Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond by Tamara Kneese

Tamara Kneese’s recent book Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond takes a close look into the uncomfortable intersections of death, technology, and commercialism. With the rise of an abundance of new and changing digital outlets and social media, the question of how these infrastructures create a new sense of mourning of the digital afterlife demands attention. The preservation of digital data is particularly important to these processes, as it has now been integrated into our everyday life practices. The book breaks down the complexity of death and techno-solutionism, beginning with a lengthy introduction and continuing in four chapters: “Social Memorials,” “Networked Death,” “Disrupted Inheritance,” and “Haunted Objects.” Each chapter includes collections of case studies that point out the messiness of death and commercialism.

Each chapter offers a glimpse into what Kneese calls “death glitches.” Death glitches draw attention to things that were previously unaccounted for, not seen, or not working. These glitches become obstacles, but at the same time they lay bare questions that were never realized or answered during life or immediately after death. When people die, they leave behind materials that Kneese calls “digital remains,” referring to the digital counterparts of the physical remains of a person. In the “Social Memorials” chapter, Kneese addresses the ways that aging platforms must adjust their policies to “deal” with the dying. The author points out how these death glitches allow us to think about digital remains as materials that live on beyond death. The following chapter, on networked death, puts emphasis on this phenomenon by exploring case studies of death bloggers who write about what death means to people even after they are gone. Her chapter “Disrupted Inheritance” questions issues of privacy and the frequent lack of digital estate management within the confines of death. She explores the many new startups and programs that have materialized, but Kneese reveals that they do not last long and generally “die off” quickly, hindered by their for-profit orientation and short-sighted business plans. The final chapter of Kneese’s book, “Haunted Objects,” examines the world of transhumanism and what those in this area of expertise have experienced in their attempts to transcend death.

The concept of bereavement is generally uncomfortable and neglected, but it is an important topic to highlight in the world of technology and archives. The world of digital archives itself is ever expanding and changing, and that includes the use of personal archives. Kneese’s book is written with a feminist intersectional perspective and calls out the negligence still felt by women, people of color, nonheterosexuals, and lower class populations. For example, many of the startups that are created to help with processing digital items are created by white men for white men. Marginalized groups often perform unacknowledged work and are sometimes forgotten or made invisible. The same can be said for those who have to work with the digital remains of their loved ones where cost alone may be a barrier. Kneese makes it a point to show how “caring” within the world of death and technology can help alleviate death glitches. Kneese’s perspective on these issues is consistent with an archival ethics of care much like that advocated by Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, who advocate viewing archival records through a lens of affective responsibility rather than legal rights.¹ Kneese, like Caswell and Cifor, argues that there is a web of responsibility entangled among the relationships that an archivist experiences when considering record producers, record users, and the communities they inhabit. By taking on a caring role and approach, the archivist can question issues of privacy, justice, historical memory, interpersonal obligations, and more. Taking an archival ethics of care approach to digital remains and questioning the level of care in this realm can acknowledge what is missing from dominant discourses.

This book would be useful for anyone interested in scholarly research about digital archives and mortality. It would also be useful for anyone interested in understanding more about the archival ethics of care surrounding personal archives. The book also attempts to dismantle existing structural inequalities that surround issues of death, which creates crossover interest for readers in the worlds of science and technology studies, media studies, gender studies, and studies of race and ethnicity. The book’s only notable shortcoming, which Kneese acknowledges herself, is that the research presented within it was wrapped up before the COVID pandemic hit in 2020. Despite this slight issue, the concepts presented within Death Glitch promise to make a lasting impression on anyone interested in this area of thought.