Hi, it’s Charley, and this is Untangled, a newsletter and podcast about technology, people, and power.
Can’t afford a subscription and value Untangled’s offerings? Let me know! You only need to reply to this email, and I’ll add you to the paid subscription list, no questions asked.
👇 ICYMI
June has been all about death, loss, grieving, and AI:
I interviewed Tamara Kneese, author of the book Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond about what happens online when we die.
I published an essay about how AI might alter loss, grieving, and our ability to move forward.
Today, I’m sharing one of my favorite conversations to date. It’s a vulnerable and deeply personal conversation about grief with Caitlin Dewey, who writes the newsletter, Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends. Caitlin tells the story of how, following her third miscarriage, she used an AI tool to create hypothetical photos of what her child might have looked like based on pictures of her and her husband — and how doing so offered comfort and concreteness to an otherwise ambiguous loss.
The conversation also digs into miscarriages as a form of ambiguous loss, how grief needs to be witnessed, and the importance of meaning-making and rituals in grieving — and how AI tools might shape all that. Along the way, I share my experience grieving the death of my mom. Oh, and Caitlin turns the table on me and asks what advice I’d offer my teenage self!
It was a meaningful and (perhaps oddly) fun conversation! The episode will be available for free subscribers on Wednesday, June 19th.
Okay, that’s all for now.
Charley
👀 Can AI actually help you grieve?