Incase-I-Die sites that became obsolete before we died.
Imagine for a moment that you died. Isn’t imagination a wonderful thing? When I went to sleep-away camp at age nine, my mom had to fly to California on business and she decided that, should the plane go down, she’d miss out on telling me all sorts of important things about adulthood and life and love. So, she wrote me a long letter and left it on my desk. The good news is that she didn’t die. She did, however, give me the letter when I got back from camp. Because I wasn’t already depressive enough.
Had this whole heartwarming story taken place a decade later, she might have done the whole thing online. Indeed, there was a moment where creating in-case-I-die letters and archiving them online seemed like a great thing to do. You had to designate a “guardian angel” to notify the site of your passing, which meant sacrificing some of the surprise factor your friends might experience upon getting a postmortem email to you. Or else you’d need to remember to notify the archiving site’s webmasters every time you got in a car on the LA thruway.
Sites like this still exist, but I found it interesting that the first wave of these services, which were mentioned in this 2000 Wired article, have all kicked the bucket. I hope anyone who sent their postmortems to these sites has been told that their postmortem correspondence no longer exists. The next frontier? I’m holding out for post-death SMS.
(via me on MotherBoard)
