From Digital Assets to Digital Afterlives: AI, Platformization and the Socio-Legal Transformation of Property, Identity and Succession

Abstract

Instead, the assets that people acquire and the assumptions that underpin succession law, are undergoing transformation in the digital sphere. Traditional concepts of property, ownership, territory, territory linked to access, goodbye to biological death and continuing digital presence, access and networked control make distinctions more complicated in the case of crypto assets, platform accounts, cloud-based contents, online businesses and/or creations based on artificial intelligence of persons deceased and removed. The article emerges from a modelling perspective, a conceptual socio/legal interpretation of these transformations and is an attempt to raise a question that is pertinent to this day: when is technological innovation so well rooted in the course of social life that it calls for a change in the old legal institutions? Based on scholarship on technology and society, digital succession literature, and technological and legal experience in the United States and the United Kingdom and Europe, the article proposes a Technology-Society-Law Co-Transformation (TSLCT) framework. It provides a framework of seven sequential, interconnected processes: Technological Emergence, Social Adoption, Social Embeddedness, Institutional Reconfiguration, Legal Friction, Legal Transformation and Law and Legal Action. In the succession context, the dismantling of the property model and the key postulates of the law of succession through digitalization equally go beyond the addition of new things to the estate. The article suggests a form of governance for digital remains that relies on a functional classification, the principle of digital testamentary autonomy, a split between legal property rights and technical management, individual responsibility for platform, protection of posthumous privacy, cross-border interoperability and make explicit principles for posthumous identity in the hands of AI. The overarching contribution is to demonstrate that law is not only external to, but also reactive to and reactive of technologization: as one of the institutional mechanisms by which socially transformative technologies are stabilized, contested and redirected.