Europe’s Otherness Problem: From Bosnia to Palestine By Habib Siddiqui

There are moments in history when a society reveals its soul. Sarajevo was one such moment. Srebrenica was another. And now, thirty years later, the world’s reaction to the death and public celebration of Ratko Mladic– the “Butcher of Bosnia” – exposes yet again the moral bankruptcy of the global order we pretend governs humanity. It is a painful reminder that the United Nations, conceived as humanity’s shield against genocide, has become a weakened world-body incapable of protecting the vulnerable. Worse still, the Western powers who claim to be guardians of civilization have repeatedly enabled the very horrors they vowed never to allow again.

I arrived in Sarajevo on May 5, 2022, invited to speak at a genocide conference. It was not my first time speaking orwriting about Bosnia; both my voice and pen had been committed to its tragedy since the early 1990s, when the world watched the destruction of a multiethnic society with a mixture of indifference, paralysis, and selective outrage. But walking the streets of Sarajevo – feeling the weight of its history, sensing the quiet dignity of its survivors – was different. It was visceral. It was haunting. It was a confrontation with the consequences of global hypocrisy.

Sarajevo was once known as the “Jerusalem of Europe,” a city where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived side by side for centuries. Under Ottoman rule, it embodied the Qur’anic principles of la ikraha fid-deen – no compulsion in religion – and lakumdeenikumwaliyadeen – to you your faith, to me mine. It was a city where difference was not a threat but a fact of life. Yet when Yugoslavia fractured, Bosnia’s Muslim identity became its death sentence. Europe, which never truly reconciled with its own history of religious chauvinism, looked away as Serb nationalists turned Bosnia into a killing field.

The siege of Sarajevo lasted 1,425 days – the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare. More than 11,000 civilians were killed, including over 1,000 children. Residents lived without electricity, water, medicine, or safety. Snipers targeted anyone who dared cross a street. Mortars fell on markets, playgrounds, funerals. The city was starved, terrorized, and isolated. And the world watched.

But the darkest chapter was Srebrenica.

Srebrenica was not merely a town; it was a promise. A UN-declared Safe Zone. A sanctuary that was supposed to symbolize the world’s commitment to “Never Again.” Instead, it became the site of the worst genocide in Europe since the Jewish Holocaust. Over 8,372 Bosniak men and boys were slaughtered by the Bosnian Serb Army under Ratko Mladic. Bodies were dumped in mass graves, then dug up and scattered into secondary and tertiary graves to hide the evidence. The killers included units of the VRS and paramilitary groups like the Scorpions – entities responsible for atrocities that should have shaken the conscience of every nation.

Yet the UN failed. Catastrophically. Fatally.

Kofi Annan later admitted that the UN’s errors were “rooted in a philosophy of impartiality and non-violence” that was tragically unsuited to Bosnia’s reality. The organization that was supposed to prevent genocide instead became a silent witness to it. Its peacekeepers were outnumbered, under-armed, and politically constrained. Its Security Council was paralyzed by the geopolitical interests of powerful states. Its moral authority evaporated in the killing fields of Srebrenica.

And Europe – self-proclaimed cradle of human rights – allowed it to happen.

Today, more than 750 mass graves have been uncovered across Bosnia. In Srebrenica alone, 91 mass graves have yielded nearly 7,000 identified remains. Of the estimated 20,000 soldiers involved in war crimes, only about 500 have been convicted. Justice has been slow, incomplete, and often symbolic.

But perhaps the most grotesque betrayal is happening now.

During my visit to Bosnia, the posters of Ratko Mladic near Srebrenicawere everywhere – smiling, glorified, celebrated. The town, once 75% Bosniak, has been ethnically cleansed. The survivors live elsewhere. The perpetrators and their supporters remain. And now, with Mladic’s death, thousands have attended his funeral in Serbia, honoring a man convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity.

What does it say about a society when it celebrates a mass murderer?

What does it say about Europe when it tolerates such celebration?

What does it say about the world when genocide becomes normalized?

The answer is devastating: our global system is broken. The UN is weakened. Western powers are hypocritical. And the lessons of Bosnia have not been learned.

The same nations that failed Bosnia now enable Israel’s ongoing destruction of Palestinian life. The same governments that refused to confront Serb nationalism now defend Israeli expansionism. The same Western capitals that mourned Srebrenica now justify the genocide of civilians in Gaza. They speak of human rights while funding occupation. They preach international law while shielding those who violate it. They condemn genocide only when politically convenient.

This is not accidental. It is structural.

Former colonial powers have always been comfortable with the suffering of “others.” Bosnia’s Muslims were othered. Palestinians are othered. The Rohingya are othered. The Kashmiris are othered. The list is long, and the pattern is unmistakable. When the victims are Muslim, the outrage is muted, the action delayed, the justice deferred.

And so Ratko Mladic, responsible for the murder of thousands, is honored by his supporters. His crimes are minimized. His legacy is sanitized. His funeral becomes a nationalist spectacle. It is sickening. It is obscene. It is a moral indictment of Serbia, of Europe, and of the international community that allowed him to operate for years with impunity.

The world promised “Never Again.” Bosnia proved that promise was hollow. Palestine proves it daily. The UN, weakened by political manipulation, has become a stage for speeches rather than a force for justice. Its resolutions are ignored. Its warnings dismissed. Its credibility eroded.

And yet, the survivors of Sarajevo and Srebrenica endure. Their dignity remains intact. Their memory resists erasure. Their truth stands firm against denial.

But memory alone is not enough.

The world must confront the normalization of genocide. It must reject the celebration of war criminals. It must dismantle the hypocrisy that allows powerful nations to decide whose lives matter. It must reform the UN or replace it with a body capable of protecting humanity rather than merely documenting its tragedies.Because if a mass murderer can be celebrated, if genocide can be justified, if victims can be forgotten, then we have already surrendered our claim to civilization.

Enough is enough.

The world failed Bosnia. It is failing again. And unless we confront this failure with honesty and courage, the next Srebrenica is not a question of if – but when.

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Dr. Siddiqui is the author of several books including 64 Hours in Sarajevo: A journey through the historic landscape of the Balkans.

When the state becomes the darkness by Solomon Mensah

Uganda is not a dark country. It is a country being darkened by the way power is exercised. That distinction matters. Uganda has extraordinary natural beauty, resilient communities and citizens who have endured political violence, poverty, corruption and instability with remarkable patience. But patience should never be mistaken for consent. Increasingly, the country resembles a place where corruption, intimidation, political violence, superstition and impunity reinforce one another and where the state is too often part of the problem rather than the institution expected to solve it.

The most disturbing feature is not that corruption exists. Corruption exists almost everywhere. It is that corruption can become a political operating system. When access to public money, contracts, influence and protection depends upon proximity to power, corruption stops being merely criminal behaviour. It becomes patronage. It becomes a language of government.

And once that happens, accountability becomes dangerous. Uganda's political system has spent decades teaching citizens a particularly poisonous lesson: that the powerful operate according to different rules. Opposition politicians can be harassed. Journalists can be threatened. Protesters can be arrested. Critics can discover that a social-media post has suddenly become a criminal offence. Meanwhile, those with sufficient political connections can appear remarkably well insulated from consequences. The message is unmistakable: loyalty is safer than citizenship.

That is how a democracy becomes hollow without formally disappearing. The military and security agencies have increasingly occupied political space that should belong to civilian institutions. When soldiers become instruments for silencing critics, the distinction between protecting the state and protecting those who control it begins to collapse. A government that fears criticism eventually starts treating criticism as sabotage.

That is not strength. It is insecurity wearing a uniform. Then there is superstition, which becomes especially dangerous when political power learns to exploit fear. Belief itself is not the problem; societies everywhere contain traditions, spiritual practices and irrational fears. The danger comes when superstition becomes a substitute for evidence, when accusations replace investigation, and when fear of witches, curses, demons or imagined enemies becomes politically useful.

A frightened population is easier to manipulate than an informed one. Crime flourishes in precisely such an environment. When citizens lose confidence in police, courts and political institutions, they begin looking elsewhere for justice. Mob justice becomes tempting. Rumour becomes evidence. Revenge becomes justice. The state then responds with more force, creating a vicious circle in which neither law nor trust survives.

Uganda therefore faces something deeper than a corruption problem. It faces an institutional problem. The tragedy is that ordinary Ugandans pay the bill. They pay through stolen public resources, inadequate services, unemployment, fear and the exhausting knowledge that knowing the right person can matter more than doing the right thing.

Yet darkness is not destiny. Uganda can still become a country where institutions matter more than individuals, where elections are genuinely competitive, where journalists do not need courage merely to do their jobs, where soldiers return to barracks and politicians return to politics, where corruption produces prison rather than promotion, and where superstition remains a private belief rather than a political weapon.

The essential question is therefore not whether Uganda has become dark. It is whether Ugandans will allow those who benefit from the darkness to convince them that darkness is normal. If you'd like, I can also make this sharper, angrier and more devastatingly satirical, while keeping it in the same newspaper-column format.

The art of black gold by Rayyan Courbis

Oil does not merely power modern civilisation. It has colonised its imagination. For more than a century, the fossil-fuel industry has understood something that environmental politics was slow to grasp: people do not live by economics alone. They live by stories, symbols, colours, landscapes and fantasies. Oil was therefore never marketed simply as a black liquid extracted from beneath the ground. It was sold as progress, freedom, prosperity, mobility and modernity. The petrol station became a symbol of independence. The automobile became an emblem of personal liberty. The offshore platform became an icon of technological mastery. The gleaming refinery became, somehow, a monument to civilisation.

This is where petroaesthetics becomes politically interesting. It is not simply art about oil. It is the struggle over how oil is seen. The fossil-fuel industry has spent generations making its most consequential product strangely invisible. Crude oil disappears into petrol, plastics, aviation, packaging, clothing, roads and countless objects. Extraction happens somewhere else; consumption happens here. The derrick becomes picturesque, the pipeline becomes infrastructure, the petrol pump becomes convenience. The ecological and human consequences are edited out of the frame.

Art can put them back in. That does not mean producing yet another photograph of a flaming oil well and congratulating ourselves on our environmental virtue. The familiar imagery of catastrophe can become almost comforting in its predictability: black smoke, dead birds, poisoned rivers, melting ice. We have seen the apocalypse so often that even disaster has acquired an aesthetic vocabulary.

The more subversive artist asks a harder question: why did we ever find this beautiful? Consider the visual mythology surrounding the automobile. The car commercial rarely shows congestion, exhaust, mining, refineries or climate disruption. Instead, it offers the open road, mountains, freedom and an apparently infinite horizon. The machine consuming fossil energy becomes a vehicle for escaping civilisation itself. It is a remarkable cultural trick: selling dependence as independence.

Petroaesthetics can reverse that trick. Artists can place the refinery beside the suburban kitchen. They can connect the plastic toy to the chemical plant, the holiday flight to the drilling platform, the fashionable synthetic fabric to the oilfield. They can expose the hidden geography connecting comfortable lives with distant extraction. Photography, painting, sculpture, film, installation and digital art can make the invisible visible without turning the work into a sermon.

That distinction matters. Environmental art sometimes assumes that showing destruction automatically produces political enlightenment. It does not. People can look at a devastated landscape, feel momentarily horrified, and then return home in a petroleum-powered car. Shock is not necessarily transformation.

The more powerful artistic intervention is psychological. It unsettles the ordinary. A petrol station at night can be made to look less like a convenient beacon and more like a shrine. A plastic supermarket aisle can become an archaeological excavation of fossil civilisation. A glossy corporate logo can be stripped of its reassuring colours and placed beside the landscapes from which its prosperity originated.

The point is not to pretend that oil has never improved lives. That would be intellectually lazy. Fossil energy helped produce extraordinary gains in mobility, manufacturing, medicine and material abundance. The problem is that its achievements have been wrapped in a mythology of permanence.

Petroaesthetics should dismantle that mythology. Art has always been capable of doing something journalism, economics and political speeches often struggle to accomplish: changing the emotional meaning of familiar things. It can make the ordinary strange. It can make convenience uncomfortable. It can reveal the politics hiding inside beauty.

The fossil-fuel age built a civilisation around a substance that was simultaneously everywhere and almost nowhere in our consciousness. Perhaps the first step beyond it is simply to make oil visible again. Not as black gold. As history.

Trekking Chat #015 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

They trek across surreal cartoon streets, armed with quirky sarcasm
and boundless humor. They map uncharted valleys, befriend bizarre creatures
and find the real adventure in their square frames.

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Myanmar’s descent into hell by Mary Long

There are moments when the language of international diplomacy becomes almost offensively inadequate. “Concern.” “Deeply troubling.” “Grave violations.” Such phrases have been repeated about Myanmar for years, as if sufficiently solemn adjectives might somehow stop bombs, halt torture or persuade armed men that civilians are human beings.

Now the United Nations says Myanmar’s human-rights situation has reached a “new low”. That should not merely produce another round of diplomatic statements. It should produce embarrassment, especially among those governments that have watched this catastrophe deepen while treating Myanmar as an unfortunate regional problem best managed at arm’s length.

The Rohingya remain at the centre of this moral failure. Nine years after hundreds of thousands were driven from their homes, their suffering has not become history. It has become a permanent condition. The remarkable cruelty is not simply that the Rohingya were persecuted; it is that persecution has become so normalised that another generation is growing up knowing displacement, discrimination and violence as ordinary facts of existence.

And the grim absurdity is that even Myanmar’s civil war has not liberated them from their old tormentors. The military has continued its brutal campaign, while the Arakan Army has also been accused of serious abuses against Rohingya communities. For civilians trapped between armed forces, ethnic militias and collapsing institutions, the distinction between liberation and oppression can become tragically theoretical.

This is what happens when the rule of law disappears. Violence stops being an aberration and becomes an economic model. Myanmar’s unregulated economy is flourishing precisely because the state has ceased to function as a state should. Illegal mining, exploitation of natural resources and other illicit businesses thrive in the vacuum. Conflict generates money; money finances conflict; and civilians pay the bill. It is a particularly ugly version of capitalism, one in which the commodity being extracted is not merely rare earths or minerals but human misery.

Meanwhile, millions are displaced and millions more face hunger. A country can survive political disagreement. It can survive economic hardship. It can even survive governments it dislikes. What it cannot easily survive is the systematic destruction of trust, law and the basic expectation that tomorrow will be safer than today.

Myanmar’s tragedy is therefore larger than the junta, larger than the Rohingya and larger than the civil war. It is the destruction of the idea of citizenship itself.

The military has repeatedly demonstrated that elections without freedom, institutions without independence and constitutions without accountability are little more than stage props. But armed opposition groups cannot escape scrutiny simply because they oppose an abhorrent regime. Human rights are not a political reward reserved for whichever side appears more sympathetic.

The international community also needs to confront an uncomfortable truth: statements are not policy. Condemnations are not protection. And remembering Myanmar only when another horrific report is published is not solidarity.

The people of Myanmar do not need another expression of “grave concern”. They need pressure on those responsible, humanitarian access, accountability, protection for minorities and sustained international attention.

Otherwise the phrase “new low” will become what diplomatic language has so often become, a temporary description of a catastrophe that everyone knows will eventually sink even lower.

Democracy discount by Mia Rodríguez

There is a revealing contradiction at the heart of Donald Trump’s Venezuela policy, Washington says it wants democracy, while constructing an economic arrangement that may give powerful Venezuelans a very good reason to postpone it. That is not a minor diplomatic inconsistency. It is the sort of contradiction that can quietly become policy.

Oil has always been Venezuela’s blessing and curse. It made governments rich enough to avoid accountability and created fortunes large enough to purchase influence, loyalty and silence. Now Washington appears to be building a new political economy around that same resource. If the oil money begins flowing before Venezuelans have freely chosen their government, the people benefiting from the arrangement will have a powerful interest in keeping the political system exactly as it is.

This is where Alejandro Betancourt matters. He is not merely an oil businessman who happened to win a remarkable contract. He has emerged as an intermediary between Caracas and Washington, with connections valuable enough to make him central to the new arrangement. That creates an obvious danger: when access to billions of barrels depends on political relationships, democracy becomes an inconvenient variable.

Imagine the conversation in a private room. Nobody needs to say, “Stop the elections.” They only need to say, “Not yet. The country needs stability. The institutions are fragile. Investors require certainty. We should not rush.” Those arguments can sound reasonable. They can also become the vocabulary of indefinite postponement.

Delcy Rodríguez has her own incentive to embrace that logic. Her government can present economic recovery and oil investment as evidence that political change can wait. Washington, meanwhile, can point to rising production and strategic energy gains and declare that Venezuela is moving toward normality.

But normality is not democracy. The most dangerous political arrangements are not always dictatorships announced with tanks in the streets. Sometimes they are systems in which economic interests become so deeply entangled with political power that everyone benefiting from the arrangement discovers a reason to fear elections.

Free elections introduce uncertainty. A new government might review contracts, investigate corruption, renegotiate concessions or demand a larger share of national wealth. Investors dislike that uncertainty. Oligarchs dislike it even more. Governments that depend on those oligarchs can begin to dislike elections too.

And suddenly democracy becomes the problem to be managed. That is precisely what Washington should avoid creating. If Trump genuinely wants Venezuela to become democratic, the sequence should be obvious: establish transparent institutions, protect political competition, hold credible elections and then allow elected Venezuelan governments to determine how their oil resources are developed. Instead, the oil arrangement risks turning the sequence upside down, money first, accountability later.

Oil can finance schools and hospitals, rebuild infrastructure and restore livelihoods. But without democratic oversight, the same wealth can finance something else: political permanence.

The irony is painful. The United States has spent years denouncing Venezuela’s authoritarian political economy, only to risk helping construct another version of it, this time with different beneficiaries and American fingerprints.

Venezuela does not need another elite bargain disguised as national salvation. It needs a political settlement in which Venezuelans, not businessmen, interim officials or foreign presidents, decide who governs them. Otherwise the greatest threat to Venezuela’s democratic transition may not be the old regime. It may be the new oil boom.

#eBook Hilma af Klint: The forgotten pioneer by Ovi Art eBooks

Hilma af Klint was born in 1862 into a Swedish naval family, a child of mathematical precision and scientific curiosity. She was one of the first women to be admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, where she excelled in portraiture and botanical illustration.

On the surface, she was a conventional, academically trained artist. Beneath it, she was something far more radical: a medium, a spiritualist, a woman who believed that she could communicate with higher intelligences through her paintings.

From 1896, she and four other women formed a group they called "The Five." They held séances, recorded automatic drawings, and sought contact with spiritual guides they called "the High Masters." It was through this practice that af Klint came to understand her purpose: she was to paint "the great images of existence," not for public display, but as a message for a future humanity that might finally be able to receive it.

Ovi eBook Publishing 2026

Hilma af Klint:
The forgotten pioneer

Read it online or download HERE!
Read it online & downloading it as PDF or EPUB HERE!
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Carpond #020 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

A cacophony of singalongs, stifled yawns,
and surprisingly insightful debates
on the existential dread of a four wheeler vacuum

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The ghost they fed by Thanos Kalamidas

Germany has spent thirty-six years telling itself a comforting story, reunification healed the wound, democracy absorbed the East and the ghosts of the twentieth century had been safely locked away in the museum of national memory. On Sunday, Saxony-Anhalt offered a rather less comforting interpretation. The Alternative for Germany, the AfD, won 43.8 percent of the vote, more than twice its 2021 result and emerged as the strongest political force in the state. Nationally, it is already Germany’s second-largest party.

This was not an accident. It was the bill arriving at the table. The German political establishment has spent decades treating the far right partly as an electoral nuisance and partly as something that could be domesticated. Immigration could be discussed more harshly. National identity could be wrapped in respectable conservative language. Cultural anxieties could be acknowledged, sometimes amplified, and then supposedly absorbed by the traditional parties. The calculation was simple: steal enough votes from the extremists and the extremists will eventually disappear.

Instead, the extremists learned to steal the language. The tragedy is not that Germany suddenly discovered an appetite for authoritarian nationalism in 2026. The tragedy is that much of the political class repeatedly underestimated how deeply resentment, humiliation and regional alienation could become political capital. Eastern Germany entered reunification not simply as a geographical territory but as a society undergoing an extraordinary psychological and economic shock. Factories vanished. Communities shrank. Careers disappeared. Institutions were replaced. People who had spent decades being told that their country was the wrong Germany suddenly found themselves being told that their experience was largely the wrong history.

That does not make eastern Germans fascists. Nor does poverty automatically produce extremism. But political abandonment creates an empty room and somebody eventually walks into it. The AfD did.

It understood something the respectable parties often did not: people do not vote only with spreadsheets. They vote with memories, grievances, fears, pride and the intoxicating sensation of finally being noticed. The party has been particularly effective at converting legitimate frustrations, about stagnant regions, declining services, immigration, housing, bureaucracy and political incompetence, into a larger story about national betrayal.

That is where the danger lies. A democracy does not become illiberal merely because angry people vote. It becomes vulnerable when legitimate anger is deliberately attached to ethnic hierarchy, historical revisionism, hostility toward minorities and contempt for democratic restraints. The AfD has repeatedly moved in that direction, while its opponents have sometimes behaved as though the principal problem were the party's public-relations strategy rather than its political substance.

And there is an uncomfortable irony here. Every time mainstream parties imitate the far right in the hope of making it unnecessary, they validate the far right's diagnosis. If immigration is suddenly treated as the explanation for every social failure, voters naturally wonder why they should choose the copy rather than the original.

The firewall, meanwhile, is becoming less like a fortress and more like a political Maginot Line: impressive in principle, increasingly awkward in practice. You can refuse to cooperate with the AfD. You cannot refuse to acknowledge that millions of voters have chosen it.

Saxony-Anhalt therefore matters far beyond Saxony-Anhalt. The AfD fell three seats short of an outright parliamentary majority, but the psychological threshold has already been crossed. A far-right party has demonstrated that it can dominate an election in modern Germany without hiding what it is.

That should frighten Europe, not because Germany is about to become Nazi Germany again, but because history almost never repeats itself with the courtesy of wearing the same uniform.

The real lesson of reunification is therefore not that Germany defeated its past. It is that democracy cannot permanently outsource its unfinished business to elections. The ghost was never gone. Germany simply stopped looking under the bed.

The woman who would fix FIFA by Kasie Hewitt

She appears to believe that institutions should be run by rules, that power should have limits, and that football might actually belong to the people who play it, watch it and pay for it.

Klaveness has spent years discovering that the easiest way to annoy powerful men is to ask them questions in public. It exposed a larger disagreement about what FIFA is for. Is it a federation of national associations, serving the game, or a commercial machine whose president acquires the instincts of a sovereign?

Klaveness seems to have made her choice. That does not necessarily mean she wants Infantino's chair. Her greatest asset may be that she treats the presidency as less important than the institution.

Her argument is essentially impolite, replacing one president with another is not reform. It is musical chairs. FIFA does not need a new face. It needs fewer opportunities for the person at the top to behave as though FIFA were a personal kingdom. Decisions need scrutiny. Commercial ambitions need institutional checks. National associations need consultation. Conflicts of interest need consequences rather than press releases. And the presidency needs to become a job, not a geopolitical lifestyle.

This is why Klaveness is dangerous to FIFA culture. She is not proposing a Scandinavian utopia in which everybody holds hands around a conference table. She is proposing something much more threatening: boring accountability.

The irony is that football's governing institutions have become sophisticated at producing spectacle while remaining primitive about governance. The World Cup is a cultural phenomenon; FIFA can negotiate billions in commercial revenue; presidents can speak to heads of government. Yet the democratic question remains medieval: who watches the people who run the game?

Klaveness's appeal lies in her refusal to separate football from politics, because football has never been separate from politics. Stadiums, money, migration, human rights, national identity and diplomacy walk onto the pitch. Pretending otherwise leaves political decisions to people who prefer not to discuss them.

That distinction matters because FIFA's problem has never been a shortage of executives. It has been the temptation to confuse charisma with legitimacy, influence with accountability, and success with institutional health. A reformer entering that palace can easily discover that the furniture is more comfortable than the principles.

Klaveness seems alert to the trap. Would she be a good FIFA president? Perhaps. She has the legal background, football experience and political nerve. More importantly, she has demonstrated something rarer: a willingness to spend political capital without knowing what she will receive in return.

But should she become president? Only if she can resist becoming the kind of president she has spent years criticising. That is the test. FIFA does not need another saviour. It needs an institution capable of surviving its saviours.

Klaveness may therefore be the future of FIFA precisely because she understands that the future cannot sensibly belong to one person. If she wants the presidency, she will have to convince the world that she wants to change the office more than she wants the office itself.

And if she does not want it? That may be the most encouraging possibility of all. Perhaps the person FIFA needs most is the one willing to rebuild the house without insisting on sleeping in the biggest bedroom today.

The passwords we leave behind by Jiro Lambert

Death used to leave behind boxes of photographs, letters, diaries and perhaps a cupboard full of things nobody quite knew what to do with. Now it leaves behind something far more complicated: a digital version of ourselves scattered across servers, clouds, social networks, gaming platforms and forgotten passwords.

The strange thing is that the digital self does not understand death. Your body stops. Your Facebook profile may not. Your iCloud library certainly does not suddenly vanish because a heart has stopped beating. Your gaming avatar can remain running around a virtual universe long after the person controlling it has gone. The internet, unlike a cemetery, has remarkably little understanding of finality.

That makes digital inheritance one of the great neglected problems of modern life. We prepare wills for houses, savings, jewellery and cars. We discuss who gets the family photographs. Yet increasingly those photographs are not in an album. They are in a cloud account protected by two-factor authentication on a phone that may be locked in a drawer.

And that is where the trouble begins. Social-media accounts generally do not simply disappear when somebody dies. Depending on the platform, an account may be memorialised, deleted or left sitting there indefinitely. Some services allow designated legacy contacts or relatives to request changes; others impose considerable restrictions. The dead person may become a digital ghost: still tagged in photographs, still appearing in memories, still occupying a little corner of the internet while everyone who knew them has moved on.

There is something simultaneously comforting and disturbing about that. A memorialised profile can become a kind of digital gravestone. Friends can leave messages. Family members can return to photographs. Birthdays can become moments of remembrance rather than occasions for an algorithm to awkwardly suggest sending greetings to someone who is no longer alive.

But preservation should be a choice, not an accident. The same applies to photographs. iCloud, Google Photos and other cloud services are effectively enormous digital attics. They may contain thirty years of family life, including pictures nobody else remembers exist. Losing access to them can mean losing an irreplaceable historical record.

The obvious solution is depressingly unglamorous: plan. Download important photographs. Keep sensible backups. Decide which accounts should be deleted and which should survive. Nominate appropriate legacy or trusted contacts where services allow it. Keep an inventory of important accounts. Make sure somebody you trust knows where the instructions are kept.

And, crucially, do not confuse giving somebody your password with giving them unlimited permission to become you. The same question becomes even stranger with gaming. Millions of people now possess digital identities that may be more elaborate than anything they own physically. Avatars have costumes, achievements, virtual houses, inventories, friendships and histories. Some contain items acquired over years and sometimes significant sums of money. Yet a gaming avatar is generally not treated like a painting hanging in a house. It exists because a company permits it to exist. That should make us uncomfortable. We have created digital lives without establishing universally understood rules for digital death.

Perhaps the most important lesson is that a digital legacy is not merely about property. It is about memory, privacy and dignity. Your family may desperately want your photographs but have no business reading every private message you ever sent. Your friends may treasure your gaming avatar while you would have hated the idea of somebody continuing to use it.

So the digital will should contain more than passwords. It should contain wishes. What should remain? What should disappear? Who should receive the photographs? Who should manage the accounts? Which parts of your digital life are private even after death?

We have spent decades teaching technology how to remember everything. Perhaps it is time to teach ourselves how to forget deliberately. Because when we die, our digital selves may remain. The sensible thing is to decide what kind of ghost we want to leave behind.