Still Spoken

In this unmissable episode of Still Spoken, Elaine Kasket talks with Catherine Mayer, who was married to Andy Gill - of the English post-punk band Gang of Four - until his death. She was close friends with the late Michael Hutchence (INXS) and Paula Yates.

Catherine and the author of All the Ghosts in the Machine  discuss the complexity of the digital legacy Andy left behind, as well as the perils of digital legacy when a public figure dies - issues we rarely consider but that are increasingly important in modern loss.

Catherine Mayer is a writer, activist, speaker and the co-founder and President of the Women's Equality Party. She co-founded the Primadonna Festival.

Catherine co-authored Good Grief: Embracing Life at a Time of Death with Anne Mayer-Bird. She wrote about losing Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates in The Observer in 2017, here.

Catherine Mayer and Elaine Kasket previously appeared together in 2022 on this podcast from the ICAEW about death and digital assets.

The New York Times article about online trolling of the Covid dead, written by Dan Levin, can be found here.

The 'big biography' Catherine refers to in the podcast is Charles: The Heart of a King (Penguin).

Images of Catherine Mayer and Andy Gill within the chapters of this episode, and on any promotion for or video versions of this episode, are used with the permission of Catherine Mayer.

I do this podcast with no help from anyone other than my guests. If you want a simple start to your own podcast, you can do what I did: get a great podcasting platform (see the link for mine below) and easily add music and sound effects with an affordable subscription to Epidemic Sound.

Music and sound effects in this episode:

Lucky Charm by Mimi Elesen, sourced on Epidemic Sound

Permission granted to Still Spoken by Catherine Mayer/Republic of Music/BMG Rights Management: The Dying Rays (2020), on This Heaven Gives Me Migraine EP, (c) Gill Music (2020)

Lyrics:

Stop the seconds flow
Oh, I'm too late
I'm back where I began at the start
I'm caught in the wake
I'll have my due and drag the rock up the hill
Nothing to lose that's not been lost
I wish the sun anchored still
What I wanted disappears in the haze
A speck of dust held forever in the dying rays
Breath on the mirror; nothing inside
The horizon's bare, but in the night, I miss the pilot's light
Control and power, empires were built in our minds
But it will all go up in a blaze; only dust in the dying rays

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Usually, Still Spoken is about how your data lives on through technology after you die. But how do you live in technology before you're able to form your own digital footprint, perhaps before you're even born?

When I was writing one of the final chapters All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data, I ended up in an unexpected place: thinking about how I'd created a digital reflection for my own child that would eventually form part of her digital legacy. These days, there's data generated, mined, and monetised about us from digital gestation to digital afterlife and everywhere in between. What are some of the ways that happens?

So in this episode we're looking the other end of identity, and there's no one better to do that with than Tama Leaver, a Professor of Internet Studies at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia; the President of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR); a regular media commentator; and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child.

This episode is a preview of host Elaine Kasket's upcoming book, provisionally titled This is Your Life on Tech (2023)- a technopsychosocial exploration of the human life span, looking at how technology is the third force in almost all the relationships we have across our lifetimes.

Written and produced by Elaine Kasket; recorded in April 2021. I do this podcast ALL BY MYSELF with no production team, editors, or help from anyone other than my wonderful guests. If you want a simple, easy start to your own podcast, you can do what I did: get a great podcasting platform (see the link for mine below) and easily add music and sound effects with an affordable subscription to Epidemic Sound.

All music and any sound effects in this episode were from Epidemic Sound:

Royal Lullaby (All in the Family)
Snooper's Paradise (Jon Bjõrk)
Computer Wiz (Marten Moses)

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Jeffrey Sconce is Professor in the Screen Cultures program and a Guggenheim Fellow for 2020-2021. Back in 2000, he published Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, which looked at how electronic media and the occult have always been intertwined, right back to the telegraph. He's the guest on this episode of Still Spoken, a wide-ranging chat about horror films, Freud, Spiritualists and seances, immortalists of Silicon Valley, posthumous electronic revenge, and whether you can expect your dog (not all dogs, just your favourite dog) to greet you in heaven. 

As always, the interviewer is Elaine Kasket, author of All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data; the interview took place in 2021. Jeffrey Sconce's more recent book is The Technical Delusion: Electronics, Power, Insanity (2019).

This podcast written and produced by Elaine Kasket. I do this ALL BY MYSELF with no production team, editors, or help from anyone other than my wonderful guests.

If you want a simple start to your own podcast, you can do what I did: get an accessible, easy  podcasting platform (see the link for mine below) and add music and sound effects with an affordable subscription to Epidemic Sound.

Music and sound effects in this episode:

All music used under license from Epidemic Sound. In order of play:

Synthesis Malfunction (Oh The City)
Confused Mind (Stationary Sign)
Snooper's Paradise (Jon Björk)
Dingle Dangle (Jerry Lacey)

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As Halloween approaches, Forbes Magazine posts its roster of that year's top-earning dead celebrities. That's the jumping-off point for this discussion, which will probably teach you a few new phrases; cultural reincarnation, parasocial relationships, and grief policing.

Elaine Kasket, author of All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data, speaks with sociologist Professor Carla Sofka, of Siena College, New York. Carla has studied death and the digital almost since the birth of the Internet, so it's an honour to have her on the episode.

Par for the course with Still Spoken, we’ll be considering questions that were unimaginable a few decades ago. Since nearly everyone is confronting dilemmas with death online these days, after listening you might want to download Carla’s ‘Netiquette’ for dealing with death, tragedy and grief online. You can find that here.  She's also written Dying, Death and Grief in an Online Universe (2012).

As with all episodes of Still Spoken, this episode addresses death, loss, and grief, to include descriptions of difficult experiences bereaved people have had online. Please look after yourself while you're listening, and reach out to professionals, friends or family for support if you need to.

Written and produced by me, Elaine Kasket. I do this podcast ALL BY MYSELF with no production team, editors, or help from anyone other than my wonderful guests. If you want a simple start to your own podcast, you can do what I did: get an accessible, easy  podcasting platform (see the link for mine below) and add music and sound effects with an affordable subscription to Epidemic Sound.

All music used under license from Epidemic Sound. In order of play:
Creepy Crawly (Arthur Benson)
Gas$ Money, Instrumental Version (Xavy Rusan)
Granular (Cobby Costa)
Liquid (Cobby Costa)
Unfriendly Users (Marten Moses)

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In February 2021, a post on Twitter by a Concordia University student in Canada went viral. Aaron Ansuini had emailed his lecturer a question. He didn't get an answer, for a very good reason.

During the global Covid-19 pandemic, every lecturer I know is pre-recording lectures, or capturing them live. What happens to those recordings? Could a university actually keep on using those lectures after the lecturer leaves - or really leaves? And if so, who benefits?

Elaine Kasket, author of All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data, speaks with sociologist Carla Sofka, philosopher Patrick Stokes, and privacy lawyer Albert Gidari about questions we could never have asked 20 years ago, such as: What are the pros and cons of being educated by the dead?

Written and produced by me, Elaine Kasket. I do this podcast ALL BY MYSELF with no production team, editors, or help from anyone other than my wonderful guests. If you want a simple start to your own podcast, you can do what I did: get an accessible, easy  podcasting platform (see the link for mine below) and add music and sound effects with an affordable subscription to Epidemic Sound.

All music used under license from Epidemic Sound.  In order of play:
Stay Whimsical (Arthur Benson)
Sneaky Sam (Jerry Lacey)
Sad Clowns (Alexandra Woodward)
Confused Mind (Stationary Sign)
It’s Not That Serious (Arthur Benson)
Gas$ Money, Instrumental Version (Xavy Rusan)
Carmen, Act II: No 14 Couplets (Traditional)
The King of Thieves (Christoffer Moe Ditlevsen)

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Do the dead live forever on social media? If so, how might the social media companies exploit their memories - AND the data of the living? The citizens of the modern age have handed over responsibility for the dead - and culture, and history - to the powers of social media and the market. Why does that matter?

Still Spoken explores how the dead live on: through us, through our stories, and through technology. In this episode, Elaine Kasket, author of All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data, has a fascinating conversation with Carl Ohman. Carl is a recent PhD graduate from the Oxford Internet Institute, the 2020 recipient of the Scotus Early Career Researcher award for Arts and Humanities. He's predicted the tipping point when Facebook becomes a digital cemetery - with more dead profiles than live ones - and more recently he's raised alarms about the dire consequences if Facebook fails.

Carl and Elaine talk economics, equality, politics, history and technology, and how it all links to the digital dead.

Host Elaine Kasket is a psychologist, storyteller, and author based in London. She's an expert in bereavement and in death & the digital. Her latest book is All the Ghosts in the Machine.

Produced by me, Elaine Kasket. I do this podcast ALL BY MYSELF with no production team, editors, or help from anyone other than my wonderful guests. If you want a simple, easy start to your own podcast, you can do what I did: get a great podcasting platform (see the link for mine below) and easily add music and sound effects with an affordable subscription to Epidemic Sound.

Music and sound effects all purchased under license from Epidemic Sound:

Savannah Nights - Zauana
Computer Wiz - Marten Moses
Ga$ Money - Xavy Rusan
Erudition - Ambre Jaune
My Machines - Real Heroes
Rather Erratic - Benjamin Rice

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In They Both Die at the End, Adam Silvera writes that 'stories can make someone immortal as long as someone else is willing to listen.'

Annie died in 2019, but to London audiences of The Moth, she feels as alive as ever thanks to her grandson, the storyteller Scott Young. His tale about Annie and an ill-advised engagement party took him to London's July 2019 GrandSLAM, a competition for some of the best storytellers around.

In this episode of Still Spoken - a podcast exploring the way the dead live on through us, through our stories, and through technology - Elaine Kasket and Scott co-create a kind of auditory memory box of Annie, full of complexity, pain, love, humour, and redemption.

Host Elaine Kasket is a psychologist, storyteller, and author based in London. She's an expert in bereavement and in death & the digital. Her latest book is All the Ghosts in the Machine.

Produced by me, Elaine Kasket. I do this podcast ALL BY MYSELF with no production team, editors, or help from anyone other than my wonderful guests. If you want a simple, easy start to your own podcast, you can do what I did: get a great podcasting platform (see the link for mine below) and easily add music and sound effects with an affordable subscription to Epidemic Sound.

Music:
Under a Cloud - Across the Great Valley (Epidemic Sound)
Le Chef - Marc Taboel (Epidemic Sound)
Audio 191283019 © Matteo Curcio | Dreamstime.com
Playing by Hollywood's Rules - Golden Age Radio (Epidemic Sound)
O Christmas Tree (Jazz Version) - The Evergreen Trio (Epidemic Sound)
Amazing Grace - Edward Hall (Epidemic Sound)
Sneaky Sam - Jerry Lacey (Epidemic Sound)
Without Words - Lalo Brickman (Epidemic Sound)
Between the Cracks - Lalo Brickman (Epidemic Sound)
Taxi - Lalo Brickman (Epidemic Sound)
An Ode to All Mothers - Howard Harper-Barnes (Epidemic Sound)

All additional sound effects from Epidemic Sound.

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Just in time for Halloween, the news hit that Kanye West gifted his wife a hologram of her late father as a 40th birthday surprise. Is this the best or worst present ever? And should we be treating this as a weird headline about those crazy celebrities, or as a wakeup call for us all?

Elaine Kasket, psychologist and author of All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data (2020) talks to Patrick Stokes, philosopher based at Deakin University in Australia and author of Digital Souls: A Philosophy of Online Death (2021) about the massive societal issues raised by Kim's milestone birthday gift.

More context:

Kim's tweet about 'the most thoughtful gift of a lifetime', where you can watch the hologram delivering its message

Tamara's Kneese's article on Slate about Herman Cain and the problems with tweeting after death

Produced by me, Elaine Kasket. I do this podcast ALL BY MYSELF with no production team, editors, or help from anyone other than my wonderful guests. If you want a simple, easy start to your own podcast, you can do what I did: get a great podcasting platform (see the link for mine below) and easily add music and sound effects with an affordable subscription to Epidemic Sound.

'Confidence is Key' by Arthur Benson and 'Jaded' by Blue Steel, both from Epidemic Sound

Get to know Elaine's writing on Substack and Medium.

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