Sometime in early 2009, Pia Farrenkopf died in the back seat of her Jeep, which was parked in the garage of her home. Around her, life in the suburban community of Pontiac, Michigan, went on. No one knew that she’d died. By all accounts, her neighbors hadn’t known her very well, though some of them would mow her grass when it got too high, according to a report in USA Today. They kept on doing so for five years, until, last month, her body was finally discovered.
Neighbors told reporters that Farrenkopf travelled abroad for business, which is why, they assumed, they never saw her, and had taken it upon themselves to manicure her lawn. Farrenkopf had left her job as a contractor with Chrysler Financial a few months before her death, according to USA Today, so no one was expecting her at work. Her family lived far away and had lost touch with her, according to Reuters.
Farrenkopf also had a bank account with a very large sum in it, and—this is the postmodern crux of the story—she had set up her mortgage and utility bills to be paid automatically from it. As her body decomposed in her garage, the funds went out regularly. Last year, Farrenkopf’s money finally ran out. Her mortgage payments stopped, and the bank foreclosed on the house. Earlier this month, a contractor employed by the bank was examining the home when he discovered Farrenkopf’s body—which has been called “mummified”—in her car in the garage. Since then, police have been attempting to piece together the details of her life and death, to find some answers to the mystery of who she was and why she is gone.
Between those two moments—when she died and when her body was discovered—she was a kind of Schrödinger’s cat, biologically dead but also, in a way, among the living, paying for her power and phone, the roof over her head. Until her body surfaced, Farrenkopf’s institutional ties were the only things keeping her “alive.”
Farrenkopf had a kind of institutional doppelgänger, as do we all: a presence that forms as we post on social media, shop online, send e-mails, and use the Internet for paying bills, banking, and dozens of other financial and technological transactions. Some of us have more than one. The institutional doppelgänger is hard to see because it shadows our everyday lives so closely. Every so often, though, the curtain twitches, reminding us of its existence. The term “identity theft” is a curious one, describing a scenario in which the doppelgänger—not the most obvious you, with your weird cuticles and inner monologue and assorted love problems, but that other you, who has a Social Security number and neatly profiled buying habits and a checking account at Bank of America—can be hijacked by an utter stranger, compromised, put on the market, sold, and used to buy three MacBook Airs, all while you’re sitting on your couch Netflix-bingeing on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
In Farrenkopf’s case, these odd circumstances seem less like a moral issue—no one would argue that there was maliciousness on the part of the utility companies or the bank, which can hardly be expected to consult their paying customers on a regular basis to make sure that they haven’t shuffled off this mortal coil—and more like a mundane aspect of the digital age.
Karl Marx believed that the product of human labor was separate from and hostile toward its maker. The same might be said of the product of our commercial activities on the Internet. You might not believe that your institutional doppelgänger works against you, but it does not seem like a stretch to argue that the sum of your activity as a consumer—your social-media posts, credit history, the freakishly accurate profile advertisers have of you—is its own creature, and can move about independently of you. You can also assign any number of automated tasks to your doppelgänger, which it will perform tirelessly.
In “Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television,” Jeffrey Sconce writes that the digital world has raised many questions about the dissociation of our minds, bodies, space, and time. Our culture has been obsessed with the idea that consciousness can be transmitted—that it can be separated from a person’s body—since the advent of the telegraph. It’s just gotten more intense in the past few decades. He points out that much of our science-fictional language about the actual transfer of human consciousness via electricity is just that—fictional—but, at the very least, something can be learned about our cultural dependence on ideas of identity existing beyond the body. Our institutional doppelgängers might not be sentient or spiritual—Farrenkopf’s spirit didn’t somehow live on in her online transactions—but they are a part of modern existence, and tell us something about the way we mete out pieces of our lives. Technology gives us the ability to rely on automatic processes, and we are only too happy to do so. It is no surprise that such dependence came together in such a dystopian fashion; perhaps the surprise should be that it didn’t happen sooner.
On a Facebook page dedicated to Farrenkopf’s story, among the posts with information about the investigation, a woman who identifies herself as Farrenkopf’s niece gives us bits of her aunt’s life—letters from old co-workers, details about her extended family, a black-and-white high-school photograph. Our institutional doppelgängers are real—but, as Farrenkopf’s story unfolds, it is a reminder that they are not us.
Photograph by Daniel Mears/Detroit News/AP.
