The Big Log Off

Online Only: A representative smattering of Georgie Binks’ e-mails.A couple of months ago, I was in the middle of one of those grand reveries we all indulge in every so often: I was imagining my funeral. After pondering the finer details (finger food or steam tables, Metallica or Elgar), I started debating what I should leave to various people. I was mentally moving through my house and dispensing items when I arrived at my basement office.

Egad! What about my computer? My whole life is in the thing, and I’d never considered what to do with it. It holds, among other things, the novel I’ve slaved over for five years, legal files, about 6,000 emails, and a heck of a lot of photos, some of them pretty racy. (Yes, that’s really me on a topless beach, years ago. Those men sans clothing were, sigh, prospective Internet suitors. And that extremely well-endowed specimen? Research.)

I figured I’d better check around and see what everyone else was planning to do with their cyber remains. I was sure “Chris,” a married friend of mine who initiates all of his extramarital affairs online, would have some strategy in place. “I’ve saved all of the emails from [one former flame],” he confided, “because I still love reading them. They’re in a separate folder on my computer.” Chris carries his laptop with him everywhere, so his wife won’t find his personal stuff. But what if you were to die tomorrow? I asked him. “I do worry about that,” he said. “You don’t want your kids knowing your indiscretions.”

Then there’s the stuff we might actually want people to find, like our brilliant, unpublished manuscripts. I asked Governor General’s Award–winning playwright Judith Thompson if she had a plan to take care of all of her plays-in-progress. “I carelessly have not made any provision for my desktop in the event of my death,” she emailed back, “and the way I ride my bike every day without a helmet, it could happen sooner than the date I have in my mind.” A writer with a highly idiosyncratic voice, Thompson was horrified by the thought that someone would discover a half-finished play and take a stab at completing it.

I knew I’d hit on something big when I quizzed Frank Cipolla, one of the composers of the score for the off-Broadway show Evil Dead: The Musical, and he started worrying, too. He’s stored the entire development of the show (from conception to recording) on very specific music software. “How would anyone other than a musician know how to use my files? ” he squeaked. “I can’t leave everything to my mother — she doesn’t even know how to use a computer.”

Surely this is fodder for the next worldwide panic-cum-business opportunity. Lawyers should be sharpening their pencils. Not so, according to John Poyser of the Canadian Bar Association’s Wills, Estates, and Trusts section. He told me the cba has “no position” on the bequest of computers technology and that adding a provision to one’s will would suffice.

Perhaps it’s no great surprise that lawyers have missed the boat on this one — most of them are still faxing, for God’s sake. But what about the real money-makers? I called Steve Wozniak, inventor of the first Apple computer. “I don’t have time to figure out what to do with the stuff in my computer,” he said, adding, “I’m in the celebrity category where so many people write about me I don’t need to save anything.”

But as we continued to speak, I could tell the possibilities were starting to churn in his brain. “This really strikes out into a new area,” he said, sounding chirpier. “People could prepare to leave behind a lot of their records in a My-Space format, prepaid perhaps, so they could stay online forever and others could go back and see what they were all about . . . It’s probably a good business opportunity.” I ought to hang up now and get myself a lawyer, I thought. But Steve was probably emailing his Apple geeks as we spoke, and he’d be taking advance orders for iDead by sundown.

Turning my attention back to the “little picture,” I did the obvious and went to the web. “What happens to your online life when your real life has ended? ” is the tag line for beforeyouaregone.com, a blog started by Texas deacon Charles Martin in March 2006. He posts sporadically with tidbits — articles, websites, online forums — culled from around the world, addressing not only what information needs to be documented, but the various methods of capturing it and making it easily accessible, Martin says, “to those who will carry on the torch or just calmly put it out.”

But there just isn’t much out there to share, I discovered. Businesses are only starting to circle around. Billed as a solution to “password fatigue,” clipperz.com is a free confidential storage service for passwords, burglar alarm codes, credit and debit card details, pins, software keys, etc. Martin, who reviews the site on his blog, points out that it will soon also enable clients to “share secrets” with family and friends. Another website, mylastemail.com, run by the UK’s Alphatalk Limited, is way ahead of them.