Dimitry Orlov - Dead Souls

[hatrack]

EDIT

Against this background of economic stagnation and decay and widespread financial insolvency one sector is experiencing a boom time: Silicon Valley is booming again, and tech start-up IPOs are doing well. Social networking and mobile computing are hot, and some are expecting them to power the global economy out of the doldrums. Others contend that this industry segment is, and will remain, far too small to pick up the slack for the rest of the resource-strapped global economy. What neither side seems to grasp is this: as the virtualized realm of cyberreality and social networking takes over daily life, the actual physical economy will matter less and less (to those who are still alive and have an internet connection). What these new gadgets offer is, simply put, escapism. In a world of dwindling resources, where each person's share of the physical realm decreases over time, it is no wonder that physical reality fails to satisfy. But thanks to the new, intimate, glowing handheld mobile computing devices, the unsatisfactory real world can be blotted out, and replaced with a cleansed, bouncy, shiny version of society in which little avatars utter terse little messages. In the cyber-realm there are no sweaty bodies, no cacophony of voices to suffer through—just a smooth, polished, expertly branded user experience.

While riding the subway through the Boston rush hour, I have been able to observe just how well these personal electronic mental life support units work in shielding people from the sight of their fellow-passengers, who are becoming a rougher and rougher-looking crew, with more and more people in obvious distress. By focusing all of their attentions on the tiny screen, they are also spared the sight of our well-worn and crumbling urban infrastructure. It is as if the physical world doesn't really exist for them, or at least doesn't matter. But as Horace already understood over 2000 years ago, "Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret" ("You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet she still will hurry back.") If we ignore the physical realm, the physical economy (the one that actually keeps people fed and sheltered and moves them about the landscape) shrinks and decays. The inevitable result is that more and more of these cyber-campers and their gadgets will drop off the network, shrivel, and die with nary a tweet to signal their demise.

And this is, of course, a shame: a terrible and unnecessary loss to the online community. Yes, resource depletion cannot be turned back, nor can catastrophic climate change. Yes, the global economy will crumble as a result, and people will die. But why should their online personae die with them? That, at least, seems preventable. Not only that, but letting users die is bad for the economy: companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and numerous tech start-ups are judged based on the size of their user base. Some of them may not generate much in the way of revenue, but if they have millions of users then everyone assumes that they must be worth something. But if the physical economy continues to cave in on itself and their users start to drop off like flies in autumn, then that would be bad for a company's valuation and stand in the way of it securing additional rounds of financing. If it finds a way to compensate, then all would be well with their business plan, and their innovative social networking platform might indeed help power the global economy out of the doldrums and into some other nautical metaphor... the coastal shallows, perhaps, where it would be careened and methodically picked clean by the coast-dwelling troglodytes... But if not, then it would be doomed. Doomed! Investors don't like the sound of the word "doomed."

The solution is as obvious as it is counterintuitive, and it comes from a classic of Russian literature: Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls. It details the exploits of one Chichikov, who rambles around the Russian countryside, visiting estates and convincing their owners to sell to him their dead peasants. With the dead peasants' papers in hand Chichikov is then able to use them as collateral for loans and to mortgage them (omitting to mention, of course, that they are dead). Correspondingly, the solution for the social networking tech start-ups, moving forward, is to leverage their dead users. This, after all, seems like a humane and caring thing to do: why let someone's online persona die with them? This is often a shock to the other users, who most likely have never even met the deceased person in real life, and don't particularly care whether he or she physically exists. It was once said that on the Internet nobody knows whether you are dog; so let it be that nobody knows whether you are even alive. In a society that lavishes hundreds of thousands of dollars on end-of-life medical care, why not save a little of that money for the cyber-afterlife? For people whose lives are mostly lived on the Internet, technology that extends their online personae past their physical death would be life-extending technology par excellence, and a fitting tribute.

EDIT

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2011/07/dead-souls.html

[pscot]

1. Russians are a gloomy lot

Doomed is such an unpleasant word.