Translation rights: Bollati Boringhieri

Facebook is the biggest cemetery in the world. How many of your friends on the social network are not around anymore? How did the perception of death change with the arrival of the digital world?

For a long time now, at least since modernity abruptly entered our lives, death has been forcefully pushed aside into an invisible corner. Our society hides death from sight, relegates it to the private sphere, in the privacy of darkened rooms, impossible to see from the outside. Death must not be exposed, almost as if it was a human weakness to hide and not an ineluctable fact for everyone. As if it was something to be ashamed of. Death, that for the ancient Greek culture was considered part of life, is not welcome in our conversations. Recently, however, the digital revolution has had an unexpected effect on this. Not only it has revolutionised the way we communicate, radically changed our social structure and modified the relationship between man and work in ways that are still not clear: all of a sudden the impalpable digital sphere has also made death visible – and somehow acceptable.

The first virtual cemetery (World Wide Cemetery) is from 1995, and its creator envisioned it as a place where the memory of the departed could live forever. Since then, however, the Internet has seen a vast array of solutions becoming available, all aiming to maintain the memory of your loved ones in the most technologically advanced ways; even with the aide of artificial intelligence, that is now able to analyse our personalities with increasing accuracy and therefore to send messages accurately similar to those that the departed would have written. An email from the afterlife is hard to forget.

Does all this sound a bit creepy? Sure, but behind this technology – Thanatechnology – there is clearly a forward thinking strategy, a new relationship between our society and death. Davide Sisto researched the subject for years. His book focuses on this field – which is completely new – and has never been handled from a philosophical perspective. If the purpose of philosophy is to interpret the present – especially in times when values are shifting –, Sisto’s book is a great example of this, a starting point for thinking about the changes in the relationship between human thought and death in the digital age, the approaching of a Digital Age Education, and confronting that part of us that will remain when we will no longer be around.