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Hybrid Event with in-person and zoom webinar options:

Dr. Tamara Kneese will talk about her new book Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond , followed by audience Q and A.

Since the internet’s earliest days, people have died and mourned online. In quiet corners of past iterations of the web, the dead linger. But attempts at preserving the data of the dead are often ill-fated, for websites and devices decay and die, just as people do. Death disrupts technologists’ plans for platforms. It reveals how digital production is always collaborative, undermining the entrepreneurial platform economy and highlighting the flaws of techno-solutionism. Big Tech has authority not only over people’s lives but over their experiences of death as well. Ordinary users and workers, though, advocate for changes to tech companies’ policies around death. Drawing on internet histories along with interviews with founders of digital afterlife startups, caretakers of illness blogs, and transhumanist tinkerers, the technology scholar Tamara Kneese will take attendees on a vibrant tour of the ways that platforms and people work together to care for digital remains. What happens when commercial platforms encounter the messiness of mortality?

Bio: Tamara Kneese is Senior Researcher and Project Director at Data & Society Research Institute’s AIMLab (Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab). Before joining D&S, she was Lead Researcher at the Green Software Foundation, Director of Developer Engagement on the Green Software team at Intel, and Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Director of Gender and Sexualities studies at the University of San Francisco.

Tamara’s research juxtaposes histories of computing and automation with ethnographies of platform labor. Her work has been published in academic journals including Social Text and Social Media + Society and in popular outlets including LARB, The Verge, The Atlantic, and Logic Magazine. In her spare time, Tamara is a volunteer with the Tech Workers Coalition. She holds a Ph.D. from NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication.

This event is part of the , organized by Dr. Alex Ketchum.

Thank you to MILA for co-sponsoring this event!

Our series was made possible thanks to our sponsors: SSHRC, the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (IGSF), the DIGS Lab, Milieux, Initiative for Indigenous Futures, MILA, Dean of Arts Grant, ReQEF, and more (see our website!)

There is no fee required to attend this event. We will provide professional captions in english.