Everyone on the Internet Will Die. We Need a Plan for Their Data

The internet is aging. As soon as the 2060s, there may 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 their users—when they die, will become a critical battleground for the internet’s future, with major implications for global power relations. Yet we have done virtually zero preparation for it.

Back in 1997, when John Perry Barlow published his now legendary, “A declaration of the independence of cyberspace,” he boldly stated that the governments of the world—the “giants of flesh and steel” as he called them—had no dominion over cyberspace. The internet, he declared, was a “new home of Mind” beyond the flesh, where its young and tech-savvy citizens would never age nor decay. We now, of course, know better. But we still tend to see the internet as something that does not age, as if the stuff that happens there is part of a constant flow of novelty, somehow located beyond the material realm. We also tend to think of it as something that has largely to do with youth. In short, we see cyberspace as a space without time.

None of these things are true. We know that everyone using the internet will die, and that hundreds of millions, or even billions, will do so in the next three decades. We also know that this poses a serious threat to an economy based on targeted advertisement (the dead don’t click on any ads, but require server space nevertheless). Yet the tech giants appear to have no plan for what to do as their (undeniably material) servers are filled with dead user data. Since dead people generally lack data privacy rights, it may gain a new commercial value as training data for new AI models, or even be sold back to the descendents in a kind of “heritage as a service” deal. But the ethical aspects are thorny, and the financial bearing shaky.  

We also know that whomever ceases control over these data will wield enormous power over our future access to the past. Just consider that one person—Elon Musk, no less—now owns the entirety of the tweets that constitute(d) the #Metoo movement. The same is true for the millions of tweets of BLM, the Arab Spring, and the 2016 U.S. presidential election, to name but a few examples. When future historians will seek to understand their past, it is Musk and Mark Zuckerberg who will set the terms.

Experience (and sheer logic) also tells us that the platforms that dominate tech today will sooner or later fail and die. What will happen to the user data? Can it, like other assets, be auctioned to the highest bidder? Will it be used to train new algorithms to trace the users, or their descendants? A hypothetical failure of a DNA testing company that stores our most personal information on their servers is a chilling example. These questions show how the fate of our digital remains is inextricably entangled with the privacy of the living. Yet, as of today, their answers are few and vague, as if the thought of a tech giant dying were beyond our comprehension.

With stakes so high, it is important that we talk about how the internet should age. That we make some kind of plan for what is to become of the past generations with whom we increasingly share it. And that we make sure dying platforms can be dissolved in an orderly manner. Crafting such a plan is not something we can outsource to experts. There is no technological fix. For it is a fundamentally political and even philosophical task. The question(s) we must ask ourselves include how we want to live with the past and its inhabitants (the dead), which principles should guide our stewardship of the digital past, for how long (if at all) should our digital remains be accessible, and for what purpose? 

Today, these questions are almost completely outsourced to the market. The answer to each of them is whatever Big Tech thinks is going to be lucrative. That is not a responsible way of caring for an aging web. Instead, we must begin to think about the internet, and our stewardship over it, as a long-term intergenerational project. Just like globalization forced us all to become cosmopolitans (citizens of the universe) by breaking spatial boundaries, the aging of the internet compels us to become archeopolitans—citizens of an archive—by breaking down temporal boundaries. 

Ever since Barlow’s declaration, we have thought of cyberspace as something fundamentally new and independent of the past. “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone” as Barlow put it. But by thinking of ourselves, the first digital generation, as archeopolitans, it becomes clear that it is we, the living, who are the newcomers. For the archives have always belonged to the dead. What is new about the online world is just that the living have moved in with them. 

Being a good archeopolitan is to recognize this status, and to take the intergenerational stewardship of the web seriously. The first step in doing so is to make sure 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 their descendants. I call upon the governments of the world, these giants of flesh and steel, to begin this task. Otherwise, within a decade, it may be too late.