Death Is Our Missing Technology

Where have all the endings gone?

We are a culture surrounded by losses we haven’t yet processed. Things that are kind of dead but we won’t let them die completely.

So much so that we’ve had to create a whole new raft of words - like ghosting, breadcrumbing, blanding, airspaces, liminal spaces, requels and nostalgia bait - to hold what we refuse to bury.

I’ve probably bought Sasha Sagan’s book For Small Creatures Such As We at least 20 times in my life for other people. It deals with the concept of endings and death rituals in a way that makes sense of the world and human behavior.

She tells us, “We pretend these rituals are for our dead, but they are for the living, for us.”

Her book has stayed with me because, as a digital native, I could see how unequipped we are to properly, decidedly mark the time something ends or dies. It is so critical to mark that moment. The rhythm of life demands it.

We cannot make new things when our spaces are cluttered with infinite half-dead brands, platforms, trends, jokes, technologies, ideas and memories that steal endless little fragments of our attention.

We’re weighed down by purgatorial ghosts both in the digital world and the physical one. And now with AI, the ghosts are multiplying. Synthetic content floods Pinterest and Twitter, trained on old material and endlessly recombined with what came before. Our deceased loved ones are reanimated via AI texting agents and holograms. The dead don’t die. They just loop and echo, or even worse, become a template for something else.

That’s making it harder to imagine and create. When nothing is allowed to end, nothing is allowed to transform.

There are a lot of reasons floating out there as to why so much of culture is effectively undead. Some say it’s the algorithm. Others say its mass accessibility and the death of subcultures. Historians like Will Durant might have said, at least for the US, it’s a clear sign of an empire in decline. All of them are probably right.

But I also know that if all of our physical and digital ghosts were properly laid to rest and we were left with only the living artifacts of our world, we would almost certainly be reborn.

This is a time of zombie-like memories and generative content, and the most radical act right now might be learning how to let things die.

And when I say die, what I really mean is letting them permanently end. Intentionally and deliberately.

(Un)Dead Internet

The dead internet theory posits that the majority of content on the internet has been fake for a long time. If that sounds hyperbolic, try carefully scrolling through Pinterest or Twitter. It might not seem so crazy after you see how hard it is to find a real image or voice.

The viral emotional support kangaroo, a video that perfectly blends highly charged emotions with low-res patina, is a good symbol of what’s haunting us. It might be better to call it the undead internet theory because what characterizes all of this AI content isn’t that it’s lifeless. It’s the pervading sense that something artificial is animating things that shouldn’t be alive.

In 2021, Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote for the Atlantic that the dead internet theory is “patently ridiculous” but also that “dead-internet people kind of have a point,” as evidenced by the co-opted i hate texting tweet trend of the time. The same ideas and trends are regurgitated over and over, and it's increasingly hard to find where something originated because we all keep blatantly stealing content from each other for engagement. We started copying ourselves way before AI started copying us. This was destined to happen.

Drew Austin perfectly describes how and why nothing ends:

“Closure is a thing of the past. One of the emergent qualities of the digital culture millennials shaped is that nothing ends any more. Wars and pandemics drag on; aging bands keep touring in a perpetual state of reunion rather than breaking up; politicians circle the drain into their eighties and nineties; bygone aesthetics and styles are forgotten and rediscovered in shorter and shorter cycles. We seem unable to fully metabolize experiences and move on, for better or worse; we suffer from cultural acid reflux.”

You may call some of it simple nostalgia, but nostalgia’s real risk is that we take a quirk of the human brain and then platform it.

A 2022 replication of a long-standing study on musical nostalgia found that listeners’ preferences for new music consistently peak at around 17 years old. Our musical tastes are shaped most deeply at that age and get locked in on social. We live in a prison of our own making, and the soundtrack keeps us stuck in mid- to late-adolescence.

We have entire unicorn companies that have been zombified, functionally dead but still incorporated. Beyond Meat, once valued at over $10B+ is now barely a mid-sized company at about $287 million.

WeWork ($47B → $750M), Vice Media ($5.7B → $350M), and Bird ($3.8B → $100M) are others on the list. All of them overvalued during their hypecycles, but I bet their PR and investor decks will tell you they’re still culturally relevant. We’ll probably never have a formal tombstone for these companies.

Myspace isn’t dead but it’s not alive either. Clubhouse’s carcass continues to twitch. Tumblr is making a comeback, but is it? Or is that headline itself also just another sleepwalking piece of content?

Of the 1.1 billion websites that are on the internet right now, only about 17% are actually active. On Facebook, deceased people with ongoing profiles are expected to outnumber the living by 2070. If you count Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to unleash an army of undead AI personas, that tipping point could happen even sooner.

In the digital world, we fail to bury our deceased, and the seemingly living aren’t really alive.

I’ve been tempted to believe that perhaps all of this will force people to live more in the real world. It’s reasonable (blindly optimistic?) to imagine that a lonely, empty, undead internet would gently push people into the physical and face-to-face realm.

But we have some interesting challenges there, too.

Empty Funerals

I’ve witnessed the passing of a loved one and it’s been my experience that without spiritual or ritual context, death does not present its own innate magic. Despite how badly you need that magic to exist when you stand at their bedside, it does not miraculously appear. You must create it. You have to give the messy, fleshy, corporeality of death your own meaning, so that they can die and you can move on.

The sandwich generation of millennials needs this meaning more than anyone else right now, because the immense stress of raising children while transitioning parents is a lot harder to bear when it doesn’t ladder up to some greater purpose or beauty. Without it, there is no finality.

What’s puzzling is that we’re also abandoning our traditional end of life rituals at the same time. “Direct cremation”, where the body is cremated with no funeral ceremony or mourners present has soared. About 41% of all US funeral consumers in 2021 chose direct cremation with no formal service. Less than half of people want a funeral when they die, and it’s not always because they have alternative plans like a virtual wake or a living funeral.

But I don’t see any deathtech companies successfully building the kinds of rituals we need at scale. There are about 1,000 deathtech startups out there right now, and while many of them are doing a great job of removing the administrative hell of managing a dying parent’s estate, there aren’t any standouts in the “marking the ending” category.

The best we get are AIs that let us text dead relatives or play with their holograms, which are quite the opposite of that.

It’s hard to overstate the fact that we’re not letting our family members properly die. We’re not saying goodbye at the funeral and we’re not saying goodbye to their digitized afterlives.

What is it going to feel like in 5 years when you can easily text your dead grandparents… but you don’t? It’ll be like ghosting a ghost.

At this point, ghosting could be our new national pastime. We ghost (and are ghosted by) both the deceased and the living. Three out of four people have been ghosted by romantic partners. We’re ghosted by friends from college, children who’ve gone no-contact, recruiters that stopped returning emails, neighbors that moved away (did you know the average person moves at least 11 times in their life?) or… dead relatives.

These unresolved endings, or “open loops” really tax the brain. One study found that lacking closure leads to greater regret, more intense emotion, and more frequent, intrusive replays of the situation in our minds. When someone disappears without closure, our minds keep cycling through the what-ifs and it prolongs the pain. You would think we’d know better than to forego the endings that life offers up to us. We need them so badly.

Our avoidance of difficult endings, whether it’s ghosting instead of honest goodbyes, skipping funerals, or hyper-nostalgia, might spare short-term discomfort, but the research suggests it creates identity confusion in the long run.

That’s because we build identity through endings and transitions, finishing one chapter to begin another. But in a culture without marked endings, people drift through infinite selves, never shedding, only layering. You’re still kind of who you were at 15, and 22, and 30 and 45.

There’s a reason why new gym memberships peak in January, why people deep clean their houses in the spring, and why midlife crises happen at 40. We make big changes at the beginning of new years, new decades, and new seasons because we cross a threshold of time. What we’ve lost with our inability to let things end is the sanctity and significance of new beginnings.

We’re leaving so much value on the table because we’ve forgotten how important death is to renewal.

And it’s critical we get used to endings right now, because everything around us is about to start dying a lot faster.

Do Not Resuscitate

Any ideas we had about work and career, ideas of community and family and identity, of creativity and authorship and building - they’re passing and something new is coming in their place, and AI has put it all on rails. But we cannot fully realize the potential of what may be if we don’t find a way to properly honor and let go of what is leaving.

Brands have long claimed to support transformation, but few ever create space for endings. If your users are stuck inside outdated perceptions of themselves, how might you help them mark the death of who they used to be? How might your product, campaign, or community offer a kind of funeral or permission to leave the past behind?

Even brands themselves need to die sometimes. Not just rebrand or pivot, but die. Acknowledge that an era is over and let the next one begin with meaning.

I hesitate to invoke the name Jaguar in a brand strategy newsletter, but they did exactly that. The marketing department caused a lot of hoopla, but they did what almost no brands do nowadays. They made it very clear that something old was dead. They’re transforming into an all-electric ultra-luxury brand and despite the turbulence, they stayed the course and their parent company posted its highest annual pre-tax profit in a decade with long waiting lists on upcoming models. They made that ending matter.

If we want to realize the full potential of what’s next - new kinds of brands, products and connection, new economies and new selves - we need to create space for those possibilities to live. And that means we have to let the old things die. Not disappear or fade, but die with intention and ceremony.

Endings can be incredibly powerful framing devices. They give us the power to define what something means before we move on. When we skip that step and refuse to mourn, we give away our right to shape the story.

Anthropologists mark the emergence of death rituals as one of the earliest signs of complex human thought. To bury the dead is to reckon with mortality and imagine something beyond the present. Our ability to ritualize endings to begin anew is what makes us the ultimate generative being. We need endings in order to be human.

In the Global North, we’re entering our summer and a time of movement. Life is stirring again. It’s a good time to make something new by burying something old. We need to become a death-literate culture that knows how to throw a real banger of a funeral, both literally and figuratively. One that understands that mourning is about the deep satisfaction of metabolizing reality.

That grief, when processed, becomes clarity. Finality, when honored, becomes power.

Death is our missing technology right now. It’s what gives form to change. Without it, we’ll continue to hoard outdated ideas of ourselves and our value systems, and confuse preservation with progress.

Endings will both free us and fuel us.

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Cannes 2025

I'll be in Cannes to present my Psychotechnology report to the Women + AI Futures delegation at Beyond The Croisette in a couple of weeks, and I'm very excited to be among such a special group of people.

I'll be talking about how to shape the future by rewriting the code underneath surface-level trends. Despite what the headlines say, the future doesn’t emerge from technology alone.

It emerges from psychotechnology: the invisible mental models, meaning systems, and narratives that determine how we perceive reality.

The sooner you stop letting every manufactured AI headline pitch you in a different direction, the sooner you can actually see the real cultural movements happening underneath. That is where the future of AI will be decided, and it's where you should be looking to figure out your bets as a leader or a brand.

Request an invite.

Or if you're around and want to meet up, let me know!

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Kids These Days

Here's what we've been consuming.

College Students Are Using ‘No Contact Orders’ to Block Each Other in Real Life (Wall Street Journal): “Over the past 10 years, however, the circumstances under which a student might request an NCO have expanded considerably. Their quiet use for other purposes—roommate disputes, ruptures between friends, relationship issues that don’t rise to the level of sexual harassment—is so secretive, traumatizing and potentially damaging that most students and administrators interviewed for this story would only speak anonymously.”

When Did People Stop Dancing At The Club? (Vox): “On the surface, the divide seems split between movers and non-shakers (with a little sprinkle of generational warfare), but it speaks to the very tenets of nightlife. The puzzling act of not dancing at a place designated for dancing is one of those mysteries that raises questions, if not calls for a full-blown investigation. Why did people stop dancing? What are they doing at the club if they’re not dancing? Who’s sitting out and who can we blame? Who’s complaining?”

We Watched Dozens of Graduation Speeches. Here’s What We Found. (New York Times): “Vice President JD Vance told U.S. Naval Academy graduates that “the era of uncontested U.S. dominance is over,” and Adm. Christopher W. Grady, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Notre Dame graduates that they were entering a world where “rival powers contest one another from the seabed to space.” Melonie D. Parker, a Google executive, spoke to Stillman College graduates about a “rapidly evolving job market” and “the transformative rise of artificial intelligence.” Jacinda Ardern, the former prime minister of New Zealand, urged students at Yale’s Class Day to remember that “we are connected” beyond national borders.”

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The work is the art. The struggle is the art. The craft is the art. The flow state of toiling and tangling with something but still not being able to help yourself from coming back to it - this is such a human need. It's not going away. We will find new struggles, we always do.

I think the brands that are building tools for the new age of creation need to keep this in mind. The artist is looking to lose themselves in the making.

Solve for inspiration and access and education, but don't eliminate the struggle.

Ask any real creator and they will know this about themselves. Art is about wrestling something from within yourself and showing it to the world. Without the fight, there's no true creative urge.

Yours,

I’m Jasmine Bina, and I’m a brand strategist and cultural futurist. If you love this newsletter and need more:

• My private strategist’s club Exposure Therapy is where the best minds and brand builders come to get better at their craft. It’s also where I drop my best original research.

• My brand strategy agency Concept Bureau works with some of the most powerful cultural brands in the world today.

• My LinkedIn where I post my ideas almost every day, before they turn into reports or articles. I invite you to connect with me. I’d love to meet you!