In Silence We Gather.

We are no longer living in the Information Age, when the internet promised universal access to knowledge. Today, we inhabit the Age of Data—a paradigm where data is leveraged for the extraction, prediction, and manipulation of human behavior. As Shoshana Zuboff calls it, we live in the era of “surveillance capitalism,” where lived experience is mined and sold as behavioral data. Data is the invisible currency of our time.

The most obvious examples are in commerce. Temu and SHEIN present themselves as ultra-low-cost shopping platforms, but their real value lies not in what they sell, but in the data they collect. In 2022, more than 80% of Temu’s revenue came not from selling products, but from selling advertising services powered by detailed behavioral data. The product is not what’s being sold. You—or, more precisely, your behavioral patterns—are.

This logic extends well beyond commerce. Every scroll, pause, or biometric signal is tracked and analyzed by recommendation engines designed not just to reflect, but to shape desire and action. The more capable our devices become, the more invisibly they map and influence our emotional and behavioral terrain.

Neurotechnology is emerging as the next logical step: a means of accessing the final frontier of behavioral data—our brains. While still met with skepticism, neurotechnology is not as far from public acceptance as it seems. The normalization of wearable tracking devices like the Apple Watch shows how quickly attitudes shift when technologies are framed around self-optimization and care. Over 90% of smartwatch users already share extensive biometric information for health and wellness. The step from fitness trackers to neuro-headsets is not as great as we might like to think.

Neurotechnology is largely used in medicine, but its transition into everyday life is accelerating. Devices once meant only for clinical use are now marketed for stress management, focus, or cognitive enhancement. Neuro headbands are already commercially available, and new laws—like California’s 2024 neurodata protection act—are emerging to manage these technologies, reflecting their momentum rather than their distance from daily life.

This is not unprecedented. Medical tools often move quickly from the clinic to the mainstream: breast implants, first developed for reconstructive surgery, became a cosmetic standard; Ozempic, designed for diabetes, is now widely used for weight loss.

Public reactions to neurotechnology often mirror anxieties about AI. In a 2023 YouGov survey, over half of Americans reported deep concerns about privacy, deep fakes, or job loss related to AI. Today, AI has become so entrenched in daily life that it threatens to replace entire industries. If the last two decades have taught us anything, it’s that technologies are rarely stopped once profitable. Despite widespread skepticism and fear, both AI and neurotechnology seem to follow the same path: skepticism, anxiety, normalization, and eventual acceptance.

This is why the question is not if neurotechnology will enter everyday life, but how—and to what end. Much of our fear comes from its capacity to invade what was once truly private: our thoughts, emotions, and memories. But what if this capacity could be reframed—not as a threat, but as a possibility?

Neurotechnology’s real promise is in making what we feel visible. It can take internal sensations, emotions, and memories and externalize them as visual forms, right as they are experienced. This offers a silent, visual language, a way to share what’s inside without needing to find the right words or perform for others. By making these inner experiences perceptible, it opens up entirely new ways to express ourselves, ways that are personal, immediate, and no longer tied to words.

This capacity becomes most meaningful when turned toward experiences that resist language. Grief is perhaps the most intimate and private human experience of all. It arrives privately, shaped by the uniqueness of our relationships, our memories, our losses.

Grief is deeply personal, and much like in the quote above, it won't ever align precisely with that of others. Although we grieve in deeply personal ways, we cannot process grief without the support of others. This is the quiet tension at the heart of mourning: we long to be witnessed, yet often feel too exposed or incapable to express something so intimate. We want to be held in our sorrow, but not always seen in it. The ideal funeral that serves everyone does not, and may never, exist, as it cannot fully speak to each person's unique way of grieving. So how can we bridge the need for communal support with the equally important need to honor and care for our deeply personal expressions of grief?

How can we express grief without feeling pressured, exposed, or incapable? These are tensions that could potentially be bridged through neurotechnology, a medium capable of translating internal states into shared, non-verbal experiences. By externalizing emotion without demanding explanation, such technologies could facilitate a new kind of mourning ritual. It invites us to imagine mourning not as something to express, but as a silent presence, a universal language where no one has to speak to be heard.

Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, suggests that the near future of AI will revolve around creating deeply personalized products and experiences, ones shaped entirely around the individual. This logic can be extended to grief. In this near future, could neurotechnology offer a hyper-individualized experience, one uniquely tailored to each person’s way of mourning? Our present technology has managed to deliver the first attempts at bridging the gap between communal support and personal grief. Stefanie Schillmöller, a grief expert and trend researcher, highlighted the importance of hybrid funerals that initially emerged during the first COVID-19 pandemic. Hybrid funerals combine traditional in-person ceremonies with digital livestreams, allowing people who cannot attend physically, or who prefer to mourn privately, to still participate and contribute to the service.

Although a case study revealed that some virtual attendees reported fewer opportunities to engage meaningfully in rituals or connect deeply with other mourners, hybrid funerals have persisted until today, long after COVID. Many participants prefer this form of attendance, as it allows them to feel part of the mourning community while simultaneously offering space to grieve intimately.

Hybrid funerals augment existing rituals without reducing their emotional weight. Similarly, I believe neurotechnology could act as an extension of established rituals, not replacing or entirely reinventing them, but adding a new layer, a new language for individual grief to be silently witnessed within the community. A ritual made for every individual mourner.

How would we be able to access our internal and capture it? Neurodevices work by detecting and recording electrical signals produced by brain activity, allowing them to capture and interpret patterns related to thoughts, emotions, or intentions. Current neurotechnological devices offer two options: invasive or noninvasive, either a brain chip or a headband. So far, only headbands are commercially accessible. Apart from that, brain chips seem like an unfitting choice; they are invasive and permanent, and therefore cannot be “switched off.” Headbands present us with a choice: we can wear them whenever we feel like it.

They are visible and tangible, turning them into a symbol for this ritual. The headpiece carries the potential to move beyond its standard clinical design and fully embody mourning attire or wearables. Historically, such wearables were symbols that externalized grief and made it socially visible. This piece reintroduces that function, a signal to the outside that one is within their individual space of grief. It serves as a reminder of personal boundaries during mourning, offering dignity to the wearer and aligning with the contemplative nature of the ritual. The headpiece is not merely a device, but a mourning crown.

As such, the Mourning Crown becomes a ritual in itself, moving far beyond mere functionality. Placing it on the head becomes a personal act of entering one’s own space of grief. It does not simply mark mourning, it enables it, offering a tangible way to access and express internal emotion.

According to Schillmöller, wearable mourning symbols have generally disappeared from Western society, and so this could be a way to bring them back. Historically, mourning wearables, such as black clothing, veils, brooches, and hair jewelry, played a crucial role in externalizing grief, offering both ritual structure and social visibility (Jalland; Hallam and Hockey). Reintroducing such symbols today could help articulate grief in a more embodied and socially legible way. Not only would the headpiece become a symbol for mourning, but also a signal to the outside that we are currently in our individual space of grief, a reminder of the personal boundaries when grieving.

The beauty of the mourning crown lies in its nature. As a portable ritual, it transcends the temporal and spatial boundaries of funerals. The mourning crown can become our companion in all our different stages of grief. Much like grief itself, it accompanies us everywhere, and it can surge at any given moment.

At home, during a walk, while waiting at a bus stop, or in the middle of a conversation, any setting can become a moment of mourning. The crown is imagined as a companion in the ubiquity of mourning.

The visualization of grief in itself is a complicated topic. Everyone’s imagination of emotion and memory is different, and much like grief, it is hyper-individual. The ritual is not only personal, but it could become hyper-individual, every visualization adjusted to how each person perceives emotion and memory. Yet how are we able to see or revisit moments of grief that we have captured? The Mourning Crown allows access to our internal landscape, but visualizations should not be confined to the moments when the crown is worn. During a funeral, they could become an integral part of the architecture, buildings with domes where visualizations are displayed above the mourners. Perhaps even more intriguing are personal objects that can display our grief visualizations. In this way, they become an extension of the individualistic nature of the ritual.

One such object could be a grief pod, a vessel that stores and displays visualized grief. These pods could be revisited, updated, or shared, becoming personal archives of emotion or gestures of connection. Just as visiting a grave can feel like speaking to the deceased, the grief pod could enable a new kind of exchange between mourners, silent but loud and deeply felt, more like a presence than a conversation. It allows for support that doesn’t intrude, a way to be heard without needing to speak.

As we move deeper into the Age of Data, neurotechnology will play an increasingly important role. The coming decades will decide its commercial breakthrough, but what intention do we imagine for it in the near future? This project imagines a first proposition that serves our needs and challenges dystopian narratives. If grief is one of our most intimate and unquantifiable emotions, what might it mean to design a ritual through speculative uses of technology? Could this be a way to reclaim neurotechnology from dystopia, by embedding it in the most fundamental human experience there is? Through the lens of one of the most fundamental and emotionally charged human experiences, death, I aim to offer a hopeful alternative to dystopia, however fragile that hope may be.