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Virtual Immortality with LivesOn

LivesOn is a ghoulish and brilliant and disgusting awesome service you can sign up to for free. Sign in with your Twitter account and LivesOn will analyze your feed and start to build a profile of your behaviour, syntax and preferences. Then... once you've died... LivesOn will step in and carry on Tweeting for you so people can still enjoy reading how late your train is or what you thought of this week's Game of Thrones.











Black Mirroring that one episode of Charlie Brooker's "Black Mirror", where this exact thing happens, LivesOn picks up patterns of "speech" you use as well people you tweet to often and what you're more likely to say, then cobbles together something to carry on your virtual legacy.

When you sign up at LivesOn.org, you assign a sort of Executor. Someone you trust and who will be thinking about what your demise means for their Twitter feed instead of sitting around crying about it. That person, and only that person, can tell LivesOn that you've passed on and get the ball rolling.

You can switch it on before you die and it will Tweet once an hour, taking breaks to sleep at night when no one's listening anyway, which was it's original purpose. The creative minds at Lean Mean Fighting Machine and the boffins at Queen Mary University came up with an algorithm that could take your previous tweets apart and reassemble them anew, but then a marketing company got hold of it and decided "Tweets After Death" was a much better spin.


To begin with the whole thing is a bit rubbish and patchworky; simply sewing up fragments of old Tweet into some new nightmarish skin-suit and then parading around the internet pretending to be you. My first preview tweet was just a list of people I've tweeted about before with the word "discuss" at the end. Not sure what that says about me, but it tells me the software (named Theo) still needs a bit of work.

You can help it along by favouriting your own tweets when you feel like they particularly represent you, and it will add those to the top of its list.

At present there's only a few hundred people signed up to the service, including me, and the more it's used the better it will hopefully become.

When your heart stops beating, you'll keep tweeting.

Words By Gazz Wood

Gazz is a writer from the Northern Film School in Leeds. He also hosts the "Possibly of Interest" podcast with TV producer Howard Cohen (Impractical Jokers) and special guests from the British Comedy world. Plus he's got his own show; "Gazz Wood Has A Podcast", with weekly guests like MISFITS Director Nirpal Bhogal and Sex & Relationships Expert Annabelle Knight! Good Lord!