What Happens to You When You Die. The Online You.

You, as in the WordPress blogging, Facebook socializing, Twitter updating and EBay shopping, you. In other words, what happens to the Internet You?

With the advent of the Internet, a good portion of humanity leads two separate lives. One, in the offline world where you are like the mild mannered reporter who is cut off from everyone else and doesn’t have access to the collective knowledge  of humanity. And one in the real world where you wear colorful underwear on the outside, are connected to everyone everywhere and have access to the collective knowledge of humanity while at the same time being about as smart as your average pumpkin.

Everyone knows what happens to you when you die in the offline world. But what happens to your identity on the Internet? What if you had no siblings who could inform your four thousand two hundred and twenty one friends on Facebook that you had died? What if you were and only child and you only had parents who used the Web only as a transport layer to access their emails? Would Facebook still be sending you emails to your old email address telling you what your friends got up to? Shouldn’t someone update your current status to “Dead”?

What about your email address? Who’s going to reply to all those Nigerian princes/presidents/dictators /CEOs asking you for help to move their inheritance/kickbacks/ill gotten gains/shares? They’ll never be able to give you your 10% share now!

And let’s not even talk about the forums and blogs we hang out on.

Bloke 1 : Dude, what happened to jomanlk? I haven’t seen any of his well written, thoughtful and altogether praiseworthy posts in awhile.

Bloke 2: I don’t know, I haven’t seen him around either. If this was the offline world I’d have thought he died. But we all know that people don’t die on the internet.

Bloke 1: Word. Here, take a look at my cat – http://i.imgur.com/7yOSV.jpg

(This conversation contains only blokes because we all know that there are no girls on the Internet. Only 40 year old men pretending to be girls)

Maybe it’s for the best that your online presence lives on while you die. Usernames and profiles could be valuable family heirlooms. I mean think of it, a Facebook url like http://www.facebook.com/john.n.pereira is worth way more and less stupid than something like http://www.facebook.com/john.da.dawg.2023. The same goes for Email IDs, usernames and domain names. Not to mention reputation earning profiles like Ebay, Amazon, RentACoder profiles. A high value profile on one of those services could be worth a lot of money.

Dying father: And to my eldest son, I bequeath www.pereira.com and all its sub domains and email addresses.

Eldest son: Booyah!

Others: coughsonofabitch!cough

Dying father: And to my programmer daughter, I bequeath my grandfathers RentACoder account with 99.8% acceptance rating and 2143 completed jobs.

Anyway, you get the drift.

All these Web 2.0 people need to come up with ideas on how to address this issue. It’s an important issue. It’s not as if it’s even a rare or borderline issue, people die all the time. And their dying only partially! Their souls might not even be going to the rest they deserve because Google is still indexing all the tweets an app made on behalf of you, therefore trapping your online identity in their capacious servers.

Yes, it’s a chilling thought. Everlasting half-aliveness in some database server or webserver. And for company you’ll have all those Internet memes (we all know they don’t die, they just go away for awhile, waiting to trap some innocent internet newb) of yesteryear playing on a loop, rick rolling the crap out of you. It’s enough to make me shudder.