In this unmissable episode of Still Spoken, Elaine Kasket talks with Catherine Mayer, who was married to Andy Gill - of the English post-punk band Gang of Four - until his death. She was close friends with the late Michael Hutchence (INXS) and Paula Yates.

Catherine and the author of All the Ghosts in the Machine discuss the complexity of the digital legacy Andy left behind, as well as the perils of digital legacy when a public figure dies - issues we rarely consider but that are increasingly important in modern loss.

Catherine Mayer is a writer, activist, speaker and the co-founder and President of the Women's Equality Party. She co-founded the Primadonna Festival.

Catherine co-authored Good Grief: Embracing Life at a Time of Death with Anne Mayer-Bird. She wrote about losing Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates in The Observer in 2017, here.

Catherine Mayer and Elaine Kasket previously appeared together in 2022 on this podcast from the ICAEW about death and digital assets.

The New York Times article about online trolling of the Covid dead, written by Dan Levin, can be found here.

The 'big biography' Catherine refers to in the podcast is Charles: The Heart of a King (Penguin).

Images of Catherine Mayer and Andy Gill within the chapters of this episode, and on any promotion for or video versions of this episode, are used with the permission of Catherine Mayer.

I do this podcast with no help from anyone other than my guests. If you want a simple start to your own podcast, you can do what I did: get a great podcasting platform (see the link for mine below) and easily add music and sound effects with an affordable subscription to Epidemic Sound.

Music and sound effects in this episode:

Lucky Charm by Mimi Elesen, sourced on Epidemic Sound

Permission granted to Still Spoken by Catherine Mayer/Republic of Music/BMG Rights Management: The Dying Rays (2020), on This Heaven Gives Me Migraine EP, (c) Gill Music (2020)

Lyrics:

Stop the seconds flow
Oh, I'm too late
I'm back where I began at the start
I'm caught in the wake
I'll have my due and drag the rock up the hill
Nothing to lose that's not been lost
I wish the sun anchored still
What I wanted disappears in the haze
A speck of dust held forever in the dying rays
Breath on the mirror; nothing inside
The horizon's bare, but in the night, I miss the pilot's light
Control and power, empires were built in our minds
But it will all go up in a blaze; only dust in the dying rays

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Usually, Still Spoken is about how your data lives on through technology after you die. But how do you live in technology before you're able to form your own digital footprint, perhaps before you're even born?

When I was writing one of the final chapters All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data, I ended up in an unexpected place: thinking about how I'd created a digital reflection for my own child that would eventually form part of her digital legacy. These days, there's data generated, mined, and monetised about us from digital gestation to digital afterlife and everywhere in between. What are some of the ways that happens?

So in this episode we're looking the other end of identity, and there's no one better to do that with than Tama Leaver, a Professor of Internet Studies at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia; the President of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR); a regular media commentator; and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child.

This episode is a preview of host Elaine Kasket's upcoming book, provisionally titled This is Your Life on Tech (2023)- a technopsychosocial exploration of the human life span, looking at how technology is the third force in almost all the relationships we have across our lifetimes.

Written and produced by Elaine Kasket; recorded in April 2021. I do this podcast ALL BY MYSELF with no production team, editors, or help from anyone other than my wonderful guests. If you want a simple, easy start to your own podcast, you can do what I did: get a great podcasting platform (see the link for mine below) and easily add music and sound effects with an affordable subscription to Epidemic Sound.

All music and any sound effects in this episode were from Epidemic Sound:

Royal Lullaby (All in the Family)
Snooper's Paradise (Jon Bjõrk)
Computer Wiz (Marten Moses)

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Jeffrey Sconce is Professor in the Screen Cultures program and a Guggenheim Fellow for 2020-2021. Back in 2000, he published Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, which looked at how electronic media and the occult have always been intertwined, right back to the telegraph. He's the guest on this episode of Still Spoken, a wide-ranging chat about horror films, Freud, Spiritualists and seances, immortalists of Silicon Valley, posthumous electronic revenge, and whether you can expect your dog (not all dogs, just your favourite dog) to greet you in heaven.

As always, the interviewer is Elaine Kasket, author of All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data; the interview took place in 2021. Jeffrey Sconce's more recent book is The Technical Delusion: Electronics, Power, Insanity (2019).

This podcast written and produced by Elaine Kasket. I do this ALL BY MYSELF with no production team, editors, or help from anyone other than my wonderful guests.

If you want a simple start to your own podcast, you can do what I did: get an accessible, easy podcasting platform (see the link for mine below) and add music and sound effects with an affordable subscription to Epidemic Sound.

Music and sound effects in this episode:

All music used under license from Epidemic Sound. In order of play:

Synthesis Malfunction (Oh The City)
Confused Mind (Stationary Sign)
Snooper's Paradise (Jon Björk)
Dingle Dangle (Jerry Lacey)

Get to know Elaine's writing on Substack and Medium.

Support the Show.