I am just hoping that this is the time when we kind of reckon with the materiality of digital infrastructures and really think about what we would want long-term preservation to look like and who should be in control of it. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, Made in Partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Tamara Nice. Tamara is a researcher, organizer, and author of

Death Glitch, how Technosolutionism fails us in this life and beyond. I never really thought about

talking about the relationship between technology, digital platforms, and death on the show,

until I came across Tamara's book, And I was like, this is such

an interesting topic and one that so many people don't really think about when it comes to

what we do online. And then what happens to all of these things that we leave behind on the

internet when we die. And also, you know, how we relate to death in online spaces.

So we explore a lot of different aspects of this in this conversation from like how platforms

manage the death of users, how people have to manage the digital footprints that their friends

and loved ones leave behind when they die and kind of like the

care work that goes into actually handling those things. But also, you know, how that presents a

broader question of like what actually should or does get saved and archived online and what

should ultimately be lost and not saved and just kind of fade away as that happens to us as well.

And that's not necessarily an easy question to answer. It can seem quite easy like on the face of things,

but then when you start to drill down into the specifics of what it actually means to, you know,

keep certain information, decide what information to remove,

things get tricky really quick because different people have different ideas about what should

be saved and what shouldn't. And then naturally, you know, we also get into this broader discussion

that is quite relevant right now because of all the conversations that Janet of AI has us

having about like this idea of people,

especially tech people, wanting to turn themselves into chatbots by using all of these digital

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