Funerals In The “Cyber-Civil-War” Age

In Foucault, the state controls information so that it can ultimately control the behavior of the physical human bodies of the population. This model does not suffice, because today the superstate instead controls physical human bodies as information carriers, to control bodies in their ability to carry and hold information, not for how they behave. The state does not produce information seeking to control the population, but rather it controls the production of information by human beings themselves; the state becoming only a controlling entity, creating life or taking life but not in charge of the production of information, because state-like production of information is now in private hands.  

In the near future under this superstate, every physical body will already be in the cross-hairs of the superstate because these bodies will be the carriers of important information, and every body will always already be like a deviant if the information systems the superstate stores within the body become virus-laden or faulty. Without the innocent body's own fault, something such as a chip or a bar-code within it may deviate and cause the necessity to unjustly destroy or intrude on the body that simply carries the deviance/faulty device. Innocent lives will frequently be lost at the hands of the superstate only concerned with the management and maintenance of its devices. Another ethical question would emerge: does the superstate let the innocent life to live and have his/her virus-laden chips infect the whole of cyberspace, or should an innocent life be killed?

The superstate may deem necessary to retrieve and erase the deviant devices within the human body of its subject, giving rise to a “cyber-civil-war” in the future between the authoritative superstate and angry but innocent “deviant” carriers of information systems who feel intruded. In this war, the biological death of the citizen would not be the end objective of the superstate, because the body is not to be killed just in its movement and behavior, but must also be destroyed for the information that it carries within it. For the superstate, the body cannot simply be shot and let to lie in the street. Proper destruction of the body and not just its death would be the aim of the superstate, making the superstate effectively an entity that controls post-death funeral processes, that approves and administers some kinds of funeral processes over other kinds, depending on which funeral process enables proper destruction of the information systems within the body. The superstate will control the complete cremation of bodies in order that the information systems in those bodies are completely destroyed. Mass concentration camps will ensue where citizens are to go to die and be cremated in a way suited to the superstate. Killing the human body will become an activity performed on the way towards the deactivation of the foreign devices within that body; the worth and value of the human body will be judged based on the smooth functioning of the devices within it: if the device manifests a lot of bugs for some reason, the human body, no matter what its wealth and class, will be considered a weakness in the superstate's order. 

The superstate's complete control of funerals would be a great denial of freedom for the population to do whatever it feels like with its dead bodies. It would be problematic for a superstate if the mourning civilians were to get rid of cremation, to make the dead body productive and active through the information stored within it, to let the virus roam freely, to withhold the information contained in the dead from the superstate, to make it possible for others to extract data from the chip before the superstate does. In this civil war, the entombing of the dead and the use of open graves would resist the superstate's authorization of complete cremation.