When the dead come online
W aking up from a short afternoon nap the other day, I thought I had overslept. I reached for my phone to check the time, only to be greeted by a Viber notification cheerfully announcing: “Karina David is new on Viber! Say ‘hi’ and get a free sticker pack!”
A wave of confusion and sadness at once swept over me. My wife Karina passed away more than six years ago. She was not “new” on Viber. In fact, she had been a lively member of various chat groups on the app.
Out of curiosity, I messaged the new “Karina,” politely asking, “Whose number is this, please?” I received no reply. But that old, familiar number remained online, like a specter haunting my chat box.
The same eerie notification showed up on the phones of several relatives and friends, both here and abroad. Within hours, messages began pouring in, expressing concern that Karina’s number, or maybe her phone, had somehow been reactivated. Their concern felt like condolences all over again.
I suddenly recalled something I’d read: nothing we post in cyberspace ever really disappears. The inescapable “datafication” of life now extends into death.
The digital traces we leave behind—mobile numbers, social media posts, chat messages—do not rest in peace.
They remain suspended in the cloud, continually acted upon by systems we neither control nor fully understand.
There are two likely explanations for what happened. First, Karina’s old mobile number may have been recycled by the telco and issued to a new subscriber after her account was closed.
When the new user joined Viber, the number — still saved in our contact lists under her name — was automatically recognized, triggering the notification.
Second, someone may have come into possession of her old phone and powered it on. If so, once connected to a familiar Wi-Fi network, the phone could have rejoined her Viber groups without needing human input.
But I checked: the phone she last used, an old iPhone, remains where our daughters had lovingly stored it, in the same box, untouched since the day she died.
The French philosopher Jacques Derrida might have called this strange incident an instance of “hauntology” — a term he coined in his 1993 book The Specter of Marx. It’s a clever play on “ontology,” the philosophical study of being, and “haunting”—suggesting that certain pasts continue to linger, refusing to be laid to rest.
Derrida had a different context in mind, but the term seems apt for describing our relationship with the remains of our digital lives.
Take ChatGPT, for example—an AI tool now used by millions. It remembers the smallest details of past conversations. The traces we leave in our interactions with it form part of an enduring profile of ourselves, much like a Wikipedia page—except curated by machine learning, not human editors.
As someone with a public profile, I often find it both amusing and disconcerting to read my Wikipedia entry. I once asked a tech-savvy granddaughter to check it for errors. She found several. Later, more inaccuracies appeared. I’ve given up trying to correct them, unless something legal or ethical compels me to do an edit.
In their book “You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity”, philosopher Hans-Georg Moeller and co-author Paul J. D’Ambrosio offer wise advice: learn to treat your online persona as an object created by others, not as a mirror of your true self. Stop trying to micromanage your public image. It’s the only way to remain sane in the digital age.
And yet, the digital world is still so new, its norms still unsettled. We are only beginning to grasp how easily identity theft can happen, especially when postpaid mobile numbers are recycled.
Given how closely our mobile numbers are now tied to our personal identities, is it too much to ask telcos not to reissue numbers once associated with the deceased? Not just out of respect for the dead, but to guard against the risks posed by these ghostly reactivations of digital lives.
It’s been six years since Karina passed on. Our youngest granddaughter, Lila, born less than a month before Karina died, still insists her Loli lives in every butterfly she sees. I’ve come to share that sentiment. “Is that you, Nins?” I would whisper when a yellow butterfly flits beside me on my morning walks. That gentle superstition comforts me.
But a message from her on Viber? That’s something else. It jars the soul. There is no warmth in it, only the cold algorithm of machines that do not know how to mourn.
