Silicon Valley “Hacks” Death

Skeleton Breedon Portrait – Roger from Derby, UK – CC BY-SA 2.0

IDEO, the insufferably named Silicon Valley company that created Apple’s first mouse, is trying to bring the shallow jouissance of the tech world to death itself. The website GOOD reported:

It’s not easy to admit, but the way we die is broken. Everything—from the inadequate cliches we mumble, to the stark rooms where many spend their final hours, to the bizarre pomp of the average funeral home—could probably use an upgrade.

But when you’re grieving, you’re probably in a bad place for rational critique (eg, “Maybe a garish flower arrangement won’t actually improve my mood.”) And when you’re not grieving, well, who wants to talk about death? Maybe there is another way. If we can just spark up some rational dialogue, not avoiding the topic like a conversational third rail, we might just work towards fixing what’s broken. At least that’s the hope of Bay Area design company IDEO, which just started one of the most ambitious conversations about death since Elizabeth Kübler-Ross.

The article then goes on to talk about all the “hiccups” that IDEO has had in trying to hack death or disrupt dying or whatever marketing newspeak suits your fancy. IDEO’s chief creative officer Paul Bennett had “death yurts” placed in his company’s headquarters to inspire employees to conceptually focus on “solving” the problem of death. They tried to create a “death app” called Keeps, or alternately, After I Go. Unsurprisingly, neither quite made it off the ground.

There’s probably a lot to say about the contemporary tech/business take on death itself. Its glibness is uninspiring. Its bravado is awkward. Its shallowness is terrifying. What’s more, IDEO is now holding a sort of open sourced competition to have people compete with each other over the best way to “hack” death, whatever that means in a secular sense.

It’s important to keep final ends in mind here. A tech company doesn’t exist to profoundly alter man’s relationship to death. A tech company exists to make money for shareholders. Bottom line. To lift some phraseology from the tech world, the attempt to monetize every human experience isn’t a bug of Neoliberalism. It’s a feature. And it’s also part of what Pope Francis calls our “throwaway culture”, a cheapening of our most profound experiences, struggles, and triumphs all in the name of – what? Money? Stock options? Vanity?

And do I really need to point out that there’s only one way to “hack” death and it has nothing to do with economics or technology?