Virtually Ever After

This study examines how networked media have transformed mourning into a visible, participatory and platform-mediated practice. It introduces the concept of performative goodbyes, public, digitally staged acts of farewell (from memorial pages to final posts, livestreams, AI chatbots and curated “legacy” profiles) and argues that these practices are co-produced by users and platform infrastructures. Bringing together theories of performativity and identity with critiques of platform capitalism, the article proposes that digital afterlives create an onlife condition in which presence and absence blur, while the visibility and durability of the dead are unevenly distributed along lines of technological access, literacy and socio-economic power. The article aims to reframe intentionality as a spectrum: some subjects consciously script their exits; others leave traces that are reanimated algorithmically. This spectrum reveals ethical tensions around authorship, consent and the governance of posthumous data. The analysis is anchored in a detailed case study of Oreet Ashery’s Revisiting Genesis (2016), a twelve-episode web series that stages end-of-life care and digital legacy through a feminist politics of care. Ashery’s work exposes how mourning is aestheticized, infrastructurally constrained and entangled with data extraction, while also opening space for refusal, ambiguity and collective forms of care. By exploring the contemporary ecology of digital mourning and its socio-technical conditions, the article advances a critical vocabulary for assessing who can perform a digital goodbye, how those performances circulate and whose memories persist in the virtual archive. It contends that to mourn today is to negotiate not only affect and ritual, but also platforms, algorithms and the political economies that script life after life.