Re: Re: Re: It sure is dark down here!

The Internet has changed everything: Now, your friends and family can receive e-mails from you even after you die. We can't decide whether that's really interesting or really disturbing — or, you know, both. The service is provided by David Eagleman, an assistant professor of neuroscience and psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine. It's called Deathswitch, and the Chronicle tells us all about it today.

Here's the skinny: While you're alive, you subscribe to Deathswitch for an annual fee of $19.95. You program in messages you want people to have after your death, and once you kick the bucket, the messages begin to be delivered. You can send messages to as many as 30 recipients — and in case you can't think what in the world you'd want to tell people from the great beyond, Deathswitch has some suggestions: love notes, computer passwords, financial information and (if you plan to be particularly catty after you die) the "last word in an argument." If you played your cards right, we suppose that could be the ultimate "I told you so."

Deathswitch goes through a rather elaborate process to satisfy itself that you're really dead. While you're alive, it prompts you to enter your password on a regular basis (usually twice a month). If you don't respond, the system begins asking for your password more frequently; you can also provide a secondary e-mail address and a friend's address for extra confirmation. If it gets nothing in response, it assumes you're dead and begins sending your scheduled messages. (And yes, if you plan to go on an extended vacation, you can let the system know that you're not dead. We don't know what happens if you end up in the hospital for a long time, though — that could get confusing.) Eagleman said the advantage to using Deathswitch instead of, say, documents in a safe deposit box is that the Deathswitch info can be more easily updated. Plus, he thinks it would be super cool to get an e-mail from a dead person: "It would be so interesting to receive e-mail from someone who passed away," he told the Chronicle.

In an article in the October issue of the journal Nature (free access to subscribers only), Eagleman speculated on what the future might hold for his service:

With time, people began to push death switches further. Instead of confessing their death in the e-mails, they pretended they were not dead. Using auto-responder algorithms that cleverly analysed incoming messages, a death switch could generate apologetic excuses to turn down invitations, to send congratulations on a life event, and to claim to be looking forward to a chance to see them again sometime soon.

How would that go, exactly? Sorry I can't come to dinner with you and Bob, but you'll never believe where I am these days ... The bottom line, apparently, is that being dead need no longer be a reason for shutting up: "I don't think there's any honor in being silent in death," he said. Bad luck for all those people who died before e-mail was invented, eh?