Text by Jonathan Stein
The banality of evil is now a well-known concept, developed by philosopher Hannah Arendt, to express how ordinary people can commit grotesque, inhumane acts. What she forgot to mention is that sometimes the worst instances of it take place in the US Patent and Trademark Office. I sometimes digitally lurk there, on the lookout for maleficence with other journalists. The most flagrant case from the last year occurred on December 30, 2025, when a certain patent was given a stamp of approval. A banal moment, the scurvy aftermath yet to come.
The patent in question [1] was submitted by a fellow named Andrew Bosworth, who is now an official member of my Rogues’ Gallery. He is the Chief Technology Officer at Meta. The intellectual property now granted to the company formerly known as Facebook describes an AI system in the form of an LLM. Specifically, the LLM can simulate a user during a period of absence from social media, including when “the user is deceased.” The AI system would replicate a user’s behavioural patterns across the platform — generating posts, responding to messages, and engaging with content as though the original account holder were still active. Or, alive.
Many technology companies want to control the digital afterlife. The hills of this realm are still being groomed, the grass still being clipped. “Meta” derives from the Ancient Greek (μετά) prefix, which means after or beyond. This patent confirms the ultimate end of a future which is already forming; one in which the dignity of the human being is secondary to the life force of the network economy, of digital artifacts, and of the extracted commercial value from individual lives. Under the guise of an “innovative” patent, Big Tech desperately pleads for the show to go on even after your last breath.
Control of the ghost
Necropolitics is the concept based on the idea that sovereignty resides in the power to dictate who may live and who must die [2]. It was first introduced by the Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe and has been a useful approach for capturing new subtleties of Foucault’s droit de glaive [right of the sword] [3]. The right to kill, from Mbembe’s analysis, slowly comes into view when a capitalist state produces various forms of immiseration.
Instances of structural racism, conditions of public health neglect, mass incarceration, lopsided resource allocation, and unequal exposure to environmental toxins are all, effectively, not random events and choices. Anyone who helps pull the strings does not have to wear an executioner’s uniform. They are protected by the system, which is organised to fashion circumstances that eliminate life. Those who are ushered to endure such injustices often become politically and socially inert as a consequence, trapped in a liminal existence. Mbembe calls these people the “living dead”[4].
In the world of technology, the signs of subjugation are not as visible as, say, racist housing covenants [5]. Big Tech has crafted an ingratiating offer of admission to the digital afterlife [6] that appears to be the opposite of necropolitical control. Tech firms position themselves as saviours at the Door of Forgetting. We all want to leave something behind, and the LLM “deadbots” and holograms of your former self are on sale.
The implicit terms from Silicon Valley appear to be that you can live forever and that you don’t have to leave. Technological necropolitics is the sovereignty over who gets to stay dead. Not only can you be remembered, the proposition goes, but your loved ones can interact with you. The world will still listen to you. It’s the strange, magical flourish of the twenty-first century, and an enticing offer to consumers, mostly because it’s already happening.
The dead now can have material impacts from beyond the grave. In November 2021, Christopher Pelkey was fatally shot at a red light in Chandler, Arizona. Four years later, AI allowed Pelkey to participate in the hearing [7] for his killer. His sister thought of creating an AI avatar of her brother to express forgiveness for his assailant. The judge noted that Pelkey’s family had originally “demanded the maximum sentence”. But after hearing the AI address the court, he said: [Y]ou allowed Chris to speak from his heart. . . I didn’t hear him asking for the maximum sentence.” The final ruling was ten and a half years for manslaughter.
Spectral labour
The ability for the virtual, postmortem world to exert influence on the living is just one reason to want control of it. The other is likely related to the fact that the digital legacy market is primed to reach nearly 80 billion dollars by 2034. The dead, it turns out, are valuable assets. Crucially, they do not demand wages, so the money simply goes to the organisation that holds their digital identity. Scholars have recently named this dynamic spectral labour — the process by which the data residue of a dead person is harvested, animated, and put “back to work”, as it were. All to generate engagement, content, and revenue.
Although the term “spectral labour” surely also carries weight in reference to the companies that profit from digital remains. The straightforward exchange of labour from an employee who is rewarded with a paycheck is now outdated. Corporations know that technology can offer most, if not all, of the value proposition for services. Work as a concept is malleable in the age of AI, and there will be many offshoots of spectral labour as this landscape evolves.
Researchers have already modelled the trajectory [8]. Deadbots, which function as grief tools, already exist, with premium subscription tiers. The advertisements will come next [9]. Companies like Meta and Google have already found great success with a business plan based mainly on third-party sellers, and why stop now? In this future, the dead are still “users” who manufacture interactions, sell products [10] and draw other users — perhaps dead as well — into the revenue model.
Because of all this, in recent years, there has been much discussion about the “right to be left dead.” California has led the way on this front. Last year, two bills became effective in the state which prohibit the reconstruction of deceased entertainers in the form of AI without the consent of their estate. Ah, so, only for performers. The forces of necropolitics continue without any federal protection of digital replicas for commercial use of other kinds.
The NO FAKES Act was introduced in Congress last year, but has yet to see any momentum. Of course, the rest of the world is less anarchic. Unlike the U.S., the European Patent Office has a morality clause, which it has utilised liberally to prevent certain inventions from being released to the public without reflective thought about their impacts. China has passed legislation requiring consent for AI to mimic one’s identity, and France has had postmortem digital rights for a decade [11].
The denial of death
In his most recent book on necropolitics, Mbembe wrote that “Nearly everywhere the political order is re-constituting itself as a form of organisation for death.”[12] He mentions borders as an example. Political leaders, with their maps sprawled before them, are tracing in black marker the lines that demarcate nation-states from one another. Borders are thick barriers at the moment, rather than thin transitions. They are scenes of militarised control where many risk their lives.
As it happens, borders are a common analogy made by those with terminal illnesses to describe the stroll towards oblivion. Tech oligarchs do not believe in this border. Peter Thiel, the first outside investor of Facebook, does not believe [13] in “the inevitability of the death of every individual.” He plans to have his brain frozen in liquid nitrogen as an immortal body [14]. Mark Zuckerberg has also reshuffled his philanthropy donations to focus almost exclusively on extending life. I could go on about Musk’s and others’ desires, but I won’t.
Those who wield influence over others are, in a sense, world-creators. State border crossings and the digital afterlife are both commanded by people with enforceable power over the disenfranchised. It is no coincidence that Meta’s patent is assigned to the division of the firm known as Reality Labs. Simulated environments and the bots within are now just as much part of the material world as trains and livestock. The definition of what is real is inseparable from what can be monetised. To the technocrats, we are a kind of digital sediment, like a lump of radium, and our half-lives begin once our biological body perishes. Our profitable value burns long after our demise. Dividends can be withdrawn ad infinitum.
Meta’s patent and the desire for immortality among tech moguls are the same thing: sovereignty expressed as control over the threshold between life and death. According to the necropolitical realities of history, nothing that emerges from this fraught threshold will be distributed evenly. And in this landscape, technology beckons us closer and frames the “living dead” as a condition to be desired.
[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US12513102B2
[2] Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Duke [2] University Press, 2019)
[3] Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (Penguin Books, 2005)
[4] Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics.
[5] https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-09-10/racial-covenants-los-angeles-pioneered
[6] https://moronicinferno.substack.com/p/the-pleasures-of-virtual-immortality
[7] https://www.npr.org/2025/05/07/g-s1-64640/ai-impact-statement-murder-victim
[8] https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/call-for-safeguards-to-prevent-unwanted-hauntings-by-ai-chatbotsof-dead-loved-ones
[9] https://www.npr.org/2025/08/26/nx-s1-5508355/ai-dead-people-chatbots-videos-parkland-court
[10] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GR3JzxlcKBs&t=34s
[11] https://www.cnil.fr/sites/default/files/2025-11/cnil_10th_ip_report.pdf
[12] Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics.
[13] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/
[14] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/11/podcasts/interesting-times-a-mind-bending-conversation-with-peter-thiel.html?showTranscript=1
Jonathan Stein is a writer in a world that barely reads. This particular strain of masochism has yet to be identified. His work (non-coincidentally) focuses on the elements of life which are threatened to be eclipsed by a mechanical and turgid future. The intersection of AI, philosophy, and culture is the modern home for these concerns, which he writes about at The Moronic Inferno.
