Avatars

Even now, these technologies aren’t so far-fetched. We already maintain the Facebook accounts of our deceased loved ones, as do we rekindle old relationships by checking in with the online presence of friends and exes with whom we no longer speak. In part, we build our own online presence for exactly this purpose. It’s no longer necessary to trust the unreliable memories of our loved ones to keep us alive in their minds. Every time we upload a photograph to Instagram or allow our phone to record our location, we are contributing to our online afterlife; each post we make to Facebook breathes a new sigh of life into the golems we’ve made of the phones in our pockets.

They are our guardians against total destruction, our guarantee against endings—if only we can be sure to arrange the right combination of pictures, if only we can be careful to give a true name to the experiences we’ve recorded.

The impulse to treasure up our spirit in a body outside our own has always been with us. It’s the urge behind writing books, behind creating art. It’s also the urge behind making golems. Sometimes we choose bodies of clay; other times, we choose bodies of paper. Now, increasingly, we choose the bodies of our phones and computers, and already, like the others, those avatars have gained a power of their own: changing us, making us more reliant, absconding with our memories, replacing us in the minds of our loved ones.

Louisa Hall grew up in Philadelphia. She holds a PhD in literature from the University of Texas at Austin, where she currently teaches literature and creative writing. She is the author of the novels Speak and The Carriage House, and her poems have been published in the New Republic, Southwest Review, Ellipsis, and other journals.