Can affects be computed? Digital resurrection and affective practices in ‘be right back’

Drawing on the current technological framework and applications of emotional AI, I revisit ‘Be Right Back’, a Black Mirror episode exploring the use of digital resurrection to alleviate the grief of the bereaved. My analysis examines how emotional AI impacts interpersonal affective practices. Although digital resurrection attempts to restore interaction with the deceased, its foundation in affective computing reduces affective communication to information recognition and transmission. This programmed interaction, lacking uncertainty and reciprocity, can lead mourners to indulge in narcissistic satisfaction from the digitally-resurrected and to escape from the reality constructed collectively by survivors around the deceased’s death. Under the surveillance and modulation by the digitally-resurrected, mourners’ consumption of their affective service also becomes a form of affective labour that continuously reproduces their emotional demands and attachment to the machines. Such emotional engagement, monopolized by the machines, loses its potential to produce human connections let alone a collective subjectivity.