How DeathTech is Redefining Remembrance
Exploring the Post-Pandemic Boom of This Billion-dollar Industry
Death is a tough topic to talk about for most of us. The thought of having to leave our world of emotional and materialistic belongings and transition towards nonexistence is incomprehensible. So we avoid thinking or talking about it.
In 2018, the Time Magazine reported1 that by 2070 the dead will outnumber the living on Facebook based on a research paper published2 that year. It was later estimated in 2022 that there were about 30 million dead users on Facebook. Many of them are memorialized users, which means their online life has been digitally frozen facebook-forever.
Our digital footprint is infinite at this point. We can only clean up that clutter to an extent. Our personal thoughts and confidential information has propagated through servers around the world for at least a century by now.
This ocean of digitized data that we continue to accumulate has a legal term - Digital Estate. For most of us in the 21st century this is really the legacy we are leaving behind. Who will take care of our digital legacy?
Meanwhile, death-care has become a lucrative industry where the demand just won’t dry up. In the wake of a pandemic that resulted in an unprecedented loss of lives, many visionary entrepreneurs saw an uptick in demand in death-care services. This paved a new path for more DeathTech startups to emerge.
