On 2 November 2022, on the occasion of All Souls' Day, Zephorum went online, the first platform in the world to deal entirely with digital burial and commemoration of the deceased also on the web. An innovative project concerning a subject that is so dear to us in real life, but still unknown in digital life. The novelty within the novelty is the fact that the idea was not launched by a Californian big tech, but by a Sardinian startup, managed by Giulia Salis Nioi, an under 36 CEO who has studied and worked around the world, to then choose to return to live (and invest) in Sardinia.
D: Giulia, let's start from the beginning: how did the idea of a webetery, a digital cemetery come about?
R: She was born three years ago, during a sleepless summer night (I had just become a mother). I was re-reading an old post of mine from my Facebook profile, and among friends' comments, I found that of a person who had passed away in the meantime. A strange feeling of annoyance seized me immediately, almost a shiver: it seemed to me that I was face to face with a ghost. Until that moment I had thought that I had said goodbye to that person, that I had said goodbye to him forever. Instead, I realized that she couldn't rest in peace until parts of her, of what she was, that she published about herself, remained dispersed online. Immediately afterwards I imagined how difficult it could be for his closest relatives having to deal with this problem and with their own suffering every day. That's why I said to myself: something must be done.
Q: So you've started activating yourself. And what did you find out? What's the situation?
A: I have found that the situation is very complex, and that this problem will continue to grow, until there are more profiles of deceased people than of living people online, which will happen, according to the University of Oxford, by the next decades.
Q: You said “something has to be done”. What can be done?
Italian law says that our online profiles, as well as what we publish from those profiles, are part of our emotional heritage, and therefore they are inherited by our heirs. So this means that effectively everything we publish, write, post belongs to us, and that we can exercise a will, and the heirs a right. But this is not so simple to achieve, because digital inheritance policies, despite the law, vary for single provider (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Google, etc), and often the heir is alone, in a moment of great suffering, having to fight against windmills. Applying to a legal service individually can become very expensive, and does not solve the problem of commemoration, namely: once the digital inheritance is obtained, how will it be used? For a private memory, or public? Because in the second case, the cost of making a mini-site dedicated to that person is also added.
