Kenzie Carpenter first decided to choose a Fannish Next-of-Kin when an online friend, whom she knew as XT, died suddenly. “I had met her in a small, tight-knit Discord server for our shared fandom,” she says. “Her death was a shock to all of us.”
FNOK arrangements allow users of the popular fan-fiction website Archive of Our Own to designate another fan to take control of their works—things like fan fiction, fan art, essays, and videos—after they die. Carpenter had heard of the policy before, but it was XT’s death—and the suggestion from a fellow server member that they all consider naming a FNOK—that spurred her into action.
AO3 remains an outlier in Carpenter’s digital life: She has no such arrangements on other platforms, partly because none of them have a feature that lets you easily leave your posts in the hands of a like-minded friend. “If more sites had the functionality AO3 has and a similarly simple process, I would probably set something up just to make it easier on my spouse,” she says, clarifying that he does have access to her computer and she trusts him with her online presence.
It’s now common practice to leave a “social media will” with login information and postmortem wishes, but without one, immediate family members or people legally designated to act on behalf of an estate are often the only ones who can control a deceased user’s online accounts. Generally, that just means taking a profile down, since most platforms will not grant access to anyone but the user. Some platforms, notably Facebook and Instagram, allow non-family members to “memorialize” a profile; Facebook now also permits users to designate a “legacy contact” who can do things like change their profile photo or put up a remembrance post after they’ve died.
The things you’ve bought or earned online can’t be passed on after death—on a gaming platform like Steam, for example, you are licensing the right to use the software, and that right is non-transferable. Most platforms have little to say about the content created by the deceased—perhaps because most platforms are in the business of signing up and retaining users, not preserving the things those users have created. In most sites’ terms of service, an individual holds the copyright to their content while licensing the platform to use it; when a person dies, that copyright passes to their heirs, just like with any other type of media. Regardless of ownership, that content usually remains untouched, if it stays online at all; one notable exception is Twitch, where the people running a streamer’s account can keep posting for them after they die. TikTok, arguably the biggest well of content creation on the web in 2023, has no publicly-listed postmortem policies at all.
Fans spend time on all of these platforms, but for a lot of them, immediate family members would be less-than-ideal stewards of the works they’ve created. Fandom can be a space to explore things you might not share with people in your non-fandom life—sexual and gender identities, for example, or maybe just weird rabbit holes that only make sense to fellow fans.
