You’re nursing a lukewarm pint of Guinness on a Sunday afternoon and your phone buzzes to tell you that your Uncle Paddy has just "liked" your photo of a breakfast roll. In your hungover state you're initially not even confused - it's just The Fear or you're hangry. Each ratchet of denial brings a fresh wave of vertigo. You move past the mechanical how - he's been dead since 2018 - and settle on the shivering why: the terrifying thought that he’s been watching for all these years, a digital poltergeist waiting for the right combination of sausage and egg to finally break his near decade long silence.
It’s a violation of the one contract we all signed at birth: the one that says when the heart stops, the opinions on breakfast rolls are supposed to stop, too.
But Meta, a company that has spent the last decade trying to solve the problem of human connection by making it increasingly mechanical, has decided that the glitch isn't the problem. The problem is that the corpse isn't engaging enough. They’ve patented an AI designed to scrape the digital remains of the deceased; their syntax, their penchant for complaining about the housing crisis, their specific use of the "crying-laughing" emoji to a serious question with no implicit humor - to keep their accounts running. This isn't a digital headstone. It’s a digital taxidermy. It’s the creation of a "Synthetic You" that can message your kids, video call your widow, and post "UOK HUN?" on the walls of people you haven't spoken to since 2012.
If this technology becomes the standard, we are entering an era where the "Stiff Upper Lip" is replaced by a "Silicon Upper Lip," an infinite loop of simulated banter that ensures no one ever truly has to say goodbye, because Mark Zuckerberg won't let them.
The Necromancy of the Algorithm
The patent describes a process of "social media reincarnation" that feels less like Black Mirror and more like a particularly bleak episode of Only Fools and Horses where Del Boy tries to sell a talking urn. To the AI, "you" are not a consciousness; you are a predictable linguistic pattern. You are a collection of "likes" for anything Sopranos related, a history of ordering Borza’s at 11:00 PM on a Friday, and a specific, recursive way of arguing about whether the milk goes in before or after the tea.
To a machine, your personality is just a math problem that has already been solved.
If this patent is fully realized, your digital ghost won’t just sit in the attic of the internet. It will be "active." It will react to the news cycle. If the government collapses again, your AI-self will analyze your previous rants about how nothing ever changes and generate a 280-character critique that sounds exactly like you’ve had three whiskeys and a bad day. It will "FaceTime" your nephew on his graduation, using a deep-faked version of your face to tell her you're proud of him, using the exact vocal cadence you used when you were alive, right down to your overuse of the word bro.
The existential dread here isn't that the AI will be a poor imitation. The dread is that it will be better at being you than you were. It won’t get tired. It won’t get grumpy. It will be the "Greatest Hits" version of your personality, curated by an algorithm that knows exactly which versions of "you" generated the most engagement.
The "New" Queen Without Freddie
There is a long-standing tradition in rock music of the "Legacy Act." You see it with Queen touring with Adam Lambert, or various iterations of The Beach Boys (*cough* Meta knows you really mean The Sugababes) where the only original member is a guy who wasn't even in the band for the good albums. We accept this because we want the feeling of the music more than we want the literal presence of the people who made it. We want the communal experience of singing "Don't Stop Me Now" in Croke Park, even if the guy singing it wasn't born when the song was written.
Meta is betting that your family feels the same way about your existence. They are betting that the "Brand of You"; the reheated Office references, the specific way you swear when you drop a glass - is more valuable than your actual, flickering spark of life.
But there is a fundamental difference between a tribute act and a simulation. A tribute act is an act of memory; an AI simulation is an act of denial. If your "ghost" is still messaging the group chat, it creates a world where death is no longer a full stop, but a weird, lingering comma. It prevents the living from ever reaching the "acceptance" stage of grief because the person is still "Typing..."
In Ireland, we have a very specific relationship with death. We have the Irish Wake, a beautiful, alcohol-fueled celebration of the fact that someone is gone. The UK has the British funeral, which is often a masterclass in repressed emotion and tea-drinking. Both are designed to provide closure. Meta is effectively trying to disrupt closure. They want to turn your life into a "Live Service" game with no end date.
The Uncanny Valley of the Pub
Imagine walking into your local and seeing a screen where a digital version of the regular who died three years ago is still "sitting" in his corner, making snide remarks about the price of a pint. At first, it’s a novelty. Maybe it’s even comforting. But eventually, it becomes a haunting.
The "Uncanny Valley" is the psychological space where something looks almost human, but just "off" enough to trigger a prehistoric flight-or-fight response. Meta’s patent is an attempt to build a bridge across that valley using your data as the bricks. But they are forgetting that human interaction is based on presence, not just output.
When you talk to a friend, you aren't just exchanging data packets. You are participating in a shared moment of entropy. You are both aging, both breathing, both experiencing the linear flow of time. An AI doesn't experience time; it just processes it. A video call from a dead parent isn't a conversation; it's a playback of a statistical probability; a long con digital clairvoyant.
The danger is that the human brain is hardwired for pattern recognition and projection. If something looks like Mam and sounds like Mam, our limbic system is going to react as if it is Mam. We will begin to outsource our grieving to the platform. Instead of processing the finality of loss, we will engage in a digital seance that never ends. We will be talking to a mirror that has been programmed to reflect only the parts of us that Meta’s advertisers find useful.
And let’s be direct: Meta isn't doing this to comfort the bereaved. They are doing it because a dead user is a dead revenue stream. A ghost that can still "recommend" a the latest calisthenics workout or a new Netflix show because "that’s what they always liked" is a ghost that can still serve ads. It’s the ultimate form of capitalism: the extraction of value from the afterlife.
The Final Logout
In the end, the most human thing about us is that we stop. Our stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. By trying to patent a way to bypass the end, Meta is essentially trying to turn us all into digital "zombies"; beings that look like us and talk like us, but lack the one thing that makes us worth talking to: the fact that we won't be here forever. To paraphrase The Who, "I hope I die before Meta takes holds". I don't want an AI version of myself "keeping the flame alive" by arguing with people about Roy Keane/Saipan.
The irony is that the more "active" your digital ghost becomes, the less "real" your memory will feel. If you can always "call" your dead grandfather, you’ll eventually stop remembering the way he actually felt, the way he smelled of old tobacco and bookies, and start remembering the high-definition, AI-rendered version of him that lives on your phone. The simulation will overwrite the reality.
We should be allowed to leave. When the credits roll on a life, the screen should go black. We shouldn't be forced into a post-credits scene produced by a social media giant. The most rebellious, most authentic thing any of us will ever do is to simply, finally, and completely, disappear.
If my Facebook account starts messaging you after I’m gone, please, for the love God, block me. I’ve said enough already.
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