Hereafter - Hardcover

by William G. Feighery (Author)

HereAfter: The Biopolitics of Digital Resurrection examines how AI-powered grief technologies-griefbots, virtual memorials, and digital resurrection platforms-function as mechanisms of surveillance capitalism and biopolitical control. Drawing on Michel Foucault's concepts of disciplinary power, governmentality, and subjectivation alongside Shoshana Zuboff's analysis of surveillance capitalism, this critical study reveals how commercial platforms extract economic value from emotional vulnerability whilst reshaping mourning practices through algorithmic governance.

The book traces grief's historical transformation from communal social practice through medical control to contemporary technological enclosure, demonstrating that current arrangements whereby platforms claim authority over relationships with the dead represent neither natural evolution nor inevitable technological development but rather particular outcomes of struggles over who controls death and remembrance. Through detailed analysis of Chinese and Western grief technology industries, legal frameworks, platform business models, and documented user experiences, the work exposes how these systems train bereaved subjects in particular mourning behaviours, commodify intimate emotional experiences, and extend corporate surveillance into the domain of loss.

Examining concrete cases from Silicon Intelligence and Super Brain in China to Western griefbot platforms, the analysis reveals how interface designs encode norms about appropriate grief, how algorithmic systems distort posthumous identity representation, how consent frameworks fail to protect the deceased or bereaved, and how regulatory attempts remain captured by industry interests. Yet the book also identifies spaces of resistance, refusal, and counter-conduct, arguing that alternative approaches to grief technology remain possible if mourning is reclaimed as commons rather than surrendered to platform capitalism.

Written for scholars and general readers interested in critical technology studies, death studies, digital capitalism, and Foucauldian analysis, HereAfter provides essential tools for understanding how contemporary technologies transform fundamental human experiences whilst proposing pathways toward mourning practices that serve human flourishing rather than corporate profit extraction.