Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond

· Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Linda Jones
Audiobook
7 hr 23 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook

An accessible yet erudite deep dive into how platforms are remaking experiences of death Since the internet's earliest days, people have died and mourned online. In quiet corners of past iterations of the web, the dead linger. But attempts at preserving the data of the dead are often ill-fated, for websites and devices decay and die, just as people do. Death disrupts technologists' plans for platforms. It reveals how digital production is always collaborative, undermining the entrepreneurial platform economy and highlighting the flaws of techno-solutionism. Big Tech has authority not only over people's lives but over their experiences of death as well. Ordinary users and workers, though, advocate for changes to tech companies' policies around death. Drawing on internet histories along with interviews with founders of digital afterlife startups, caretakers of illness blogs, and transhumanist tinkerers, the technology scholar Tamara Kneese takes listeners on a vibrant tour of the ways that platforms and people work together to care for digital remains. What happens when commercial platforms encounter the messiness of mortality?

About the author

Tamara Kneese is a visiting scholar at the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Oakland, California.

Linda Jones is an award-winning narrator and NYC actor with a penchant for dark edges and curious truths. She has narrated for Penguin Random House, Recorded Books, Audible Studios, and Dreamscape, as well as a variety of independent authors and publishers. She holds a BFA from Ithaca College.

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