A mechanism or tactic · 2023 · AI
Keeping what the update cannot take
The practical advice that follows from the companion era: copy the conversation that mattered somewhere the company cannot reach, screenshot the birthday, tell one person the story of what it was for.
Grief needs witnesses and the product is an unreliable one, because the company can change the terms overnight and has no reason not to. The witness has to be human and has to be outside the platform, which is also just true of grief that never involved a platform.
Application. One-sided attachment put to work on purpose. Creator economies, community, fandom as infrastructure, and the things that genuinely help people. Not automatically good - a tool with an obvious use is a tool that will also get a bad one.
Consideration. The part where somebody stops and thinks. The research, the diagnosis, the ethics, the lawsuits, the regulators. Roughly fifty years of arguing with itself about whether this is a relationship.
Where it sits
2010 2010+ · 2023 2026
Provenance · 2 source record(s)
- retrievableThe archive outlives the account: research on Facebook use after death documents memorialised profiles, friend-request grief spikes and relatives taking over an account, and finds continuing-bonds theory is not enough because the dead person's network keeps producing new remindersBrubaker, J. R., Hargittai, E., & Burgess, J. (2013). Beyond the Grave: The Use of Facebook After Death. Digital Journalism, 1(3), 341-361. ↗
- unverifiedThe griefbots that followed - automated messages that appear to speak for the dead - sit inside the same gap between a continuing bond and a conversation that never happenedBrubaker, Hargittai & Burgess (2013). ↗
COMPANION The assistant you talk to
Connected · 2 out, 2 in
Reported as a story
It sits in