When my grandmother died in 2019, we gathered at her graveside on a cold November morning. When my colleague's father passed during the pandemic lockdown in 2020, seventy people attended his funeral—all of them sitting alone in their living rooms, watching a livestream. His teenage daughter delivered her eulogy to a camera instead of mourners. Afterward, friends who couldn't attend the virtual service left condolence messages on his Facebook wall, which is still there today, frozen in time like a digital headstone.
Something profound has shifted in how we grieve.
The Virtual Cemetery on Your Phone
Social media platforms have become the modern cemetery, whether tech companies intended it or not. Facebook hosts millions of memorialized accounts—profiles of deceased users that friends and family visit to share memories, post birthday wishes to people who will never read them, and mark anniversaries of loss.
These platforms initially had no plan for death. Early social media assumed eternal life, or at least eternal activity. But as users aged and died, companies scrambled to create policies. Facebook introduced "Legacy Contacts" in 2015, allowing you to designate someone to manage your account after death. Your chosen person can write a pinned post, respond to friend requests, and update your profile photo. They cannot, however, log in as you, read your private messages, or edit what you posted while alive.
Google offers an "Inactive Account Manager" where you decide what happens after three, six, twelve, or eighteen months of silence. Instagram lets families choose between memorialization or deletion. Twitter deactivates accounts but doesn't memorialize them. LinkedIn does both.
The policies vary wildly because the companies are making this up as they go. Death wasn't in the business plan.
These digital spaces serve a genuine need. A grieving mother can scroll through her son's Instagram and see him alive again, laughing with friends. A widow can reread her husband's tweets. Unlike physical graves that require a pilgrimage, these shrines live in our pockets, accessible whenever grief strikes at 2 AM.
But there's an eeriness too. Algorithms don't understand death. They suggest you wish your deceased friend happy birthday. They recommend you reconnect with people who no longer exist. Facebook's "People You May Know" feature has suggested dead users to their own grieving relatives.
When Funerals Went Online
The COVID-19 pandemic forced the largest sudden change to mourning rituals in modern history. By August 2021, over four million people had died globally from the virus. In the United States alone, 621,000 deaths occurred while gathering indoors was dangerous or illegal.
The CDC recommended against hugging, kissing, sharing religious books, and standing within six feet of others—basically everything that happens at traditional funerals. Families couldn't be present when their loved ones died. Hospitals became fortresses. People died alone, FaceTimed their goodbyes through N95 masks held by exhausted nurses.
Funeral homes invested in streaming equipment overnight. Services that would have drawn hundreds were limited to ten people sitting six feet apart in masks. Everyone else watched from home. The intimacy of shared grief—the hand on your shoulder, the communal tears, the casseroles delivered to your door—evaporated into pixels.
Some aspects improved the experience. Elderly relatives who couldn't travel could attend. Friends scattered across continents joined together. Recording services meant people could grieve on their own timeline. But something essential was lost. Grief is physical. It lives in the body, in the embrace of someone who loved the same person you did.
Virtual funerals revealed both technology's power and its limits. They solved a logistical problem but couldn't replicate the human need to gather, to witness, to mourn together in physical space.
Many funeral practices adopted during the pandemic have persisted. Hybrid services—some attendees present, others remote—are now common. Livestreaming has become standard. The technology that was emergency infrastructure has become permanent architecture.
Talking to Ghosts: The Rise of Griefbots
Ten years ago, a website called Eterni.me promised digital immortality. Upload your data—messages, videos, social media posts—and they'd create a chatbot version of you that could interact with loved ones after your death. It sounded like science fiction.
Today, it's science fact. Companies now offer "griefbots" or "deadbots"—AI-powered chatbots that simulate deceased individuals using generative AI and personal data. The technology that powers ChatGPT can also resurrect the conversational patterns of your dead mother.
The concept terrified audiences when "Black Mirror" explored it in the 2013 episode "Be Right Back," treating it as psychological horror. By 2020, Amazon's "Upload" played it for laughs. The cultural shift happened in less than a decade.
Creating these digital ghosts requires enormous amounts of personal data: video recordings, text messages, emails, voice memos, social media posts. The AI analyzes patterns and extrapolates probable responses. It learns how your father told jokes, how your sister signed off her texts, how your best friend would respond to news about your promotion.
Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, who researches this technology at Cambridge University's Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence, notes that we live in a moment when people can be "biologically dead but at the same time virtually present and socially active." It's unprecedented in human history.
The United States leads in developing and promoting digital immortality technology. Silicon Valley's answer to death is, apparently, to treat it as a bug that needs patching.
The Ethical Minefield
The technology exists. The regulations don't. That gap contains multitudes of ethical problems.
Consent is the most pressing issue. What if someone creates an AI version of you without permission? What if your grieving spouse makes a chatbot of you, but you would have hated the idea? Once you're dead, you can't object. Third parties can potentially create avatars of deceased people using publicly available data, with no way for the dead person to have consented.
There are currently no protective mechanisms for users of digital immortality technologies. Researchers find this "surprising and super alarming." The companies building these tools are moving faster than ethicists, legislators, or society can process the implications.
Privacy laws and platform policies often restrict access to deceased people's accounts, even for immediate family. A parent might be locked out of their dead teenager's social media, unable to access photos or messages. Yet those same platforms might allow third-party apps to scrape that data for AI training.
Experts across multiple fields—palliative care, ethics, theology, technology, psychology, funeral services—agree that we desperately need discussion, ethical guardrails, thoughtful regulation, and responsible design. But those conversations are happening in academic journals while companies are shipping products.
Different cultures view digital immortality differently. A research project called "Imaginaries of Immortality in the Age of AI" is studying how Poland, India, and China each conceptualize these technologies through their distinct cultural and spiritual lenses. Western Silicon Valley assumptions about death, memory, and technology aren't universal.
Practical Steps for Your Digital Legacy
While society grapples with the big questions, individuals face immediate practical ones. What happens to your online life when your physical one ends?
Creating a digital will is increasingly important. Write clear instructions about your social media accounts and online presence. Do you want your profiles memorialized or deleted? Who should have access? What should be shared and what should remain private?
Appoint a "digital executor"—someone you trust to carry out your wishes. Make sure they know where to find your instructions and have the information they need. Platforms like GoodTrust, Everplans, and My Digital Afterlife help organize digital assets and ensure your wishes are followed.
Deathswitch and similar services ensure critical information reaches designated recipients if you become incapacitated or die. They work by requiring regular check-ins; if you stop responding, they assume something has happened and deliver your pre-written messages.
Tell your family your preferences while you're alive. Do you want them to create an AI chatbot of you? Would you want your social media accounts to remain active? These conversations are uncomfortable, but so is leaving your loved ones to guess what you would have wanted.
What We're Really Talking About
Technology hasn't changed what grief is. It's changed where grief happens and how grief is expressed.
The fundamental human experiences—loss, love, memory, longing—remain constant. We still need to mourn. We still need to remember. We still need to find ways to carry our dead with us while continuing to live.
What's different is the permanence and accessibility of digital traces. Previous generations had photographs, letters, maybe voice recordings. We have thousands of photos, years of text conversations, videos, social media posts—a digital abundance of the person who's gone.
This abundance is both gift and burden. You can hear your father's voice anytime you want. You can also never escape reminders of what you've lost. The algorithm will make sure of that.
The real question isn't whether technology should play a role in grief. It already does. The question is how we build that technology with intention, ethics, and genuine understanding of human needs rather than letting it evolve haphazardly through corporate decisions and market forces.
Digital mourning rituals are still evolving. We're the first generations navigating this landscape. The practices we establish now will shape how future generations grieve, remember, and honor their dead. We're writing the rules as we go, making it up in real time, figuring out what helps and what harms.
Perhaps that's always how mourning rituals work. They emerge from human needs meeting available tools, shaped by culture and circumstance. Medieval Europeans built elaborate stone monuments. Victorians took photographs of their dead. We create digital shrines and AI chatbots.
The technology will continue changing. Grief won't. The challenge is ensuring the former serves the latter, not the other way around.