By Austin Shepard Woodruff
An imperative of modern life is to at once produce
and maintain an online presence, to be involved in the digital age as it
unfolds. Social conventions require that individuals keep at least one email
account as a kind of online holding where formal business and other forms of
exchange can take place. Similarly, cultural norms demand connection via social
media platforms; we are expected to present ourselves online in both a
professional sense as well as for personal relationships. But always already
carried into the development of online interactions are the political and
ethical challenges of human life, what marks the difference between virtual and
physical engagement is a matter of distance through the medium. The medium of
the Internet provides us with a means of connecting with other people around
the world as never before, but caught up in this apparatus is the question of
how to represent non-digital life as it synthesizes with our digital
experiences of the Internet.
As the Internet becomes
an increasingly relevant influence on the ways in which we live our lives, it
becomes a horizon towards which we can lay our greatest hopes and our most
terrible fears. The Eternime project embraces the Internet as the frontier of
the future, the frontier which will finally solve the life-anxiety of the human
condition; Eternime seeks to overcome the consequences of physical death by
building virtual avatars based off an individual’s online presence during his
or her life. Subscription to Eternime entails that an individual will string
together their profiles on several social media platforms, provide basic
information, and include intimate details of formative memories into an
algorithm which then authors an avatar. This avatar, upon the individual’s
death, will continue that person’s online presence, acting virtually as though
death were no longer an obstacle to engaging in social action. The project is therefore
a modern attempt at achieving immortality and as such it imports cultural
mythologies about death, transcendence, and memory.
With this in mind we must
then say that the Internet embodies a web that catches and then feeds off of
data input, growing ever more expansive with each morsel of information
included into its frame of reference. In this way it is a rabbit hole in which
virtual identities are constantly transitioning to fit the model of digital
interaction. The rate at which these identities (and the platforms that sustain
them) grow and change is a reflection of the flow of the real public’s
withdrawal and resurgence into virtual rendezvous. The Eternime project tracks
this flow on an individual level, collecting the sum total of one person’s
digital footprint in order to simulate that individual’s personality. It is
clear then that the project has a certain understanding of what constitutes
personhood online; Eternime states that one can live forever if one subscribes
to the program and uploads their private digital presence into the project’s
database. The immortality at stake for
the project is in a person’s virtual conception of him/herself, and while the
digital components that make up a profile are finite, the project aspires to
create from their finitude an infinite presence. The question remains whether
this immortality will be static, in the sense of repetition ad nauseum, or if
somehow the avatar algorithm can predict the trajectory of that person’s identity
over time had they not died.
In light of this
consideration, we ought to inspect what makes up the profiles that defy death
and the motivations involved in both the process and the product. For example,
the social pressure to represent oneself online dictates that in order to stay
ahead of the competition we must build the most appealing profiles on the many
platforms. But these platforms, each with their own set of mores and economies
of performance eventually become their own reason for participation; one is
more likely to post on Facebook if that online community takes well to what
that person is sharing, thereby encouraging further posting. The appeal to
social approval ends up as not only the consequence of online interactions but
often the principal or even the sole reason for it. An online profile
constitutes a tool that one can use to garner attention, but just as much as
this is true we always run the risk of setting our online presences as
indispensable priorities, priorities which ask for constant attention and in
effect distract from physical non-digital action. Under these conditions, in
the worst of circumstances, the infinity we ask of Eternime then becomes a
closed loop of superficial interactions online perpetuated into the future of
the Internet.
For this reason we must
look carefully at the mythologizing of death that the project engages in in
order to provoke subscription. Roland Barthes speaks to this in the book Mythologies in writing that “myth…is a
language which does not want to die: it wrests from the meanings which give it
its sustenance an insidious, degraded survival…it turns them into speaking
corpses” (244). Barthes’s understanding of myth ties directly into the Eternime
project, drawing together the end goal of overcoming death by birthing a
virtual avatar with the dramatic irony that Eternime performs in making these
digital puppets speak endlessly beyond the grave. The simulation of life is not
life itself, but the project of Eternime collapses when this is spoken out
loud.
Furthermore, Eternime
more than represents but indeed enacts the very process of mythologizing; we
project the image of ourselves into the algorithm, hiding behind the digital
footprint of our time spent online. We cover over our real selves with the
pictures, videos, memes, and posts of our profiles. There is a ringing
falsehood that inaugurates the profile into being, a call which the profile
itself promptly ignores by means of continuing to engage with the online
community. The profile is a myth of personhood, and in buying into Eternime’s
project we succumb to the cultural mythologies that assert the fallibility of
human memory in the face of digital immortality.
And yet to cheat virtual
death by creating virtual immortality is to cheapen the meaning of digital
presences entirely. The eternal avatar is a semblance of personhood evacuated
of any real human substance behind it, monitoring its growth and nurturing its
involvement in the online community. If what I post online is to last forever
in the care of an algorithm calibrated to my personality, why not subscribe
while I still live and let the virtual life I spawn tend to my concerns on the
Internet now? Why not let the avatar become the idea of me while I ride out the
rest of my time in this meat reality without needing to check on how “I” am
doing online? Eternime suggests boldly that we can live forever and that
nothing can be lost to the failure of memory if we are within the project’s
folds. Yet what the project always wants us to forget is that we are not safe
from death no matter how much we pretend that we may live beyond it in the
digital memory of its vast databanks. Material death remains our fate.
In order then to live the
good life in the light of Eternime, in order to take refuge in the algorithm’s
care of your personhood, you must believe that your online presence is the same
thing as you yourself, that it is a result of your action and that what you do
you freely choose to do so. Without this freedom of choice the program will not
be able to accurately illustrate your personality. Such being the case, we
notice that the algorithm is a causal chain of factors taken into account which
then produce a certain portrayal of what data is plugged into it. Eternime is
founded on a mathematical prediction of the person behind the virtual mirror of
the computer screen. The algorithm then takes on the profile, much like a
vampire sucking the life from its victims or like a zombie spreading death in
its bite. Once claimed by physical death, the algorithm continues into the
future as its own end, not changing or growing but merely representing what you
probably would have been because there is no need to change or grow. The
profile is the myth of the person, and as Barthes says, “myth plays on the
analogy between meaning and form,” for “there is no myth without motivated
form” (236). The profile in this sense is a kind of tombstone, a grave-marker
that is made to continue speaking as though the person it represents were
immortal, untouchable, and unstoppable. This is foul puppetry indeed.
Eternime therefore falls
into the great threat the human ego always holds against itself. We seek
perfection and eternal life, but in each attempt we make to reach for it we only
highlight its impossibility. The myth of life beyond death in our modern world
has made a dash for the material platform of the Internet, building for itself
a foundation on which to lay out its most recent monument to this betrayal of
the ego. We do not have gods to whom we pray for everlasting life, no, now we
have near-omniscient avatar profiles whose ontological positions are almost
those of demigods, on the Internet. These are empty profiles whose emptiness we
worship. Eternime demands we pretend all the while that there is the ghost of
the person lost looming there in the avatar’s endless online presence,
projecting into the future the recorded memories of a life apparently lived in
vain.
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