Upload: Navigating Privilege, Power, and Perpetuity in Digital Afterlife
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Bhargava, Deepti
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Routledge
Abstract
Fictional portrayals of digital afterlife have gained prominence in popular culture, offering both imaginative narratives and critical reflections on the socio-political, legal, and philosophical implications of digital immortality. Amazon Prime’s Upload (2020–) envisions a near future where human consciousness can be transferred into corporate-controlled virtual afterlives. The series follows Nathan Brown, who is uploaded to Lakeview, a premium digital afterlife owned by the tech giant Horizen, with access dictated by financial privilege. Unlike The Good Place, which follows a similar comedic arc of self-discovery, Upload offers a critical inquiry of digital eternity, highlighting inequalities that persist beyond death. This chapter examines Upload as a cautionary satire that exposes the commodification of afterlife technologies, raising key questions about power, control, and access in the expanding digital death industry.
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Keywords
Art, Humanities, Religion, Popular culture
Source
In: Nairn, A. (Ed.) (2025) Depicting the Afterlife in Contemporary Film and Media: Morality, Religion and Death. Routledge. Chapter 14. eBook ISBN: 9781003438403 DOI: 10.4324/9781003438403
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This is the Author's Accepted Manuscript of a chapter in "Depicting the Afterlife in Contemporary Film and Media" edited by Angelique Nairn © Taylor & Francis. The final, published version is available via subscription at (see Publisher's version).