Fahime Hajiabadi presents her research on griefbots from a psychoanalytic perspective, using the example of Black Mirror's "Be Right Back."
The rapid emergence of AI-driven "grief-tech" has fundamentally disrupted the human experience of mourning, transforming the ontological and psychological dimensions of loss.
Using the Black Mirror episode "Be Right Back" as a cultural and philosophical harbinger, Fahime critically examines the existential implications of digital resurrection through Griefbots.
Through a psychoanalytic lens rooted in Freud and Lacan, she argues that outsourcing grief to the machine precipitates a profound collapse of subjective agency. Rather than confronting the agonizing abyss of the Real—akin to the tragic courage of Orpheus—the modern subject regresses into fetishistic disavowal and melancholia.