Thank you Netgalley and University of Chicago Press for access to this arc.

When I requested this title, I was expecting something to help manage data after death - the data of loved ones who will mostly likely die before me as well as proactively managing mine. After reading a few other reviews, I knew that this was actually not what the book is about. Instead it's a philosophical look at digital data. Who controls it, who should control it, what is the future of all this data? Or at least that's what the long introduction promised. Some important questions and quandaries about digital data were brought up. I was intrigued. Then chapter one almost put me in a coma. Chapter two arrived with an actual real life case of how digital data was being handled and I perked up. Only to sink back into eye glazed stupor the longer that chapter continued. This is a short book and honestly I ought to have been able to power through it but the thought of slogging along to the end was more than I could face. Sadly, this one isn't for me. DNF

So what happens to all the mountains of personal data – the blog posts, the tweets, chatroom nonsense, flames, rants, purchases, Google searches, porn sites and collections – after you die? Who owns them? Who wants them? Who is trying to make money from them? These and many more such questions bother Carl Ohman in his remarkably wide-ranging examination called The Afterlife of Data. There is lots to think about here. The book takes readers in directions they never considered, and weighs pluses and minuses of each path and aspect. It is exhaustive and thorough, though perhaps not entirely fair. Ohman is firmly on the side of preserving and leveraging this data juggernaut.

Data is generally considered a curse. It piles up with unstoppable speed and volume. It takes up massive quantities of computer hardware, air-conditioned storage space, and electricity, in world-beating amounts. It costs a fortune to maintain. It is also fragile: old protocols, and obsolete software and hardware can make it inaccessible within just a few years. It can become Rosetta Stone-like, taking a hundred years to make sense of. Data can also be totally erased with a single click in the wrong place at the wrong time, among other things. But “digital remains are becoming a macro-level matter,” he says, exposing a trauma I had no idea was taking up so much time and effort for so many people.

Look at ownership and privacy. Who gave you permission to reassemble my entire life — every trip I took, every person I chatted with, every message I sent, every bill I paid and document I received from the government — and used that it in your recreation and evaluation of life in my time? Or as a factor in someone else’s life? Who said you could buy or sell that personal data?

Then there’s Web 2.0. Unless social media starts seriously deleting accounts, the dead will outnumber the living on those sites within 30 or 40 years – and still be accessible, if not continuing to post as much. Do we really want the dead to be social? But the sites have found real pushback from relatives, friends and fans to leave them be. That’s an additional cost for accounts that won’t be clicking on any ads. Billions of accounts. And all their photos.

On the flip side, never has a human society been so well documented. Never has anyone been able to reconstruct life as finely as with all this totally unprecedented data. It is such a wonder, maybe all data should be shielded by UNESCO for its heritage value, Ohman says.

He goes all the way back in time to show that as soon as Man stopped wandering, he took much better care of the dead. Early tribes buried bodies beneath their own homes, so the dead would always be with them. The Natufians cut off the heads of the deceased and built them into their walls, so they would always be present. It is a human peculiarity to want to preserve memories in a longlasting and substantial way. The extreme case, big data, Ohman says, probably knows more about you than you do.

The book spends a lot of time on a Black Mirror episode, where a grieving young and pregnant wife gives in to an ad that can console her, by recreating her late husband. First in text messages, then by recreating his voice, and finally by building a robot that looks, sounds and acts just like him. So death can be assuaged with a workaround, for profit of course.

Already, all kinds of businesses are popping up to memorialize loved ones from their social media posts. One that Ohman focuses on sends out supplications for Muslim subscribers, basically forever. Millions of these messages are sent out continuously from the faithful. As long as there is capitalism, someone will try to make a buck from the data we propagate. Not only is death their basis, it the key to the sale. It even has a name: the Digital Afterlife Industry.

The issues are absolutely endless. Ohman moves the book really well, but it is so complex and self-referential, he has to keep reminding readers of people he mentioned earlier, as well the things they and he have said in that other chapter. That is probably valuable in its own way, but for me it was repetitious.

My real problem with all of this preciousness is that unless you are landed gentry in Britain, and the mansion where the family has lived for 600 years is absolutely blotto with glorious, giant portraits of at the least the firstborn males of the clan going back that far, no one even knows the names of their own relatives beyond three generations back. People cannot even name their eight pairs of great grandparents, let alone recite their personal life stories to the unwary. I look at the photo albums my parents left, and have absolutely no clue who 95% of those people were. The motivation for preserving all the digital detritus of this civilization is quite rightly of little concern, except for historians, ethnographers, archeologists and paleontologists.

Should we turn the world upside down for them? Sacrifice social services expenditures in favor of centuries of credit card statements? After all, if you’re dead, whatever anybody says about you won’t hurt you. And anyway, how many of your progeny in the 26th century will want to know the extraordinarily detailed story of your entire life in the 21st century? And that of every other relative between you and them?

Then Ohman saves it for me. He explains the real life background to this intensive effort in the Acknowledgments: “Our sometimes heated (rarely sober) debates in the pubs of Oxford have been more educational than any class I have ever taken.” This admission puts the book in a whole different light, one I can really and readily appreciate. Well done, lads. You have thought it all through, given readers the yin and the yang, and produced a worthy assessment of the 21st century’s curse. And none of it was digitized in the making (except for all the mobiles in your pockets, the credit cards you used to pay, the security cameras in the pubs and the streets, and the apps you had activated at the time).

David Wineberg

This work does a particularly good job of orienting our present moment within the long history of how we humans have dealt with both death and what remains of those who die. This approach is certainly helpful with developing an a deeper understanding of what is unique about our present moment and the ways it might resemble the past. In that way, the weight of the choices that we're making now are very well presented. That is, arguably, the greatest strength of this work. We are creating so much data about so many people, and it is not feasible that it can all be saved forever. What do we do in light of that? This book posits that question brilliantly.

On the other hand, the analysis of our present moment is all too swept up in the tides of capitalism. The author very correctly points out that even companies and organizations that feel very permanent, like Meta or Alphabet, or even perhaps Ancestry.com, will inevitably close or be sold. We saw a change in Twitter completely alter its relationship to archival research, as Elon Musk made it virtually inaccessible to academics. Even governmental regulation falls under this critique -- no institution lasts forever. Öhman clearly struggles with how to approach the preservation of our data from this long-term perspective of hundreds or even thousands of years. That struggle is certainly worthwhile.

These questions are so big as to guarantee they are entirely out of our control. Even if we could all work together collectively to make changes now across the globe, that doesn't generate any certainty that our descendants in two hundred years will agree and maintain those practices. I do wish, that in the context of these difficult long-term questions, this book could also tackle the question from a more personal perspective. This is hinted at here and there, but never fully addressed. For those of who accept the premise of the book, and want to be stewards of our data afterlife, what can we do individually? This is a conversation worth having.

Beyond the academic philosophers and media theorists who will be interested in this work (and I'm one of those), I also feel this book will be relevant to those with professional or hobby interests in genealogy (of which I am also one), though they will have to put in a little work to make some connections that aren't drawn explicitly in the book. It's a short read, and the jargon is minimal, making it accessible to a wide audience.

This book is more philosophical and talks about issues concerning the digital data of someone else has died. Who has the right to that data? Should it be saved, or shared? Should it be destroyed?
The most poignant story was about a boy who was unable to play on a gaming system after his father died. They had spent a lot of quality time playing together, and it hurt too much for years, but eventually the son played their game again and discovered the "ghost" of his father still in the game, which made him happy.
There are also issues about regulation and accessibility. If you are interested in what happens to data after someone dies, this is an interesting book.
Thanks to NetGalley for letting me read this

“The Afterlife of Data” by Carl Ohman

This is not a self-help book to managing data for death but a philosophical book on the societal issues of corporations controlling our personal data even after death. The book has so many great questions about the different issues that are possible with the data being out in the universe when we die without proper guidelines in place of who controls it and why and how they will use that data. The thought of leaving pieces behind for future generations sounds very useful but there is a much darker side to what corporations and governments could do with those pieces is pretty scary. The entire book gave me a lot to think about how little control we actually have regardless of our wants and wishes. I gave the book a 3 out of 5 stars.

The Afterlife of Data is an academic book. It has a subtitle: "What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care" which doesn't sound particularly academic. It's an interesting subject, and one I have often been curious about, so I chose this book. I was hoping I suppose for it to be more of a guide on how to manage your data while you are alive. The truth is the book raises more questions than answers and one of its main themes is that we are all trusting our digital remains to a handful of corporate entities who don't really know what to do with it and whose raison d'etre is to make money.

The first part of the book looks at parallels in the past in human cultures and how we treat the dead. Much of it is about the ethics of our legacies after we die and there are many philosophical discussions including quotes from actual philosophers. I found as the book progressed that the narrative often came back to interesting real-world examples, only to deviate into a long discourse of what it all meant.

As someone who has researched my family tree, something that resonated with me is how priceless our data is. Most of our ancestors have left so little. Before the 1841 census, there was almost nothing and no photographs until about 150 years ago. Now, the opposite is true, we leave unbelievable quantities of data for the future to sift through. Twitter alone could be like the Doomsday Book for future generations. But to Twitter, it's a commercial commodity.

Who owns our data after we die? The author picks a good illustration of some of the moral issues about our remains. Max Brod decided not to destroy Kafka's novels (as instructed) after his friend's death. I often think of Thomas Hardy's second wife Florence who destroyed all his papers (as instructed) on his death and what a great loss that was for posterity. But which is right?

As far as my personal actions upon reading this book. I will a) think about what data I need to pass on, and what I want to; b) make what platform settings changes I can; c) look into after-death bots (an interesting phenomenon alluded to in the book). Obviously, big decisions need to be made at some stage by the world's leaders, the author himself doesn't suggest any real solutions, raising the area as one that needs (much) consideration. But will it receive it, and is there anything ordinary people can do to make this happen? Probably not much, other than asking for it to be considered when asked for feedback.

Something he didn't mention is encrypted data. Is this something that should be kept or destroyed? What about private keys? Lots of cryptocurrencies for example will die with their owners who don't pass on information that only they possess. This is a massive issue! Although almost certainly the future will be able to decode them eventually, but should they?

If you are looking for a hands-on guide to managing your digital remains this is not the book for you. If you are interested in the ethics of digital remains then you will probably like it.