How to Die Digitally

There is the person who lives the day, and there is the person the day becomes online.

One gets tired, changes his mind, misunderstands something, has an ordinary conversation, spends an afternoon on work that goes nowhere. The other has a biography. A photograph chosen from several. A description of what he does, written to make someone understand quickly why he matters.

They share a name. They do not have quite the same life.

For many of us, living now includes maintaining this second person. We select what reaches him. The achievement, perhaps, with less of the confusion that preceded it. The opinion after we have found a sharper way to phrase it. Even vulnerability can arrive carefully edited, intimate enough to feel honest, contained enough to remain presentable.

The version we build depends on what we want. Work. Recognition. Friendship. An audience for something we care about. Sometimes simply the reassurance that somebody noticed. A professional profile and a private account ask for different performances, but each gives us reasons to choose which parts of a life become visible.

This does not make the online person entirely false. Real work is shared there. Real friendships happen there. Nor is the person away from the screen free of performance. We choose how to appear in person too. But a profile can keep introducing us after we have left the conversation. It can repeat a sentence long after we have changed our minds.

And other people can begin editing that person without our permission.

A screenshot travels without the conversation around it. An old statement meets an audience it was never written for. A mistake becomes the detail through which everything else is read. Sometimes the exposure brings a real harm to light, and the person being criticized owes an answer. Sometimes the accusation is wrong. Neither possibility justifies abandoning the question of what happened once the crowd has found someone to punish.

There is a point where public criticism becomes a campaign to make a person untouchable. The goal becomes to make association with them costly, to reach their employer, their friends, anyone who has not yet withdrawn. The phrase digital lynching reaches for that spectacle of collective punishment. The comparison concerns the crowd taking punishment into its own hands; online condemnation is not equivalent to a physical killing. It is worth being precise about the difference, even while asking how much harm a crowd feels entitled to inflict in the name of being right.

Watching such a spectacle can change what it means to be visible. Before saying anything, a person can begin preparing for the least generous reading it might receive. The public version becomes safer, more controlled, and harder to recognize as someone who is still learning how to think.

Yet fear is only one reason to wonder about leaving. Approval can keep a person occupied too. Even a well-liked version of you needs time to maintain.

I wonder what would happen if I stopped maintaining mine.

I imagine removing the accounts, the biographies, the pages through which a stranger can assemble an explanation of me. I imagine the more complete disappearance that deletion alone may not accomplish: no searchable public version waiting to speak on my behalf.

Would I feel relief? Would I miss the archive? Would I still want to know whether anyone had noticed I was gone?

The title of this essay borrows from How to Die: An Ancient Guide to the End of Life, a collection of Seneca’s writings edited and translated by James Romm. One of the questions behind that book is how preparing for death belongs to the practice of living. Thinking about an ending asks us to examine what we have attached ourselves to, what we fear losing, and what those fears ask of our days.

Digital disappearance is a different kind of ending. I would remain here to experience it. I could miss what I had removed. I could discover that some of it had mattered more than I admitted, or that I had spent years maintaining something I no longer wanted.

That is the philosophical question I want to borrow. Before deciding whether to remove this version of myself, can I understand what I believe would die with it?

My work would still have happened. What I learned would still be mine. But I would have removed some of the ways other people recognize those things, and perhaps some of the ways I reassure myself that they count.

How much of the life I want requires being known? How much requires being close to particular people? And when did I begin treating those as the same need?

I have not disappeared. I am trying to imagine the first ordinary morning afterward: still here, with a day to live, and less of it already promised to the person I have taught the internet to expect.

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