The advertisement opens with a heavily pregnant woman, speaking to an older woman on her phone. It seems at first to be a video chat, but rather than just a close-up of the older woman’s face, her entire body is visible on the screen, standing against a white background. “He’s kicking like crazy,” says the pregnant woman to her phone. “Put your hand on your tummy,” says the older woman, “and hum to him. You used to love that.”
In the next scene, the pregnant woman is now a new mother, clutching with one hand her 10-month-old son to her chest, and with the other her phone. Her mother, again, is on the screen. “Mom,” she says, “will you tell Charlie that bedtime story you always used to tell me?” The old woman smilingly obliges; in a soft and loving voice, she tells the baby boy a story about a flying unicorn.
The ad continues in this fashion; Charlie grows older with each successive vignette, until by the end he is a young man, chatting to his grandmother on the screen of some mildly futuristic-looking handset. He is holding up to the screen a printout of a pregnancy scan – his own first child.
“You’d have loved this moment,” says Charlie, looking suddenly a little sad. From the screen in his hand, the old woman replies: “You can call anytime.”
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In the ad’s final moment, the chronology reverts backward, to a time before the opening scene, before the grandmother’s death, and her transfiguration into an afterlife as a wisdom-dispensing avatar on her loved one’s phones. We see the daughter filming her on her phone, rendering her mortal likeness using an app called 2wai. It will just take three minutes, she tells her. The ad closes with the tagline: “With 2wai, three minutes can last forever.”
The app, which is the entrepreneurial creation of a former child actor named Calum Worthy, is branded as “the world’s first social app for avatars”. When the ad was posted on social media last week, it was, perhaps inevitably, widely likened to an idea from the television show Black Mirror, and widely condemned as evil, depraved and dystopian.
There is, it is true, something creepily exploitative about a tech start-up trying to convince people its product will allow them to communicate with their dead loved ones. I would not be surprised, in fact, if Worthy had lifted the idea for the app directly from the Black Mirror episode in which Domhnall Gleeson dies and is “brought back” in the form of an avatar on his bereaved girlfriend’s phone. There is a long and ignoble tradition of Silicon Valley types encountering ideas in dystopian science fiction and attempting to make them a reality. The phenomenon was best expressed in a 2021 viral twitter post by Alex Blechman, a writer for The Onion:
“Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.”
Needless to say, 2wai’s product is no Torment Nexus. Despite the lavish claims of its 90-second ad spot, it is nowhere near providing a believable, or even functional, simulacrum of either a real or imagined person. The most dystopian thing about it is that it’s just another piece of pointless tech tat, likely destined within months for the vast and growing digital landfill.
But it’s also part of a strange and surprisingly long lineage of technologies whose creators have claimed they can, in one way or another, allow us to contact the dead. When I was writing To Be a Machine, my book about the technologists who, in their various ways, were trying to find solutions to the problem of human mortality, I came across a very intriguing woman named Martine Rothblatt, an extremely wealthy tech entrepreneur who founded a kind of technological religion called Terasem, predicated on a belief in future eternal life through technology, through uploading human minds to AI supercomputers and so on.
Rothblatt, an eccentric even within the deeply weird milieu of transhumanism, was also the owner of a humanoid robot called Bina48. This machine was modelled to the likeness of her own wife, Bina, and programmed with customised AI algorithms and voice recognition tech that allowed the user to chat with it. Bina48 was, for Rothblatt, intended as a sort of insurance policy against the death of her wife, a robotic AI trained on her social media posts and other digital utterances to speak and “think” like her. I found the idea a little unsettling, but also strangely moving.
The idea that technology might allow us to commune with the dead is not a new one. The advent of the camera gave rise to a mid-19th century enthusiasm for so-called “spirit photography”, whose practitioners produced cleverly double-exposed photographs they claimed depicted ghosts. The phonograph, too, seemed to present an opportunity to record ghosts; spiritualists thought they could use this new technology to record the murmuring voices of the dead, by recording the silence of empty rooms.
Thomas Edison even speculated that it might be possible, using a variation on the telephone, to speak directly with the dead. “I have been at work for some time building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this Earth to communicate with us,” he told Forbes magazine in 1920. “If this is ever accomplished it will be accomplished not by any occult, mystifying, mysterious or weird means, such as are employed by so-called mediums, but by scientific methods.”
All of these ideas were, of course, either fanciful or outright fraudulent. But the notion that a new gadget might somehow mitigate the finality of death proves persistent. The more advanced our technologies become, the more effectively they channel primordial desires, terrors, delusions. The glow of the screen in your hand brings forth dreams no less primitive than the flickering of the earliest human fires.
