You Won’t Miss Me When I’m Gone

Death sucks for the living.   

Depending on your personal beliefs the dead themselves are either in a better place, no place or getting their just deserts, leaving those who loved them behind to face the day alone…but maybe not in a few more years.

According the founder of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, John Smart, digital twins are in our future…our near future. Drawing off our computer interactions, phone communications and whatever else can be harvested about us, a computer program could be our understudy. Capable of making decisions, it might take care of paperwork and have conversations as though it were us. And, assuming the hard-drive doesn’t crash, outlive us, giving our family and friends an ongoing fix of our charm and personality once we’ve gotten busy pushing up daisies.

According to Smart, “Where we’re headed is creating this world in which you feel you have this thing out there looking after your values.”

Nope!  We’re creating this world in which you feel like you better not turn your back on a computer.  If we’ve learned anything from ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and ‘War Games’ it’s that computers are just waiting in the wings to take things over.  (On a side note, does anyone else think Mathew Broderick changed his name and got a job on ‘Two and a Half Men’?).

As I write this article, I wonder what’ll actually get emailed to the editors.  Maybe what I write…maybe what I would write if I wasn’t relying on the computer to do my job…or maybe propaganda from the Cyberluminati trying to convince you everything is just fine and I’m not tied to a kitchen chair with printer cables and a mouse-pad taped over my mouth.

It’s bad enough that we pickle deceased bodies, nail them in a crate, seal the crate in a giant concrete humidor and bury them with a large “here’s the dead guy” marker.  Now we’re going to be capable of pretending nothing is wrong, their spirit has simply moved from a fleshly vessel to a Mac Book.

If it keeps a person from being lonely, I suppose it’s not a bad thing.  The pain of loss associated with the death of a loved one is devastating.  My grandfather died in his early sixties and it would have been a tremendous comfort to my grandmother to speak with him, even via a computer screen (which was dark gray and capable of only green letters back then).

But it reeks of those ‘My Buddy’ dolls they used to market before we invented computer games and the internet to socially isolate children.  The idea of computer ghosts piques the same apprehension in me as a table full of teens busily ignoring one another to text.

Living vicariously through anything, a sports hero, a television, a cable news station that tells you half of society is pure-evil, is human nature.  But, as with coffee, Twinkies and Disco music, moderation is key.  

I’m pretty sure, once I’m gone, everyone who happened across my path during my living years will have had enough of me.  So after my funeral leave the computer off and go visit some breathing friends, that way you won’t miss me when I’m gone.