 Hey gang, welcome Thank you for coming to this exciting event at New America. Welcome to your digital afterlife Sounds like you're dead. I'm sorry. You're not dead. No one's dead. We're all fine here. Okay so Just want to Run through a little bit of basic intro first of all. I am Catherine Maggie Ward I am the editor-in-chief of Reason magazine and I am also a future tense fellow here at New America And I am not dead yet, but I hope when I am that it's awesome New America Future tense and Arizona State University slate magazine It's like a glorious conglomeration of people who are all trying to figure out what the future looks like And I suppose make it a bit better than it would be otherwise The partnership between New America Arizona State and slate Explores emerging technologies and their transformative effects on society and public Policy they have stuff like this here in DC and also stuff like this in New York, which you could probably go to anytime you want it There's a future tense future tense channel on slate and they've been publishing stuff this week all week long on Your digital afterlife So if you hear something you want to follow up on here, you can probably do it at slate calm you can also Tweet at us and about this using the hashtag digital afterlife and follow future tense on Twitter at Future tense now, which is my favorite paradoxical Twitter handle Turn off your cell phones your digital afterlife is not happening at this exact second. You do not need your cell phone Turn it off. Thank you During the Q&A which there will be wait for the microphone to come to you ask your question into the microphone Introduce yourself if you want use a pseudonym if you want nobody's holding you to account here And please do stick around after this conversation is over. There will be more drinking So depending on how the conversation goes we can drink to celebrate or we can drink to forget I Would like to introduce my co-panelists here today first I have Naomi Khan. She is the Harold H. Green professor of law at George Washington University Law School And she is a reporter the revised uniform fiduciary access to digital assets act Ask her about this later on. In fact, that's what we're here to talk about basically. I also have Alex Darnit. I meant to ask how to say your name Hall of A's Yeah, as someone with an insane last name I try to do better but he's an associate professor of social technologies at Arizona State University and He will be teaching us how to say his name as well as other exciting things about the digital future We are alas without Adam Ostrow who was not able to make it due to some travel fails So we will do our best to soldier on without him If you want to know what he would have said you can watch his TED talk as like 80 million people have already done on this So let's get started So the first place I want to start is with what our What the legal landscape looks like right now you're dead you have an email account you have a Twitter account You have an Instagram account. You have the other Instagram account where you post the stuff You don't really want people to see you have your checking accounts. You have your Ashley Madison account you have your Tinder Yeah, there's a hypothetical you not a you a personal you What is there to worry about what are we doing right? Walk us through it. Okay. Let me first of all is it we were talking first of all Thank you and and thanks to everybody for being here. We were talking in advance about How many times we were gonna kill ourselves off during this and so when I talk about killing myself off killing you off Killing you off. Please don't take it personally. Oh, so we did talk about whether we should institute a drinking game, which I Will just let's say that so every time somebody is hypothetically murdered during the discussion drink I'll grab my water on Okay, so so the problem is that we're living in this brave new world or maybe not so new world of digital assets and When we die There are questions of whether we treat digital assets in the same way that we've treated all the other assets that people have Always had when they died so when someone dies and they've got physical assets There is someone appointed by the court the personal representative or the executor who goes in and who tries to wind up the bank accounts Who tries to wind up the stock account if the person has all this But who also goes in and finds not all not just all of the dirty laundry all of the old love letters all of the old love letters to Not just a spouse but to other people Finds everything else that someone could possibly have left behind and so that's in the physical world That's what that's what used to happen. The question is now that we live so much of our lives online does the Personal representative does the executor. I'll just call the person the fiduciary doesn't fiduciary have the same rights to digital assets as the fiduciary has had to Physical assets that someone leaves behind so that person could go into your safe deposit box Could just can collect everything the reason I should know that the reason for doing that was to make sure That the the person who died that the decedents that everything was wound up in the way that that person wanted okay, so Flash forward today's world where We do have all of these accounts that you mentioned and so what happens? We're kind of we're leaving in there. They're starting to be more certainty About three quarters of the states including Maryland and Virginia, but not DC have passed a law that helps figure out what to do and Essentially essentially what happens is there are a few of these internet service providers like Facebook and Google that Offer ways to set up to have somebody deal with your assets when you die So on Facebook has the legacy. How many of you by the way have heard of a legacy contact? That's actually really good. Um, what about how many of you have used Google and active account manager? There seems to be a gap between knowledge and implementation here Google and active account manager So both Facebook and Google let you set up ways to have somebody else manage your accounts When you're either incapacitated or when you die and those are the on most of the other internet service providers Have not done that. So that's one way of dealing with all this is if you have actually filled out the right If you click through the right forms on Facebook and on Google and active account manager Then you have appointed someone else to help manage those accounts If you haven't done that and we're talking about someone who's dead Well, they're all kinds of new companies that can help your executor Collect all of your assets can find all of those bank accounts can find those bonds that are going to some other address But nobody's ever heard of on I that will find whatever accounts you have So there are services that can help do that the really important point is and particularly because everybody who is here is alive is to figure out what to do when you're alive to Make sure that your executor is not in this Legal limbo land trying to get access trying to corral everything after your death trying to figure out on Trying to collect your Etsy account trying to Collect all of your eBay receipts do without necessarily getting access So we're gonna get more into the nitty-gritty But first I want to go to Alex to talk about the kind of other side of this Which is okay you die and you leave a bunch of stuff and that is inevitable, but also you might want to Do some things purposefully you might want to say okay, I want to create You know I'm gonna create a legacy. I want to have certain message that I leave to the world How do we do that and and I think it's a continuum too And and I think we're we may differ on this because legally it certainly isn't when you're dead you're dead But I think we're mostly alive here That is to say you're probably already doing some of the things you might want to do when you're dead You may already be scheduling your tweets ahead of time and so those may hit afterwards And so it is a very slight continuum, but a lot of these questions of who gets access to this stuff But the same kind of questions you're asking right now Do I want my spouse to have access to everything when I die? No So but there's layers right what I want my kids to know what I want my spouse to know what I want the wider world to know my audience on Facebook to know So I would like to be able to design that but I'm already designing that and I sort of online persona And so that virtual me is already out there And the question is how much does that virtual of me die over time and it doesn't necessarily die when I do If you go into Barnes and Noble you have letters to the future like right up at the this is a big thing this year Right, you're supposed to give them to your grandmother and have her write you letters for when she dies which Was a drinking and morbidity, but I can't quite imagine giving down to grandma I can't quite imagine giving that to people, but apparently people are right It's little letters with dates that you're supposed to write to yourself or to others in the future So this idea of kind of communicating past death is already out there in physical media and in sort of more digital Media and so my question becomes How do we start to edge more and more Toward this autonomous version of ourselves continuing on how long does our what our digital spirit go beyond our physical presence So one element of this that I think is true both for digital afterlife and other Questions about the digital realm is how analogous is it to the physical realm? How you know we have a habit of you know using the the mental tool of saying Okay, so my email account is the same as the box of letters And of course that's true in some senses and very not true in others And I actually recently did this exercise of culling The box of stuff that was in my attic on the premise of okay if I get hit by a truck tomorrow What shouldn't be in this box? Which is also an exercise in humility if ever you're feeling a little bit full of yourself Like just go into that box man high school Catherine was the worst So so there's this feeling right of just like there was once a box it could be curated It was a filing cabinet whatever it was it was diaries There's so much more, but is it just a difference in volume? Or is it a difference in kind as well to curate the digital version of the box And that may be where we differ But but let me I also realize I want to clarify something which is when I talk about a fiduciary I am only talking about a legally appointed Court representative or someone that you have authorized to have access through some some legal documents Such as a power of attorney and that's very different So so Alex and I are actually talking about different aspects of your your future digital afterlife I'm talking about the legal, right? I mean I'm happy to talk about the other but I'm focusing on the legal parts and who can manage Your digital afterlife legally and you're talking about well gee on how do I create this legacy and What about these non legally authorized people do I really want them to get access to that? So I just want to I want to clarify that they're two different aspects of of what we're talking about There are areas there where I'm unclear. I'm not a lawyer Things like protection of your likeness we run into this a lot And so that is strictly speaking of a property issue, right? But it also feels very much like the virtual future self, right? So if you don't want to be dancing in a commercial in 15 years as a simulated self Do I or you do as long as I go as long as I don't dance like I do now. I'm fine with it It's not your high school But I mean that so I'm not even clear where the legal legal boundary of the property question there is and and so I think there is gray area and Let me say on the answer to that it varies from state to state. So, California, New York are completely different when it comes to What happens to your digital what happens? What happens to your likeness? Can you can you just sort of Sketch the outer limits of those variations. I mean in California anyone needs it for anything in New York It's you know yours to the grave or I mean, what are we? I mean, yeah, it varies from state to state for Maryland Monroe's likeness depending on where it was she died That's I mean, I'm sorry. We know where she died But depending on there there've been arguments as to who can use her likeness Because the state laws vary and so lots of fights on that Right, and I'm working with a student right now who who's looking at new forms of memorials And one of the things you wanted to do is have sort of a digitized version of the person there on the gravestone pop up in kind of Disneyland that's way and talk about their lives, right and if they don't actually Record that ahead of time Can you have someone craft that with because you know we're maybe not everyone in this room? But many of us are getting 3d scans of our faces or bodies Do you want them to be able to kind of tell their story through you or not? And so it gets to be really fuzzy so but this I think this gets back to my my previous question basically You know should we just like put the word cyber on this and like everybody panic, right? Like is is the fact that there is a sort of online digital variant of this long-standing question You know are we looking at something fundamentally different or or is it just more of saying that that's the core issue Is it should it be treated in the same way or should it be treated? I mean I my position is it's the same. There's just more of it Yeah, and I don't I don't think so I really do think that that you can transform the use of these records in a way that you couldn't before right And so Google wants to know more about you than you do I mean this is there's the stated purpose of their research VP right they want to know more about you than you do and With enough ephemera they kind of can and so I think that changes and I think it we see an echo of that right now in people having to produce Kind of large records from their organizations and having you know in lawsuits that are large scale lawsuits and Discovering far more about the organization than the organization itself knew and so I think it is a different I think once you get to a certain degree Kind of mass of data It's not something that an individual or even a group could make sense of but there are electronic ways of Finding stuff in there you wouldn't have expected How many of the crowd here are viewers of black mirror? Are we black mirror fans? All right, so Seems like it seems like one way to think about this discussion is sort of bracketed by a couple of different black mirror episodes Which even if you haven't seen them are sort of traditional thought experiments just done and you know sexy new boutique television style, but Season two I think the beginning of season two they they do an episode in which You give the company a company the rights to mine your public and private communications and Generate a facsimile of you Which in the in the particular episode a woman generates her dead husband, right? and and it's not She basically like slides right down into the uncanny valley where she like, you know curls up in a small ball and cries, but You know that is sort of one variant of the digital afterlife that I think Science fiction writers for a long time been I've been holding up as a specter like what if you can live forever But it's not quite you and it's not quite right I Think for you I would ask, you know, are there any preemptive legal remedies if you really don't want that to happen Is there anything you could do about it? And then for you I would ask is there any way they? Not have it happen from a kind of cultural and technological perspective. So first save us with the law. Oh, well With the law and I mean my advice is to write everything down My advice is you don't have to go see a lawyer But but at least write down everything in a legally binding way write down your wishes on your wishes Aren't always binding on the people left behind But at least the people left behind will know what you want to the extent possible Write them down in a binding way and there are relatively easy ways to do that online that don't involve hiring a lawyer But it might be difficult I mean the question then is who's going to enforce them if you say I don't want my likeness used And someone your beloved family decides to use it Who's gonna protect your rights when you're dead when you're dead unless you have said in advance? I mean any even if you said in advance, I don't want my likeness used and your family goes ahead and ignores it It's really hard to figure out how to protect those rights. We don't have the state coming in to say Oh, well Naomi said she didn't want her likeness used when she died Right that's not going to be happening So so for me the most important thing is to write down your wishes and then hope that people respect them and unfortunately You're not going to be around to know whether they do Yeah, I think traditionally you could shape that a little bit more strictly, right? So if you're known for your writings you might do that and you might allow your letters to be collected But they're not your high school letters you've edited that before and before you die Hopefully right so you had some control over this and that might be interpreted very differently in 200 years And it often is but you have some control over that I think that question of either technologically controlling or stopping this being reassessed is an interesting one and You know people have done this with with public figures where you know You can go and talk to a virtual George Washington or something and it's an educational experience But how well can you control that I guess this this goes back to my original thing which is To the degree to which you're creating Bots of yourself now you'll kind of know what it looks like so I would say don't just say what you want But make it happen create your bot now I mean the reason that the episode is interesting is because people tend to imbue machines with Intelligence and spirit anyway. Well, you know, it can be a very dumb robot And you'll still you'll still feel like it's the real first I mean there have been stories and stories about people who save the voicemails from their dead loved ones because they get to Call and hear it and re-experience it that way, but even beyond that, you know The original chatbot which should have people played with Eliza at some point I mean when when Eliza was created it is a dumb dumb chatbot. It's very simplistic But people with I will people I would sit and play with it for long periods Because you know you start to imbue it with this and I have a different student who has a chatterbox that's Doing health counseling and it's amazing. It's a very dumb chatterbox But it's amazing how people start to feel like they it's called buddy bot They they refer to it as him or her depending on how they visualize the bot This is over a period of a week or two. They feel like they can tell the bot things They can't tell people in their family. I mean they they become very intimate with this very stupid robot very quickly And so part of the question here is not with the dead person once but how we should be interacting with these artifacts of people who are once living Just just to I teach trust in the states and there are just two stories from trust in the states One of them is there's a very very famous article in trust in the state that's titled burn the Rembrandt upon my death Right and so the question is how much and how much should that be respected? When the person dies should a Rembrandt really be the person owns it? It's a person's property But doesn't the Rembrandt I mean is there something to be preserved with the Rembrandt and then there's another case That I used to teach which involved a woman who said when I die. I want my house burned down This is a real case, right and her neighbors went to court and said gee I'm that'll really affect the neighborhood that'll affect our lives We really don't want that to happen and so she owned the house her estate owned the house and A court said we're not going to do it. It's contrary to public policy So, I mean if there is someone to enforce your wishes, it might be contrary to public policy But there has to be someone I mean in the case of the the woman who wanted her house burned down There has to be someone to come in and say we don't want this to happen I think there's also a question of what? Again, you know attempting to to kind of analogize the digital world to the physical world What is the equivalent of burn my house down online and you know? I think the first blush thought is okay. Well, that's gonna have a lot fewer negative Externalities right if you if you eradicate your own digital footprint You know it doesn't Give your neighbor smoke inhalation damage, but but at the same time when you think about okay Well, if I deleted every tweet I'd ever tweeted all the threads. I participated in would be broken, right? They no longer would make any sense. So actually there there are still ways in which Something that looks like property that you control that's clearly stuff you produced in your lifetime Maybe it still is the same as you know burn down my house and the courts will say no Though it's I mean it is hard to imagine the the world in which the courts is like that that Twitter thread is so good We're gonna deny you the right to delete those after your Especially in the European context that question of whether you know They're trying to archive all of national archives of of ephemera of people who are citizens and that is a big question because they have a much more developed right to be forgotten and so especially with an Going to be implemented Well, I think the beginning of next year with a change to the law There's the expectation that you should be able to not only delete your stuff, but the stuff in the archives about you So that that question of reaching out in that direction is one side of it the other side of it is you know Do researchers have some? Public claim to being able to see this stuff. Is there a fair use of the stuff which you know Can we show that I have a dream speech right is the the more local version of it? But going forward, you know, is there some expectation of the public should have access to your dead stuff once you die Should you give that to some of that stuff to the public domain in some way, right? And then the other side is Contrary-wise, can you actually destroy the stuff that you've created not just control it destroy it? I think on the point of well, maybe are we sort of already dead? We've already given away lots of our kind of right. I mean, this is something that you know I don't know my Facebook feed periodically has like a round of the hysteria where everyone says I don't give Facebook the right to my Images and I'm but I'm definitely not gonna get off Facebook. So right the end and you know, I wonder You know to what extent death is an artificial line that we want to draw there I mean legally it doesn't much matter, right? You've already given rights over your content to certain third parties and they exist after death or is that not true? Well, if you look at if you look at those terms of service agreements that most of us do not look at whenever we sign up for a new service and and actually there are studies showing that 95% of people who've signed up for terms of service agreements or their studies showing that they've given away their firstborn that They've agreed to pay a million dollars I mean, they're all kinds of different ways of showing that we do not read these terms of service agreements But the terms of service agreements generally say that when you're dead the account dies with you And it will be closed the problem is showing and and they also say I mean Facebook said you will not You shall not give your password to somebody else So in in that sense it dies in terms of someone else not being able legally to access it according to the terms of service agreement and if you do have a legacy contact on Facebook that person can shut down your account So there is a way of producing digital debt particularly who planned for it in advance Otherwise, I think it was three years after my uncle died. He was still asking me to friend him on Facebook Finally, he's it stopped. I Love the idea of a digital death sentence I mean like you know, I don't love I love the idea of a death sentence in general But this idea that it as a punishment you could be deleted from the internet is an interesting one Well, we actually already have that right with certain types of sex offenders or other people, right? I mean there We already have Again a sort of a pre-death digital death, you know Which we let judges at this point deploy more or less at their discretion, which there are potentially some problems there too, but Let's talk a little bit about Privacy just more broadly and we should have touched on that, but I want to come back to it if I think that's something that Most people think about when they think about this topic is okay There are some kind of conventional understandings of what's private and what's public in my digital output those understandings are basically wrong or faulty in most cases, you know the the notion of you know I set my Facebook's privacy settings to only be visible to my friends and that's deeply meaningful all the way through You know sort of fundamental underlying question of like anything in the context of telecommunications Once you hand it over to a third party that third party can hand it over to a government investigator or you know in any kind of legal proceeding Is there anything that can be that can be done as a as a Bulwark against Or a bull work to sort of protect our conventional understanding of privacy I mean there there are there are terms of service and there are legal agreements and you can sort of appoint people to do this But there's also just this general idea like my emails will never see the light of day and That's not true Can we make it more true should we make it more true? My hands vaguely and say blockchain at this point, so I'll do that That's right. I'm as a libertarian. I am bound to agree with you if you say blockchain I just have to be like that's right if the blockchain will solve it all that's right, of course But I mean there is but blockchain, but there is this kind of question of so I am I am Radically open at least I thought so I don't really think but once I started to think about what I wanted to protect when I was dead I started to layer things like do I really care? Do should be should anyone but I know what my favorite brand of shoes is And so I started to kind of list these things that people should know they should know my bank account number They should know where you know with legal kinds of stuff and then I started to move on to the What should my kids know and when and started to really layer this in a nuanced way And so for me at least as someone who doesn't think a lot about privacy at least in the traditional sense of my everyday I don't care what you know kind of thing It really let me to start to think about this and I do think that there are ways that technologically you could you could limit This so all my passwords are held in something called last pass and last pass does have this process of handing over up It to a beneficiary, but you it's also at least theoretically and this isn't quite true Encrypted on my side so I could actually say all my emails that I've retained I could leave encrypted and nobody ever gets the gets the key nobody and once I'm dead it really is gone So I think there are ways you can do that to a certain degree And I think there are some technological solutions, but they they are tricky There's a story that Leonard Bernstein's memoirs are stuck in his computer And no one has been able to figure out the password to actually get access to Leonard I mean and apparently it was something he actually wanted to have published, but no one has been able no one's been able to crack the code I don't know. I mean, it's it's repeated all the time, but but but but but there there certainly are ways to Protect things. I mean you have to very consciously Take the steps to do that and then there also are some legal protections as well from both federal and state laws when it comes to Computer privacy and unauthorized access to your information believe it or not, but they're really there really are these protections So I'm going to open it up to questions from the audience, but first I'm going to ask one last question of my own which is In very concrete terms, what have each of you done to prepare for your inevitable demise? Let me go first. Well, I've talked a little bit about this the standard stuff the wills the the Whatever the thing is the living living will and my medical stuff stuff you're supposed to do I've actually I have a lawyer for a wife. So she kind of forced me to do do this But beyond that it a lot of it is that kind of encryption and I have been this is this is very morbid When I was on the plane here and someone asked what I was doing and I said I was coming to DC for a death panel and Coming from Arizona that was a great because I'm sure it'll get passed on but But this is morbid, but I've been thinking about what I write to my kids. So I've got a nine-year-old and a seven-year-old and Although I'm pretty sure I'll live forever I'm not positive and so I've been thinking about whether I actually want to try to communicate to things to them when they're older and much older And so that's the piece that I'm working on right now Well, I have a will and I have various powers of attorney and healthcare powers of attorney But I realized they were done before when my kids were one and two and they are now One's just graduated from college. So I kind of need to I mean, that's one of the problems is I need I need to update them digitally Well, there are all kinds of different ways to keep I mean the advice I give the advice I give my students the Anybody who ever gets me talking about this? I can't shut up about it right is is I have made a list of at least as many of the accounts as I can remember and The passwords and I have told and I don't use last pass but I should be using I should be using last pass or some other way of Protecting all of these passwords in one place So I have made that list. I do know where all the passwords are I probably not the most secure way of doing that, which is why a digital service provider would be a whole lot better and I have filled out my legacy contact and I've done Google and active account manager So at least those accounts are taken care of And I have as I said, I have told everybody I know to do this as well because Digital digital death digital. I've also to be able to plan for incapacity. What if you're in the hospital? And you can't pay your bills and your credit cards, you know the expenses amount What if you run a small business and you're at least temporarily incapacitated? What are you gonna do? Make sure you plan for it? So I give lots of advice incapacitated is also a very broad spectrum. I realized this week that I bought $70 in Bitcoin 10 years ago. I have no idea what that password is It's gone and and I like it kept me up for a night thinking Yeah, I that's actually worth something now. I mean, I just did it as I know and it's gone There's no way it's sitting in a wallet and an old computer and and there's no way I'm gonna get that back because I honestly do not remember what very secure password I used to encrypt it. So, yeah We actually have a big feature in the current issue of reason magazine That's about Bitcoin FOMO like it's about or maybe shot and fried depending on how you want to sort of slice it So many people in exactly your position But but it's as you say easy to extrapolate that to lots of other Black chain based technologies that might exist in the future, which will solve all our problems So let's take some questions We can do both this version of digital afterlife and also the version that we haven't really talked about yet Which is the you know, should we all upload our brains into the experience machine and like live a glorious Digital future after our bodies die, which I think probably at least some of you were here to talk about that since the name is a little bit Unclear, so you know give us your best shot on that too My name is Jan and I recently researched of this topic and I found exactly the same dichotomy It's sort of the philosophical, you know futuristic I can we upload ourselves and all of the sort of Memorials and the issues about you know, can you friend somebody who's gone yada yada So there's that whole different side and then there's the practical side of what spreadsheets do you make? Who do you leave your passwords and I ended up writing their article about the second half which is more practical But here's my question What is the legal status of an ideal world your executor will be able to manage your digital estate as well? But sometimes it's not going to be the same person What's the legal status of a digital executor in other words if there's a disagreement with your physical? Materials executor and your digital executor. Is there any legal protection? I Okay, I should say I'm not getting any legal advice, right? I'm a lawyer official disclaimer official disclaimer I mean part of the problem is the digital world has outpaced the legal world and so the legal world is very much in the throes of trying to deal with all of these issues and so The question of I certainly don't know of any reported cases involving digital executors And I know that there's a wonderful tool now on slate someone can tell me what the exact site is which Which spits out this great legal document? No, I'm sorry not legal that fits out this great document that says this is not a legal document But that sets out your wishes as to what you want to have happen. Um, I I mean I guess if a digital I mean from a trust in the state's perspective if a digital executor is appointed in your will To manage all of your digital assets that your digital executor will have the authority over all of those those assets and your other You're the person whom you appoint to manage your physical assets will have control over that now What happens when your digital assets indicate that you have a bank account in a bricks and mortar bank? What happens and the answer is that the digital? Executor will be able to get access to that. I mean this is this is presumably I'm Speculating here because we're in the process of working this out on your digital executor would be able to get access to the Internet communication about that, but your physical executor would be able to deal with the funds. That's the now speculative there's Just people are just starting. I mean I yeah people are just starting to die with these digital executors and and There are potentially lawsuits in the making but the goal of the executors I mean They have these they have these responsibilities of loyalty to the dead person to the decedent and so Yeah, a court might have to sort them out But courts have been courts have been dealing with these issues for centuries I mean if their co-executor is the same thing if there's a trustee of a trust versus the executor of an estate Courts have had to deal with these issues all along I and generally they'll say to the people you both have to be acting in the interests of the person who has died and We'll make the judgment ideally there. I mean ideally there wouldn't be a conflict because the person would have appointed people who? Trust one another or who can work together. I do wonder if these Sort of expressed wishes death plan type documents are about as effective as birth plans I don't know if anyone here has young kids But this is now like a thing that the Millennials do when they have babies, which is that they write down their plan for how the birthing of the child is going to go and they don't want this Intervention and they only want the room to have more c-playing or whatever and and at least anecdotally None of it ever works. It's a total disaster from start to finish It's like a lovely wishful thinking type document that in fact does not manifest in any way in reality Because birth like death is a big event with lots of uncertainties where things happen in the way that you didn't expect You know similarly, I think neither of these documents are are fully legally binding, but courts consider them when things go wrong I I worry that it could be people trying to write these things down Might not understand the reality of what they're facing I mean, if it let me if a court does a point And I've just called them a physical executor and it is a digital executor then those people actually do have legal Responsibilities, and so it's different from I had a birth plan. Yes, and I had right so we won't go there TMI, right? Um, I but but so it's a very different. That's a much more informal document. Yeah, so I It's and I should also say I'm not a millennial obviously on I millennials think they invented everything So it's a they probably But but at any rate on these are these are these are people with legal responsibilities, and so it's very different Yes in the back And I will say I this is not in any way a slight on the previous question, which was excellent Please do frame your question in the form of a question briefly That pause makes me nervous What about children and those who? We're here now We get to make these decisions because we were born in the digital age, but as children are born and parents Make decisions to create them Facebook accounts create them create posts in their name Has anything happened legally or Societally in your opinions or that you know of that that sets a precedent for what children who inherit digital debt Have the ability to to do or do about it. You know, I should have a brief anecdote on this Which is that Facebook murdered my baby? Digitally speaking I set up a Facebook account for both of my children when they were born and Technically Facebook's policy is that you have to be 12 or whatever it is 13 to have an account, but My my son continues to exist under the radar Facebook has not noticed based on some super great algorithm that he is for but they killed my daughter I just one day. I just got an email that was like nope. This is not a legit account and you are welcome to scan Your daughter's driver's license and send it to us to prove that she is an adult Wow, and I was like God, it's gonna be tough cuz she's So I am actually the victim of a horrible digital death in the family already I'm not sure you're a victim. I think it's Facebook trying to protect young children there, right so I So I think that that's the answer is it is that there are laws that protect children that protect children in the online presence Right, I think there were two questions there right one one is the inheritance question Are you inheriting your parents digital legacy in some way? And I think that that is our art the person's legacy the person who owns the legacy for now while they're alive You can have some determinants of that the other side around this is I think trickier And I think you even know this person that I won't name them who had a teenager die of suicide and she maintains this Kind of on Facebook maintains this Identity for her and and brings people together around her in the anniversary of her death And so I that question of whether parents have the right to continue to Memorialize or make use of the materials that children have produced is an interesting one I don't have a I don't have any answer for it But it's an interesting question Well parents do have It's actually an interesting question what happens when when the child would have turned 18 because at that point the child can kick the parents out of the child's life on and I mean one of What one of the answers that I have to keep giving as a lawyer is we don't know We're just we're working all of this out, and I'm actually working I just co-written a chapter on Children and digital assets with a law firm. It's actually working on precisely these issues I'm particularly for celebrities Thank you So have you seen any trends and how the funerary industry is responding to all of this both in memorializing and Legally how I know that they sometimes are not always the quickest to adopt new trends And so how how's the whole industry sort of reacting to this? So this student who's trying to do new kinds of memorial has been out talking to a mortuary directors and I Don't know if you've noticed how bad online minority Yeah, they're just they are the worst and I think it's because it's client. It's kind of trust in the states It's great because their client's dead, but in this case, you know There isn't you're at a particular loss when you're in the position of acquiring this And so there are a number of companies that do websites Which they click here to leave a flower on the grave and other things that frankly I think creep out anyone who's normal But they have been very slow to adopt anything else. And so at least from what I know This is kind of a dead industry, right? I mean, it's not it's not innovating in the ways that the others are I suspect that's changing a little bit With the people with people who are kind of playing around with digital assets that goes back to memorialization to a certain degree And so I suspect people will be over the next, you know, five years or so trying to create both business models and also Technological innovations that can that can start to move towards more interesting ways of memorializing Especially around I think so one of the things that makes the web Memorialization bad is that we have traditionally tied memorialization very much to the physical because the dead person is already virtual And so, you know that we have a very long as long as there's been humans a long history of tying to the physical and now that we're moving into the Internet of things and Augmented reality. There are some new opportunities that may not have been every foot Yeah, and there are companies that are starting to help you There are companies that have started to help you establish your digital legacy. So They're they're out there. I guess they're not they're gaining in more Sophistication and they're comparatively new but they are more than happy to help you Create legacies for whomever you would like And part of the problem with that is honestly I have no interest in a digital startup handling my legacy because they tend to be they tend to live longer Less than I do. I mean they they have a very short life span. So, yeah, yeah The sort of few Funerary industry the mortuary industry. I don't know what it's called. Exactly. Um, it's in many states It's also a heavily regulated and like almost like a cartel style Industry, you know, there's there's there are always lawsuits about, you know There are states where you can't buy a casket off the shelf You have to go through a authorized dealer. So I suspect that may be part of the lack of innovation in the industry, too But and actually another thing speaking of startups we haven't talked about of course is your straight-up head-freezing option which Cryogenics is another area where you know, maybe you don't want to go with the startup because you're trusting them to keep your head frozen until You know the singularity comes and And it's unclear how you build brand loyalty to set up people for a thing that hasn't happened yet So I imagine Sure, is there any recommendations or Projections as to businesses that will be successful to exploit what's going on in the future Cryogenics comes to mind as I saw was a demolition man years ago. So that's one, but what about others that you may have? So I think I think there are around the things we've already been talking about right which is managing managing it for living people and and Finding the spaces in which you can exploit that for long term I mean one of the problems with all digital companies is that that the customers especially fickle and I've got the biggest cryogenics firm down the street from me and because when you're free his heads you really want to leave them there is Oh, no, but But you know, this is actually a pretty good business model Do you really want to be the air that turns off the refrigerator on your on your dad? And so that that that builds brand loyalty I think in a way that very little can and so I think there's an interest not necessarily in a particular Sort of company your startup But in businesses across the board thinking more about the fact that their audience is no longer, you know 15 to 35 but in more and more people that are old like me And so how do you how do you engage us by talking to us about how our legacy will look once we're dead? The other business model is you were saying the last past the sort of the managing your passwords There's also there's ever plans which will help you plan your digital future And I have to say a digital technology firm that helps on state planners Collect all of the assets the digital assets of someone who has died Said emailed me after reading the slate article saying how come you didn't mention us? And it's a whole new model that is designed to work after after you after after one is dead that works with the Executor to try to collect all of the assets to try to find them all for someone who hasn't done all the planning Or even for someone who has done all the planning and there are still going to be all of those assets out there So there is in the legal world There's certainly that way of hoping the executors collect the assets and then outside of the legal world All of these new ways of making sure that your passwords are safe that your wishes are known etc So there's that outside of the head briefing model My garbage guess even though I'm the moderator and not the expert is Amazon I mean this is this seems like a logical expansion of the Bezos Empire and Amazon's most or Bezos is most kind of unsung or under sung Achievement is the fact that everyone stores everything in the Amazon grid now everything everywhere all the Internet is basically Jeff Bezos is you know floating server farms in the sky or wherever he keeps them. I don't know and I think You know sometimes I feel like Amazon's the only one who really knows me Yeah, it's like those those little those little recommendations are very good If you've bought all the things your entire life on Amazon And if by the way they have all your photos and and your you know backup email storage I can imagine a not-so-distant future in which sort of Mortuary services is a thing that Amazon for sure One more question. It should be an awesome one. It should be from you No pressure. I'm a ghost writer but um So the one thing I'm wondering about is since I do a lot of work with people with their individual histories corporate histories organizational histories knowledge transfer Is there any attempt to value the legacy it does is it regarded as intellectual property? I mean what how do anybody looking at that? Ghost writer seems particularly appropriate given what we're talking about right on The IRS will actually value your digital assets and assess taxes on them so They do have value and the state taxes will be assessed on them I mean domain names can sell for millions of dollars and so That's one possible One possible asset in addition There have been various surveys of how we how we value our digital assets and we each do put well Surveys surveys a surveys report that we value our digital assets at about thirty five thousand dollars That's the average value and it's it includes our photos that we store online all the memories our diaries whatever it is our tweets whatever it is that we store online In surveys people say approximately thirty five thousand dollars. So And that's not even including the Bitcoin If they can be found so there are there are ways I mean we assign values The IRS will happily assign a value to them as well insert joke about death in Texas here I mean and I don't know if this was part of your question, but You know but people say you should come up to me and say Alex you know a really interesting life story You should definitely write it up. You know whether my life story is worth anything I don't think you determine until actually Distributed right so I don't think there's any way to value that in that perspective, but it's an interesting question There's another valuation question and this I guess does come up in the IRS context is when you buy Gaming pieces and virtual games right there's a value those can be sold I mean like like domain names and so those two can be so there actually are some Value, I mean there are some standard ways bitcoins right there are some standard ways of valuing digital assets that that have value in the physical world and So there there are there those ways of translating them in addition to the memories, etc. That we've all stored online Thank you so much for joining us You all have value in the physical world and we appreciate that you spend time with us New America Arizona State University Future tents slash slate is a glorious conglomerate of future innovation magic And you should consume all of their products and come to all of their events. Thank you very much