Elaine Kasket: We have founders saying things like, "Oh, we're gonna solve for grief in 10 years," as though it's a problem to be solved or a pathology to be cured or something. What we're just talking about is the normal cycle of living and loving and losing and loving and losing and, you know, that we've experienced the whole of our human history. Grief is, I think, much the same as it ever was. It's just being suggested a lot that maybe we can fix it

Sarah Cavanaugh: Welcome to Peaceful Exit, the podcast where we talk to creatives about death, dying, grief, and also life. I'm Sarah Cavanaugh, and my guest today is psychologist and author Dr. Elaine Kasket. She's an expert in what's known as the digital afterlife, and in this episode Elaine and I talk about the complex intersection of technology, identity, and grief, and how they often collide in an increasingly online world. She shares things I have never even thought about. We cover the rise of grief bots, AI continuations, and the practical challenges of managing our digital footprints after we die. Elaine also explains how technology can shape a legacy, as well as what it truly means to stay human in the digital age

[00:01:20] Sarah Cavanaugh: Welcome to Peaceful Exit

[00:01:22] Elaine Kasket: Thank you for having me

[00:01:24] Sarah Cavanaugh: So how did you become a scholar of death in the digital?

[00:01:28] Elaine Kasket: Well, there was a point at which it came together, but there was a situation where I had each of those ingredients a bit covered separately because, I'm a psychologist and I also did a master's in psychotherapy. And for my master's thesis, it was the very early days of online counseling, which was a lot of asynchronous messaging and asynchronous email, around sort of 2000. And I wrote about the experience of practitioners shifting from in-office work to this online environment. So that was the online piece, and then my doctoral thesis was actually about physicians coping with patient death. And so I had these realms of interest that then came together around 2005 when Facebook was — let's use the word “unleashed” on the public. I came across a phenomenon that was then happening on Facebook, because Facebook didn't have memorialization, which is a kind of preservation of deceased users' profiles. They didn't have any form of memorialization until 2007, they used to have a delete upon death user policy. So what some people would do is they would start a group, like an “in memory of” group,and my curiosity was immediately piqued by it because I was very interested as a psychologist in people's behavior on an interaction with the group and with the deceased individual in a way. And that got even more interesting when I navigated to that individual's profile that they created in life, and people were still very active there too, speaking directly to the deceased person. I just was immediately inspired to take this up as a formal research project. I am still studying these phenomena more than two decades later, and they are absolutely not a phenomenon of little consequence, so I feel, I feel vindicated.

[00:03:23] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yes. Yes. You open your book “Reset: Rethinking Your Digital World for a Happier Life,” with an almost romantic description of the pre-digital world in which you became a psychologist. When did you first get interested in how the online world and technology shape our identity and our inner lives? And is it all bad?

[00:03:46] Elaine Kasket: I think for a long time my focus was quite narrow on the area of interest that I was just talking about, and it was in the course of writing the digital afterlife book, the previous book, “The Ghosts in the Machine” book, that I found myself quite unexpectedly thinking about the digital legacy one ends up with, and thinking about how that is shaped and contributed to throughout the lifespan. So it really was the death and technology work that inspired my interest in identity as a whole because digital afterlife is a kind of continuation of one's digital identity that has been forged by them and with other people, with the assistance of a lot of other people over the course of a life.

[00:04:36] Sarah Cavanaugh: Your first book goes into depth about the digital afterlife, but how has technology historically impacted death practices and how we grieve? I talked to Mary Roach a little bit about how embalming changed the way we're buried and how we communicate with our loved ones.

[00:04:57] Elaine Kasket: Before this, there were all sorts of technologies for communication that, as they emerged, were almost always pulled into service at some point to try to stay connected to the dead, or to try to be in contact, or receive contact, or be aware of the presence of the dead. So that included the telephone, that included radio, that included the telegraph, which if you recall the craze for seances in the mid 19th century, centering in America and the spiritualism movement around the Fox sisters, who were hoaxers but who popularized the table rapping announcement that the spirit had arrived, which was the telegraph was the primary communication technology of that time. And apparently, I think this was in Scientific American back in the 1920s when Thomas Edison was talking about the phonograph, one of his hopes was that he would be able to capture the voices of the dead from the Great War. People have always used whatever technology was available post or pre-industrial to stay connected to their ancestors, and in some ways what we have now is a continuation of that. It's along the same through line. However, it is really fundamentally different in important ways, one being that the digital remains or digital traces or digital personae of the dead reside in the technology in abundance. And with AI and large language models and so forth, it's so incredibly easy and cheap and accessible and a no-brainer to combine digital remains with AI to produce quite plausible, convincing kinds of facsimiles or simulations of people, and you don't have to be a loved one of that person to do it. You can be a stranger. The digital afterlife industry, sometimes abbreviated DAI, is absolutely burgeoning. It's booming. And so that's one way in which it's different, the kind of availability of such ample and vivid digital traces that people leave behind. But the other difference is that this phenomenon is arising against the background of the surveillance capitalist economy. Karl Marx talked about dead labor, and what Karl Marx meant when he talked about dead labor was like the factories, the machines, the means of production that previous generations had built that we then continue to extract value from as the generations go on. We have this kind of form of dead labor or spectral labor in the digital space, and these kind of grief bots and all these phenomena that we're hearing about now are a form of spectral labor, of dead labor, and it's being very platformized. We've had other eras before where there's been big pushes of commercialization of death, like the funeral industry in the United States in particular, but then elsewhere. Embalming, other kinds of kind of funerary technologies, you know and all the add-ons and all the things and the upsell and all this kind of business. In a digital world, in an information economy, the remains of the dead, the digital remains of the dead, their labor, their experience, their personae, we're still trying to extract value from those. It's being done very creatively and without much regard to the privacy, dignity, or erstwhile personhood of the dead. That's a pretty novel situation. It's different from where we've ever been before.

[00:08:43] Sarah Cavanaugh: Indeed. Let's talk a minute about grief in the digital age. How has the online world changed the way we love and the way we lose?

[00:08:54] Elaine Kasket: You know, the thing that bothers me the most about the discourse around this, which is largely getting influenced and driven by the market is it's kind of based on the idea that the online world has or can change grief. We have founders saying things like, "Oh, we're gonna solve for grief in 10 years," as though it's a problem to be solved or a pathology to be cured or something. What we're just talking about is the normal cycle of living and loving and losing and loving and losing and, you know, that we've experienced the whole of our human history. So I think my answer to your question is that grief itself, which is of course every bereavement is as idiosyncratic and individual as the relationship we had with any given person, and everybody's grief takes different paths, has different manifestations. But it is normal, and it is not a sickness, and it is part of what gives life its rich tapestry. That it's like one of those other things like boredom or loneliness or impatience or frustration or inconvenience or any number of things that's being suggested can and should be designed out of human existence, which is really troubling.

[00:10:10] Sarah Cavanaugh: It feels like that's what makes us human

[00:10:12] Elaine Kasket: Exactly. So we're having these two competing things. Like, it's really important to stay human in an increasingly mechanical or AI-driven world, but then we're all being funneled towards these machine goals, as though the machines are becoming more like humans and we're becoming more like machines, and we're gonna meet somewhere in a very gray, unhappy middle. Grief is, I think, much the same as it ever was. It's just being suggested a lot that maybe we can fix it

[00:10:41] Sarah Cavanaugh: What is online grief exactly? Has it evolved since the early days when Facebook created these memorial pages?

[00:10:50] Elaine Kasket:It's really interesting because there's just so many more places to encounter the online dead because there's so many other places that we encounter each other in life online. But in terms of the kind of specific mechanisms for grieving, there have definitely been phases whereby early on it was almost like there were support groups, so people gathering but just in this, you know, helped by the technology. And then there were things like the Worldwide Cemetery, which was a free, kinda like not-for-profit thing where people could put online memorials, so like a separate online cemetery. And then you started getting phenomena like, oh, we're gathering on these new social media, and then eventually, as you start getting more and more people with an online presence dying such that major gathering places, like Facebook for example, then became repurposed sites of mourning and memorialization. So there's this repurposing sort of thing. And probably simultaneous with that there were the people with technological know-how and expertise who decided, like, I would like to build a grief bot or a chat bot of my deceased friend. The founder of Replika, one of the first AI companion apps, was a grief bot that she built of her friend Roman Mazurenko, who died in a pedestrian auto accident. And then there came this era of lots of services that really emphasized in a way, like, they pulled on people's concerns about mortality and like, "Oh, you can almost achieve digital immortality. You can make sure that you're still here for your loved ones by storing up videos that we'll parcel out to them at intervals," or "we'll archive stuff for you or put you in a vault,” these kinds of things to try to kinda offset people's fears of not being there for their loved ones. And now we're in this era where, again, anybody can make a grief bot, and anybody can be a grief bot, and you can resurrect or revivify someone, something that sounds like them and looks like them. You know, you can take a generations-old picture of your great-grandmother and put it through some kind of thing so she can move around and look like she's talk — it's just, like, it's incredible, and it's so accessible, and it's so cheap, and it's so convincing. But now the predominant thing is just that whole AI companion and grief bot, and, and the idea that it's like, "Oh, here's how you get around the problem of death. You never experience loss in the first place." So if, if it seems like the person is still here and you can still continue talking to them the whole time, then like, "See? Isn't that..." But it's very weird logic.

[00:13:30] Sarah Cavanaugh: Would you call that an avatar? What would you call that replication of that person?

[00:13:34] Elaine Kasket: People are still, it's like it hasn't settled in the vocabulary. People are saying gri — when it's for grief, people seem to be calling them griefbots. [SC: Okay] Sometimes people call it deathbots or thanabots. AI resurrections some people are calling them, or but then sometimes it's AI continuations.

Sarah Cavanaugh: So interesting.

Elaine Kasket: So interesting. And one of the things I'm really keeping an eye on and really interested in is the various ways in which people are constructing clones, resurrections, simulations, avatars for political purposes. So you've got things like Indian politicians, who are dead, advocating for their successor. You've got one of the victims of the Parkland shooting, uh, Joaquin Oliver, giving an interview to Jim Acosta about gun violence and about regulation of guns, and this was with, uh, his parents' endorsement to form a chatbot of Joaquin that would give this message. There's an Israeli example of victims of domestic violence, female victims of domestic violence appearing on a public service being resurrected to talk about what happened to them.

[00:14:42] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah, I believe it was 60 Minutes who did a story on, they were creating these sort of resurrections of Holocaust survivors to preserve their life stories and their experience for future generations, so you could walk into a museum and actually have a conversation with a Holocaust survivor, and they're able to answer questions given the data that was inputted. From your perspective, what does the brain do when we create a replica in order to talk to them?

[00:15:12] Elaine Kasket: You know, how people feel about digital remains and things that are done with them depends so much on, like, the function or the context of those things. Okay, well, what if your digital remains were used to preserve something about your community or to help historians of the future understand what it was like, you know, in the time where you lived? Or what if it were used to help medical science, you know, that might help strangers or your family? What if your digital remains were used to instruct, you know, in the way that you're talking about? There's lots of examples of that. One of the biggest draws the Musée d'Orsay in Paris has had in recent years is when they trained, uh, an interactive chatbot on Vincent van Gogh's biographies and all these kinds of things to enable him to talk to museum visitors and so forth. And when it comes to a chatbot or a griefbot of someone that's died, not a public figure, it's a personal figure in a family — one family member may have an incredibly embracing, comforted, kind of warm feeling about that phenomenon, that entity, that construction. And another one, a family member might find it traumatic. Another reason why that might be difficult is because you can't just create one entity like that, a griefbot or a deathbot, and expect every single person to relate to or resonate or recognize it the same way. The reason why every bereavement is as unique as the relationship we had with that person is that we had a unique relationship with that person. If you have siblings, each one of you is going to kind of know or experience a different parent slightly. You know, they're gonna have a different perception of them. It's also kind of weird, the idea that you can create this accurate facsimile of someone because what does that mean when our relationships are so individually co-constructed?

[00:17:05] Sarah Cavanaugh: Wow, you're making me wonder what does healthy grieving look like in the digital age?

[00:17:12] Elaine Kasket: It's probably the number one question that I'm asked. This is a very situated idea, you know, like normal grieving or healthy grieving. There's so many, like, cultural and familial and individual factors that go into that. We've all got this idea that there's these stages, and there's these stages you're meant to go through, and it's predictable, and first this, and then — and that's not, those are not empirically demonstrated. They just took a hold of the popular cultural imagination probably because, gosh, the suggestion that this terrible pain and loss can be predictable, and then you'll go through, and there will be an end.

[00:17:47] Sarah Cavanaugh: There's a framework.

[00:17:49] Elaine Kasket: There’s a framework, and you can like — don't worry, you know, you'll get to acceptance, and there's a light at the end of the tunnel. I mean, that's gotta be something that a lot of people cling onto, you know. And as the grief scholar George Bonanno talks about in his books, including "The Other Side of Sadness," the majority of people are what he would classify as resilient grievers, where, you know, yes, you know, you go through all that, but within that trajectory there are infinite number of unique experiences. And so I think that people do a lot of unhelpful comparing themselves either against the framework or against one another. I think that some — in, in a way the online space has solidified some unhelpful sacred cows or mythologies about healthy grief that we were just starting to —

[00:18:33] Sarah Cavanaugh: Get away from.

[00:18:34] Elaine Kasket: Get away from. Uh, because I mean, if you, if you go into a search engine and say, "What are the stages of..." The first suggestion is probably gonna be grief.

[00:18:43] Sarah Cavanaugh: I had a great conversation with Dr. Lucy Hone, who overlays resilience and grief. She lost her daughter suddenly and she wrote a great book about resilient grieving. And there's a lot more out there about conscious grieving and giving yourself permission to whatever form it takes, however it emerges for you, and I wonder sometimes if being on a screen sort of preempts that because you're, you're stuck in that grief because you're on screens all the time and you're in the digital world instead of possibly maybe being outside or doing some of those things that kind of help move that energy through your body.

[00:19:22] Elaine Kasket: I think that the digital and the physical spaces both contain all sorts of possibilities for processing things and things are moving through, or where you're blunting and distracting. I think that one of the things that's happened — we don't grieve in community in the same way that we once historically did. Families are much more widespread and often, not always of course, you know, but we, a lot of us don't stay local. I'm speaking to you as I sit here probably 4,000 odd miles away from my family of origin, you know. So we've lost a shared sense of ritual or what you do or what you expect. Um, the Victorians, for example, had an extremely codified system of even, like, mourning dress that would communicate to people what stage of grief you were at. You know, most grief these days is invisible. The world moves on very fast. And so sometimes the online space might be one of the only places where people with ongoing waves of grief can continue to seek support and solace and comfort when the world out here is kind of, it might have moved on. There might not be anybody there. Other people in the household might not want to talk about it, so other people might think, "Okay, it's time to stop now." Do you know what I mean?

[00:20:42] Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah

[00:20:43] Elaine Kasket: It's horses for courses. There's lots of different possibilities, both positive and negative, in both the offline and the online realms

[00:20:50] Sarah Cavanaugh: Why does it matter what we leave behind online, and who should be thinking about this? A lot of our listeners may be really interested in sort of the practical part of this. Do you talk to your loved ones and say, is this something you would want, like a digital afterlife, or is it something that we'd want to erase from the digital world?

[00:21:15] Elaine Kasket: The reason it's a complicated question to answer is there, there are lots of facets to a digital afterlife, much more than the visible. For example, social media traces and things like that. Partly because even in the way that we conduct our lives and our business and our finances and manage accounts and all these kinds of things. So your phone tends to be your portal to all sorts of stuff that is both practically and sentimentally important, and sometimes actually essential for settling the estate. And yet for your own security during life, things are locked away behind double verification or triple verification kinds of processes. Lots of places that you deal with don't have good mechanisms for figuring out what to do when a user of some kind of service or a platform dies. For some of the biggies like Meta and Google and Apple and LinkedIn — so these have memorialization and reporting processes, and you can, for Facebook, Instagram, Google, Apple, you can appoint a legacy contact before you pass away. And you can do that in your settings. But the vast majority of people don't know about that and don't do it. So it's a vanishingly small percentage of people who actually set that up. There are things that you can do ahead of time to nominate a kind of a executor or a person to take care of things. And that's not just about the visible stuff, because like with Google and Apple, that could be a portal to photographs, which might have sentimental value, to intellectual property, portfolios of work, you know, written or visual work that you may have stored in the drives and cloud storage and things like that, that might sometimes have value. So with a death certificate they can't, they can't actually help you. It doesn't matter how close you are to the deceased. Part of the reason that people don't do it is that I think they either fantasize that when they die, kind of everything else just disappears too, or they assume that by dint of like close relationship or next of kinship or whatever that somebody's just automatically gonna be able to take care of things, and that's not the case. It's helpful even just to leave a list not of passwords, but of the places where you have accounts. I absolutely guarantee you sitting here today that my husband has no idea where all my bank accounts are, and that's not my trying to, like, hide something from him. It's just that they don't come to the house. We don't really think about how much difficulty there's gonna be just in the practical business of settling an estate if we don't set something up. Now, in the United States, in most states, you can appoint a digital executor that actually has some powers, that are allowed to go into accounts and take care of things. So you need to find somebody who's knowledgeable about that, and they can help you with what a digital executor does and how it can smooth things.

[00:24:10] Sarah Cavanaugh: Has there been any losses in your life that really changed the way you work in this field?

[00:24:24] Elaine Kasket: I'm fortunate to be able to say that I've had very few that were unexpected losses. I start “All the Ghosts in the Machine” with a sort of anecdote. One of the things that did get me interested in this identity thing was my mother's discovery of a box of love letters, World War II love letters between my grandmother and my grandfather at the back of a closet after my grandmother passed away. There was a kind of particular picture that a lot of people had of my grandmother, and these letters, which some people argued against reading because they said, "oh, they're too private” — it was an astonishing record of, like, mid-century life in America, for one, so very historically interesting. But completely revamped the kind of picture, the narrative we had of this woman, who, you know, in the letters was this very vulnerable and passionate and warm, you know, kind of woman. And my grandfather in his later years had said, "Oh, your grandmother, she never loved me. Elizabeth never loved me." And that was just so patently, obviously untrue, you know, from these letters. But it was only through her loss and our being able to access these letters, which she'd hidden away, where we kind of came to know her as a different sort of woman. That has made me very interested in how I work with kind of identity, how I think about identity, digital remains, all the tensions between privacy and dignity, but then other kinds of things — that my mother was incredibly healed by these letters herself. Seeing this version of her mother was really psychologically important for her. So the tensions between some of our needs and the needs and wishes of the living, and the privacy and the humanity and the dignity of the dead, and the online space is an arena where these two things come into real conflict. But it was my grandmother's death and loss and then the rediscovery of these letters that made me see that through a particular lens, I think.

[00:26:26] Sarah Cavanaugh: It's a beautiful story. So what does a peaceful exit mean to you?

[00:26:31] Elaine Kasket: So peaceful exit for me means trusting and believing that my loved ones have the ability and the capacity and the resilience to embody and remember me without needing to have me present in some artificially intelligent form, and being allowed to go to my rest without further violence being perpetuated on the earth at my hands. I know that sounds dramatic, but collectively I feel like it is dramatic. We should not be normalizing these extractive practices and acting like it's okay to be doing what we're doing. It's not okay. And so peaceful exit means not playing my part in that whole game.