But at some point in the (probably very distant) future, the number of dead people online will suddenly outnumber the living ones. Virtual corpses will start to become a real problem, just as physical corpses fill up real-world graveyards and have to be carted off and stacked up somewhere else. Imagine the internet as a virtual version of the Catacombs of Paris or the Sedlec Ossuary, a digital museum whose aura of human involvement is concealed behind a brittle carapace of hyperlinks, tweets and forgotten comments.