PUBLISHED
July 13, 2025
KARACHI:
When I was writing my Master’s dissertation, a friend pursuing his PhD introduced me to Nicola Wright’s work on the Digital Afterlife – a body of research that examines what happens when rituals, practices and cultural legacies are transplanted from the physical world into the digital realm. Wright’s insights helped me think more critically about the posthumous releases of musicians, the fate of digital estates, and the eerie ways algorithms can keep a star alive online long after they’ve died in the flesh. For someone who only experienced a public figure through the Internet, the star doesn’t pass away – they simply become part of the feed, resurfacing perpetually, like a living ghost in the machine.
These are not just esoteric musings about stardom or virtual memory. They are philosophical and political inquiries into what it means to live and die in an age when platforms preserve, remix and monetise both presence and absence. And, crucially, they help us understand how Freddie Mercury’s question – “who wants to live forever?” – has become the default setting for celebrity remembrance.
But the last few days on the Pakistani Internet forced me to revisit these ideas from an entirely different angle. Not from the curated legacies of global icons, but from the silence around those who die unknown and unclaimed – until, suddenly, they aren’t. The last few days online – not in the real world, where countless bodies are buried quietly by Edhi and Chhipa — have been shaped by someone the general audience had never heard of before: Humaira Asghar.
Her death didn’t merely go viral – it gave the Pakistani Internet a new subject to mourn, a spectacle to perform, and a cause to rally around. Here was someone the industry didn’t even classify as a “C-list” talent – an invisible woman, surviving on the margins of a hyper-competitive fashion and television world. And yet, in death, she commanded the attention of Sindh Governor Kamran Tessori, the Sindh Culture Department, A-list actors, and ACT (the officially registered trade association for Pakistani actors), to name a few.
That an otherwise forgotten figure could achieve such posthumous visibility reveals a strange truth: in the digital age, death can be a launchpad for fame. It underscores a deep absurdity of Internet culture – how obscurity in life can be undone by the grotesque spectacle of death. What couldn’t be accomplished through PR agents or talent managers was suddenly delivered by the sheer virality of bodily decay and social neglect. That is, perhaps, the most sobering irony: that visibility is no longer proof of value, but of narrative utility. And Humaira, in death, became a story that fit.
But what exactly are we mourning when we share her photo, write our heartbreak, or blame the industry in Instagram captions or a journalistic analysis similar to what you are reading? Is it her death or is it the discomfort it brings us? The tragedy of Humaira’s lonely end forces us to interrogate what our online mourning rituals say about our capacity for care, and whether we’ve become better at performing grief than preventing it. Social media profiles of the deceased now function as digital mausoleums. Humaira’s photos and interviews, once uploaded for visibility and relevance, now serve as a mosaic of her absence. In death she became hyper-visible, an ironic fate for someone abandoned in life.
This shift from personal profile to an online shrine is not neutral – it reshapes our relationship with both the deceased and ourselves. When mourning is mediated through a feed, it displaces traditional rituals with algorithmic aftershocks: a “memory” notification, a resurfaced post or a recommended video featuring a now-silenced voice. These algorithmic echoes of Humaira Asghar don’t just preserve her; they curate her, often stripped of nuance and context. What we are left with is a fragmented, crowd-sourced version of her identity, no longer anchored in real relationships but floating in the collective imagination of strangers and spectators.
This is the double bind of the digital afterlife. In Digital Anthropology and Internet Studies jargon we’ll say, it democratises memory while destabilising the personhood it seeks to honour.
A recent trend in digital humanities is the study of “posthumous personhood.” This refers to the way identities continue to circulate and be reconstructed after death, particularly online. Humaira Asghar’s persona is now mediated more by those who knew of her than those who truly knew her. In this way, her identity is no longer her own – it belongs to the digital commons, subject to reinterpretation and exploitation. Our South Asian methods of mourning – the duas, the funerals, and the acts of charity – are meant to provide dignity and closure. Yet in Humaira’s case, the janazah became an afterthought to the narrative. Volunteers scrambled to secure a final resting place for her after her family declined to claim her, but this too was uploaded, documented, and debated, and eventually her brother showed up to prove all the speculations wrong.
Humaira’s case exposes how digital spaces do not merely preserve legacies; they produce them, often posthumously and without the subject’s control. Her identity is now refracted through the lenses of grief, voyeurism and social commentary. A clip from a past interview, such as Ahmed Ali Butt’s Podcast becomes evidence of her yearning for a lover; a glamorous photo becomes proof of loneliness, a sad, sentimental caption is reason to believe she was depressed. This retrospective storytelling, often tinged with projection and moralising, obscures more than it reveals.
And yet, it is also the only form of remembrance many will ever engage in, a paradox that reveals the uneven terrain of online mourning. Who gets to be remembered, and in what form, is increasingly decided not by family or faith or sect, but by digital participation and platform governance.
Thus, the moral hazard is not only about management. It’s also about presence and representation. When the living fail to protect the dignity of the dead in their lifetime, do they have the moral authority to construct their afterlives? When Humaira’s social media became a digital shrine, it wasn’t built by those closest to her, but by an anonymous digital public that claimed her only after her silence.
In this context, Humaira’s digital afterlife becomes a case study in what scholars call posthumous subjectivity – a state in which the dead continue to be constructed as social agents, but without agency. We see how the dead are rendered symbolically active while materially silent. Their identity becomes a canvas upon which collective anxieties, moral judgments, and unresolved guilt are projected.
In Humaira’s case, her death has been mobilised to critique the entertainment industry by people like me, highlight mental health neglect, and lament the breakdown of familial and social bonds. Yet, paradoxically, these narratives often do more to serve the needs of the living than to honour the person who has passed. Similar to how a family you must have known waits for the patriarch to die in order to lay claim to his supposed wealth only to find out it never existed or was entrusted to someone else. The dead person then loses all ‘value’ and is only being mourned by the successors because the world expects them to mourn.
What the practice leads to on the Internet is a form of grief capitalism, where digital mourning becomes both emotionally and socially transactional. The more viral the grief, the more “value” it holds. Humaira’s story gained traction not necessarily because many remembered her fondly, but because her lonely death – and the synaptic horror of it – fit a tragic archetype palatable to digital outrage and sentimentality. Her posthumous visibility, then, did not emerge from remembered love but from a renewed usefulness to a content-hungry system. The question of what is owed to the dead becomes muddied in this terrain: Is visibility a form of justice, or a second, more subtle form of exploitation?
Ultimately, Humaira’s fate invites us to confront how digital spaces both preserve and pervert memory. Her digital afterlife, shaped by strangers more than loved ones, raises difficult but necessary questions: Whose grief is being performed? Whose narrative is being amplified? And at what cost does visibility come for someone who, in life, was largely unseen?
When actor Osman Khalid Butt spoke out in the wake of Humaira Asghar’s death, his words carried the clarity and restraint that the moment demanded: “I don’t even know what to say anymore. Feels like we’re walking in circles. I get it: engagement is currency. Contrarian opinions aimed to provoke, framing grief and rage for clicks are the new economy. But can we please pause for a second and bring back basic empathy.” His statement wasn’t simply a defense of Humaira’s dignity – it was a rebuke of the culture that has made mourning a monetisable performance. In an age where tragedy travels faster than truth, Butt’s call serves as a warning: we are blurring the line between remembrance and relevance, between solidarity and spectacle. What he described was the rise of grief farming – a digital behavior where grief is harvested for attention, engagement, and social capital, often at the expense of the dead.
This is not merely a moral failing; it is a cultural shift rooted in the architecture of social media. In the attention economy, visibility is currency, and loss – especially one as horrifying to our senses as Humaira’s – is immediately co-opted into a cycle of virality. The problem is not that people grieve online, but that they perform grief for an audience, flattening complex lives into emotionally potent thumbnails and teary-eyed reaction reels. What gets lost in this process is not just nuance, but humanity.
Grief becomes a genre, complete with its own aesthetic tropes and emotional rhythms. And as with any genre, its currency depends on recognisability and repetition. But grief in real life is messy, slow and nonlinear. It is also private and often invisible. What happens, then, when our experience of loss is shaped more by algorithmic rhythm than emotional reality? What does it mean for the bereaved to see their loved one’s death become a trend, their final moments debated in comments and dissected by strangers?
These are the questions that Humaira’s death forces us to ask. Her case is not unique in its tragedy, but in its digital afterlife. The public nature of her death, the discovery of her decaying body, the familial confusion, the volunteer janazah offers, the social media uproar was swiftly turned into content. A woman who died forgotten became unforgettable only because her anonymity became grotesque. She did not trend because she was beloved, but because her end fit the aesthetic of tragedy that performs well online.
This cycle is what scholars increasingly identify as grief capitalism – where the emotional labour of mourning is extracted, packaged, and redistributed for consumption. It is a system that privileges content over context, spectacle over care. The problem is not remembrance, but who gets to remember, how, and for whom.
Digital afterlives can be comforting. They allow for asynchronous grieving, collective memory, and archival presence. But they also introduce a moral hazard: who manages these legacies, and with what consent? Who speaks for the dead when the only voices left are followers, fans, and critics?
