We missed out on the launch last September - so therefore hereby, with some delay, a BIG CHEER for Bethany Crawford (DAI, 2020) who happens to be the next DAI graduate ( after Luca Carboni*) whose MA thesis for DAI has morphed into a, for real academic publication, printed on real paper. In Redefining Eternity: Interfacing Immortality in the Digital Corporate World, Bethany Crawford critically assesses the implications of “digital immortality” for central tenets of the human experience - such as consciousness, death, and time - as a preliminary mapping of the shifting existential paradigms of the digital age.
This groundbreaking new book explores the social consequences and provocations of a digitally replicable subject in the current sociopolitical context. It thereby confronts a timeless philosophical question, imbued with ever greater urgency in our digital age: What does it mean to be human?
Redefining Eternity establishes the motivations of digital and information technologies in creating “immortalization” through social and modal engagement with these new media. By analyzing various digital services currently promoting immortality, both intentionally and unintentionally, and engaging with texts by transhumanists and technologists such as Ray Kurzweil, Martine Rothblatt, and Max More, this endeavor allows for critical interpretation of the key terminologies, processes, and intentions for an immortal digital being. Crawford’s findings offer a dynamic foundation for conceptual analysis of the ramifications of “living forever” as a digital post-death self.
Read more about Bethany Crawford
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*The book “Who Makes the Fash”; is an adaptation of Luca Carboni’s MA thesis for DAI: Don't Buy the Hype: The Past is No Future - What Role Can Art Have in the Context of a Re-emergence of Fascism?