In the latest episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, Master Data Storyteller, Sam Knowles, spoke to Carl Öhman, Associate Professor of Political Science at Uppsala University, about one of the most overlooked questions in the digital age: what happens to our data when we die?
Öhman’s work begins with a deceptively simple observation. Every day, people leave traces of themselves online: messages, posts, searches, photographs, location data, and interactions with digital systems. Individually, much of this may look trivial. Collectively, it forms the largest archive of human behaviour ever created.
His-story never her-story
For Öhman, this is not just a technical issue, nor even a private one. It is a question of history, power, and memory. Previous generations left behind partial records. We know the words of Roman senators, but almost none uttered by their wives, daughters – even slaves. We know the names of powerful men, but far fewer women. 98% of the figures from the past whose names we know are men and 78% of statues in the UK are men. History has always been shaped by decisions about whose lives were believed (almost always by men) to be worth preserving.
Today, the default has changed. Digital life records almost everyone, at least in theory, irrespective of gender, ethnicity, or sexuality. That creates a remarkable opportunity: future historians could inherit a richer, more representative account of human life than ever before. But there is a problem. Much of that archive is controlled by a small number of technology companies.
Power in the hands of the very few
This concentration of power matters. If social media platforms hold the records of movements such as #MeToo, then future access to those records may depend on the decisions of private companies. Öhman warns that we risk “monopolising history”, allowing commercial actors to become gatekeepers of collective memory.
The issue becomes even sharper when those companies store the data of the dead. Platforms built on advertising depend on living users who click, consume, and generate revenue. Dead users do not click ads, but their data still takes up space, energy, and maintenance. Companies may therefore choose to delete some records, charge families for preservation, or develop new ways to monetise digital remains.
Who guards – and owns – the data of the dead?
That raises uncomfortable questions. Should bereaved families have to pay to preserve a loved one’s online memory? Should companies be allowed to use the data of the dead to create interactive AI versions of them? And who should decide what deserves to be kept?
Öhman does not argue for a simple answer. He proposes a broader, multi-stakeholder conversation, involving historians, technologists, regulators, families, archivists, and the public. The point is not to preserve everything forever. That would be environmentally costly, practically overwhelming, and historically unhelpful. The question is what should be preserved, by whom, and under what principles.
AI and the gods of data
His work also reaches into the future of AI. Large language models, he suggests, can be understood as a form of collective digital afterlife: vast systems trained on the traces of both the living and the dead. In his next book, The Gods of Data, Öhman explores whether AI systems are becoming a new kind of secular divinity, built from the accumulated remains of human expression.
The conversation ends with a strangely hopeful thought. If our dead are now buried inside digital platforms, we may begin to feel entitled to those platforms as shared public spaces. The dead, unexpectedly, may become allies in the project of democratising the web.
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The first draft of this blog was written by ChatGPT, using a transcript of the episode and an ever-refined prompt. It was then edited by real humans.