Necro-Capitalism

Abstract

This paper introduces Necro-Capitalism as the systematic extraction of economic value from digital remains. The digital afterlife industry, projected to reach $80 billion within a decade, deploys AI systems to reanimate the dead through "thanabots," voice cloning, and postmortem avatars. Operating without meaningful consent frameworks, the industry exploits grief through subscription models and platform architectures characteristic of digital commons Enshittification. Drawing on Archaeobytology's artifact taxonomy, we introduce the Zombie Byte: AI-reanimated data forced to simulate life without possessing the contextual integrity that distinguishes living heritage (Vivibyte) from suspended artifact (Umbrabyte). The Right to Rest principle holds that archives must remain static and finite to retain meaning. Finitude creates meaning; extending a corpus through generation erases the choices that defined it. The Right to Rest Protocol establishes seven principles for ethical stewardship of digital remains, opposing reanimation while supporting preservation. The protocol aims to distinguish verified provenance from fabrication, protecting both the dignity of the dead and the psychological vulnerability of the bereaved. Necro-Capitalism violates the relationship between living and dead; and resistance requires tools that honor archives as found, rather than forcing them to produce.

Introduction: Reanimation as Economic Extraction

The dead now work for the living. "Thanabots" simulate deceased loved ones. Generative models train on the works of passed artists without permission. The digital afterlife industry is one of the fastest-growing sectors of platform capitalism, projected to reach nearly eighty billion dollars within a decade. Necro-Capitalism is the systematic extraction of economic value from the digital remains of the dead. The extraction is conducted without meaningful consent, driven by grief-exploitative business models, and enabled by the same platform architectures that define the broader Enshittification of the digital commons. Archaeobytology applies its artifact classification to the ethics of digital remains. The Right to Rest holds that some archives must remain static and finite to retain meaning. The Vivibyte, living contextual heritage, is contrasted with the Zombie Byte, AI-reanimated data forced to act alive when it is not. The Right to Rest Protocol for the handling of digital remains is proposed as an ethical alternative. The protocol stands against an industry that has turned grief into a product.

1. The Necropolis as Marketplace

Every civilization develops rituals for the handling of its dead. Egyptians built pyramids and filled them with grave goods for the afterlife. Romans burned their dead on pyres and kept the ashes in columbaria along the roads outside the city walls. Victorians dressed in black, covered mirrors, and stopped clocks at the moment of death. Rituals honored the deceased and structured the grief of the living. They established a boundary, however permeable or contested, between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

The digital age possesses no such rituals. Instead, a marketplace has emerged.

The digital afterlife industry encompasses a rapidly expanding range of services that manage, memorialize, and reanimate the digital traces of the deceased.^[1] The range runs from the relatively benign, such as digital estate planning and memorial websites, to the ethically volatile: AI chatbots trained on the text messages, social media posts, and voice recordings of dead people. Competing terms have spread across the literature, including "deadbots," "thanabots," "griefbots," "ghostbots," "postmortem avatars," and "mind clones." Hollanek and Nowaczyk-Basińska observe that these terms are used interchangeably without clear differentiation.^[2] The chaos in terms is a clear sign. The industry moves faster than the ethical frameworks needed to govern it.

NPR reported in August 2025 that the digital afterlife industry is expected to quadruple in size to nearly eighty billion dollars over the next decade. The growth is driven by AI-powered deadbots.^[3] In Arizona, an AI avatar of a road rage victim who had been killed was used to deliver a video impact statement at the sentencing of his killer. The judge handed down the maximum sentence.^[4] Companies such as Hereafter AI, Project December, and StoryFile already monetize posthumous simulation through subscription models and upfront fees. Cambridge University's Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence has warned that deadbots could allow corporations to deliver targeted advertising to the bereaved through the voices of the dead.^[5]

The logic driving these developments is Necro-Capitalism, the systematic extraction of economic value from the digital remains of the dead. The extraction covers texts, voices, likenesses, and creative works. It proceeds without the consent of the deceased and targets grief. Business models transform mourning into a subscription service. Necro-Capitalism names an emerging economic sector that treats the dead not as persons deserving of rest but as resources awaiting extraction.

2. The Archaeobytology of the Dead

The discipline of Archaeobytology provides the tools to analyze the status of digital remains.^[6] Archaeobytology sorts digital artifacts not by format or content but by how they relate to modern technical environments. The classification distinguishes four primary states. The Vivibyte is a living artifact, fully functional in current systems. The Umbrabyte is a suspended artifact, preserved but requiring mediation such as emulation or migration to be accessed. The Petribyte is a petrified artifact, whose bytes exist but whose ecosystem is dead or inaccessible. The Nullibyte is a presumed extinction, where no known copies remain, though the possibility of an undiscovered copy on a forgotten drive or buried medium can never be entirely ruled out.^[7]

Digital remains of a deceased person—text messages, emails, photographs, voice recordings, and social media posts—occupy a distinctive position as Umbrabytes. These artifacts exist in suspended preservation, accessible but severed from the living context that gave them meaning. A text message from a deceased parent reading "I'm proud of you" is legible. The bytes remain intact. However, the specific relationship and emotional tone are irretrievable. The message exists, but the world in which the message was meaningful does not. The Umbrabyte persists while the relationship that animated the artifact has become a Nullibyte.

The digital afterlife industry proposes to reanimate these Umbrabytes. Developers feed text messages into a language model. Engineers use voice recordings to train a voice cloner. Algorithms process photographs into a video avatar. The result is not a Vivibyte, not a living artifact restored to functional context. The result is something the existing classification does not account for: an artifact forced to simulate life while possessing none of the original context that distinguishes preservation from fakery.

A new Archaeobytology classification, the Zombie Byte, names this phenomenon.^[8] The term draws from the Haitian Vodou zombi. In Vodou and creolized traditions, the zombi is a corpse reanimated not by its own will but by the will of the bokor, the sorcerer who raises the dead to serve as forced laborers.^[9] The zombi tradition is inseparable from the memory of slavery: a body stripped of will, identity, and autonomy, made to labor for someone else's profit. The zombi is not a monster. The zombi is a victim; the horror is the theft of agency.

The Zombie Byte is a digital artifact extracted from the remains of the dead, processed through generative AI, and deployed to produce new outputs attributed to the deceased. The deceased never authored these outputs, nor did they consent to them. Correction or disavowal is impossible. The Zombie Byte is not living, lacking the original context of the Vivibyte. It is not suspended, as models forcibly extracted it from the Umbrabyte state. It is not petrified, for systems actively animate it. It is not absent, as the bytes demonstrably exist. The artifact is undead. Animated by external force and stripped of its inner life, the Zombie Byte performs a simulation of the life it no longer possesses.

Corporations raise the dead without consent to labor in the attention economy. The reanimated dead generate engagement, sell subscriptions, and drive advertising revenue to the corporations that control the means of reanimation. The zombi does not choose to return. Nor does the zombi benefit from reanimation. The zombi performs labor for the profit of the one who raises the body.

3. The Violence of Reanimation

Creating a Zombie Byte requires three steps, each violating the relationship between the living and the dead.

First, companies extract data. They gather digital remains—emails, text messages, social media posts, voice recordings, and photographs—and process them as training data. A text to a spouse or a voice message to a child was never meant to train a model. Kasket has shown that autonomy extends beyond death, and that individuals have rights to dignity in how their digital traces are used.^[10] Yet legal frameworks provide minimal protection.

Next, models fabricate content. Using the extracted data, they generate new text, speech, and video attributed to the deceased. The person never wrote these words or spoke these sentences. Yet the outputs carry their style and voice. Fabrication violates the integrity of the historical record. The dead cannot object. They cannot say the words are not theirs. Every fabrication is an act of ventriloquism on a body that cannot resist.

Finally, platforms simulate presence. They deploy these fabrications in interactive chats where users converse with the simulation as if speaking to the person. The system forces the Umbrabyte to act alive. The desire to hold on clashes with the unease of talking to a program that mimics but does not embody the loved one.^[11]

These steps have consequences. Extraction monetizes private communication. Fabrication corrupts the historical record. Simulation stops the grief process. Research emphasizes that accepting loss is essential to healthy grief.^[12] Griefbots inhibit healthy grief by offering the illusion of connection. When the bereaved rely on the simulation, canceling the subscription feels like killing the loved one again. The company profits from this trap.

Öhman and Floridi's research on the political economy of death in the age of information demonstrates how digital platforms treat death as a revenue opportunity.^[13] Memorialization features are tied to premium subscriptions. Grief transforms into an engagement metric. The logic is Enshittification applied to bereavement. First, the platform offers genuine value to the grieving, such as a comforting simulation of the deceased. Then, exploitation of the bereaved serves business customers via targeted advertising delivered through the voice of the dead. Finally, maximum value is extracted from both through premium subscriptions, data harvesting, and the selling of mourning itself.

4. The Zombie Byte in the Creative Industries

Reanimation extends beyond personal relationships into the creative industries.

When developers train AI systems on the complete works of a deceased artist, including paintings, novels, recordings, and films, and users then generate new works in the artist's style, the result is a Zombie Byte of a different order. It creates the simulation of a creative practice. Companies extract, process, and deploy the deceased artist's body of work to generate outputs that compete directly with the works the artist created. These originals took lifetimes of practice, experimentation, failure, and refinement to produce.

Legal frameworks remain chaotic. The United States Copyright Office released a 108-page report in May 2025 concluding that AI developers who use copyrighted works to train models that generate expressive content that competes with original works operate beyond the scope of fair use.^[14] Tennessee's ELVIS Act, signed into law in 2024, became the first United States legislation specifically protecting musicians from unauthorized AI cloning of voices.^[15] Major labels have sued AI music generators Suno and Udio for training on copyrighted recordings without consent. Plaintiffs filed additional lawsuits in October 2025.^[16] The music industry organization APRA AMCOS has warned that twenty-three percent of musicians' revenue could be at risk from unlicensed AI by 2028.^[17]

The ethical problem exceeds the legal question. Copyright protects economic interests. More important, the Zombie Byte violates the integrity of a creative life. When a generative model produces new paintings in the style of a painter who devoted decades to developing that style, the model does not continue the artist's work. The model colonizes it. Surface patterns are extracted while the inner life that produced the patterns is discarded. Generation proceeds without judgment and without the capacity to decline. The result is similar in form but hollow. It is a Zombie Byte masquerading as a Vivibyte.

In 2023, an AI-generated track mimicking the voices of Drake and The Weeknd drew over fifteen million social media views and 600,000 Spotify streams before removal.^[18] Both artists are alive and could respond. The incident illustrates how fast AI-generated fakes spread and how far they reach. The problem becomes far worse when the artist is dead and cannot object, litigate, or refuse. A dead artist's estate may license, but the dead artist cannot consent. Financial benefit to the estate is not the sole question. The dead have a right to silence, a right to not produce, a right to have a body of work remain finite, bounded, and complete.

5. The Right to Rest

The Right to Rest stands against Necro-Capitalism. The principle holds that some archives must remain static, finite, and closed. The appropriate response to the digital remains of the dead is stewardship rather than extraction. Protection replaces fabrication. Preservation stands against reanimation.^[19]

The Right to Rest is not a rejection of digital preservation. Archaeobytology exists to recover and steward digital heritage, to excavate the Ancient Byte, to rescue the Vivibytes, stabilize the Umbrabytes, and catalog the Petribytes before a shift to Nullibytes occurs.^[20] The opposition is to reanimation. The digital ethic draws a line between maintaining an archive and forcing that archive to produce new content. Archivists may preserve text messages of the dead, organize them, and make them accessible to those who have legitimate claim. Archivists may not use them to train a model that generates new text messages. Family members may cherish and replay voice recordings. Family members may not clone the voice to speak words the deceased never said. Curators may exhibit and study paintings. Curators may not process them into a model that generates new paintings.

The Right to Rest draws force from a recognition that limits give meaning. A human life is meaningful in part because the life ends. A body of creative work is meaningful in part because of boundaries. The artist made these choices and not others. The artist painted certain paintings and not others. The author wrote specific words and refused others. Synthetic generation does not honor the artist by extending the body of work indefinitely. Synthetic generation erases the fact of choice, the very thing that made the work the artist's own.

Heidegger argued that human existence is defined by its relationship to death. Being-toward-death is not an accident of biology but the condition that makes authentic existence possible.^[21] The insight applies to the digital afterlife industry. The meaning of a life, and of the artifacts that life produced, depends upon having an end. To reanimate the dead is not to overcome death. Reanimation denies the condition that gave the life shape.

Robin Wall Kimmerer has articulated a parallel principle in the context of ecological stewardship. Decay is not a failure but a function. The decaying log on the forest floor is not waste but the substrate from which new life emerges.^[22] Mycorrhizal networks, which the Myceloom Protocol takes as a governing metaphor, depend upon decomposition. Nutrients that sustain the living are released by the dead, not through forced extraction but through the slow, natural process of return to the soil. The Right to Rest applies this ecological wisdom to the digital domain. Digital remains of the dead should settle into the archive. Artifacts become context rather than content. The remains inform the living without being forced to perform for the living.

6. The Right to Rest Protocol

The Right to Rest requires more than a principle; the principle requires a protocol. And the following seven principles govern the ethical stewardship of digital remains.^[23]

1. Preservation is Permitted; Simulation is Not.

The protocol allows collection, organization, and protection of the digital remains of the deceased. It permits making the remains accessible to those with legitimate claim. But it prohibits using the remains to generate new content attributed to the deceased. The Archive is the appropriate mode for relating to the dead. The Anvil may not be directed at the remains themselves.^[24]

2. Context Must Be Preserved, Not Simulated.

An Umbrabyte is meaningful precisely because the artifact is situated. The deceased sent the message on a specific day, to a specific person, in a specific context. Stewards honor this situatedness. Simulation destroys the context by abstracting artifacts into a model that can generate utterances in any context. Decontextualization of the Umbrabyte transforms the artifact into a Zombie Byte.

3. Consent Must Be Obtained from the Living and Honored from the Dead.

Hollanek and Nowaczyk-Basińska's framework of mutual consent requires agreement from both the data donor and the service interactant.^[25] Where the deceased did not provide advance directives regarding posthumous digital use, the default must be non-reanimation. Service providers must not treat silence as consent.

4. The Bereaved Must Be Protected from Exploitation.

Grief is one of the most psychologically vulnerable states a human being can experience. The bereaved are not in a position to make fully informed decisions about long-term digital relationships with simulations of the dead. Subscription models that create psychological dependency are exploitative. In such models, the bereaved experience cancellation as a second death. The European Union's AI Act prohibits AI technologies that manipulate and exploit vulnerabilities. The Act provides a potential regulatory avenue, though specific address of deadbots is pending.^[26]

5. The Dead Must Be Permitted to Be Finite.

The body of work a person produced in a lifetime is the complete body of work. Completeness comes not because the work contains everything that might have been said, but because the work contains what was actually chosen. Synthetic extension violates integrity. The Right to Rest is the right of the dead to remain silent.

6. Gaps Must Be Respected, Not Filled.

The dead leave gaps. Unsaid words, unfinished projects, and missing records are part of a complete life. Such gaps are sacred. Filling them with synthetic content is not preservation but desecration. The ethical steward marks the gap but does not cross it. To fabricate the past is to erase it.

7. The Zombie Byte Must Be Named and Resisted.

Identification of the Zombie Byte as a distinct category of digital artifact is an act of clarity. Resistance requires naming. The digital afterlife industry depends upon confusing preservation with simulation. It blurs memory and manufacture. The Zombie Byte makes visible the mechanism of that confusion and provides the conceptual tools for refusal.

7. Conclusion: Against the Bokor

Necro-Capitalism breaches the relationship between the living and the dead. The extraction of economic value from digital remains proceeds without consent. The industry targets vulnerability. Such a project violates more than privacy or copyright. It is an assault on finality.

Resistance requires tools. Digital remains must be sorted by function, not format. Preservation must be distinguished from fabrication. An ethical steward honors the archive as found, marking gaps rather than filling them. The dead must be permitted to remain dead. Archives must close. The most respectful act the living can perform is to tend the remains without forcing them to speak.

The Zombie Byte is the characteristic artifact of Necro-Capitalism. Undead and decontextualized, the artifact performs a vivacity imposed by external force for the profit of the living. The Vivibyte lives because context persists. The ecosystem that gives meaning continues to function. One is a memory inhabited by the past. The other is the zombi, a corpse animated by the present. It is the difference between keeping the dead and using them. It is the difference between an archivist and a bokor.

Notes

1. [1] The term "digital afterlife industry" (DAI) has been formalized in recent scholarship. See Tomasz Hollanek and Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, "Griefbots, Deadbots, Postmortem Avatars: On Responsible Applications of Generative AI in the Digital Afterlife Industry," Philosophy and Technology 37, no. 63 (2024): 1–27, https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-024-00744-w.
2. [2] Hollanek and Nowaczyk-Basińska, "Griefbots, Deadbots, Postmortem Avatars," 2.
3. [3] The eighty-billion-dollar projection was reported in Chloe Veltman, "AI 'Deadbots' Are Persuasive—and Researchers Say They're Primed for Monetization," NPR, August 26, 2025.
4. [4] Veltman, "AI 'Deadbots' Are Persuasive." The AI avatar of Chris Pelkey was used at the sentencing hearing in Arizona in May 2025, with Judge Todd Lang subsequently handing down the maximum sentence.
5. [5] Hollanek and Nowaczyk-Basińska, "Griefbots, Deadbots, Postmortem Avatars," 12–15. The "MaNana" speculative design scenario specifically explores corporate advertising delivered through the voice of a deceased grandmother.
6. [6] Jefferson, Josie, and Felix Velasco. "Archaeobytology: The Discipline of the Ancient Byte". Unearth Heritage Foundry, January 15, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18260673.
7. [7] Jefferson, Josie, and Felix Velasco. "Archaeobytology: The Discipline of the Ancient Byte". Unearth Heritage Foundry, January 15, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18260673.
8. [8] Unearth Heritage Foundry, "Zombie Byte," in The Unearth Lexicon of Digital Archaeology (2025), https://unearth.wiki. Introduced in this paper as the fifth state of the Archaeobytological taxonomy: a digital artifact synthetically reanimated to simulate the vivacity it no longer possesses.
9. [9] For scholarly treatment of the zombi in Haitian Vodou and its cultural-economic functions, see Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist's Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis, and Magic (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985); and Elizabeth McAlister, Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). The zombi as laborer for the bokor is a persistent element of Haitian folklore with documented connections to the plantation economy and the memory of slavery.
10. [10] Elaine Kasket, All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data (London: Robinson, 2019). Kasket's research emphasizes that autonomy and dignity interests persist beyond biological death and require legal protection in digital contexts.
11. [11] Belén Jiménez-Alonso and Ignacio Brescó de Luna, "AI and Grief: A Prospective Study on the Ethical and Psychological Implications of Deathbots," in Ethics in Online AI-Based Systems, ed. Santi Caballé, Jordi Casas-Roma, and Josep Conesa (London: Academic Press, 2024), 175–191.
12. [12] Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut, "The Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement: Rationale and Description," Death Studies 23, no. 3 (1999): 197–224. Stroebe and Schut's model, widely adopted in bereavement psychology, emphasizes the oscillation between loss-orientation and restoration-orientation as essential to healthy grief processing.
13. [13] Carl Öhman and Luciano Floridi, "The Political Economy of Death in the Age of Information: A Critical Approach to the Digital Afterlife Industry," Minds and Machines 27, no. 4 (2017): 639–662.
14. [14] United States Copyright Office, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence—Part 3: Generative AI Training (pre-publication version, May 9, 2025). The report concluded that "it is not possible to prejudge litigation outcomes" but that uses generating "expressive content that competes with" original works may not qualify as fair use.
15. [15] The Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security (ELVIS) Act was signed into law in Tennessee on March 21, 2024, effective July 1, 2024. It specifically criminalizes the unauthorized cloning of performers' voices using AI technologies.
16. [16] Major lawsuits filed against Suno and Udio by Universal Music and other labels; class-action lawsuits filed October 2025.
17. [17] Cited in Leon Furze, "Teaching AI Ethics: Copyright 2025," November 12, 2025, referencing APRA AMCOS industry analysis.
18. [18] The AI-generated "Heart on My Sleeve," mimicking Drake and The Weeknd, was widely reported in April 2023 and subsequently discussed in the U.S. Copyright Office's consultations. See U.S. Copyright Office, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence—Part 1: Digital Replicas (July 31, 2024).
19. [19] Unearth Heritage Foundry, "The Right to Rest," in The Unearth Lexicon of Digital Archaeology (2025), https://unearth.wiki. The term is coined in this paper as a principle of digital ethics governing the handling of digital remains. The principle draws resonance from two sources: the universal mourning tradition of "rest in peace," and the European Union's Right to Be Forgotten, which grants individuals the right to have personal information removed from public access. The Right to Rest extends the latter into the posthumous domain, holding that the dead have a right not merely to be forgotten but to remain undisturbed.
20. [20] Jefferson, Josie, and Felix Velasco. "Archaeobytology: The Discipline of the Ancient Byte". Unearth Heritage Foundry, January 15, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18260673.
21. [21] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (1927; repr., New York: Harper & Row, 1962), Division II, Chapter I. Heidegger's analysis of Sein-zum-Tode (being-toward-death) argues that Dasein's authentic existence is constituted by its relationship to its own finitude.
22. [22] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013). Kimmerer's discussion of reciprocity and decomposition as ecological functions provides a biophilosophical grounding for the Right to Rest.
23. [23] The Right to Rest Protocol extends the principle articulated in footnote 19 into a practical framework for stewardship. See also Unearth Heritage Foundry, "The Steward's Mandate," in The Unearth Lexicon of Digital Archaeology (2025), https://unearth.wiki.
24. [24] Jefferson, Josie, and Felix Velasco. "Archaeobytology: The Discipline of the Ancient Byte". Unearth Heritage Foundry, January 15, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18260673.
25. [25] Hollanek and Nowaczyk-Basińska, "Griefbots, Deadbots, Postmortem Avatars," 18–20. The authors recommend "adhering to the principle of mutual consent of both data donors and service interactants."
26. [26] The European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act entered into force on August 1, 2024. It classifies AI according to risk level and prohibits technologies posing "unacceptable risk," including those that manipulate and exploit vulnerabilities. Whether deadbots fall within this prohibition remains a subject of ongoing regulatory interpretation.