How did a rigid market in 1992 become particularly dynamic in 2022? Has death become a trend? Or is it due to the ingenuity of many players who, surfing cultural, legislative and technological developments, have managed to make people ‘like’ people almost to death?
These actors are of course not only the undertakers, the inevitable interlocutors of the families and the entourage of the deceased, but also the countless start-ups that want to disrupt the various mortuary markets one by one, such as Grantwill who created the “first post-mortem social network “, or even Testamento attacking notaries with its supply of safe holographic wills.
It is these actors, their offers and their way of working that Faouzi Bensebaa and Fabien Eymas analyze in their book Le business de la mort (Éditions L’Harmattan), of which we offer you the good magazines here…
(De)regulated markets
The revitalization of the death market began in particular with the promulgation of the Sueur Act, which sounded the death knell of the municipal monopoly on undertakers. This led to the development of a small number of private players who, taking advantage of the oligopolistic structure of the market, were able to raise prices and thus increase their turnover.
Nevertheless, the funeral market and, more generally, the death-related markets still appear to be regulated. When a person dies, it is necessary to respect the temporality determined by the legal texts. For example, the death certificate must be made by a doctor within 24 hours and the cremation or burial must take place within a margin of 48 hours after death at the earliest and up to 6 days at the latest. Regulation also plays a role in developing markets related to death. France appears cautious in this regard and its regulations – rightly or wrongly – prevent the development of markets such as cryogenics, ash scattering or assisted suicide.
By imposing the distribution of all the ashes of the deceased in the same place, French law reduces the possibility for families to use certain creative services developed abroad. However, the development of cremation – 1% of deaths in 1980 compared to nearly 40% today – raises the potential demand for differentiation in ashes distribution. If in France it is possible to have his ashes scattered in the middle of nature (forest, sea, etc.), their transformation into diamonds, their shipment to deep space or the deposit of part of them in a dildo as suggested by a Dutch designer does not seem possible. Should we regret it?
On the more sensitive topic of assisted suicide, legislation going against the grain allows a country, in this case Switzerland, to take advantage of a competitive advantage over the rest of the world. Specifically, since this market can only exist in Switzerland, this country attracts many non-Swiss European citizens who want to end their lives, making the Swiss Confederation the main destination for “death tourism”.
Even when it comes to pet funerals, not everything is possible. If animals up to 40 kg are allowed to be buried on the family site, this is in a pit of at least 1 meter deep and at a distance of at least 35 meters from homes and water points. But burials in animal cemeteries – that of Asnières-sur-Seine (92) dates from 1899! – and cremations in particular are on the rise. In the United States, more than 500,000 animals a year are entitled to a burial!
An uberization in progress?
Unable to enter legally inaccessible markets, French start-ups are attacking traditional undertakers and…notaries! The former, accused of charging opaque prices – and thus necessarily insulting – have to do with the rise of online funeral directors offering similar services, promising knockdown prices in the process.
Paradoxically, the advent of these digital businesses in the 2010s didn’t – far from it – prevent the price inflation of traditional undertakers. They have certainly taken advantage or benefited from the low appeal of their customers – people aged 60 to 70 on average – to online commerce. Certainly a simple reprieve that calls for a profound evolution of actors taking advantage of the emergency facing families.
Another example of an attempt to uberize historical players is that of start-up Testamento attacking the de facto monopoly of notaries in the will market. But on closer inspection, this does not seem to us to be a frontal attack, but rather an additional proposal that – for the time being at least – should not get notaries into trouble.
Screenshot
Indeed, there are three types of wills: holographic, authentic and mystical. The first is drawn up and kept by the testator himself, while the other two require the intervention of a notary: for the drafting and preservation in the case of the authentic will and simply for safekeeping in the case of the secret will.
Of course, it is much more difficult to dispute an authentic will than a holographic will. This is where Testamento comes in, offering through modeling to secure the drafting of a holographic will. So it seems that for now, Testamento is more out to exploit an off-market practice – drafting a holographic will – than to compete with notaries in their oh-so-closed market of authentic wills.
But markets related to death are not only affected by the digitization found in most sectors, the most modern technologies are also being mobilized to discover the key to eternity and bring the dead back to life.
Technology not to die…
The search for eternity is old. The way of eating, in particular, has been associated with a human — or rather divine — longevity since ancient times, since ambrosial or nectar was reserved for the gods. Sisyphus paid a heavy price for coveting an immortality inaccessible to mere mortals.
The technological progress of the past decades has been accompanied by projects that some consider crazy, pathetic or, on the contrary, desirable and promising. First of all, there is cryogenization which, as we have pointed out, is not allowed in France and where a handful of companies, mainly American, take delight in freezing the bodies and/or heads of people who have died of an incurable disease and they need to be awakened as soon as medical advances make it possible to treat them. For those who have made the choice to freeze only the head, other scientific advances are needed for an “awakening” that has the obstacles, no matter what is frozen.
ThenCC BY-SA
Transhumanism may therefore seem like a more modern and less risky technological solution, even though we are still only in the research phase in this area and so no offer is being brought to market. But this research is promising. Serious scientists consider the regeneration of a damaged organ from the stem cells of the same individual a realistic goal. In contrast, other announcements, such as those to copy the human mind to transfer it to another body or to a computer, seem more risky.
Well-known entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk have embarked on the adventure of transhumanism. It was in 2016 with the founding of Neuralink that the founder of SpaceX and Tesla followed in the footsteps of transhumanism. Neuralink’s mission is to develop electronic implants that aim to enhance the capabilities of the human brain. In late summer 2020, Elon Musk’s start-up showed that it had designed an implant that, installed in a pig’s brain, could read its brain activity and transmit it to a computer. Ultimately, such an implant could allow humans to control machines by thinking…
…or bring the dead back to life
In the absence of immediate reliance on transhumanist technologies, it is possible to ‘resurrect’ the dead, in part undoubtedly. There are at least three options.
The first is to use a conversation robot or chatbot to continue exchanging with the deceased after death. This is what James Vlahos did to continue the dialogue with his father. For the conversation robot to function properly, it is necessary for the deceased to record stories, anecdotes and other life stories in advance, which the robot then tells on request. Even better, thanks to artificial intelligence, the robot can rearrange the words from the recordings to produce sentences and thus new and non-stereotyped conversations…
This option seems compatible with the second that comes to us from Japan. Indeed, in 2018, a Japanese artist developed a robot that shows the face of a deceased person and, thanks to an integrated computer program, imitates the gestures and voice of the deceased. Combined with James Vlahos’ chatbot, this robot would get even closer to the deceased.
The third option is to visit the deceased(s) in a virtual world using virtual reality technology. A South Korean was able to do this in early 2020 in a program that was broadcast on television. By mixing photos of her 7-year-old daughter who died three years earlier and the movements of a child, Vive Studio has created a character that looks exactly like the mother’s offspring.
These developments are not without questions. In particular, these technological means that make it possible to bring the dead back or bring them back to life in another way raise the question of whether mourning is feasible. Questions that the makers of these technological replacements for the dead sometimes ask themselves. For example, James Vlahos expresses the contradiction between his desire to improve his dadbot – robot father – and his wish not to make it too real to allow mourning…