Now look what’s happening here. Brian Brushwood has created a site that, once it figures you’ve passed into the great beyond, will mine your Facebook and Twitter feeds to post your old thoughts and/or revelations.

Afterlyfe is your ghost in the machine.

From that point on, every birthday for the rest of my life, I’ll need to check in to let Afterlyfe know that I’m still alive and kicking (if I’m smart, I’ll also make sure the site hits me up with email reminders every year as well). Once I stop checking in, Afterlyfe will assume I’ve kicked the bucket, and go into action, taking control of my facebook and twitter pages.

From that point on, Afterlyfe will use all my previous tweets and facebook updates to recreate a digital simulacrum of my life. The goal is to make me the world’s first virtual ghost.

For starters, we’re going to keep it simple: the default settings will be that the moment I die, Afterlyfe will make an exact copy of my last year in tweets, and release them at the exact times they were originally posted, year after year. Every year, followers will see me complain about taxes come mid April. You’ll get my same Christmas tweets. Happy birthday wishes I made in the past will continue to arrive, year after year, right on schedule.

The idea reads like one of many morbidly curious endeavors that we’ve stumbled upon whilst traveling the Internets. But that was long ago. We’re older now. We can see how this project has a foot in the dark humor/nerd conversation circles.

According to the too-quickly-killed SyFy series Caprica this is how the Cylons first came into being. A human girl’s digital presence was scraped from every corner of their internet, combined with some sort of algorithm and formed a living AI of that person. Then, 60 years later, damn near all of human civilization in that system is destroyed. Those that survived are left to wander the coldness of space while their evolved creations hunt them down like dogs.

But that’s just silly nerd delusions.

A few weeks ago a friend committed suicide. Seeing his profile pop up in our friends profile on Facebook is unsettling enough. Having his old status messages and tweets come at us from the nethers of the noosphere would be downright disturbing.

That, is currently, a fact of our life.

Is this insane? Silly? Creepy? I’d love to get your thoughts, as I honestly don’t know myself… that’s sorta the whole point of this experiment.

Last December, Mr Brushwood, we could see this project erring on the side of morbid fascination.

Now in the dawn of 2011, and in the wake of a good friend gone, we’re pretty fucking sure you did not think this project through at all.

Official site:
http://afterlyfe.me/

via brian brushwood