Grief Rent: Platform Afterlives and the Price of Keeping the Dead Available
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Digital afterlife services promise to preserve voices, likenesses, memories and conversational presence beyond biological death. This article introduces grief rent as an analytic concept for the recurring monetary, data and affective value extracted from mourners in exchange for continued access to a platform-enclosed representation of the dead, where withdrawal of service threatens a technologically produced second loss. Bringing research on continuing bonds and digital remains into dialogue with care theory, platform capitalism and rentier capitalism, the article develops a six-stage mechanism: capture, enclosure, animation, attachment, extraction and eviction. A documentary vignette shows how promises of enduring presence can coexist with revocable access, non-portability and changing fees. Grief rent reframes consumer vulnerability as infrastructurally produced rather than individually possessed and identifies design and governance principles for care-compatible digital afterlives. This manuscript is a preprint and has not undergone peer review.
Author: Zhu, Mila
Institution: Southeastern Oklahoma State University
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7203929782
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