Transcript
Speaker: the problem of preservation and archiving with a lot of these platforms especially from an historical perspective um it was so really alarming and then
Speaker: Hi, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Glam Reaper podcast.
Speaker: I'm your host, Jennifer Muldowney, a.k.a.
Speaker: the Glam Reaper.
Speaker: And on today's episode, quite timely, I have a gorgeous author called Tamara who came out with a really interesting book called Death Glitch.
Speaker: So we're going to get into it today on all things tech and death.
Speaker: And let's hope there's no glitches in this podcast.
Speaker: So Tamara, welcome to the show.
Speaker: Thank you so much for having me, Jennifer.
Speaker: So tell us a little bit about you and not necessarily just all of it, but tell us a little bit about you, your background and who you are.
Speaker: Who's Tamara?
Speaker: So I'm an academic, primarily, and my background is in cultural anthropology, which is part of the reason why I became so interested in death as a subject matter.
Speaker: And I did a master's degree and a PhD.
Speaker: My PhD was in media studies, and so I did a lot of work on digital cultures and trying to understand
Speaker: the different kinds of subcultures attached to the internet, including very weird ones and ones that were quite ephemeral and part of web history, but maybe didn't continue on into the contemporary moment.
Speaker: And I also have worked
Speaker: in the tech industry, and I was at Intel in a couple of different roles.
Speaker: And primarily, my research focus within the tech and policy nonprofit world is very much focused on the ethics of technologies, including AI, and the matter of sustainability.
Speaker: And increasingly, my work on death and my work on climate tend to intersect.
Speaker: Hmm.
Speaker: And so thinking about what happens to the data of the dead is also very much tied to thinking about data storage and the role of data centers and the power of tech companies over people's data when they're alive and then also when they're dead.
Speaker: And so I do a lot of writing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And tend to write for a lot of different kinds of audiences.
Speaker: And yeah, I would say that the other thing about me is that I'm very interested in dead media forms.
Speaker: So a lot of vinyl records and also vintage clothing is one of my passions.
Speaker: And I worked in vintage shops all throughout graduate school.
Speaker: And maybe the other part of me that is worth mentioning is that I have a background as a labor organizer and was very active in my graduate student union, faculty union as a professor, and am very engaged in tech worker union movements and other labor organizations around tech.
Speaker: So, and that I think is also a thread that comes out in the book.
Speaker: Very cool.
Speaker: Well, I mean, that is a decorated resume, as they would say over here in the States.
Speaker: That's amazing.
Speaker: And we've actually you and I have a lot of crossed paths there because, you know, I am.
Speaker: I own a memorial planning business.
Speaker: I'm from Ireland and I'm here in the States about nine years now, 10 years.
Speaker: I think it actually is this year.
Speaker: I keep saying nine.
Speaker: I keep living in the past.
Speaker: But I've always, always, always, aside from that,
Speaker: and my, you know, advocacy for pre-planning your own funeral.
Speaker: I've always been absolutely fascinated with the industry or the death space impact on digital, our digital legacies and then the environment.
Speaker: I've worked with companies.
Speaker: I've consulted with people all along my kind of travels, my own decorated resume where I've gotten kind of, yeah, a snapshot into that.
Speaker: It's just so fascinating.
Speaker: And I want to get into that more.
Speaker: Your book, Death Text, I'm going to show it here.
Speaker: So I, again, because of my fascination with it, it's called Death Glitch, How Techno Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond.
Speaker: It's not for everybody.
Speaker: You know, it's it is one of those books that you kind of have to be interested in.
Speaker: I think everyone in the funeral space should read it, honestly, just to have the knowledge.
Speaker: But there's a lot of things I think a lot of people in the funeral space should do and they don't.
Speaker: But because it's just so fascinating.
Speaker: Now, the first thing I thought of, because I read a couple of these types of books and yours was extremely thorough, though.
Speaker: And you can tell you have that research background and you can see my so many notes and dog ears.
Speaker: A very well used, well read book.
Speaker: And that's mainly because, honestly, I just recently spoke about AI and death, AI and grief.
Speaker: And we have that video on our YouTube channel and you can find it on the website.
Speaker: But it was a panel of us, which was interesting.
Speaker: So I was kind of representing the funeral space.
Speaker: And then we had a, I was about to say an estate attorney, but no, she was.
Speaker: She was from the legal side of it.
Speaker: She wasn't a state attorney, but she was from the legal aspect of sort of what your digital legacy can do.
Speaker: And then we had an engineering data analyst.
Speaker: And so we were coming from three very different sort of spaces, but we were all kind of pretty much singing off the same hymn sheet.
Speaker: But in my research for that, I kind of wanted to absorb as much
Speaker: as possible.
Speaker: And one of the things that I wanted to ask you while I have you is in the books that I've read and even in the things I've written myself in this space, isn't it wild how just fastly out of date everything becomes?
Speaker: Like it just like people have often said to me when they see sort of on my LinkedIn, I'll say my three pillars are pre planning or, you know, planning your own funeral, digital legacy in the environment.
Speaker: And people will often say, why don't you?
Speaker: Why don't you specialize?
Speaker: Why never did you specialize in digital?
Speaker: And I'm like, because it changes so fast.
Speaker: It's.
Speaker: It's crazy.
Speaker: So how, how, I mean, you're talking in this book a lot about the past and your experiences and case studies with that.
Speaker: And there is one major one I want to want to talk about because I feel very strongly about it.
Speaker: How do you feel about that or what's, you know?
Speaker: I mean, so as an academic researcher, that's par for the course.
Speaker: So if you're going to be studying digital cultures, they're going to be shifting all the time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think, you know, I wrote the book, certainly it's, you know, an academic press book.
Speaker: It was intended to be my tenure book had I stayed in my academic job.
Speaker: And so...
Speaker: I was more concerned about reaching academic audiences and ensuring that it would be taken seriously in those circles.
Speaker: But I did also want it to be accessible to people who were not academics and didn't care about particular forms of media theory.
Speaker: But I think part of it is that I wasn't necessarily intending it to be a how-to or a guide.
Speaker: And that's in part because of how quickly things change.
Speaker: And so trying to accommodate
Speaker: the pace at which these technologies and just all of the infrastructures and cultures around them change over time, it would be so hard to capture that in anything connected to academic publishing because that takes years.
Speaker: And so, you know, there's a year gap between me turning in the final copy edits and the book being printed.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so when people say, you know, generative AI, it was not really a hot topic.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And yet I kept having to work in new references as I worked on this project from 2007 onward.
Speaker: But for me, I mean, it's a history.
Speaker: Yeah, and it's very much like that.
Speaker: You know, and that's what I found so interesting is discovering sort of how a lot of these things came to par.
Speaker: And I know, so I've written books as well, and
Speaker: That's one of the parts of me that I was like, oh, my God, like from the second you turn it in and it's the final copy of final edit, it's at least a year before it hits the shelves.
Speaker: So it's it's one of those things.
Speaker: And probably because it's digital, why would you put it in maybe physical form?
Speaker: Honestly, you know, so it is it's it's.
Speaker: That was kind of top of mind.
Speaker: And as I said, I've read the other books and stuff.
Speaker: But what I thought was what I found fascinating was, as I said, the history and you coming at it from, you know, a very different brain to my own, really, because I am not scholarly.
Speaker: Well, I don't think, you know, I wouldn't consider myself that, but I could tell that that was the purpose of your book.
Speaker: And I just found it so fascinating.
Speaker: Like I never knew that really the beginning of Facebook meta, we'll call it their start into memorial pages started with Virginia Tech.
Speaker: But then, you know, when I was reading that, I was like, I mean, of course, because, you know, it makes sense.
Speaker: Like when you think of when I think of even my own timeline with Facebook.
Speaker: And and then, of course, all of these digital powerhouses are are developing as these crucial things are happening.
Speaker: You know, Facebook coming out with the emergency, like make letting people know you're safe and that sort of stuff.
Speaker: So how was it researching all that?
Speaker: Did you find people easy to talk to?
Speaker: Yeah, by by and large, I started feeling a bit uncomfortable with the idea of interviewing people who are in mourning.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: For my book.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I don't like the idea of being extractive in that way.
Speaker: And I think that tends to be an issue within especially academic research, but also in industry-based research.
Speaker: But at least, I mean, I wasn't working on...
Speaker: creating a product for people to use or creating something that was maybe of any kind of tangible benefit.
Speaker: And so that's why a lot of my work is more focused on the people who are creating companies.
Speaker: And so the startup ecosystem and understanding the motivations behind that is
Speaker: I felt much more comfortable doing that kind of work, particularly around something very sensitive like death, care, and mourning, which isn't to say that I didn't participate in things like death salon and kind of obviously did interview people who were...
Speaker: the spouses of people who had died of cancer and maintaining their illness blogs and all of those things.
Speaker: But I found it easier to interview people who were maybe already publicly writing about those things as well.
Speaker: And so it was something that they already felt comfortable putting out there.
Speaker: And that's very different to cite people as kind of other people in the field, other journalists, other writers, other people who are thinking about this
Speaker: in a personal but also maybe a somewhat abstracted way rather than, you know, being like a, I don't know, like a Harold and Maude, like going and turning up at people's funerals.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: There's there's quite a few books in the funeral space.
Speaker: But even for me in my own business, you know, honestly, and it's something I'm toying with a lot lately.
Speaker: It's, you know, I've this nickname that I got from the media after my first book, the Glam Reaper, which is great.
Speaker: And it's a little bit of fun and stuff.
Speaker: But you have to be so cognizant of the of the business we work in, you know, and if I lost my mom, like what?
Speaker: Am I do you want somebody who's who's fun putting that?
Speaker: And I hate this, the fun back into funeral and stuff like that.
Speaker: And to me, I very much of the school of thought that a funeral is both for the living and the deceased.
Speaker: It should be a tribute and it should be cathartic for the for the living.
Speaker: But it's finding that fine line where social media, all of that sort of marketing.
Speaker: It is it is really, really difficult.
Speaker: My one of the major things I really wanted to talk to you about or that I feel very passionate about that was definitely highlighted in all your research is since I started and I've been in this business 15 years now, probably more, and I've seen so many businesses come and go.
Speaker: So many.
Speaker: Some of them have contacted me to be a brand ambassador or to just help them enter the field or whatever it is.
Speaker: I've seen so many.
Speaker: I've helped many, you know, and I've seen so many come and go, you know, and the startup culture is real.
Speaker: I don't even know what the percentage is, but I think it's like 70% or something fail startups within the first three years, something like that.
Speaker: Anyway, something crazy.
Speaker: And that, of course, will apply to the funeral space.
Speaker: Why wouldn't it?
Speaker: But the problem with that is that you have all these...
Speaker: families mourning families who are putting their trust in you and then all of a sudden three years later you're gone you're bankrupt you're whatever now my biggest ick if you like my biggest problem with that and we have had a couple of people i interviewed on the glamoury for podcast and i as i say to them all i'm like i wish you well and i hope you succeed because i just think of all the crushed families left behind but it's these memorial pages or these companies who start you know we're going to be the facebook for the dead we're going to be the instagram for the dead we are
Speaker: you know, your memorial page online, your obituary online.
Speaker: And there's so many of them that have come and gone.
Speaker: And that data is just poof, you know.
Speaker: Yeah, it's just it's heartbreaking.
Speaker: And you really touch on that in the book.
Speaker: You mention a lot of them.
Speaker: How do you feel about that?
Speaker: Or what's your kind of take on that?
Speaker: Obviously, I've read the book, so I know, but.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it is upsetting because there is a need for it.
Speaker: And so people do keep trying to create new versions of these companies because the large platforms, the tech companies are still failing to bridge that gap.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And the law has been very slow and catching up.
Speaker: And of course, West, we also have very limited things like data privacy and things that are in effect in Europe do not matter in the US.
Speaker: And so figuring out the differences between international law and different cultural rituals and
Speaker: even in the US state by state differences.
Speaker: And so it and that's why the the person I interview in the book who is an estate planning attorney, but who also has worked in tech, she worked at Twitter.
Speaker: So Megan Yip and all her work on estate planning, and her ability to create plans for people that will endure in part because legally obligated, yeah, as an attorney to carry forward these plans.
Speaker: But, you know, she and I have had many conversations about the fact that there is still a need.
Speaker: There are services that large tech companies do need, particularly those that don't even have any kind of memorialization policy in place.
Speaker: And I think something that she has also really been firm about is the fact that it isn't just death.
Speaker: It's also when people become incapacitated.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: about aging and with a large demographic of people, the baby boomers who are now aging and some people may not die right away, but if they are no longer able to manage their accounts and their children or next of kin need to be able to access them,
Speaker: this will be a big problem.
Speaker: And so we've talked about different ways of, you know, what can be done?
Speaker: How do you package services?
Speaker: And how do you figure out how to deliver something that would make this easier on people, but that maybe isn't
Speaker: totally a startup model, like maybe this is a kind of cottage industry of consultants or people who are doing policy at nonprofits like mine.
Speaker: This is also where they might come in to help kind of shape internal tech policies around this kind of issue.
Speaker: It seems like something that responsible AI teams, in fact, should be looking at, the death use case.
Speaker: But
Speaker: I think they're so overwhelmed by work right now.
Speaker: And this is the issue too, is just that within tech companies, this is not a subject that is being prioritized.
Speaker: It is not something that is being well-funded and well-staffed.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And with kind of good reason, you know, in some respects, like, you know, I've often thought like if I put myself at the top of a tech company, like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, they're about living and life and the moments and the memories.
Speaker: That's what they're about collecting.
Speaker: They're not focused on, you know, I mean, sure didn't Elon Musk, when he bought over Twitter, didn't he cull all the profiles or something like that?
Speaker: Like he just got rid?
Speaker: Wild.
Speaker: Yeah, the problem of preservation and archiving with a lot of these platforms, especially from an historical perspective, it was so really alarming.
Speaker: And then the fact that a lot of people still don't have any plans.
Speaker: through their own possessions and haven't really thought that through and don't have any way of documenting it.
Speaker: And so I do think that the services that seem to be a little bit longer lasting are those that provide mortuary care and will writing, planning, and other end-of-life protocols on top of the digital housekeeping aspect.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, because it's, you know, as we talked about at the at the panel discussion on AI and, you know, as I said, I could have talked for hours and hours about it because there's so many different aspects.
Speaker: There's so many different facets we could have talked about.
Speaker: Like we did, we talked about history and I'm like, you know, reenacting my grandmother who's passed away.
Speaker: I may not want that.
Speaker: Like that might be horrific for me.
Speaker: I just don't want it.
Speaker: You know, creepy.
Speaker: But to another person, that might not be the case.
Speaker: And then you think, OK, but historically, historically, historically.
Speaker: So my great, great, great, great grandmother, you know, if she was in, I don't know, the Battle of Hastings or something, wouldn't it be incredible to sort of, you know, reenact her memories or somehow like for me to hear her voice that I never heard in real life?
Speaker: So, you know, there's so many there's so many pros and cons to it.
Speaker: And a lot of it is an emotional attachment to it.
Speaker: You know, like one of the conversations that came out in the panel discussion was, well, what right do we have to celebrities?
Speaker: You know, and I had to be the sort of the I brought it back to being human.
Speaker: I said, yeah, you might think Whitney Houston, we deserve to sort of have access to her voice forever.
Speaker: But I mean, she's a human being.
Speaker: She was a daughter.
Speaker: She was a mom.
Speaker: Like she's all these things that doesn't we don't get a right just because somebody's in the public arena.
Speaker: We don't get a right to them.
Speaker: But then there's that argument of, well, do we?
Speaker: And, you know, what?
Speaker: What do you sell your soul?
Speaker: You know, if you become a celebrity and all that sort of stuff.
Speaker: But then it comes down to.
Speaker: It kind of comes back to pre-planning.
Speaker: And, you know, I do have a PDF document and it touches on digital a little bit, but it's like your passwords, you know, financially you might have investments in music, you might have books you've bought online.
Speaker: You know, where do all they go?
Speaker: Your digital profiles, do you want them kept up?
Speaker: Do you want them turned into memorial pages?
Speaker: Do you want them taken down?
Speaker: Maybe you're an influencer.
Speaker: So where is that money going?
Speaker: You know, like, are they going to use your likeness for years to come?
Speaker: Like several celebrities.
Speaker: I mean, didn't they bring Audrey Hepburn back from the dead in some ad?
Speaker: You know, your thoughts in your blogs, this like this podcast after long after we're gone tomorrow, maybe they'll, you know, take our heads and voices and put them somewhere.
Speaker: Maybe not.
Speaker: I think if they could if they could make a buck from it they would.
Speaker: Yeah that's a scary thing.
Speaker: I mean I joked at the panel discussion a joke but it was deadly serious where I had a conversation with my parents because I said this is you know the world is kind of getting scarier and I said if you ever get a phone call somebody saying they have me kidnapped.
Speaker: It did elicit quite a bit of a laugh.
Speaker: I said that if they have been kidnapped and they're demanding $10,000, which is really not a lot.
Speaker: But anyway, if they're demanding $10,000, my dad would probably say, keep her.
Speaker: They'll soon return me.
Speaker: But I said to them, I said, you might hear my voice, but it might not actually be my voice.
Speaker: So now we have a secret code question that they have to ask me and I have to validate it and stuff like that.
Speaker: that's the world we're living in.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Yeah, the capacity for deception and for scams has only increased.
Speaker: And I do think this problem of being able to say plainly, I don't want my likeness or my digital assets or anything about me used in this particular manner.
Speaker: But it is so hard to because to preempt what future technologies will be.
Speaker: And
Speaker: So for quite a while now, we've had this issue of people, you know, the sort of Tupac hologram phenomenon or other cases of reviving celebrities even earlier.
Speaker: Like you don't even need digital technology to do that entirely.
Speaker: You can, there are other kinds of splicing techniques that you can use and
Speaker: But now with generative AI, there is this notion that it can be universalized, that it could happen to anyone.
Speaker: And the notion that there are so many terrible, terrible use cases for it, really.
Speaker: And so to be able to have control over these things in the future is something that I think if people do think about these things, they would find it quite disturbing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And there will always be, you know, on every post, there'll always be somebody who comments, you're all be dead, who cares?
Speaker: And that sort of thing.
Speaker: And absolutely.
Speaker: Look, we understand that it's, you know, you're you've only got so much control once you pass away.
Speaker: Unfortunately, you've only got so much control.
Speaker: And a lot of that falls into your family or your next of kin or whoever you've nominated at hand.
Speaker: But it is a scary thing.
Speaker: It's something we do need to address.
Speaker: I was really watching an episode of Criminal Minds there recently.
Speaker: I've started rewatching it where one of the I know it's a fictional show, but it just highlighted to me what can be done.
Speaker: And they obviously deal with criminals.
Speaker: But one of the detectives or FBI agents, whatever they're called, she appeared on the dark web in Pornography.
Speaker: And it was not her, obviously, but it was her likeness attached to somebody else's body.
Speaker: And that's why a lot of parents I know are afraid to put their children's faces out on the web, on social media and stuff like that, because there's that fear of child porn and stuff.
Speaker: But it's...
Speaker: Just having control over our voices, our face, you know, our likeness.
Speaker: Yeah, I don't I don't.
Speaker: The scary thing is I don't know in my lifetime, honestly, if the law is going to catch up with it.
Speaker: Because as you just said, in these companies, these hugely growing companies, most of them are just concerned with the bottom line and satisfying their client, their target audience.
Speaker: And their target audience and therefore them and their and their finances are not concerned with death because then you're not, you know, you don't exist anymore.
Speaker: You're not.
Speaker: They can't sell you anything anymore.
Speaker: And that's that's a tragedy.
Speaker: It's crazy.
Speaker: And, you know, for for my funeral folk that are out there listening, because I know we have my audience of this is sort of funeral folk, but it's also people who just sort of want are interested in the crazy things I talk about.
Speaker: I know for me, for my clients,
Speaker: For the most part, I recommend my families, we do a website, a personal website for the person as opposed to using any of these startup companies.
Speaker: And I kind of hate saying that, and I would never discourage somebody from using one of them, but it's just that.
Speaker: fear that I don't want to put my clients through the pain of in three years time I have to say to them you know when they go looking for it they're saying Jen where's my website and then it's not there so at least a personal website you know we can transfer to them it's up to them if they want to keep it going if they want to let it go they can download everything but again even that part of me goes yeah but what if the internet just explodes one day and that's got you know oh god it's a lot to think about this time of day Tamara yes yes I mean yeah certainly it's
Speaker: The shakiness of the undersea cables and crews of people who are trying to maintain them is always somewhat alarming.
Speaker: But I think, I mean, you can only really do the best...
Speaker: know with what you can control exactly and i think every if any any big tech companies are listening to us out there i think the one thing we would both ask is that there'd be some even if it's one person in the department in the tech in the tech department so like facebook like have people looking out for this taking care of it creating some sort of a okay what do we do when this person dies
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Memorialization should be part of trust and safety.
Speaker: It should be part of responsible AI.
Speaker: There has to be a way of integrating it into companies, especially large ones.
Speaker: It is alarming that even a lot of quite large companies don't have a real policy in place.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, on that kind of depressing note...
Speaker: Thank you so much, Tamara.
Speaker: This was super interesting.
Speaker: I hope everybody's as obsessed with this as I am.
Speaker: Like, I'm just fascinated with it and I could talk to her for days.
Speaker: But definitely get her book if you're in any way interested in it, because it's just super interesting and it does.
Speaker: It just looks at everything, I think, from a
Speaker: from a bit of a historical point of view, but just the background, the why and the fact, you know, you've interviewed so many people and stuff.
Speaker: It's just really, really interesting.
Speaker: And I looked up, I Googled so many of them and, you know, I learned quite a bit from it.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: So thank you for writing the book.
Speaker: Thank you for coming on the Glamour River podcast.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker: This was great.
