Internet Afterlife: Virtual Salvation in the 21st Century

277 Pages·2010·1.61 MB·English

by  O’Neill

Copyright © 2016 by Kevin O’Neill All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior
permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: O’Neill, Kevin, 1941-author.
Title: Internet afterlife : virtual salvation in the 21st century / Kevin O’Neill.
Description: Santa Barbara, California : Praeger, an imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC, [2016] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016016192 | ISBN 9781440837968 (acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781440837975 (EISBN)
Subjects: LCSH: Death. | Future life. | Internet. | World Wide Web. | Information technology. |
Theological anthropology.
Classification: LCC BL504 .O54 2016 | DDC 306.9—dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2016016192
ISBN: 978-1-44083796-8
EISBN: 978-1-44083797-5
20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5
This book is also available as an eBook.
Praeger
An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC
ABC-CLIO, LLC
130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911
Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911
www.abc-clio.com
This book is printed on acid-free paper
Manufactured in the United States of America
This book belongs to my beloved wife and life companion, Dorothy, in more
ways than I can possibly say. The time and intelligence that she voluntarily—
and so generously—lavished on this project continue to amaze me, and I will be
forever in her debt.
I also dedicate this book to all the extraordinary rescue animals whose love and
antics have made our journey so much richer and so filled with joy and laughter.
I wish they all lived longer, so that we could love them more.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations

1. Introduction: Journeying into New Worlds of the Dead
2. Beginnings: Online Memorialization and Haunted Social Media
3. The Rise of the Avatar
4. Can the Mind Be Portable? Theories of Mind from Plato to Turing
5. Moving Minds: Transhumanism and the Path to Internet Afterlife
6. Martine Rothblatt and the Virtually Human
7. The Truths of Terasem
8. Dmitry Itskov and the Immortality Button
9. Itskov and Neo-Humanity
10. The (Post)Human Future?

Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown
old. The owl of Minerva appears only at the gathering of the dusk.
Georg Wilhelm Hegel
Lectures on the Philosophy of History
This book completes a journey I have been on for the past 23 years, in that
trackless and ambiguous borderland between the living and the dead that Jacques
Derrida—the most serious philosopher of death since Heidegger—sketches out
in his meditation on death, Aporias. What you read here recaptures the final
steps of my journey, when I departed this world, without dying, and went to visit
the new homes of the dead on the Internet and in cyberspace. There, in the
Cloud, on websites, and in virtual realities, I found many things. I visited online
cemeteries and virtual vaults. I relived 9/11 and Sandy Hook and Katrina. I was
haunted by ghosts on Facebook and got tweets from the dead on Twitter. I went
to websites that invited me to create an online replica of myself that my family
could visit when I died.
Finally, at the end of my journey, I found people who told me that in a few
years death itself would die and everyone would become an immortal presence
—not in Heaven or Hell, but in the Cloud. The world would be populated by
android robots and holograms in which the dead would live on. Computer and
smartphone screens would teem with even more of the dead, turned into avatar
copies whose software would capture each dead person’s subjectivity.
In this book you will meet the dead, all these ghosts, these robots and
avatars, and when you have finished you will wonder whether Hegel was
absolutely right. Are we living at the end of a phase of history in which human
beings actually died? Are we at the dawning of a new world in which the dead
will live among us in digital form, and when they—and we—and the entire
universe will morph into one enormous simulation? Will the virtual absorb the
real? Will bodies disappear? Will time and space come to mean nothing?
Welcome to the journey to Internet afterlife.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank my former student Eli Kramer, whose invitation to speak to the
philosophy graduate students at Southern Illinois University in 2013 provoked
me to write the initial version of the paper on which this book is based. I also
acknowledge and thank Catherine Lafuente of Praeger-ABC-CLIO for showing
interest in my project and for encouraging me to prepare my initial book
proposal for submission to Praeger. I would also wish to acknowledge the
assistance of Lorraine Rhodes of the Terasem Foundation for guiding me
through the development of my first virtual presentation at a 2015 Terasem
conference on Teilhard de Chardin. Lorraine guided me through the steps
necessary to become an online avatar—an experience that changed my
perspective completely.
The work I did preparing for the Summer Alumni Seminar on death in 2013,
for the Johnston Center at the University of Redlands, gave me a sustained focus
on the topic of death that led me back into investigating digital immortality. The
experience of connecting the theme of death to its representation in visual
culture—which I did in preparing my keynote address to the national ADEC
conference in 2013—also helped provoke my interest in death on the screen.
Finally, and most importantly, I want to acknowledge the invaluable editorial
assistance provided by Michael Wilt of Tucker Seven Editorial Services. His
meticulous review and revision turned my work into a genuine manuscript. But
Michael might never have gotten to help had it not been for the urgings and
tireless editorial and emotional support provided by my spouse and life partner,
Dorothy Clark. Her kindness and patience, as well as her uncompromising
dedication to making this the best manuscript possible, were what made this
book a reality.