The Facebook Generation Have a New Way to Die

Hey – you're going to die one day. Mangled in an industrial extractor fan. Hit with a lamp. Peacefully sleeping off a big wank. Doesn't really matter how: you are going to die. Your veins will wither in their meat. New growths pulsate in your head, neck, lungs. You are going to die. Your muscles creak and snap. Your bones render down to dust. You're dying. You are dying right now. You are going to die.

Anyway: Facebook knows this, and so is introducing a new feature to help users manage their accounts from beyond this mortal coil. As The Next Web reports, the new "Your Legacy Contact" will allow you to nominate a friend to take control of your account should your legs, arms and face get enmeshed in a wood chipper, and that person can pin a final message to your homepage, notify friends about your memorial service and update your profile to something more grave and appropriate.

It's the profile picture that's the most important one. I have a lurking feeling that I might one day be murdered – limbs deposited in bins, head at the bottom of a lake, torso fed to dogs, that sort of thing – and I worry about which photo of me the news will use as a manhunt sets out across a moor with torches and dogs to find what remains of my dick and balls. I worry it will be that one of me, spotty and youthful and with shit hair, cheering with a beer in the shower at a house party. Maybe it will be that one of me prone on the floor after I got hit in the balls with a rounders bat. Maybe it will be me dressed as a Nintendo character in an awful northern nightclub, looking as though I just realised I've shit myself. There are no decent, upstanding photos of me in existence. This is what I fear most of all about the inevitability of death. That BBC News will lead on a photo of me strawpedoing a WKD, about to vomit in a bin.

IN WHICH THE AUTHOR BANGS ON ABOUT THE DEATH OF HIS MOTHER,

AGAIN

No because we actually had to do this, last summer. We had to flip open Mum's laptop – she was still logged in, thankfully – and post a "Hi everyone, bit of a bleak one"–type status, then apply to Facebook to have the account digitally interred. It was a strange bit of admin in an already weird and woozy period of grief, but imagine if she had Twitter, or Instagram, or a network of weird racist friends she'd made in the YouTube comments of a music video. All of them would need closing and immortalising. Online-only friends would need notifying. The internet is making it more and more complicated to die.

END OF HUMAN ANECDOTE

I suppose this is a sign of Facebook growing up. Eight years ago, it was a platform to share photos of exuberant youth and messy nights out; then it became the place you would announce your first dumb little relationship, and even dumber break-up. It's how you've organised every party you've been to in the last five years; it knows you and your friends' birthdays and milestones better than you do. Facebook has grown up with us – holding our hand, sending us Farmville invitations, letting us do those "I've just lost my phone everyone send me your numbers" status updates – and now it's thinking about death. I'm not saying Facebook actively wants us to die, but Facebook certainly had a transformative experience and is now really aware of death, in that kind of panicked, sweaty way. Facebook stayed up a bit too late on its own doing cocaine and stumbled across a run-over fox in the road and just fucking freaked out. Facebook is calling you at 5AM, all: dude, I love you. I know I don't say it enough but – dude just never forget that I love you. Because one day we are all going to die, and I don't want you to die not knowing that I love you. Facebook is like: do you want to play Candy Crush right now?

The creation of the "Your Legacy Contact" feature is a potentially more important decision than the emergency contact you fill out on an HR contract; up there with choosing a best man or maid of honour. You die at work, and you just need to fob your slowly bloating corpse off to the most responsible member of your family so they can organise putting it in a casket. But your Facebook page? That takes craft, guile. You need someone who is going to click "Like" on every commiseratory message. Someone who knows which Instagram selfies make you look your best. Someone to hide all those photos of you passed out at parties with your arse out. Essentially, the role of Legacy Contact is chiefly one of editor: to filter out all the bad parts of your life, and primp and enhance the good, like painting make-up on a corpse.

Anyway, you'll be fine. You've got ages left. You're going to live forever. But for the rest of us – all us doomed people, with invisible timers above our heads, ticking down to death – the Legacy Contact is a stark reminder that the Facebook party is over, and our youth is but a shimmering memory, and that the Big Sleep is on the horizon, now, and we need to start making responsible friends before we inevitably fall into it. Happy Thursday!

@joelgolby

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