The Dividuality and Modularity of Digital Immortality: The Concept of Persons in the Age of New Media in Literary Imaginaries

초록

With the advent of the electronically networked digital media age, humanity’s long-held dream of shedding the mortal coil to achieve immortality has never felt as feasible as it does now. While the drive to achieve a vicarious sublimation of the liberal subject model as that which aspires to such state fuels myriad endeavors in the tech-sector, the outcomes so far demonstrate that there remains much to be desired—not only in terms of their functional viability but also ethical integrity. The wondrous prospect of persevering beyond the demise of one’s material fetters abounds in our current mediascape, with narratives about digitized humans or humanized artificial intelligence proliferating more than ever. Such portrayals of digital immortality, however, must contend with the risk of rendering the human-machine analogy literal, alienating the very value that it sets out to advocate by instrumentalizing personhood in service of its preservation. Focusing on comparative readings of fictional human and nonhuman entities that problematize the prospect of reducing the sovereignty of personhood to bodies of reproducible information, with specific focus on Ancillary Justice as an exemplar of the second variety in the two dominant strains of representations that respectively center on human and nonhuman provenance of personhood, this essay investigates the discontents of digital immortality to illuminate its an ontological paradox.

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