(est. 2021) explores the intersections of technology, culture, and human experience. From urban phenomena and digital spirituality to the evolving landscapes of creativity, we investigate how modern life reshapes perception, identity, and society.
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#21 — VIOL: the ‘anti-violence’ drug that is spreading through Lisbon by Mark Ellison
#20 — Signal Ghosts: The Cities Where Wi-Fi Never Dies
#19 — Digital Detox Retreats: Escaping the Algorithm by Cassandra Myrren
#18 — The Urban Sleep Crisis by Eleanor Voss
#17 — Cryptic Art: NFTs and the Revaluation of Creativity by Marcus Ellwood
#16 — Virtual Pilgrimages: Religious Experience Online by Mark Ellison
#15 — The Dark Side of Wellness: When Self-Optimization Becomes Obsession by Eleanor Voss
#14 — AI Companions and the Loneliness Epidemic by Isolde Maren
#13 — The Rise of Microdosing in Corporate Culture by Cassandra Myrren
#12 — Sonic Immunity: Healing Through Frequencies by Cassandra Myrren
#11 — The Ethics of Immortality by Adrien Veyra
#10 — Algorithmic Faith: When Machines Preach by Mark Ellison
#09 — Post-Human Erotics: Desire Beyond the Flesh by Elin Vårnes
#08 — Synthetic Memory: The Future of Personal Archives by Caio Navarro
#07 — Neurosprawl: Mapping the Brain as a City by Eleanor Voss
#06 — The Archive Will Outlive You by Liang Wei
#05 — Eternal Scroll: The Infinite Feed as a Prison by Isolde Maren
#04 — Terraforming the Mind by Alessio Romano
#03 — Digital Necromancy by Mark Ellison
#02 — Speculative Hunger: Future Diets in a Synthetic World by Cassandra Myrren
#01 — The Ecology of Glitches by Alessio Romano
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In the age of data ubiquity, death has ceased to be a purely biological event and has become a digital phenomenon. Memory, personality, and presence are increasingly encoded in streams of ones and zeros, allowing the deceased to persist within the networks they once inhabited. Digital necromancy—the practice of reviving, reconstructing, or interacting with these posthumous digital traces—emerges at the intersection of technology, ritual, and desire. The dead no longer rest; they linger in feeds, AI simulations, and immersive virtual spaces, creating a liminal realm where mortality and digitality intersect.
Every social platform, every cloud archive, becomes a graveyard and a laboratory simultaneously. Here, the distinction between remembrance and recreation blurs. AI-driven avatars reconstruct personalities from text, images, and behavioural patterns, producing entities that mimic but do not replicate the original subject. Philosophically, this challenges our conception of selfhood and temporality: are these digital revenants extensions of the individual, or autonomous simulacra born from collective memory? The work of N. Katherine Hayles on posthuman cognition (How We Became Posthuman, 1999) provides a framework for understanding these entities not as ghosts but as data-driven continuities, existing at the boundary between being and algorithmic abstraction.
The ethical implications are profound. Consent, agency, and the right to digital death become pressing concerns. When a person dies, should their digital shadow persist indefinitely? Who governs these posthumous representations, and how do we distinguish between homage and exploitation? Moreover, as AI reconstructs deceased personalities for entertainment, commerce, or companionship, society risks commodifying grief itself, transforming mourning into interaction. In this sense, digital necromancy is both a tool of remembrance and an instrument of control, reflecting contemporary anxieties about surveillance, autonomy, and the commodification of identity.
Culturally, this phenomenon exposes deep desires for continuity and mastery over finitude. From interactive memorials to AI-driven “resurrections,” the dead are repurposed into avatars for the living, offering comfort, education, or even ethical instruction. Yet, the more sophisticated these digital revenants become, the more we confront unsettling questions: does interaction with a data-driven echo constitute true dialogue, or merely a performance generated by algorithmic probabilities? And in relying on such simulations, do we risk redefining what it means to mourn, to remember, or to let go?
Digital necromancy is, ultimately, a meditation on temporality, presence, and human-machine interrelation. It forces us to reconsider the boundaries of life, death, and identity in an era where digital persistence challenges the natural order. In engaging with these spectral networks, we are both participants and observers, architects and audience of a new form of posthuman ritual.
References
- Hayles, N. K. (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press.
- Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International. Routledge.
- Kurzweil, R. (2005). The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Viking.