"Davide Sisto, a philosopher and thanatologist at the University of Turin, has written a fascinating book on death and the internet, now translated into English by Bonnie Mcclellan-Broussard as Online Afterlives: Immortality, Memory, and Grief in Digital Culture."
Houman Barekat, The Los Angeles Review of Books

“An eye-opening study of an underexamined aspect of the internet age.”
Publishers Weekly

“Online Afterlives is a well-organized work, packed with insights.”
Prestigious scientific magazine “Nature”

«A brilliant essay, packed with insights and information on how the web compels us to rethink our relationship with the end that awaits us all.»
Tommaso Pincio, Il Venerdì di Repubblica

«Can the web help supersede a cultural model that envisages the repression of death from the social world? If so, at what price and with what risks? Drawing with equal scrupulousness on Derrida and Black Mirror, on Walter Benjamin and Simon Reynolds, Sisto challenges the bottleneck of dystopia and seeks the answers to these questions without prejudice […] A meticulous, non-dogmatic read.»
Robinson, La Repubblica

«In recent times, the so-called fourth revolution – the technological revolution that thinks it can make us live forever with the use of machines – has ended up returning death into public discourse. Here Sisto, a research fellow at the University of Turin and lecturer on the Death Studies & the End of Life specialisation course in Padua, makes a rigorous scientific analysis of how technology is bringing death back into our lives.»
La Lettura, Corriere della Sera

«Technological innovations, smidgeons of anthropology, jurisprudence, philosophy – written in highly enjoyable prose, Davide Sisto’s essay triggers many uncomfortable but necessary questions. At the centre of the book, ethics and the acceptance of human narrow-mindedness.»
Critica Letteraria

«A book that is, at once, engaging and profound.»
Federico Vercellone, La Stampa

«Philosopher Davide Sisto has produced a vademecum for anyone keen to approach Death Studies and the way they have been revolutionised by new technologies with a critical eye. Eschewing all snobbery, Sisto puts everything from highbrow philosophy to that of TV serials on the same plane.»
Il Tascabile

«Digital technologies are transforming our relationship with memory and grief. In the words of the philosopher Davide Sisto, we are trying to find the “natural” role of death.»
Mind

«It’s something of a leap from the romanticism of Friedrich von Schelling to the commemorative profiles on social networks. Davide Sisto, a Turin-born philosopher specialising in thanatology, managed it about four years ago.»
La Repubblica

★Online Afterlives has been sold in German, worldwide English and Spanish!
★Remember Me has been sold in Finnish and worldwide English!
★Digital porcupineshas been sold in Worldwide Spanish!
★Remember Me won the 2020 Napoli Prize!
★English language rights to Online Afterlives have been licensed to MIT University Press,and was among the best books in translation of the Fall 2020 for The New York Times!
★Does the future of humanity lie in the Digital Life Program or the Wandering Earth Program? The movie "The Wandering Earth 2" has given its answer to this question, what will your answer be as an audience member? The movie explains in detail what the Wandering Earth Project is, but to answer this question, you need to understand what Digital Life is. David Sisto's work will explain the existence of digital life in our real world and its impact on humanity!
★Highly recommended by many media in Italy and abroad, such as Publishers Weekly, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Corriere della Sera, Il Sole 24 Ore, La Repubblica, etc.
The "Digital Life Trilogy" utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to explore the meaning of digital life (including death).
★English sample available.

The series includes 3 titles:
Online Afterlives. Immortality, Memory, and Grief in Digital Culture
Remember Me. The digital revolution between memory and oblivion
Digital porcupines. Being Embodied Through Screens

Facebook is the biggest cemetery in the world. How many of your friends on the social network are not around anymore? How did the perception of death change with the arrival of the digital world?

For a long time now, at least since modernity abruptly entered our lives, death has been forcefully pushed aside into an invisible corner. Our society hides death from sight, relegates it to the private sphere, in the privacy of darkened rooms, impossible to see from the outside. Death must not be exposed, almost as if it was a human weakness to hide and not an ineluctable fact for everyone. As if it was something to be ashamed of. This invisible death is particularly prominent in the western world, where the subject is almost taboo, where the mourning process has been «medicalized» and labelled as a psychotic syndrome, where ultimately the awareness of our finiteness is not considered a necessary value for personal growth and self-improvement that enables a more human social bond; which is how it should be. Death, that for the ancient Greek culture was considered part of life, is not welcome in our conversations.

Recently, however, the digital revolution has had an unexpected effect on this. Not only it has revolutionised the way we communicate, radically changed our social structure and modified the relationship between man and work in ways that are still not clear: all of a sudden the impalpable digital sphere has also made death visible – and somehow acceptable.

The first virtual cemetery (World Wide Cemetery) is from 1995, and its creator envisioned it as a place where the memory of the departed could live forever. Since then, however, the Internet has seen a vast array of solutions becoming available (mostly at a cost), all aiming to maintain the memory of your loved ones (or your own) in the most technologically advanced ways; even with the aide of artificial intelligence, that is now able to analyse our personalities with increasing accuracy and therefore –for example – to send messages accurately similar to those that the departed would have written, years after his or her passing. An email from the afterlife is hard to forget.

Does all this sound a bit creepy? Sure, but behind this technology – Thanatechnology – there is clearly a forward thinking strategy, a new relationship between our society and death brought in by technological advancement. Davide Sisto researched the subject for years. His book focuses on this field – which is completely new – and has never been handled from a philosophical perspective. If the purpose of philosophy is to interpret the present – especially in times when values are shifting –, Sisto’s book is a great example of this, a starting point for thinking about the changes in the relationship between human thought and death in the digital age, the approaching of a Digital Age Education, and confronting that part of us that will remain when we will no longer be around.

Davide Sisto is a philosopher and a post-doc researcher in Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Torino. He is an expert in Thanatechnology, which is the study of death from a philosophical perspective and in relation to medicine, digital culture and the posthuman. He teaches «Death Studies & the End of life», a master’s degree at the University of Padova and at the Collegio di Milano; he also collaborates with Infine Onlus of Torino, where he is member of the scientific committee and co-head of the blog «Si può dire morte» (We may talk about death). Sisto has also researched Romantic Philosophy, with particular focus on Schelling. In addition to numerous essays on national and international journals, he published Lo specchio e il talismano. Schelling e la malinconia della natura [The mirror and the talisman. Shelling and the melancholy of nature] (2009), Narrare la morte. Dal romanticismo al post-umano [Narrating Death. From Romanticism to posthuman] (2013) and Schelling. Tra natura e malinconia [Schelling. Between nature and melancholy] (2016).