uploading my consciousness to the internet: a ramble
now, as the title says, I'm rambling here. I've had this thought for a while since I finished watching Lain and I was shown the concept of dying, but your consciousness being kept alive in the world wide web, soon I realized this isn't too far at all from reality.
what is this website, exactly? it's a piece of my mind, a huge piece of my thoughts, likes, dislikes, and other things that make me human, and they're all here on the web for everyone to see. it doesn't look so special, but I am sharing part of my soul with strangers whenever I update this website with another blog, another diary entry, another update, another status and more so, i am sharing a part of my soul others don't really know about, the real me.
I see this in other websites too and mostly on other social media that allows us to share out thoughts even more impulsively, like twitter or instagram. uploading a photo or saying something on your mind is really easy nowadays, and when you die, this part of yourself will forever be alive as small thoughts in tweets, random pictures on instagram, full on blog posts or quick status updates.
while this whole thing sounds cool, did you know it's a huge problem? yeah. on nov 2022 there was an estimate of atleast 30 million deceased users in facebook, and it's calculated that the number of dead people in social media will be much bigger than those of alive people.
people are still haunted by profiles of dead relatives like digital zombies on sites like facebook, where the process to delete the account of a deceased family member is much more complicated than it seems. the profiles still post notifications from games the person once played, apps the person once used... a part of their consciousness will keep itself forever alive in the web with constant updates even if those are automated ones from games. because, well, those games they played still reflect something of them as a person, their likes, what they did to have fun and kill some time.
the finishing note is that I hope when I die this website forever haunts the web like my own digital ghost. technology is advancing and who knows, maybe an AI that can perfectly replicate me will do that. isn't that cool and extremely frightening? techological advancement and it's conscequences.
