My mother died recently. I am not attending her funeral in person, which requires a separate accounting that these pages are not the place for. I asked for the livestream link so I could attend from a distance.
The link arrived in an email. Before accessing it, I read the terms and conditions, which is a habit I have maintained across a lifetime of encountering systems that embed significant commitments in documents designed to be ignored.
There were three sets of terms and conditions. Between them, they established that by providing my email address to receive a link to my mother’s funeral, I had also agreed to receive marketing communications from a range of funeral-adjacent businesses—not only the funeral home itself, which is a global corporation operating under a name that implies local sensitivity while functioning as a multinational procedural ecosystem, but from affiliated businesses across the spectrum of death-related commerce.
Pre-paid funeral plans. Memorial products. Grief counselling services. The infrastructure that the living require when someone close to them has died, offered to me at the moment when I was most likely to need it and least likely to have the emotional capacity to evaluate it with the attention it would deserve.
I invented a person. I gave this person a plausible name and a real-format email address that did not belong to anyone I know. The invented person received the link. The link worked. I attended my mother’s funeral from a distance, through a screen, with the invented person’s credentials validating my access to the stream.
The invented person will, presumably, receive the marketing communications that my actual contact details were required to generate. The invented person will decline to purchase the pre-paid funeral plan. The marketing will have reached its intended destination in the technical sense and nowhere else in any meaningful sense. The system will record a contact. The contact will produce no revenue. The system will not know why.
What I actually needed was the link. The link was the service the funeral home was providing—the technical infrastructure that allowed remote attendance at a ceremony that was occurring elsewhere. The link required an email address to be delivered to. The email address was the functional requirement. Everything else—the marketing consent, the affiliation agreements, the cross-sell architecture bundled into the terms and conditions of three overlapping documents—was not required for the link. It was required for the secondary value capture that the link’s delivery had been designed to enable.
The secondary value capture is not surprising. Businesses collect data and use it. Funeral homes are businesses. The fact that the occasion for the data collection is grief does not, within the logic of the collection system, alter the system’s behaviour. The system does not have a mechanism for behaving differently when the data subject is in distress. It has a mechanism for collecting data and using it in the ways the terms and conditions specify. The terms and conditions were available for review. Most people reviewing them while organising or attending a funeral will not read three sets of terms and conditions. The system knows this. The consent architecture was designed for the conditions under which it would be encountered.
This is the temporal and emotional opportunism that makes the situation something more than a routine data collection complaint. The funeral home’s marketing apparatus is encountering people at the specific moment when procedural vigilance is most likely to be reduced—when attention is on the ceremony, on the loss, on the logistics of grief—and is extracting consent in conditions that are structurally designed to produce consent without careful consideration. The consent is technically valid. The conditions under which it was given are not the conditions under which most people make considered decisions about what they are agreeing to.
The incorrect death date is the detail that most precisely captures the quality of the encounter. My mother’s registration in the funeral home’s system listed her death as occurring two weeks after it had actually occurred. Someone asked, with the humour that absurdity forces, whether they had buried her alive.
The question is not entirely facetious. The death date is the one piece of administrative information that death tends to clarify with finality. A person died on a specific day. The day is the fact from which all subsequent arrangements derive their temporal coherence. The funeral home’s system had this fact wrong by a fortnight, in the direction of the future, which implies not merely a data entry error but a data entry error of a specific and peculiar kind: the system was prepared to record the death before it had made itself administratively real.
The error will have been corrected. These things are corrected. The correction will have involved someone in the funeral home’s administrative chain noticing the discrepancy, updating the record, and the system proceeding as though the error had not occurred. The record will not reflect the error’s existence, because the record is the corrected version. The corrected version is accurate. The accuracy of the corrected version does not require the system to examine why the error occurred or whether the conditions that produced it continue to produce similar errors in other records.
The death industry’s transformation from local practice to multinational procedural ecosystem is worth examining for what it reveals about the colonisation of what were once understood as sacred transitions. The local undertaker who knew the family, who had prepared bodies for the same community for decades, who understood the specific cultural and religious requirements of the specific community he served, was operating within a relational frame that the global corporation cannot replicate at scale. The relational frame provided its own quality assurance—the undertaker whose error was known by the community bore the reputational cost of the error immediately and directly. The global corporation’s administrative error in a death registration is processed through a customer service channel, escalated if necessary, corrected if possible, and resolved within the system’s own framework without the relational accountability that once governed these matters.
The care of the dead has always been, across human cultures, among the most significant acts a community performs—the ritual transition that acknowledges the weight of the loss and the dignity of the person who has died. The rituals vary enormously across cultures and across history. The significance they assign to the transition is remarkably consistent. The industrial processing of the transition—the intake form, the terms and conditions, the incorrect date, the marketing consent bundled into the livestream link, the global corporation’s administrative chain managing the ritual in the same system it uses to manage its other inventory—is not a neutral development in the history of how humans have managed death.
It is the application of the industrial management logic to the one event in human life that the industrial management logic is least suited to address.
The pre-paid funeral plan as a marketing category is worth a brief examination, because it crystallises what the secondary value capture is actually selling. The plan is marketed to the living as a gift to their survivors—the decision made now so that the people who will grieve them later do not have to make it in grief. The marketing thus positions the funeral home’s product as an act of consideration for others, and the moment of encountering the marketing—the moment of attending another person’s funeral, of accessing a livestream through a link that required three sets of terms and conditions to obtain—as the appropriate moment to consider purchasing it.
The logic is not entirely without merit. People do make better decisions about funeral arrangements when they are not simultaneously managing grief. The pre-paid plan can genuinely reduce the administrative burden on survivors. The product has a real function and a real market.
What is objectionable is the moment of the approach. The person accessing their mother’s funeral livestream is not in the evaluative state that any significant financial decision requires. They are in grief. The marketing apparatus does not distinguish between these states, because the marketing apparatus cannot distinguish between them. It knows only that the person has been identified as someone who has recently lost a family member and is therefore in the target demographic for the product. The targeting is accurate. The moment is not.
The invented person sits in a database somewhere, associated with a plausible name and a defunct email address, flagged as a contact for funeral services across the corporation’s affiliated network. The invented person will not attend another funeral through the corporation’s livestream service. The invented person will not purchase a pre-paid plan. The invented person exists only in the database, as evidence that the system collected a contact, and as a small demonstration that the data the system required for its secondary value capture was not required for the service it was providing.
The link worked with false credentials.
The system did not know the difference.
The service was the link.
Everything else was something the system was collecting for its own purposes.
The purposes had nothing to do with my mother.
The paperwork rarely does.
The Vorpel Foundation