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We’re all going to die — what happens to our Facebook accounts?

We’re all going to die — what happens to our Facebook accounts?

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A new Why’d You Push That Button? episode

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Photo by James Bareham / The Verge

This week on Why’d You Push That Button?, Kaitlyn Tiffany and I think about death. This slightly dark episode marks the start of our three-part miniseries, Death Online, which, as you can probably guess, tackles how the internet changes how we (and our things) die. This episode is about planning for our deaths. Yes, we know we should make a will and think about our physical assets, but for this episode, we’re focused on our digital assets. What happens to all of our Instagram posts? What happens to our accounts? Does someone know our passwords?

We chat with a bunch of people who have thoughts, including Cat Frazier of the Animated Text accounts on Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, as well as Tim Herrera, the Smarter Living editor for The New York Times. We also chat with an estate planner who specializes in digital assets law, Megan Yip, and a Why’d You Push That Button? listener named Jon who has thought deeply about his death plan.

Listen to the episode above, and you can subscribe to the show anywhere you typically get your podcasts. To make it easy for you, we’ve also got our usual places linked: Apple PodcastsPocket CastsSpotifyGoogle Podcasts, and our RSS feed.