flâneur

Digital Graveyards and AI Obituaries - by charlie squire

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You’re falling asleep, or waiting for the dentist, or riding the bus. You’re passively scrolling, taking in blue light and clickbait, when you see the announcement on an Instagram story or Twitter feed or Facebook post. Someone is missing or suddenly passed away, and it isn’t a stranger, but it isn’t someone you know, either. It’s someone you could know, a friend-of-a-friend, someone the next neighborhood over, the middle school teacher your older siblings had, a person who is completely real but only realized to you in that moment through the LED glow of the phone screen. It is at this moment that the distance between the digital world and the physical world becomes non-existent, a false wall torn down, each pixel of grief as tangible as ink and paper. There’s this phrase, “real life.” It isn’t too new; Dostoevsky uses the term in The Idiot to separate the sphere of fiction and literary imaginings from the on-the-ground happenings in front of us. There’s IRL, which is short for “in re

You’re falling asleep, or waiting for the dentist, or riding the bus. You’re passively scrolling, taking in blue light and clickbait, when you see the announcement on an Instagram story or Twitter feed or Facebook post. Someone is missing or suddenly passed away, and it isn’t a stranger, but it isn’t someone you know, either. It’s someone you could know, a friend-of-a-friend, someone the next neighborhood over, the middle school teacher your older siblings had, a person who is completely real but only realized to you in that moment through the LED glow of the phone screen. It is at this…

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