Digital Death Drives

Computers have long inspired dreams of immortality, if not for us, then at least for our memories, our avatars, and our data. They are also extraordinarily fragile machines, providing, with each hard-drive crash and video-game death, new mirrors of our own mortality. 

Julian Lucas is the spring 2026 Franke Visiting Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker, an editor at The Dial, and an editor-at-large at Cabinet. His writing focuses on literature and the arts, and particularly the representation of history across media. He was a contributing writer at the The New York Times Book Review, and his work has appeared in Harper’s, Vanity Fair, and The New York Review of Books, among other publications. 

He is working on a book, “Death Drive,” about death and the digital, from the representation of mortality in video games to the rise of “grief tech” and the archival challenges posed by life online. It will combine criticism, reportage, and memoir.