In the book Digital Immortalitythe philosopher Raquel Ferrández launches an elegant and devastating warning: we are not living in a time of technological transition, but an ontological mutation. It is not only that the digital has colonized our relationships, our memory or our mourning; it is that we have entered a logic in which total bonding has become destiny. He calls it “omnivinculation”: a seamless interconnection, with no possibility of escape, where every gesture, piece of information, emotion or memory is absorbed by an ecosystem that is no longer a network, but a hive. A hive without drones, but with a Queen: the algorithms.
This Queen has no throne, but servants. She does not give orders, but optimizes conduct. She does not punish, but recommends. She does not forbid, she simply shows you what you were already going to want. The big technological platforms – Google, Meta, Amazon – have taken on this function without declaring it, becoming invisible architectures that shape what we see, what we feel, what we believe. Everything is connected, but nothing is entirely free. Individual autonomy is eroded not with repression, but with efficiency. Why choose if the system already knows what you want?
This finds an almost literal reflection in series such as Uploadwhere consciousness can continue to “live” after death in a digital paradise with fees, usage clauses and embedded advertising. Immortality is no longer a spiritual promise, but a subscription. But the most disturbing thing is not the idea of surviving, but the idea of doing so without a body, without pain, without error. An existence without fissures, but also without risk, without surprise. A simulation of life that has lost its life.
Ferrández does not limit himself to criticizing the present, he frames it in an older, much richer genealogy. From his specialization in Indian philosophy and Sanskrit literature, he recovers texts from the 5th century where the dilemmas of identity, memory and the multiplicity of worlds were already addressed in a different language. In stories such as those of the Kathāsaritsāgara or the approaches of the Yoga Vāsiṣṭhaappear beings living simultaneously on various planes, consciousnesses that replicate, realities that coexist and transform. But while in those narratives the self was seen as something fluid, mutable, even illusory, in our digital culture there is an attempt to fix it, preserve it, store it. To turn it into property. In backup.
Hence the contemporary obsession with preserving consciousness: creating avatars from our data, bots that mimic our responses, simulacra that carry on conversations with the living as if we had not died. Instead of ritualizing loss, we postpone it indefinitely. Mourning becomes maintenance. We don’t bury the dead, we update their software. We do not remember, we interact. And in that false continuity, without end and without rupture, the human experience of absence vanishes.
Black Mirror anticipated this drift in episodes such as San Junipero, where two women choose to live eternally in a simulation of youth, or Be Right Backwhere a widow commissions a replica of her deceased partner based on his messages and publications. In both cases there is tenderness, but also an underlying concern: technology is not only managing memory, it is designing the way we stay alive after we die. The question is no longer whether we want to live forever, but in what version. Under what conditions. Under what terms of service.
The most disturbing thing is that this digital hive we inhabit is not imposed by force, but by desire. We happily participate, we generate content, we share every fragment of our lives, we delegate time management, desire and attention to virtual assistants. And the more we do it, the more difficult it becomes to disconnect. Disengagement becomes a radical, even anti-social act. Not being online is no longer a withdrawal, it is a disappearance.
Ferrández does not propose a nostalgia for the analogical world or a technophobic rejection. His bet is more subtle: he proposes to look this transformation in the face in order to understand its ontological implications, not only practical ones. If we stop dying, do we also stop living? If an artificial intelligence can anticipate our every move, is there anything left that is still ours? If love, friendship, memory or pain become programmable objects, what is left of human experience? Perhaps the key lies in the body, that great absentee of digital immortality. Everything in this logic points to its elimination: the body ages, suffers, dies. Consciousness, on the other hand, can be stored, transferred, improved. But it is also emptied. It becomes an interface, a flow of data, a tactless avatar. Perhaps the price of this artificial eternity is the loss of error, of surprise, of trembling. That is to say, of life.
