A couple of weeks ago, I just finished watching the whole episodes of the first season of an American TV-Series called “Upload.” I love watching sci-fi shows. I think it is better (although not always) than watching a cliche and too romanticized TV-Series like “Emily in Paris.” Hehe. Seriously, why Paris and not Leiden? Anyway, I knew “Upload” initially from amazon’s ad that just popped out on my Instagram account. So, yes! I’ve gotten myself the next TV-Series to watch that matches my taste. All thanks to the Instagram algorithm and Meta, who introduced me to them. However, summarizing the whole point of a TV-Series is not something I can do very well. But I’ll try my best!
So, when I watched the first episode, I could already feel the cringe of the American capitalistic society. It was narrated straightforwardly, making me wonder whether it accurately describes authentic American culture. The creator behind this series is Greg Daniel. The same guy behind my favorite mockumentary, “the Office.” I love the basic idea that is underlined in the whole story. It is about living in the digitalized afterlife. What I mean by that is when you are dying, you don’t necessarily have to literally die. Your consciousness can be ‘uploaded’ to the digital afterlife. It means that you will continue to live ‘forever’ with your consciousness and the best part is that your family and relatives can still talk to you from real life. However, the story of “Upload” doesn’t merely celebrate the high discovery of the digital afterlife in human history. I can sense that they also try to deliver social critics in our modern society. That was the main reason why I was continuously being curious about what will happen next and what else does the creator want to tell his audience.
The story begins when the main character, Nathan Brown, has a severe car accident and is uploaded to the digital afterlife. They call it ‘Lakeview,’ owned by the most extensive company, Horizen. Honestly, just the main idea about creating the digital afterlife amazed me. Another thing that surprised me was the process of ‘upload’ itself. The transferring process of your consciousness starts by cutting off your head. That sounds already scary, but as well as the whole idea of inventing ‘upload,’ doesn’t it? After that, an external hard disk device (HDD) as big as Oxford Encyclopedia will replace your brain. This means that your whole ‘you’ is living inside an artificial aluminum object. The second step will be creating your avatar. In this case, the admin will be responsible for recreating the digital version of you as accurately as possible. The very last step will be uploading your whole memories into their database and connecting them to your avatar. Within two working days, you’ll be ready to be a resident of Lakeview.
This whole ‘Upload’ technology is crazy, and even more crazy if it happens in real life. Can you imagine how our modern society would react to this discovery? Imagine being able to talk to the ‘dead.’ Imagine never ever having to experience death. Do you think that our society is ready for all the consequences?
Following your description of how this ‘uploading’ works means that:
1. The digital afterlife ‘you’ is in essence ‘not real’ (but then again what is real?)
2. The digital you basically is just an empty slot/avatar upon which memories have been artificially downloaded. So in a sense, you’re recreated or there has been a copy of someone else uploaded on you as an empty sheet but you are not continuing in the same physical body that has experienced all of this ‘data’.
My concern with this digital afterlife would be that once I’d grown truly conscious of that, I’d end up in an identity crisis. An external force has programmed me to be someone that has already existed, but before ‘uploading’ this data I was something else wasn’t I? Maybe an empty avatar, but I could have grown into my own, different personality. Of course, AI might not work that way (we feed the computer with information and instructions) but if you create ‘real humans’ with human emotions, these philosophical questions might become inevitable.
OR maybe I’m overthinking it!
I watched ‘Upload’ last year and really enjoyed it. In addition to what you told about the show, I think it’s also notable that it shows how technologies and developments (digital or non-digital) are almost always more accessible to certain socio-economic groups than others. In the show if you are in the digital afterlife and your “alive relatives” do not pay enough for your subscription you only get a limited amount giga-bytes that is not even enough to think about a complex situation. So the show is also quite critical about accessibility and classes even in a digital utopia.