This return of the dead happens more often than we think, and often with disturbing resonances. Images of Rehtaeh Parsons, a seventeen-year-old Canadian girl who committed suicide after a campaign of cyberbullying, began appearing after her death online as part of ads that beckoned: “Meet Canadian girls for friendship, dating or relationships. Sign up now!� The algorithm that crawled the Web, grabbed these images, and repurposed them for advertising had no idea—was never programmed to have an idea—about Parsons’s life, her backstory, her death, or how her image’s sudden reappearance could be
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