you but the other part of me doesn't. Personally, I feel death (and afterlife) has played an important role in popularising (selling?) religion.It is still a difficult subject to talk about, in some cultures even joking about your own death is a big no-no. Maybe this is the best way to break this barrier and understand that death is "normal" and it's okay to talk about it along with other normal things. Maybe this "productization" will get us all to a point where we are all okay talking about it openly and frankly, without making a big deal about it?
- DanielBMarkham 10y agoI agree with what I think you're saying, but the right words can be very tricky here. Maybe this "productization" will get us all to a point where we are all okay talking about it openly and frankly, without making a big deal about it? What's a "big deal"? For my friend, I knew her and she seemed like a nice person. I did not know her that well, though. The first couple of times somebody posted how sad they were on her wall, I was moved. The second couple of times, sad to say, not so much. By the time we got to 20 or 30, I was both annoyed -- and angry at myself for being annoyed. How about her husband? He got to watch her die, bury her, and then watch all this come in, day-after-day. Two months later he was dead. Social networks take everything and genericize it. What was a big deal to me was probably a huge deal to him. Assuming those little bits were somehow part of who she was, you can't just assume that they were the same kind of "big deal" to everyone involved. To me, to the husband, to the still living kid. [ed: and it's not right to try to force it into the same kind of deal for everybody. That's dehumanizing.] I'm a transhumanist and I think the singularity is coming and I'm okay with that. But as we evolve, we have to stop and take a freaking look at what we're doing. Software may be eating the world, but the world is not all the same stuff. The differences matter.
- sabmalik 10y agoI am not great with words, please accept my apologies. When I say "big deal", I meant it more like talking about homosexuality is now less of a "big deal" then it was back in the day. I am not saying that the loss itself is not a big deal, just talking about it shouldn't be. Maybe, if we live in a society where it's easy to talk about death then maybe the grieving process would become easier too. Right now, people tend to act weird around people who has just lost someone (I have experienced that first hand), the people who are suffering the loss feel like they have to "stay strong" and not show their emotions to others because they don't want to be a burden. It's a vicious cycle which we can break by just talking about it.
- dredmorbius 10y agoI'm seeing a bit of Niel Postman's Technopoly criticism of media. We get these little news snippets, originally by wire to select locations, now anybody via Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, or HN. I see Pieter's notice sandwiched between police complaints / cameras, and the Nobel prize in physics. One out of two ain't bad. Information, writing, and media have the ability to convey information totally unrelated to our present reality from anywhere on the planet, and a few points beyond. But leave us with having to contextualise all of it. It's quite jarring. Not the first time I've received a death notice by (nominally) social media. Still carries a shock. As for the "after he's gone" -- that's what death is, so far as I've realised. Life for the deceased stops, for the rest of us, it goes on. We have experiences, and conversations, and reminiscences, in which the dead are only memories.