YouSaid · the spoken record

Carl Öhman

lines on the record: 33
first: 2025-04-12
most recent: 2025-04-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“We tend to think about the emergence of the dead online as an anomaly. We're like, hang on a minute, this is really weird. What are the dead doing here? And as I say in the concluding chapter, it's really the other way around. The internet is one big archive. And the archives were built for the dead. So the newcomers here, the anomalies, that's us, the living. It is we who have moved into a space that was originally built for the dead. And now that we realize that archives are actually for the dead and that they start to emerge in this space, we're like, what? That's super weird. And I'm trying to flip that narrative around and say, no, it's weird that we have started living in an archive.”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the approach I went for was kind of doing the opposite. I'm trying to show that when people hear about my research topic, when they think about digital remains and the data that we leave behind upon death, they're like, oh, that's such a niche topic. How interesting? And what I'm trying to show in the book is that it's not a niche topic. It happens to everyone, but it's also so entangled with the biggest questions of our time. It's about data rights. It's about the power of capital. It's about capitalism. It's about culture. So it's really all of these huge questions that all crammed down into this tiny question of what do we do with the data of the dead?”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in the book, I mean, in every chapter, I'm pointing to how the question of posthumous data management is so intimately entangled with the logic of capitalism, of big tech, with ancient cultural customs and so on. And I'm like, I told my editor, but I can't write a chapter that solves capitalism. And she was like, well, that would make it a very popular book if you pulled it off.”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what I'm pointing to in the book is that, and I keep returning to this word, that we need a plurality of perspectives and a plurality of values need to be taken into account when we manage the data of the dead because there is an onus, of course, to study the dead and to, as you say, to gain those advantages from studying in the past. That's not the only thing involved because it's also the privacy of those individuals, and it's also the privacy of the individuals who are the descendants of those people. So, many, many layers, much more than I can disentangle in one single book. And that's also, I think, the core message of the book. When I came to the final chapter and my editor was like, well, you need a solution. Like, okay, so what's the solution?”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Economically. So economically, they're like much, much more valuable. So from a pure economic perspective, it makes sense to preserve the digital heritage of North America and Europe, but basically just to destroy the African and South Asian data. But culturally and ethically, we realize that we can't really do that because there's a value, cultural value in diversity of our digital heritage. And then you can add on other layers on top of it's not just the cultural and the economic. It may also have, say, ethical values of saying, well, that particular culture is very touchy about posthumous. humans data rights so there may be and there may be spiritual aspects to this as well”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly. I can see many ethical advantages on that. No, I think that we even, there's even an ethical imperative to study the past and learn from the past. And I think that previous generations should allow for that kind of research on their digital footprints. But we must recognize that there are multiple forms of value at play here. There's, of course, the economic values that could come out of that. Sure. You could build better AI models based on the data of the dead. You can do different kinds of market research and so on. You can do medical research on it, but it also has a cultural value. So like to give you an example, economically, North American users are way, way more valuable. Than, say, African users who only”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we have a good and healthy precaution for state dominance when it comes to control of the past. We've all read George Orwell's 1984, and we know that whoever controls the past controls the future and so forth. But when this discourse was born, it's as if we couldn't imagine. bigger data controller than a state where like a state is like the peak of a data controller But now it's a different kind of organization that we've got to keep an eye out for, which is not states, but multinational tech corporations who vastly outsize states when it comes to data control. But we're still very focused on like, oh, let's make sure that the state doesn't have too much data about its citizens. Let's outsource that to some companies that do not have our best interests in mind nor any long-term incentives to do the right things.”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or if we could have read the WhatsApp messages from Napoleon and his conversations with his private conversations with the officers the night before battle. I mean, that would have been an amazing, both on a collective level and individual level, an amazing historical asset. And it's not like that asset doesn't exist. And we realize that there are conflicts here between the privacy of the dead and the historical value. But I don't think that is a sufficient reason to just completely capitulate these questions to big tech. It's almost like, you know, oh, like as long as the state doesn't do it, it's fine.”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These are on the fringes. They're not really a part of the bigger battles about the really, really valuable data, the personal data, the stuff that connects the private with the collective and the political. So it's almost like we've surrendered the parts that tell the really interesting history about the past. Probably because there are really difficult lines of conflict here. So sure, we all recognize that an archive like Facebook has a massive historical value. Of course, like imagine if we would have had access to that granularity of data on, say, Germany in the 30s. Like the historical insights would have been massive.”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Run some of these very short term cycles. Whereas librarians and archivists, they're concerned with the long term. And there are really good things happening from that community. There's of course the internet archive who are doing a very, very important job. The Wikimedia Foundation who are doing an amazing job in just preserving human knowledge and expanding it to more and more languages. UNESCO has a number of really interesting Preserved software for the future.”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doing in five years, or it's absurdly long term. It's like, but what if AI in 100 years destroys humanity? But the questions that are like two or three decades ahead of us tend to be forgotten. And I think there are two reasons for that. The one is that the industry is not interested in things happening two or three decades from now because it's vain to do any kind of investments that long term. And policymakers aren't really interested either because politics runs on a four or five year cycle where you want to be re-elected. So you're going to have to deliver results on a short horizon. It's not like we're saying, oh, I'm going to vote for this party because they made some really good choices 25 years ago that have paid off now. So both the industry and politics”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think your question highlights an interesting point about the entire tech discourse. Which is that it's very short term focused. It's about what's going to be the next blockchain breakthrough or, you know, what's AI going to be?”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I certainly want to see more legal requirements. I think that the GDPR explicitly states that your data protection rights sees upon death. And I think that it would be a good thing to include dead people, like not to grant dead people the exact same kinds of rights that the living are granted to the GPR. Analog rights at least, you know, some basic level of protection. Like for me, it's crazy that if a company goes bust, even if they have hundreds of thousands or millions of dead people on their servers, they can do whatever they want with it. And I'm like, how is that possible? And I often get that question from when I do media people are like, but why? Like, why don't the dead have any data privacy rights? My answer is that, well, the dead don't have very strong lobbying groups in Brussels.”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you may not care about what happens to your data, but you should care about the society you live in and your immediate family and next of kin.”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Guess what? That company won't be around forever either. And what's going to happen when they go bust? Well, the same thing that happens when every company goes out of business. Their assets are going to be auctioned out to the highest bidder, which means that your data, both your social data, but also your genomic data, may be auctioned out to the highest bidder who can do whatever they want with that data, by the way, because you're dead, so you don't have any data privacy rights. And that can, of course, be used to draw inferences about your immediate family, because that company may not have any information about them, but if they own their dead parents and siblings and so on, all of a sudden that can be used to make predictions about their health or what their credit score.”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is a question that will have massive impact on your peers and potentially even on your immediate family. So one of the examples that I'm drawing on in the book is bio data. Tens of millions of people, perhaps hundreds of millions of people, have uploaded their DNA to ancestry sites for genealogy research. And it's fun doing that, and you're like, oh, turns out I'm like 7% Irish. But the thing is, when you die, you will have zero rights over these data and you have no way to control where they go and what happens to them. And you may trust the company, let's say that you uploaded your stuff to 23andMe or something like that.”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But rather as a citizen leaving a certain kind of society behind. So when you leave your data behind upon death and you may say like, I don't care what happens to it. Like I'm going to be dead anyway. So who cares if someone goes through my WhatsApp messages or my search history or whatever? Sure, but you may care about the society that you leave behind. And if you don't do anything about your digital legacy, you're basically giving a present, a free present to Musk and Zuckerberg, provided you're using one of their platforms or to Google or Whichever company owns your data.”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The book is intended to be read really by anyone who has an interest in these questions. I think by my former mentor Luciano Floridi, who provided one of the blurbs on the back side is saying that it will be of interest to any mortal with a digital presence, which is like anyone. But it's a call for people to consider what happens to their data when they die, not solely as consumers, but as citizens. So I commonly get this question from journalists, like, okay, so, but what can our listeners do to protect their digital legacy? And of course, I have advice for that, and that's also in the book. But I think my most important advice is to say that try to think of this question not only about not only as a matter of your individual price.”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Spread everywhere, so there's no single actor who can control the narrative of that event or series of events. Whereas when it comes to events that are taking place today, it's almost the opposite. Sure, they can be journalists and media reportings about something that happened, but that is nothing compared to hundreds of thousands of text messages or geodata from phones or having direct access to exactly what kind of news an entire population were consuming at a certain event and so on. So the real valuable historical records are today sadly controlled by these handful of tech giants.”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Any single solution to that? I'm not saying that there should be state ownership. I'm not saying that this or that UN body or organization is going to assume control over the digital past, but rather that we need a plurality of principles and organizations to manage our digital past. And a good comparison here would be information about World War II. So where is the information about World War II? It's everywhere. thousands of museums and archives and records and photos.”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, whatever solution we settle upon for the management of our digital past is going to have to be a collective solution. We're going to have to say, okay, these are the principles by which the data of the dead are safeguarded. These are the kinds of organizations and the principles that we think are good for the management of the digital past. And I'm not in the book, I'm not promoting”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They are not the full answer, and especially not the answer when it comes to the accumulated digital past and our digital remains. Because any solution that gives the individual the power over their own data, sure, that's great, but there are already hundreds of millions of dead internet users. What about them? And even if you're trying to get one of these savvy tech solutions where you own your own data through fiduciaries and so on, even if you manage to get, let's say, a huge percentage of the population of the internet to adopt those, let's say even 20%, that's nothing on a global scale. I mean, nothing. And it will certainly not do much for the accumulation of digital remains.”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I mean, there are plenty of promising solutions. Tim Berners-Lee, who basically invented what we understand to be the Internet, but the World Wide Web, is working on some really interesting solutions that lets individuals be in control of their data to a completely different extent than they are today. And I'm all for these kinds of solutions and they're good. Worthy”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is privately owned by the Zuckerbergs and the musks of the world. And that's a very dangerous development because they are going to use it and they are going to restrain the kinds of usage of that data.”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, of course, future historians are going to want to study what happened, how did it spread, what kind of testimonies, what were people witnessing about now, that access to this very important part of our history. Going to be gate kept by one individual, and that individual is Elon Musk. So Elon Musk is going to decide in the future who gets to study our collective digital past. And that's a very, like even if Elon Musk was a saint, which he is not, that would have been a very scary and unstable development. And I'm using the Me Too movement as an example here, but any major event from the Arab Spring to the Black Lives Matter movement to, you know, I could keep listing these really important events, the history about these events”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that is true, but they're even more scary aspects of that. My biggest fear is not necessarily that we will lose historical archives, but rather that these archives will be dominated by a handful of tech giants who are going to use them for economic but also political gain. So one of the examples that I bring up in the book where I talk about this privatization of our collective digital past through our digital remains is former Twitter now X. And the Me Too campaign. So the Me Too movement was arguably one of the most important events of early 21st century, especially when it comes to women's rights. And it's a global movement with millions of Testimonies from women all around the world.”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I mean, that's a question with many answers, but it's a real thing that archivists are talking about what they call a digital dark ages, where we think about digital information as being so secure, as you're pointing out. But the hard truth is that in only a couple of decades from now, if we continue this very short-sighted Style of data management, it's not unlikely that we'll actually, or that generation will actually be quite oblivious about their digital past.”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be clear the problem here is actually not storage. Storage is cheap. The problem is accessibility of keeping the file formats updated and making sure that it's updated with the latest hardware and so on. In facing that question of, okay, so what do we do with these billions of accounts that are just laying around here and not really being economically productive? Facebook is going to have to face the question. Which accounts do we delete? Which profiles do we not consider to be worthy of preserving for posterity? And for a for-profit company, of course, the answer to that question is, which data can we make money on? So when we talk about do we have enough data, how are these data going to accumulate over the 21st century? It's all about what a handful of companies are going to find worthwhile preserving for posterity.”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this is only growing, so sooner or later someone's deleted, someone's data is going to have to be deleted. I think in illustrating case here is Facebook. So I led a study in 2019 on where we predicted Based on really good data, the number of dead profiles on Facebook or how many profiles in each year the 21st century are going to belong to dead people on Facebook. And it turns out that somewhere around the mid to late 2060s or 70s, it's a fair chance that there are going to be more dead than alive users on Facebook. Why does this matter? Well, it matters because the entire business model of the platform is based on users clicking on ads. Dead people don't click on any ads. They're not consumers. Nevertheless, they take up a lot of server space and those data centers are going to have to be managed.”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one of the first things I realized when I started researching this topic for my PhD was this myth of the eternity of the internet. We tend to think about the internet as this kind of ephemeral space, this almost like immaterial space beyond the world where you can just And it's even to the extent when the book was about to be released, the marketing team from my publisher suggested that the title would be forever online. And I was like, but my point is that nothing is forever online. It's only going to be there so long as somebody's paying for it. So when we get to the question of do we have enough data, well, what kind of data would be my follow-up question? Because we are deleting heaps of data every day. We produce far, far more data than we can possibly manage.”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Literature? What if there was an entire digital footprint of a person? Could this be done also with your social media data, with your search data, with every kind of digital trace that you're producing? So I became interested in what would be the relationship between a person and the data that they leave behind upon death. So I wish I had a more personal answer of like, oh, someone close to me died and that made me realize so and so. But I really came at this from a philosophical angle. It poked my interest as a scholar. And then I realized that, oh, there are so many layers to this. It's not only the ethics and the philosophy, but it's also the political economy of this entire phenomenon. Who owns that data and who decides what's Going to happen to it and so on.”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Surprisingly, perhaps from comparative literature, when I was a literature student, I heard about, and this is back in like 2014, I heard about these AI applications where you could feed an entire corpus of text into this algorithm and it would start reproducing text in the same style as the author. So you could hypothetically take all of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novels and you would run them through the machine and it would spit out another Dostievsky novel. And that got me really interested in what would be the relationship between that new novel and what does Devsky produce during his life? And that, coupled with when I started studying the internet during my masters, I realized that, oh, hang on, this is not only possible for art.”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I often describe myself as a kind of disciplinary orphan in academia. I started out in comparative literature and then I did a second, like a double major degree in sociology. And then I came to the K and I started studying at Oxford at a place called the Oxford Internet Institute, which is this interdisciplinary environment where people from all around academia come together to study the internet. So the degree I got for my master's is literally called Master of the Social Science of the Internet, shorthand, master of the internet. And then my PhD was in information communication in the social sciences. So interdisciplinary studies of the internet and digital technology, that would be my background.”
2025-04-12 · Intelligence Squared · Who Owns Our Digital Afterlives? With Carl Öhman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT