Jon: Welcome to episode 147 of the Digital Life, a show about our adventures in the world of design and technology. I'm your host, Jon Follett, and with me is founder and co-host, Dirk Knemeyer.

Dirk: Howdy, Jon.

Jon: Dirk, today, we’re going to talk about a crazy topic, maybe a little.

Dirk: Crazy?

Jon: Yeah. This week, we’re going to talk about how deaths, burial, and remembrance is changing as it intersects with technology. I know the show I called the Digital Life. Today, we’re going to talk about the digital afterlife a little bit. I wanted to start out with laying the groundwork talking about some of the factors that are driving change in innovation, however you want to frame it up, in the 21st Century starting with there’s a lot more people on the planet and a lot more planet are living in cities. Those are two undeniable trends.

Additionally, there are demographic shifts in different nations that make traditional burial rites no longer sustainable for various reasons. As more people are living in cities, there’s necessarily also a lack of space, at least in the areas where most people are. Then, finally, we’re starting to tune into a variety of environment concerns that come along with something like burial which can involve all kinds of artificial materials, be they plastics, just things that aren’t going to degrade over time.

These factors come together in such a way that it’s really influencing how people are thinking about being buried, or cremated, or what have you, and then, also how they’re going to be remembered by their friends, their family, their offspring in the years that follow their passing. That’s where things like the digital space that we talked about all the time, that comes into play as well because as you well know, there’s lots of information about us that we update regularly in cyberspace and certainly, that’s information that may exist long after we’re gone.

I wanted to start with an example of innovation, for a lack of a better word, in this space which is actually happening in Tokyo, Japan. There’s a futuristic graveyard space that belongs to this Buddhist temple in downtown Tokyo. The space is called Ruriden. It’s basically this very beautiful, almost ceremonial and sacred space that just has thousands of these glass Buddha statues. Each statue represents a person who either has passed or has been reserved that spot. They glow in different lovely colors.

This huge installation, as you can imagine, these thousands of statues all glowing with LED light. Then the remains of the person is stored nearby although certainly, not in the exact spot as the statue but nearby. There’s a swipe card that a person who, whether it’s a relative or a friend, can have encoded with their loved one’s information so the specific Buddha statue will glow representing that person when you come to remember that person at this space.

What that solves for a lot of people is that there’s no longer all of the trappings that come along with a gravesite in Japan which involves costly maintenance. It’s a piece of real estate in a very expensive market that needs to be shouldered by the family, those expenses ongoing presumably for as long as a family is around. Additionally, it still gives that location, that sacred space, where someone can go and remember a person. Even though the person’s not there, it gives them a place to meditate on that or what have you.

I thought this Ruriden Temple space was a good example of how our burial rites are changing and how it’s still providing that interaction that people want, that meditative space but in a totally different way, and leveraging some technologies that are in pretty unique ways. I have some other examples but I wanted to pause to see what your thoughts were on that space in Tokyo.

Dirk: I think it’s an interesting story but I don’t know that it’s all that new or unique. My grandparents, for example, died in 1995.