Unreal City
Every large social platform now contains a substantial and growing population of the dead. Their accounts remain. Their photographs remain. Their birthdays come round and the system, which does not know, prompts their friends to wish them well, and a small number of the friends do, in public, every year, addressing a person who is not there in a comment field beneath a photograph taken in a pub in 2011.
The platforms have improvised responses. There is memorialisation, in which an account is flagged and frozen and a banner appears; there is the legacy contact, a person you may nominate in advance to manage the remains; there are settings almost nobody has configured, because configuring them requires an afternoon spent thinking about your own death, and there is no notification prompting you to do it.
Where the improvisation fails, it fails in court. Bereaved parents have sued for access to a dead child’s messages and have generally found that the law regards the correspondence as belonging, in some measure, to the people at the other end of it, who did not die and did not consent to a parent reading it. Executors discover that a lifetime’s photographs are held under a licence that terminates with the licensee, and that a library of purchased books and music was never property in the first place. The estate can inherit the house and not the inbox.
Researchers at Oxford ran the demographics a few years ago and projected that, on a conservative set of assumptions about growth, the number of deceased users on the largest platform could exceed the living some time in the second half of this century, running into the billions by 2100. The precise figures depend entirely on the assumptions and I would not defend any one of them. The direction is not really in doubt.
Which means that the most significant archive of ordinary human life ever assembled is on course to be, in the main, an archive of the dead, held by a commercial entity, under terms of service, subject to product decisions taken for reasons that will have nothing to do with the dead or the people who miss them.
from Black Mirror: How the Future Learned to Look Like the Present (2026)
