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Your Electronic Afterlife

Our Lady Has Left the Building

07:43 / 18.08.07

So, if you're run over by a truck tomorrow (consider that your one warning Pete Doherty), do you have plans in place for your e-footprint? Should you? Do you care?

After all, you're not around any more to worry about it (prove me wrong God fans!), but would you like your various e-ndeavors to stand as a testament to who you were, or would you like them to vanish immediately once the time of death is pronounced? And what about your various imaginary friends? Do you want them to know?

This is something that's been bubbling around in my subconscious, since the tube bombings a few years back. Nowhere near them and not in any real danger but as I, like every other Londoner, was answering texts, emails and LJ posts from people checking I was okay, it occured to me that, while I'm not too fussed about my 'life' on here, or what happened to my blogs and whatnot, if something did happen to me I'd quite like my friends to know, if only so they could swear on my grave to form an elite terrorist fighting unit to hunt down those responsible and make them pay.

And you?

09:32 / 18.08.07

In the past, people could go through your papers and sort things out/learn all your secrets, but now your passwords die with you. Do places like LJ and flickr have policies as to what to do when people die. Do accounts get deleted after months of inactivity or will we be wading through pages and pages of frozen electronic dead wood in the years to come?

11:24 / 18.08.07

You can get hold of someone's materials through blogger and through Yahoo! services (including flickr) once they're dead. It's incredibly frustrating - especially considering you're probably dealing with someone you liked enough to warrant the work being fucking dead - and time consuming, and some services will not accept an AP notice of the death or, even something as specific as this as proof of anything. It may take years, but hypothetically, they'll turn over access, eventually, or at least they say it's possible.

You probably have to be pretty damned well recognizable to get quick release of materials. Which, is fine, really, since it's those people whom most folks would be interested in seeing unfinished work or scattered thoughts and vacation photos from, but, y'know, for families' sake, it'd be nice(r) if there were programs specifically set up at these organizations to handle such. Of course, I haven't dealt with such in a few years, so maybe they do now and I just don't know about it.

11:32 / 18.08.07

I suppose I mainly worry about what any biographers I might be so fortunate to have when I'm in limbo, or hell, would make of my 'internet years.' Hopefully, they'd just gloss over it with a simple 'He was drinking heavily, it was a dark time,' but if not, I dare say even Saul Bellow's reputation might stuggle a bit in the face of, say, the set of circumstances that led to my being banned from Byrne Robotics. And then there's all the times I threatened Paranoid Writer ... Sometimes, in my dreams, I'm on the South Bank Show, Melvyn's laughing at my jokes, everything's going fine, and then this cloaked figure emerges from the corner of the studio ... 'J'accuse ...'

Less searchable M0rd4nt

11:34 / 18.08.07

"Ze was drinking heavily. It was a lunch time."

That's what I want for the title of my biography.

11:43 / 18.08.07

(Now that I've excised some bitterness about extracting dead folks' data,) I think I'd like to be writ off as 'well, he just fucked off to Mexico one day, something about The Revolution; nobody knows what the fuck happened.' It's innocuously mysterious, can't be trumped or otherwise beaten by explanation, and it takes the attention off all the cantankerous, misty-eyed, or otherwise absurd things I got up to online before disapppearing.

13:09 / 18.08.07

Hell, of course, being something that doesn't exist.

At least, I don't suppose I'm alone in feeling that it would be a total disaster if it turned out that it did.

08:44 / 19.08.07

I don't even want to think about this. The first couple of years of posts from me on this board alone will probably make me cringe for several lifetimes. I just want to leave some art and writing behind on the net to be honest, (and I've already started doing that.) and hope that it outweighs the stupid shit of my mentally ill/odiot years.

"The symbolic ritual that accompanied this ritual was the weighing of the heart of the deceased on a pair of enormous scales. It was weighed against the principle of truth and justice ( known as maat ) represented by a feather, the symbol of the goddess of truth, order and justice, Maat. If the heart balanced against the feather then the deceased would be granted a place in the Fields of Hetep and Iaru. If it was heavy with the weight of wrongdoings, the balance would sink and the heart would be grabbed and devoured by a terrifying beast that sat ready and waiting by the scales."

I CaN HAz sum POST deltiONs PLZ?!