Redefining Eternity: Interfacing Immortality In The Digital Corporate World

by Bethany Crawford

Overview

In Redefining Eternity: Interfacing Immortality in the Digital Corporate World, Bethany Crawford critically assesses the implications of “digital immortality” for central tenets of the human experience - such as consciousness, death, and time - as a preliminary mapping of the shifting existential paradigms of the digital age. This groundbreaking new book explores the social consequences and provocations of a digitally replicable subject in the current sociopolitical context. It thereby confronts a timeless philosophical question, imbued with ever greater urgency in our digital age: What does it mean to be human? Redefining Eternity establishes the motivations of digital and information technologies in creating “immortalization” through social and modal engagement with these new media. By analyzing various digital services currently promoting immortality, both intentionally and unintentionally, and engaging with texts by transhumanists and technologists such as Ray Kurzweil, Martine Rothblatt, and Max More, this endeavor allows for critical interpretation of the key terminologies, processes, and intentions for an immortal digital being. Crawford’s findings offer a dynamic foundation for conceptual analysis of the ramifications of “living forever” as a digital post-death self.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781680539646
Publisher:	Academica Press
Publication date:	09/15/2020
Pages:	94
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Bethany Crawford is an artist and researcher currently based in The Netherlands. Her practical and theoretical work are meditations on the human condition, framed through critical investigations of the social, political, and economic convergences of death. This research has taken her to charnel grounds, mortuaries, crematoriums, temples, and cemeteries around the world.

What People are Saying About This

Antonia Majaca

“In this engaging critique of the digital transhumanist terrain of immortality, Crawford adeptly traverses the enterprise of living forever and compels us to reimagine death and collectivity beyond their neoliberal capture.”

Marina Vishmidt

“In this probing account of venture capital’s Cartesian meditations and mindtricks, Crawford engages transhumanist start-ups and platform immortality to open a sightline into the social afterlife. When life does not live, data cannot die. Decay, however, whether corporeal or digital, may be our last remaining link to the universal.”