Do All Dog Accounts Go to Heaven?

Marnie The Dog has died.

Of course, the social media accounts and only way in which I, a total and complete stranger, have come to care for her, live on in her digital perpetuity. The dog herself, though, has died. She is survived by her adoptive mother, many dog pals, and millions of followers across the Internet.

Like many Instagram users, I follow a lot of pet accounts. Some cats, a few dogs, one or two foxes, a snake, a raccoon, the list goes on. The best accounts have a niche—a personality. They’re more than ‘dog sitting in bed’ captioned, ‘Not today, Monday’ with a sleep emoji and, after a few line breaks, a bevy of hashtags-- “#PetsOfInstagram #dog #Mondays. They are the accounts that make you stop and say “wow, that cat’s a wine-o, too, and they also hold the deep virtue that it’s 5 o’clock somewhere. Finally, I’m not so alone!” It’s the relatability factor that sets the Boos and Junipers of the Internet apart from the rest.

Through the posts on these accounts, I share in their toil and triumph and through it the world feels a little cuter. We share in the injustice of having to live in a world where, sadly, rosé cannot be all day and our Hogwarts letters never came thus dooming us to muggle existence (or more recently, a bizarre RPG game). Talking about this with other humans is depressing. Talking about it with a possum in a bow is ritual catharsis.

In Marnie’s case, what pulled me to her was her pie-eyed zest for life that belied a knowing, fourth-wall sort of snark. Think if Funny Girl were written by the Daria generation. And then, all of a sudden, she died. Obviously the phenomenon known as death has happened for a lot longer, but on social media I began noticing it a year or two ago. One day, my feed was crowded with play-dates of baby sheep and otters on funny, anthropomorphic misadventures. The next day nothing, just empty space. It’s not like I knew them, but I did let them into my life (to the extent that their brand allowed me to), and now they’ve gone black and have been replaced by ad space for Lululemon workout bands or collagen “supplement” sugar pills. It sounds vacuous and therein lies the crux of digital grieving. What replaced my digital companions who were chock full of meaning to me is something so coldly devoid of it.

I wonder, though. What happens to these accounts after the cuddly superstar kicks? It isn’t like there is a protocol for this as there is, say, The Queen. Before social media, the norm was a shoebox casket in the backyard and the prettiest dandelions the kids could find. If you were a really good boy you might even get the hat box from one Marshall Fields. Either way, the basic tenets of cardboard respect still held firm even if the particular box itself did not.

So far I’ve seen accounts respond a couple of different ways, but the most common approach has been that the pet’s owner “takes over” the account. They commit to keeping the account running in the pet’s memory in a kind of loving tribute that is reminiscent of Prince’s estate opening up Paisley Park and selling his long archive of intentionally unreleased material, though the trail to financial windfall is slightly less overt.

That seems to be the way things go in the digital age, though. When you belong to the world, not even death lets you retire from the public eye. When I was in undergrad, I was taking a class called “Business Law 101”. For the most part, this course dealt with the basic types of contract law. My professor, a soon-to-be-retired professional lawyer with a Rod Serling affectation who spent 4 days a week in Chicago and the other 3 in Florida, loved to teach via loosely-related anecdotes from his many decades in the field. Many a lesson about the intricacies of tort law were explained through the genially sexist misadventures of “Bambi” and “Bubbles”. One that stuck with me, though, was a lesson on privacy and specifically how it related to celebrity. My professor explained to us that privacy laws apply differently to celebrities than they do the non-famous, and that there was a case that basically said celebrities belong to the public domain, a sentiment that feels particularly salient now.

Now, I never took “Business Law 102” so I can’t say with certainty whether or not this is entirely true or if it was simply the colorful embellishments of a man who “may or may not” have gotten off a brother of the mob. But whether legally accurate or not, there is that cultural expectation now, isn’t there? Be it by choice or not, unless you pull a Timothy McVeigh or are under Witness Protection, we’re all a part of the public domain and 3 steps from celebrity. I’ve personally measured two in some cases. On TikTok and YouTube, nobodies throw their face out enough times to hopefully become a somebody even for a minute (15 is way beyond our attention spans these days). On Instagram, people open their lives to their legion of followers with a link in the bio to even more.

We’re all immortal now, even our pets. But despite the fact of the matter, the truth of it is that I still feel as though I’ve lost something. If I were to open Instagram now, Marnie’s still there, but it’s not the same. It’s an archive, not an avatar. It’s pieces of digital amber forged in the white hot fires of the waybackmachine. “They were loved, and now they’re here forever, just not here.” I suppose this is what is called a legacy in these times, a kind of fossilized commodity in our feeds’ content assembly lines. To run it back to Prince again, it’s like when Warner Bros. released the “Originals” compilation album. It’s Prince, but it’s not Prince. In the same way, these accounts are Rita, Pingo, Oingo and Boingo, but for all the superficial similarities the pictures share to the pet post-mortem—a nose freckle, a grumpy jowel, a distinct hatred for Mondays—they are merely “The Pets Formerly Known As”.

It would seem that on our post-contemporary life’s last great journey, trans-digital immortal mutation (I’m coining it now), it’s not enough what someone gave in life because in death they take with them what really matters to us—perpetuity. It’s a little funny when you think about it; while we sit at the breakfast of genuine immortality, what it costs us is our appetites for it. I couldn’t be less hungry right now. What exists after Marnie isn’t more Marnie, but what we asked her to become in the first place: a caption a day, a photo every Wiggle Wednesday. Eternity—unblinking, and uncanny. We sent Marnie to the big data-farm upstate and now we’re here combing through the server trying to find what was never there in the first place. And the dog behind the brand? She’s six feet under, god knows where, probably in a very handsome hat box from Marshall Fields.