You Might Not Know I'm Dead for a Year

A few days ago I wrote about how the internet doesn't know when something dies. I am writing this pretty much right after that, with some time to get all the facts right. To reacp: The forest does. The internet doesn't. Cool. Very mystical. Are tress thenew stars? I couldn't get over the me part. You will have to go read Wednesday's post if you want the details. The TLDR is what happens to MY stuff when I die? My accounts. My messages. My dumb little corner of the internet that I've been filling with words and photos and opinions for fifteen years. Does it just... sit there? Forever? Sending birthday reminders to people I haven't talked to in a decade while my body is in the ground? Sending friend requests to people from highschool I have never talked to?

The answer is yes. That is exactly what happens.

And it's already happening to people I can see. Ozzy Osbourne died in July 2025. His Twitter account... excuse me.. his X account... posted a photo of a bird on April 18th, 2026. Nine months after the man died. I know - because I watched the final concert and posted about his death 2 days later. The death announcement is pinned at the top of his profile, and underneath it? New content. Posted by who? Sharon? A social media manager? An AI? I don't know. Nobody knows. The account has 9,000 posts and it's still going. The man is dead and his digital self is posting bird photos. But not even in a good - legacy - or "things I didn't say" kind of library of unsent posts way. The creepy way where it is someone wearing his profile and using his platform to BE him. Awful. If you didn't know he died - which some people genuinely don't because the internet is a firehose - you'd have no idea. His account looks alive. The algorithm treats it as alive. The platform has no mechanism to treat it any differently. Someone has literally just took over his online life.

Then there's Michael Jackson. And this one is a whole different level of iick. Jackson died in 2009 with negative $500 million in debt. Half a billion dollars in the hole. Sixteen years later his estate is worth somewhere between $2 billion and $3.5 billion depending on who you ask. Three and a half BILLION. The biopic that just came out, Michael, opened at $215 million globally in its first weekend. His catalog sold to Sony for $600 million. His estate earned $105 million last year alone. Forbes has him as the highest paid dead celebrity. "When it comes to estate earnings, it's MJ, then an enormous canyon, then everybody else." That's an actual quote from an estate lawyer.

So the man went from millions in debt to billions in revenue. All after he died. All using his name, his image, his music, his likeness. None of it with his input. None of it with his consent beyond whatever contracts existed before he stopped existing. His identity became the most profitable asset his estate owns and he has had exactly zero say in how it's been used for sixteen years. This goes way beyond any MJ impersonators. They don't even need to know how to moonwalk.

I don't want that. I don't think anyone wants that. Except those making money. But in the real world, we call that unethical and downright corrupt. But most people also don't have a plan for what happens to their digital self after they die because most people don't think about it until it's too late to think about anything. I know I don't. And the platforms sure as hell don't help. Facebook has a memorialization setting. Google has an Inactive Account Manager. Apple lets you designate a Legacy Contact. All of which require you to set them up in advance, which approximately nobody does, and all of which still leave your data sitting on someone else's server indefinitely. Because why would you? 2 options. 1 - you are a famous person and you set all this up - and they just ignore it to tap into your fortune. 2 - why would you? Nothing is happening to the data - why set up a 'clean up' for no reason. It can just sit there in the pile afterwards.

So I went looking. What's actually out there for people who want to control what happens to their words after they're gone. Not their money. Not their property. Their words. The stuff they said. The stuff they meant. The stuff they never got around to saying.

There are more of these apps than I expected. SafeBeyond. MyWishes. ForKeeps. My Heartspace. Dead Social. Most of them work the same way. You write messages. You schedule them. You assign a "trusted contact" or a "guardian angel" (actual term one of them uses... guardian angel... I can't). When you die, the trusted contact confirms your death and the messages get released. Some let you schedule them for specific dates, birthdays and anniversaries and graduations. Some charge per message. One charges 2.99 euros PER MESSAGE. Another one closed entirely. Afterwords. Life. Just... shut down. All that stuff gone anyways. Your posthumous messages - that is what dead people messages are called - hosted by a company that itself died. Someone paid for it while alive - and the dead still get stiffed.. HA! Sorrs - no disrespect to the dead - I couldn't resist. The irony is almost too perfect to be infuriating.

Here's my problem with most of these. They treat death like a scheduling problem. Like the main thing you need after you die is a really good calendar. Prepopulated with a bunch of stuff that you hope is evergreen. Send this on their birthday. Send that on the anniversary. Release this video at graduation. It's event-based. It's planned. And there's nothing wrong with that if that's what you need... but it feels like the digital version of writing letters and putting them in a safety deposit box. Which people have been doing for centuries. You're just doing it on an app now and paying per message for the privilege. Skip the shutdown, just write a letter.

What none of them do, at least not the ones I found, is solve the Ozzy problem. The problem of your account continuing to exist and post without you. The problem of your digital identity being a puppet that anyone with the password can operate. The problem of nobody knowing whether the person behind the screen is still the person. Or any person. The scheduled messages are nice. But they don't address the problem underneath, which is the same brain hangup I keep writing about, the one that doesn't know when someone leaves and doesn't care. Even opposedely - what if Ozzy or MJ DID want their socials to die when they were gone. Nothing is forcing those wishes on the internet. The internet is forever has never felt so daunting and spooky.

There is one that felt different. And yes it's the same one I've been writing about for a few weeks now, which either means I'm biased or it means there's a reason I keep coming back to it. Deth-x doesn't schedule messages for birthdays. It doesn't charge per message. It doesn't have guardian angels. What it does is let you write something raw, right now, when the feeling is there. After you die. Not on a schedule. Not as an event. As a release. Everything you wrote, all at once, in your voice, the way you actually are when nobody is performing. And the fact that it also goes public through your social media means your digital self doesn't just keep going like Ozzy's weird bird photos. Your digital self says something true. One last time. In your actual words. And then it's done. It finalizes your online presense. There is no pretending that doesn't exist... especially when it says something like "Fire my Agent." - instead of letting him run your estate for the next two decades.

That distinction matters to me. The difference between a scheduled message and a released one. The scheduled message is you planning from the grave. The released one is you being honest while you're alive and trusting that honesty to land after you're not, but with a witness: The entire world. Not that slinky agent with something to gain. That is a self-serving bias - it is why so many lies exist... I have to stop writing blogs within blogs.

I don't want my account posting bird emojis nine months after I'm gone. I don't want an estate turning my name into a revenue stream. I don't want my data sitting in a server farm collecting dust and billing my credit card. I want to say the things I mean while I'm here, knowing that someday they'll reach the people they were meant for. And I want the internet to know I'm gone when I'm gone. Not keep pretending I'm still scrolling; or having my account just sitting there - getting auctioned off to the highest bidder.

We're not there yet. If you have been keeping up this week - no pressure if you had a mothers day like mine - you will alreeady understand that the internet post-life is just a big data center slash dumpster fire. The internet isn't built to clean up footprints of the dead. But at least someone is naming the gap. I will continue to call out skin walkers using peoples accounts long after they are gone. Not sure it will be enough. But it exists on the internet now. For today, that is enough. If this resonates with you - go unfollow that dead account - let it rest in peace.