ETNO: Publication, Cemetery, Bubble

    When it comes to parasocial media, the unavoidable subject of 2821 has been NTO.
From incredibly flinch-inducing yesterati rhetoric, to incomprehensibly tasteless biopics from deceased celebrities, to eight-figure sales of the “retroactive rights” on intellectual property, it’s the thing that’s currently dominating the collective brain space of virtual artists and sucking up all the data in the ‘verse.
And I DO want to publish my opinions on NTO, posthumous ownership, and mediums; all the myriad dimensions of the issue, but I don’t just want to write about NTO, it can’t be addressed in a vacuum because it’s just a symptom of so much more loss and suffering, and it’s that “more” that is ultimately important.

So, let me tell you a story.

In 2608 we lost roughly 37% of the population to RAVID-6. The basic chain reaction was thus:

    A highly contagious airborne variant of rabies managed multiple interspecies transmissions in a matter of months; by the time domesticated canines were identified as the source of the ‘06 variant, it was too late. Man’s best friend was asymptomatic for just long enough that the false alarms and defensive spasms of the beef and pork industries prevented an adequate response, not to mention how reluctant people were to abandon or destroy their four-legged family members; the damage was done.

Prior to advances in the living vaccines that would put an end to all but the most tenacious and benign of cold viruses, insurance companies came up with a thing called a community-backed policy, a financial instrument that was based on a bundle of thousands of individual life insurance policies. Based on the general inability of governments to inter the dead, it became illegal to dispose of a body in any way OTHER than cremation, and part of the cultural and religious shift away from expensive funerals and headstones meant that community policy holders were forced to accept what the corporations were willing to arrange; massive physical registries with virtual catalogues that stood as monuments to all we’d lost.

    These simulated graveyards were seen as a temporary solution; however, they were also immensely profitable for the insurers who both issued the policies and maintained the vast digital and physical memoriams. Because of that perceived monopoly it was assumed that this was a temporary stopgap; that eventually the corporate ash vaults would be privatized somehow and the remains would be returned or re-interred after the global economy stabilized…

For decades after the pandemic to end all pandemics, the life insurance machine maintained its control over billions of cremated dead bodies. This was around the time that room temperature superconductive material science was finally starting to make headway, alongside a new kind of data storage that used ultra-dense calcium phosphate derived lattices. The promise of effectively infinite processing AND storage meant that computing was about to enter what would, in hindsight, be referred to as the cryptosingularity.

Not much heed was paid to the fact that these advances were almost wholly backed by insurance corporations.

    Indeed, by the time community lobbying and legislation uncovered the mismatch between what the digital and physical memoriams contained, most of the metaverse’s infrastructure, the physical servers ran on lattices of what used to be men, women, and children.
The properties of this technology that we were suddenly so reliant on was thought to be a special balance of carbon and potassium or sodium that experiments stumbled into; surely they had tried cremating all sorts of organic matter, but for reasons science couldn’t explain, nothing yielded the same results as human remains.

    Certain overly sensitive netizens of the metaverse were having strange and potentially paranormal experiences all the time, but it was largely chalked up to synthesia, immersion stress, neural i/o degradation; endless syndromes and excuses. Incidents became MORE common over time when logic dictated that refinements in neural interfaces should be reducing potential side-effects.

By the time NTO was figured out and democratized, hacking mediums had already amassed power using information they couldn’t possibly have obtained from anywhere other than the minds and memories of the deceased.
The rest is recent enough history as to be beyond the scope of this article, but culture is shifting all around us; as unorthodox a version of immortality as haunting the metaverse is, more than enough people are agreeing to it that the premiums are low and the community payouts are covering for our lack of social services.

    Still, the troubles are all around us. For every nostalgic comfort and convenience the dead provide, so do they extend power over everything we’ve built. The state of inheritance alone will have to be a topic covered in another, less historically-burdened article.

    Necro-Tele-Ontology is here to stay. The living are simply going to have to deal with this level of access to dead people and their ideologies going forward.
Hopefully, by maintaining a realistic rear-view of the events that led us down this path, we can see our way forward into a future that belongs to our children and grandchildren instead of our great-great-grandparents.