WHEN DEATH DEPENDS ON NETWORKED INFORMATION

One of the founding stories of the United States centers on PatrickHenry’s 1775 declaration “give me liberty, or give me death” on the floor of the SecondVirginia Convention where war with Britain was being debated (Cohen, 1981). A similarsentiment is part of several national origin stories including the 1320 Declaration ofScottish Independence, which may have been an inspiration for Henry, and Greece’s nationalmotto of “Liberty or Death,” which was the rallying cry in the 1820 Greek War ofIndependence. In each instance the suggestion is that independence will be achieved eitherthrough successful revolution or death. But in our modern networked cultures, what kind ofindependence can be found in death? This panel takes up the AoIR 2021 Independence theme byconsidering how our information and communication technologies are entangled with the end ofhuman life, both at individual and community levels. Our case studies focus primarily on theUnited States and is deeply invested in considering practices that are evolving in thecontext of the Covid-19 pandemic, the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic, and the long epidemic ofpolice killings of people of color in the U.S. In each of these long events, we arewitnessing a myriad of efforts to collect mortality data and render it in ways that makesense of scales of loss. But questions about digital afterlives, networked and remixed loss,and proprietary control over digital remains complicates the foundational narratives ofliberty through death and enrolls our dead in practices of nation formation even when thosevery lives were rendered expendable by the nation-state. At the same time, these practicesare an important part of the problematic narrative that nothing dies on the internet, wheredeaths can circulate as undead memes and commodified data streams. The papers on this panelexamine the intersection of data management and speculative death (life insurance, mortalitytables, pandemic statistics, counting the dead or potential dead) and death care management(personal digital archives, maintenance work, kinship ties, digital estate planning/mortuaryrites, memorialization). As interdisciplinary scholars from Library and Information Science,Science and Technology Studies, and media history, we interrogate the historical,sociotechnical, and cultural aspects of sorting and caring for the dead through networkedinformation. How are people, institutions, and infrastructures working to make sense of andaccount for the dead on both individual and collective scales? In what ways do histories ofracialized and gendered surveillance and violence impact the treatment of the dead when itcomes to both digital and physical remains? Major digital platforms and tech companies areincreasingly at the center of memorialization and mourning practices, both building on andtransforming the ways that these longer histories inform mortuary politics. All four papersshow how institutions and individuals are using digital media and networked information—from mortality data and barcodes affixed to coffins to social media memorials andcrowdfunding platforms—to assess, track, memorialize, and otherwise manage the dead. We payparticularly close attention to the ways that race, gender, sexuality, immigration status,and citizenship affect how the dead are counted and remembered. We trace the history oftechnologies used to assess risk and manage mortality, comparing recent COVID-19 relateddevelopments to previous crises or pandemics and to longer histories of deathcare managementas data management, including the history of the life insurance industry, mortality tables,and surveillance, from chattel slavery to contemporary predictive policing. In the 21stcentury the majority of these practices have transitioned to online and networked spaces,even as they continue to create social networks of information and ritual. Despite digitaltechnologies being offered as a “solution” to the problem of death, our disparate casestudies show how digital systems tend to reinforce existing structural inequalities, therebytroubling any sense that independence from violent social formations exists even in death.Cohen, Charles (October 1981). "The 'Liberty or Death' Speech: A Note on Religion andRevolutionary Rhetoric". The William and Mary Quarterly. 38 (4): 702–717.