The internet has long hosted the materials of the dead. Now it hosts the dead themselves, not only as archival traces (as stored ‘old media’ – documents, photographs, stories), but in the form of persons, things, bots or deadbots, all being given some semblance of agency or even of life. At any rate some of these forms suggest life, or claim it, or claim some intimate connection to it – coming close enough to touch it, perhaps; and desired or not, touch brings with it fears of contagion. But what kind of life is this? What fuels it, what guarantees it, what crossings and fusings does it entertain with or require from ‘standard’ biomachines – we ourselves, as technologised humans in the 21st century (Thacker, 2003)? Do these forms constitute a new mode of, or a new engagement between, technologies and the flesh, a new biomachinic contract? Or do they simply simulate life, ultimately remaining safely on the far side of the ditch dividing the algorithmic from the organic, or from what Beatrice Fazi (2019) terms the discrete and the continuous? If these are algorithmic ghosts, are they honest ghosts?
Bassett Caroline (Fri,) studied this question.