Who do you trust more with your organs, Facebook or the DMV? Or do you even care who controls them? (Because you’re dead, hopefully.) The dead part is becoming more and more debatable actually, with a kind of emerging grey (matter, heh) area around the concept of brain death and what’s known as the dead donor rule, which is just the rule that says you have to be actually dead before you can have your organs harvested. The problem is that, you don’t just die; unfortunately, it’s not that easy.“Death is not an event but a process,” a 2008 article in the journal Anaesthesia reminds us. You can respond to pain and bodily trauma — like carving out an organ — after brain-death; you still have reflexes. If you drowned or froze, you might even appear to be awfully dead because of something called the “mammalian driving reflex,” which puts your body into a deathlike super-energy-saving mode. A popular quote from the annals of emergency medicine goes: “They’re not dead until they’re warm and dead.” (If death is terrifying, being “buried alive” is even more terrifying.) This creates some weirdness/discomfort around the organ donation idea.Anyhow, this is all a long way of approaching the oddness of how organ donation is actually handled. Typically, you tell someone at the DMV right after you pass the eye exam that, hey, it’s cool if whoever harvests my organs if I die before getting my driver’s license renewed in, gulp, ten years. Death lurks. And, yes, death also lurks on Facebook, with “the company announc[ing] a plan on Tuesday morning to encourage everyone on Facebook to start advertising their donor status on their pages, along with their birth dates and schools — a move that it hopes will create peer pressure to nudge more people to add their names to the rolls of registered organ donors,” according to The New York Times.The thing is, there aren’t enough organ donors out there. Thousands of people die every year because of this. There are worse causes that Facebook could use to demonstrate its power with, I suppose. (As far as issues go, organ donation is nicely apolitical.) That’s what I read into this, beyond the thinking about death lurking and still-beating hearts, that Facebook is as ubiquitous and omnipresent as state-issued ID, though maybe not as legally-binding. Anyhow, the hope is that people that didn’t sign up at the DMV will be so inspired to do so now, what with all of their friends and “friends” signing up. Hey, Facebook is a “more personal” place than the DMV and, perhaps, one might be more comfortable becoming an organ donor via Facebook than via an impersonal actual person.Need I also point out that this is another step on Facebook’s march to afterlife monopoly? They already have your memorial, of course, like the real one where people might actually collectively contemplate and reflect on “you” rather than the usual formal event of grieving in a funeral home or church or whathaveyou. Now Zuckerburg and his future fellow shareholders will have a hand in sending off actual bloody pieces of your body.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
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