Everyone on the Internet will die. What about their data?

TThe internet is aging. By the 2060s, there could be more dead than alive users on Facebook. Many of the platforms that are now part of society’s basic infrastructure face a similar prospect. What happens to these platforms – and your users-when they to die, will become a critical battleground for the future of the Internet, with major implications for global power relations. However, we made virtually no preparation for this.

In 1997, when John Perry Barlow published his now legendary, “A declaration of independence from cyberspace,” he boldly asserted that the governments of the world – the “giants of flesh and steel,” as he called them – did not have dominion over cyberspace. The internet, he declared, was a “new house of the mind”Beyond the flesh, where its young, tech-savvy citizens would never age or decay. Now, of course, we know better. But we still tend to see the internet as something that doesn’t age, as if the things that happen there are part of a constant stream of new things, somehow located beyond the material realm. We also tend to think of it as something that has a lot to do with youth. In short, we see cyberspace as a timeless space.

None of these things are true. Us to know that everyone who uses the Internet will die and that hundreds of millions, or even billions, will die in the next three decades. We also know that this represents a serious threat to an economy based on targeted advertising (dead people don’t click on any ads, but they still need server space). However, the tech giants seem to have no plan on what to do as their (undeniably material) servers are full of data from dead users. Since dead people generally do not have data privacy rights, data can gain new commercial value as training data for new AI models, or even be sold back to descendants in a kind of “inheritance as a service” arrangement. . But the ethical aspects are thorny and the financial situation is unstable.

We also know that whoever ceases control over this data will exercise enormous power over our future access to the past. Just consider that one person – none other than Elon Musk – now owns the entirety of the tweets that make up the #Metoo movement. The same applies to the millions of tweets about BLM, the Arab Spring, and the 2016 US presidential election, to name just a few examples. When future historians seek to understand their past, it will be Musk and Mark Zuckerberg who define the terms.

Experience (and pure logic) also tells us that the platforms that dominate technology today sooner or later fail and die. What will happen to user data? Can it, like other assets, be auctioned to the highest bidder? Will it be used to train new algorithms to track users or their descendants? A hypothetical failure of a DNA testing company that stores our most personal information on its servers is a frightening example. These questions show how the fate of our digital remains is inextricably intertwined with the privacy of the living. Yet, to this day, their answers are few and vague, as if the idea of ​​a technology giant’s death is beyond our comprehension.

With the risks so high, it’s important to talk about how the Internet will age. May we make some kind of plan for what will become of past generations with whom we increasingly share it. And that we ensure that dying platforms can be dissolved in an orderly manner. Creating such a plan is not something we can outsource to experts. There is no technological solution. Because it is fundamentally political and even philosophical task. The question(s) we should ask ourselves include how to want live with the past and its inhabitants (the dead), whose principles he must guide our management of the digital past, for how long (if at all) should our digital remains be accessible and for what purpose?

Today, these issues are almost completely outsourced to the market. The answer to each of these is whatever Big Tech thinks will be profitable. This is not a responsible way to care for an aging web. Instead, we must start thinking about the Internet and our stewardship of it as a long-term, intergenerational project. Just as globalization forced us all to become cosmopolitans (citizens of the universe) by breaking down spatial boundaries, the aging of the Internet forces us to become archaeanpolitans – citizens of a file– breaking temporal boundaries.

Since Barlow’s statement, we have thought of cyberspace as something fundamentally new and independent of the past. “In the name of the future, I ask the past to leave us alone,” as Barlow said. But when we think of ourselves, the first digital generation, as archaeopolitans, it is clear that it is us, life, who are the newcomers. For archives have always belonged to the dead. What’s new in the online world is that the living have moved in with them.

To be a good archaeopolitan is to recognize this status and take intergenerational stewardship of the web seriously. The first step in doing so is to ensure that there is at least some basic framework to govern how the Internet, including its platforms and its users, can age and eventually die with dignity and without threatening the privacy of its descendants. I call on the governments of the world, these giants of flesh and steel, to begin this task. Otherwise, within a decade it may be too late.