T6: What is death in the digital age?

Digital data storage has evolved into a modern form of memorialization, with Facebook alone hosting over 50 million profiles of deceased users—a digital graveyard ten times larger than the world's largest physical cemetery. These "digital ghosts" reside in massive data centers that function as landed repositories of memory, yet their environmental impact is increasingly unsustainable. The IT sector's energy consumption now ranks third globally, trailing only China and the US, with data centers producing more CO2 than the entire airline industry. While physical cemeteries manage space through grave leases, applying similar deletion protocols to digital archives raises complex questions regarding power and privilege. The Library of Congress's 2017 decision to stop archiving every tweet illustrates the difficulty of determining which data deserves preservation. Ultimately, digital memorials replicate the same challenges of immortality and maintenance found in traditional burial practices, but on an ecologically precarious scale.