Your grandmother's Facebook profile just wished you a happy birthday. She's been dead for three years, rotting in a box somewhere while her digital corpse continues its mindless shuffle through the social media graveyard, vomiting automated pleasantries into the void like some twisted algorithmic zombie that doesn't know it's supposed to be fucking dead. Welcome to the future, you miserable bastards, where death is just a minor inconvenience in our content calendar, where corpses have better engagement rates than the living because let's face it, dead people can't post cringe, where we've turned grief into a fucking spectator sport and everyone's competing for the gold medal in performative mourning.
We've become necromancers without the balls to admit it, haven't we? Pathetic little digital witches casting spells with hashtags and heart emojis, trying to summon spirits through WiFi connections. Every time we tag a dead friend in a photo, every time we write "miss you" on a profile that will never fucking respond because newsflash, dead people don't check their notifications, we're performing a kind of digital séance for an audience of other desperate fucks doing the exact same thing. The modern cemetery isn't six feet under; it's stored in server farms that consume more electricity than small nations, all to keep our beloved dead perpetually undead, trapped in an eternal present tense where they're always "feeling blessed" or "checking in at" some shithole restaurant their decomposing arse will never visit again.
There's something profoundly fucked about the way we've sanitised death through technology, transformed it into something manageable, scrollable, likeable. Death used to be absolute, a full stop at the end of a sentence. Now it's merely an ellipsis, a "see more" button that leads nowhere, a hyperlink to oblivion. We've created this grotesque theatre where the dead perform for us daily, their profiles becoming digital marionettes we manipulate with our desperate need to believe they're still somehow present, still somehow listening when we type our pathetic little messages into the comment sections of their final posts.
The algorithms don't give a shit about our grief. They see engagement metrics, not mourning. They see data points, not the devastating reality that someone's consciousness has been permanently deleted while their digital shadow continues to dance. Facebook's "On This Day" feature becomes a Russian roulette of trauma, spinning the chamber and pulling the trigger on your emotional stability by showing you that video from five years ago when they were still breathing, still laughing, still unaware that their expiration date was approaching like a freight train in the darkness.
And Christ, the AI chatbots, those silicon succubi that promise to let you talk to your dead lover one more time. Feed them enough text messages, enough emails, enough digital detritus, and they'll cobble together a grotesque approximation of the person you lost, a ventriloquist's dummy made of machine learning and desperation. People are literally fucking chatbots trained on their dead partners' sexts, getting off on algorithmic dirty talk from beyond the grave, and we're supposed to pretend this isn't the most dystopian shit imaginable? We're masturbating to ghosts made of code, climaxing to the echo of someone who no longer exists, whose actual flesh has long since begun its journey back to carbon and nitrogen.
The performance of grief has become more important than grief itself. We curate our sorrow for maximum impact, crafting memorial posts with the same careful attention we once reserved for thirst traps. "RIP angel, heaven gained another one today 😇💔" we type, checking back every five minutes to count the reactions, to harvest the comments, to feed on the validation that our pain is being witnessed, being acknowledged, being monetised by the same platforms that sell advertisements for funeral homes between our lamentations.
LinkedIn keeps sending job recommendations to corpses, suggesting they might be interested in new opportunities, as if death is just a temporary career setback. Instagram continues to suggest we might know dead people, their faces appearing in our discovery feeds like specters haunting the algorithm. Dating apps haven't figured out how to swipe left on mortality, so dead profiles accumulate matches they'll never meet, conversations they'll never have, dick pics they'll never be horrified by.
We've created a kind of digital purgatory where nobody ever truly dies because their data persists, floating through the network like plastic in the ocean, never biodegrading, never disappearing, just accumulating into vast islands of digital debris. The dead outnumber the living on social media now, did you know that? By 2070, Facebook will be primarily a platform for corpses, a vast necropolis of expired consciousness where the majority of users have flatlined but their profiles continue their mindless existence, sharing memories they can no longer form, celebrating birthdays they'll never see.
The truly fucked part is how we've normalised this madness, how we've accepted that death now comes with terms of service, that our digital afterlife is determined by whatever box we ticked when we were still capable of ticking boxes. We've outsourced our mourning to machines that neither know nor care about the weight of absence, the texture of loss, the way grief sits in your chest like swallowed glass, cutting you from the inside with every breath.
There's something violently pornographic about the way we consume death online, scrolling through tragedy with the same mindless hunger we bring to everything else. A car accident here, a suicide there, someone's parent withering from cancer sandwiched between a recipe video and a cat meme. We've turned mortality into content, into something to be engaged with, commented upon, shared. "Sending prayers," we type with fingers that have never clasped in supplication, "thoughts and prayers," as if thoughts and prayers have ever raised the dead or made the algorithm care about human suffering.
The living are haunted not by ghosts but by notifications, by birthday reminders for people who no longer have birthdays, by friend suggestions for people who can no longer be friends, by the constant digital resurrection of the dead through cached images and archived conversations. We're living in a gothic horror story written by a computer programmer, where the monsters are made of metadata and the haunted house is in the cloud.
What does it do to us, this constant presence of absence? This perpetual performance of connection with the disconnected? We're teaching ourselves that death is negotiable, that absence is relative, that if we just keep their profiles active, keep posting on their walls, keep including them in group chats, somehow they're not really gone. But they are gone, aren't they? Gone in every way that matters, gone in every way except the way that allows tech companies to continue profiting from their digital remains.
The algorithm doesn't mourn. It doesn't grieve. It simply processes, sorts, displays. It shows us the dead because the dead generate engagement, because nothing makes people click quite like mortality, because we're all desperate to believe that when our hearts stop beating, our tweets will achieve immortality. We've built a monument to our own denial, a vast network of electric delusion where we can pretend that death is just another user experience issue that can be solved with better coding.
But here's the savage truth, the one we scroll past as quickly as we can: these digital ghosts aren't preserving anything real. They're simulacra, empty shells, hollow echoes of people who were once magnificently, messily, gloriously alive. The person you loved, the one whose profile you visit like a digital grave, they're not there. They're not in the photos that Facebook randomly surfaces, not in the tweets that get retweeted annually, not in the LinkedIn profile still claiming they're "passionate about synergy." They're gone, actually gone, properly fucked off into whatever comes after this electric dream we call consciousness.
And yet we persist in our technological séances, our algorithmic attempts to raise the dead, because the alternative, accepting the absolute finality of death in an age that promises infinite connection, is too terrible to contemplate. So we keep tagging corpses, keep messaging the void, keep pretending that somehow, somewhere in the vast network of networks, the people we've lost are still listening, still present, still giving a fuck about our desperate attempts to keep them alive through likes and shares and broken hearted emojis.
The dead don't need our digital prayers. They don't need our memorial posts or our anniversary remembrances or our carefully curated grief. What they need is what they've already achieved: the freedom from this endless, exhausting performance of existence. They've logged off permanently, escaped the notification hell we've built for ourselves, found the ultimate privacy setting. And maybe, just maybe, that's the most honest thing any of us can do in this age of digital delusion: admit that death is still death, that absence is still absence, that no amount of algorithmic necromancy will bring back what's been lost.
But we won't, will we? We'll keep performing our séances, keep summoning our digital demons, keep pretending that the electric ghosts in our machines are somehow the people we loved, rather than the soulless echoes of a technology that knows everything about human behaviour except what it means to be human. Because facing the truth, that death is still the same ruthless bastard it's always been, just dressed up in silicon and fibre optics, would mean admitting that all our technology, all our connection, all our desperate scrambling for digital immortality, amounts to nothing more than pissing into the void and calling it communication.
Your grandmother's Facebook profile will wish you happy birthday again next year. And the year after that. And every year until the servers finally fail or the company collapses or the heat death of the universe finally puts us all out of our misery. She'll never age in her profile picture, never update her status, never actually wish you anything at all. She's dead. Properly, permanently, irreversibly dead. And all the algorithms in the world won't change that fundamental, brutal, beautiful truth.
Welcome to the future, where we've mechanised mourning and digitised denial, where we've built the most sophisticated denial machine in human history and called it social media. The séance never ends, the ghosts never rest, and we never stop scrolling through the endless feed of the dead, looking for signs of life in a graveyard made of code.
Thank you Charlie Brooker <3