Digital Legacy and the Afterlife of Data

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Across
  1. 3. The act of cutting away what is dead, excess, or unwanted in order to encourage healthier growth — a gardening practice that serves in the story as an unexpected metaphor for the careful management of what we leave behind.
  2. 4. Permission given willingly and with full understanding — what nobody gives when they accidentally create a decades-long archive of their private thoughts, and what is conspicuously absent from most digital resurrection services.
  3. 5. A copy or likeness of something, especially one that has been accepted as a replacement for the real thing — used philosophically to describe AI systems that generate the appearance of a person without the substance.
  4. 7. What you leave behind for others after you are gone — not only money or property, but anything that persists: a reputation, a body of work, a digital archive, or even an old laptop with a cracked hinge.
  5. 9. A person who is legally and ethically obligated to act in the best interest of another — the kind of responsibility that digital estate laws are trying to extend to the management of deceased people's online accounts.
  6. 11. The act of creating something that preserves and honors the memory of a person who has died — though in the context of social media platforms, it has the additional quality of being a business decision dressed up as a tribute.
  7. 14. A whole made up of many individual parts combined — when applied to digital data, it describes the vast combined record of billions of people's online activities, which is considerably more powerful and revealing than any individual piece of it.
  8. 16. Supreme authority or control — in the context of personal data, the principle that people should have ultimate power over information about themselves, including what happens to it after they die.
  9. 18. Being brought back to life after death — the word borrowed by tech companies for services that use AI to simulate deceased individuals, with considerably more commercial ambition than theological precedent.
  10. 20. A person responsible for looking after or protecting something — the role that platform companies occupy with respect to deceased users' data, and one they did not ask for, were not designed for, and perform with varying degrees of care.
Down
  1. 1. A state of lasting forever, or at least an indefinitely long time — the uncomfortable reality of most digital data, which tends toward persistence rather than disappearance absent deliberate effort to remove it.
  2. 2. The process of something formally ending or coming apart — applied to a digital account, the deliberate closure and deletion of a person's online presence after their death, as opposed to indefinite preservation.
  3. 6. Temporary, conditional, and subject to revision — the kind of word that fits perfectly when describing things said in a moment, in a mood, with no expectation of permanence, like most of what we put online without thinking.
  4. 8. A collection of historical documents or records preserved for future reference — the internet has created one of these on a scale never before imagined, and it contains both remarkable historical treasure and a truly impressive quantity of nonsense.
  5. 10. Temporarily inactive but capable of becoming active again — the state of most digital accounts after a user dies: not deleted, not actively maintained, just waiting, on a server, possibly forever.
  6. 12. An intricate network of paths designed to confuse and disorient — used by Borges as a central metaphor for the impossibility of complete knowledge, and a reasonable description of most platforms' terms of service.
  7. 13. The process of receiving property, rights, or characteristics from someone who has died or passed them on — the concept at the center of digital estate planning and the thing that most platform terms of service currently prevent.
  8. 15. Occurring or coming into existence after a person has died — like a publication released after the author's death, an award given to someone who can no longer receive it, or an AI simulation nobody asked for.
  9. 17. The process of encoding information so that only authorized parties can access it — the double-edged technical feature that protects your privacy while alive and denies your family access to your device when you are not.
  10. 19. Present but not yet active or expressed — the quality of data that exists but has not been opened, messages that have not been read, and recordings that sit in a folder for eleven months before someone finally presses play.