Oops? Interdisciplinary Stories of Sociotechnical Error| Ephemeral Platforms, Enduring Memories: Errors and Digital Afterlife

Abstract

Taking death as an empirical site of sociotechnical errors, this article explores how the end of life highlights the disjunction between individual mortality and platform ephemerality. Inadequate platform policies often render digital legacy inheritance logistically challenging, leaving the personal data of the deceased unattended and lingering as digital phantoms in cyberspace. Online memorialization poses a design glitch for social media platforms by transforming deceased user profiles into unfenced memorial spaces. Real-life instances such as RIP trolling and grief tourism demonstrate how platform algorithms exploit the emotional value of posthumous data, inadvertently shaping the grieving process and imposing an emotional toll on the bereaved. The “death glitch” lays bare the precarity and complexity of digital infrastructures, which grieving individuals are ill-equipped to navigate. In this article, I outline two common types of sociotechnical errors engendered by death, highlighting the complexity of making the death glitches legible to platforms designed for fleeting interactions and algorithms aimed at scalability.