Published July 13, 2025
Karachi:
When I wrote my master’s dissertation, a friend who pursued his PhD introduced me to Nicola Wright’s work on the digital afterlife – a body of research that explores what happens when rituals, practice and cultural heritage are transplanted from the physical world to the digital world. Wright’s insight helped me think more critically about the postume releases of musicians, fate for digital estates and the creepy ways algorithms can keep a star alive online long after they have died in the flesh. For a person who experienced only a public figure through the Internet, the star does not go away – they simply become part of the feed reappears, like a living ghost in the machine.
These are not just esoteric patterns about star status or virtual memory. They are philosophical and political studies of what it means to live and die in an age when platforms preserve, remix and monetize both presence and absence. And decisively, they help us understand how Freddie Mercury’s question – “Who will live forever?” – has become the default setting for celebrity membrane.
But the last few days on the Pakistani internet forced me to visit these ideas from a completely different angle. Not from the curated heritage of global icons, but from the silence of those who die unknown and not – until they suddenly are not. The last few days online – not in the real world, where countless bodies are buried quietly by Edhi and Chhipa – have been shaped by someone whom the general audience had never heard of before: Humaira Asghar.
Her death not only became viral – it gave the Pakistani Internet a new topic to mourn, a view to perform and a reason for collecting around. Here was someone that the industry did not even classify as a “C-LIST” talent-one invisible woman who survived in the margins in a hyper-competitious way and the TV world. And yet, in death, she commanded the attention of Sindh Governor Kamran Tessori, the Sindh Culture Department, A-List players and ACT (the officially registered trade association for Pakistani players) to name a few.
That an otherwise forgotten figure could achieve such a posthumous visibility reveals a strange truth: In the digital age, death can be a starting pad for fame. It emphasizes a deep absurdity of Internet culture – where obscurity in life can be undone by the grotesque sight of death. What could not be achieved through PR -agents or talent managers were suddenly provided by the pure virality of bodily decay and social neglect. It is perhaps the most sober irony: that visibility is no longer proof of value, but about narrative tool. And Humaira became in death a story that fits.
But what exactly do we do when we share her photo, write our heartache or blame the industry in Instagram -image texts or a journalistic analysis that is similar to what you read? Is it her death, or is it the discomfort it brings us? The tragedy of Humaira’s lonely end forces us to interrogate what our online grief rituals say about our capacity for care and whether we have become better at performing grief than preventing it. Profiles on social media of the deceased now act as digital mausoleums. Humaira’s photos and interviews, once uploaded for visibility and relevance, now serve as a mosaic of her absence. In death, she became hyper-visible, an ironic fate for someone who was abandoned in life.
This shift from personal profile to an online shrine is not neutral – it transforms our relationship with both the deceased and ourselves. When the grief is conveyed through a feed, the traditional rituals of algorithmic aftermath displaces: a “memory” message, a resurrected post or a recommended video with a now -sounding voice. These algorithmic echoes of Humaira Asghar not just retain her; They compile her, often deprived of nuance and context. What we have left with is a fragmented, crowd-sourced version of her identity, no longer rooted in real relationships, but flows in the collective imagination of strangers and spectators.
This is the double bonding of the digital afterlife. In digital anthropology and internet studies jargon, we will say it democrats memory while destabilizing the personality it seeks to honor.
A recent trend in the digital humanities is the study of “posthumous personality.” This refers to the way identities continue to circulate and is reconstructed after death, especially online. Humaira Asghars Persona is now being communicated more by those who knew her than those who really knew her. In this way, her identity is no longer her own – it belongs to the digital commons, subject to reinterpretation and exploitation. Our South Asian methods of grief – Duas, funerals and charity actions – are intended to provide dignity and closure. Yet in Humaira’s case, Janazah became a reflection of the story. Volunteers shrinked to ensure a final resting place for her after her family refused to claim her, but this was also uploaded, documented and discussed, and eventually her brother showed up to prove that all speculation the wrong ones.
Humaira’s case exposes how digital spaces not only retain inheritance; They produce them, often postponed and without the control of the subject. Her identity is now broken through lenses of grief, voyeurism and social comment. A clip from a previous interview, such as Ahmed Ali Butt’s Podcast, becomes evidence of her longing for a lover; A glamorous photo becomes evidence of loneliness, a sad, sentimental caption is reason to believe she was depressed. This retrospective storytelling, often dotted with projection and moralization, hides more than it reveals.
And yet, it is also the only form of memory that many will ever engage in, a paradox that reveals the uneven terrain of online grief. It is remembered and in what form is increasingly not decided by family or belief or sect, but by digital participation and platform management.
Thus, the moral danger is not just about leadership. It is also about presence and representation. When the living fails to protect the dignity of the dead in their lifetime do they have the moral authority to construct their afterlife? When Humaira’s social media became a digital shrine, it was not built by those closest to her, but by an anonymous digital public that claimed her only after her silence.
In this context, Humaira’s digital afterlife becomes a case study in what learned calls posthumous subjectivity – a state where the dead are still constructed as social agents, but without agency. We see how the dead are made symbolically active while they are materially silent. Their identity becomes a canvas on which collective anxiety, moral judgments and unresolved fault are expected.
In Humaira’s case, her death has been mobilized to criticize the entertainment industry by people like me, highlight the neglect of mental health and lament the collapse of family and social bonds. Yet, paradoxically, these tales often do more to meet the living needs than to honor the person who has gone. Similar to how one family, you should have known waiting for the patriarch to die to claim his supposed wealth to find out only that it never existed or was handed over another. The dead person then loses all ‘value’ and is only seen by the successors because the world expects them to grieve.
What practice leads to on the Internet is a form of grief capitalism where digital grief becomes both emotionally and socially transactionally. The more viral grief, the more “value” it has. Humaira’s history did not necessarily get traction because many remembered her lovingly, but because her lonely death – and the synaptic horror of it – fits a tragic archetype tasty to digital indignation and sentimentality. Her posthumous visibility did not emerge from remembered love, but from a renewed usefulness to a content -resulting system. The question of what is due to the dead becomes muddy in this terrain: Is visibility a form of justice or another, more subtle form of exploitation?
Ultimately, Humaira’s fate invites us to confront how digital spaces both preserve and perverse memory. Her digital afterlife, shaped by strangers more than loved ones, raises difficult but necessary questions: If grief is performed? Who story is reinforced? And at what cost does the visibility of someone who in life were largely unseen?
When actor Osman Khalid Butt spoke out in the wake of Humaira Asghar’s death, his words wore the clarity and restraint, as the moment it takes: “I don’t even know what to say more. Feeling like we are going into circles. I get it: Engagement is currency. Contrectual statements aimed at provoking, striking and rage to click. Dignity – It was a reprimand of the culture that has made grief a monetizable performance in an age when tragedy travels faster than the truth, butt’s calls as a warning: We blur the line between memory and relevance between solidarity and spectacle.
This is not just a moral failure; It is a cultural shift that is rooted in the architecture of social media. In the attention of the attention, visibility is currency, and loss-notes are so terrible to our senses as Humaira’s is immediately exposed to a cycle of virality. The problem is not for people to mourn online, but that they perform grief for an audience, flat complex lives in emotionally potent miniature images and tear -protected reaction rags. What is lost in this process is not only nuance but humanity.
Grief becomes a genre, complete with one’s own aesthetic tropes and emotional rhythms. And as with any genre, its currency depends on recognizability and repetition. But grief in real life is messy, slow and not -linearly. It is also private and often invisible. What happens then when our experience of loss is shaped more of algorithmic rhythm than emotional reality? What does it mean for the deprived of seeing the death of their loved ones becoming a trend, their last moments discussed in comments and dissected by strangers?
These are the questions that Humaira’s death forces us to ask. Her case is not unique in her tragedy, but in its digital afterlife. The public nature of her death, the discovery of her dilapidated body, the familial confusion that the volunteer Janazah offers, the social media information was quickly transformed into content. A woman who died forgotten became unforgettable only because her anonymity became grotesque. She did not trend because she was loved, but because her end fit the aesthetic of tragedy that is doing well online.
This cycle is what scholars are increasingly identifying as grief capitalism – where the emotional work of grief is extracted, packed and redistributed for consumption. It is a system that privileges content in relation to context, viewing care. The problem is not memory, but who gets remember, how and for whom.
Digital afterlives can be comforting. They allow for asynchronous grief, collective memory and archive presence. But they also introduce a moral danger: Who controls these inheritance and with what consent? Who speaks to the dead when the only voices left are supporters, fans and critics?
