DISRUPTING DEATH / Vol. 93, No. 3 (Fall 2026)
- 5 days ago
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Joseph E. Davis, William Hasselberger, and Paul Scherz, Guest Editors
Oz Frankel, Journal Editor
PART 1: SOCIAL CHANGE
Digital grief applications, powered by generative artificial intelligence (AI), are coming on the market. How they will be received and used is a question not just of the technologies themselves and their affordances but also of the distinctive environment into which they are introduced. At present, this milieu is characterized by a highly psychologized understanding of grief and approach to mourning. It has taken shape over three time periods, from roughly the 1920s to today. First, socially prescribed grief roles and rituals steadily disappeared. Next, a Freudian science of grief work arose, which was subsequently replaced by a “new work of mourning.” The new work, currently normative, is centered on unique experience, personal storytelling, and continuing bonds with the deceased. The change has created a fertile context for AI-powered grieftech, and the article concludes with reflections on the new grief work and tech interaction.
My essay examines the growing role of social media in shaping the experience of grief and the construction of memory. It analyzes the narrative forms through which mourning is expressed online, giving rise to what is commonly called “online mourning.” These practices transform the traditional symbolic relationship between the presence and absence of the deceased by creating a public space where digital traces of the dead—such as their social media profiles—remain visible. Social media can thus function both as a symbolic bridge between the living and the afterlife and as a place where communities of mourners form around shared grief. These “thanatechnological” practices intersect with emerging rituals, such as QR codes on graves or virtual cemeteries, giving mourning a new public dimension.
PART 2: SOCIAL CRISES
Tech companies offering generative AI chatbots suggest that bereavement care can be supplemented or even replaced by a machine. To explore this claim, we conducted 25 interviews with grief-care professionals, including psychotherapists, chaplains, and grief group leaders, asking what counts as proper or full care and what persons require in the aftermath of loss. Situated against a troubling cultural backdrop of declining rituals, social isolation, and death denial, the professionals emphasized that grief is not a problem to be solved or a program of steps but a deeply human experience to be lived in the company of others. Supportive “witnesses,” they argued, are irreplaceable in the face of loss. Automated systems may provide limited benefits under certain circumstances, but genuine human care—embodied, attentive, discerning—cannot be outsourced.
In the face of shifts to a high-aging/low-fertility population, a post-growth economy, and a trend toward solo sociality, the family system that once handled mortuary care in Japan is coming undone. In this “era of dead without family,” a new wave of businesses, services, and initiatives is emerging to offer ending plans not dependent on kin or the family grave. The essay explores two different trends in Japan’s new ending industry (shūkatsu). One is the anticipatory planning that individuals are enjoined to take up ahead of time to avoid winding up in a plot for the disconnected in death. The other is new-style urban columbaria, high-tech and high-rise, that are becoming increasingly popular for even the reinterment of ancestral remains. Considering how the socio-ontology for honoring the dead is getting redesigned, the essay argues for a social imagination emerging here with potentially radical implications for the living.
The contemporary condition is experienced by many as despair. Whether as a response to climate change, the threat of nuclear war, or the possibility of AI Armageddon, many people— and especially young persons—no longer believe that they have any possible future. The response to these looming catastrophes is too often posed in technoscientific terms that not only threaten to hasten our collective demise but also provide no values around which hope could be enacted. This essay explores how secular immortalists offer an extreme example of just this approach and the pseudoconception of hope it expresses.
Transhumanism posits humanity’s evolution by technological means. Recent advances in artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and genetics have shifted it toward the center of academic discourse and mainstream culture. Embraced by Silicon Valley billionaires as well as scholars, transhumanism comprises a full-blown movement. It shares features with Christian soteriology and is sometimes called a “techno-religion” or “secular theology.” It rejects the supernatural, however, arguing that technology will deliver humanity from death. An aggressively futurist mode of thought, transhumanism nevertheless has origins in the medieval past. In seeking to disavow these roots, it has inadvertently defined itself against them.
PART 3: ETHICS OF SIMULATION
This article gives a philosophical analysis of the nature and value of ghostbots, artificial intelligence simulations of the dead. We identify a pervasive and revealing ambiguity in how ghostbots are described by tech companies. They are both radical new technologies that preserve the “essence” of the dead and enable continuing “relationships” with them, and mere entertainment or memory aids that are comparable to photographs or recordings. We argue that this ambiguity is not accidental. Illusion plays an essential role in how ghostbots operate, and by their very nature they invite psychological conflict in users. We explore serious concerns raised by this dynamic for mourning, remembrance, and the good of grieving persons.
Using speculative fiction as a cultural probe, this essay critiques “deathbots” as extensions of late neoliberal capitalism. By examining Black Mirror, Upload, and The Final Cut, I make the case that these stories demonstrate a colonization of grief where the dead become extractable data for profit and the bereaved become dependent users. The essay draws on Homi Bhabha’s concept of mimicry and Sherry Turkle’s “ELIZA effect” to show how artificial intelligence simulacra trap mourners in loops of sycophantic affirmation that interfere with real grief. These technologies, I argue, foster a “crisis of narration,” the inability to achieve the temporal closure necessary to mark an end to grief and transform the raw data of loss into shared meaning. Ultimately, digital afterlives foster emotional stasis rather than healing, necessitating a critical recovery of memory and communal rituals in an era of algorithmic intimacy.
The longing to speak to the beloved beyond death is humanity’s oldest yearning. I describe a modern phenomenon, the ghostbot, an artificial intelligence reconstruction of a human person, “created” by using text and images left behind after a person has died. Often this data is generated by a willing participant, who, knowing they are dying, wishes to memorialize themself. Most common, however, are postmortem ghostbots, also called “griefbots,” which are sold as commodities to mourners by companies that then cobble together a semblance of an existent being from left-behind texts, social media posts, and images, and which are capable of interactive “speech” with the living. This article turns to the rabbinic medieval and modern philosophic texts to consider a normative response to the phenomenon.
Griefbots promise mourners either help to deal with their grief or an ongoing connection to the deceased. By providing a technological mediation of the relationship to death, these technologies threaten to come into conflict with religious practices of mourning. This article examines a similar conflict in which early Christians sought to transform Greco-Roman mourning practices. Christians demanded an affective transformation of grief into feelings of longing and a shift in graveside feasts into an opportunity for prayer and alms. This older encounter between cultural and religious practices can inform an analysis of the concerns and opportunities contemporary Christians might discern in new technologies of mourning.