Virtual Estate
2026-01-18
When I encounter the term digital estate, it's almost always when someone has died and it's now time to figure out what to do with their Internet remains. Should they be deleted, inherited by next of kin, memorialized, etc..?
Technically, digital estate exists long before that point, but it's usually not referred to as such. My simple definition is:
Digital estate is the collection of digital assets that a person controls at any point in time.
Where a digital asset is anything you need a computer to interact with.
So that's the PDF you have saved under Downloads/, your posts on social media, the contents of your email inbox, etc. You may not exactly "own" all of these digital assets, but you do have some amount of control over them which places them in your digital estate.
If digital estate is "past tense", then virtual estate is "present"
What happens to someone's digital assets after they're gone is an interesting question, but an even more interesting question (to me) is how those digital assets are handled while they're still here.
Since changing the connotation of generally accepted terms is hard, I'm just going to start using a new one: virtual estate. It means the same thing, but it's used in different contexts.
Virtual estate isn't about what happens to your digital assets after you've exhaled your last breath, it's about your digital assets right now!
Sandpolis is our virtual estate monitoring/management tool. You can use it for trivial tasks like opening a shell on any of your boxes, browsing filesystems, checking the health of your systemd services, etc.
But, the underlying goal in Sandpolis is really to help you realize as much sovereignty over your virtual estate as possible. It provides total control over the devices you own (via a local agent) and visualizes how those devices interact with the parts of your virtual estate that you don't own (such as cloud services).
Why control of your virtual estate is important
Control of your virtual estate is divided among multiple parties. Some examples:
Control of your Github repos (a digital asset) is shared between you, Github Inc, and probably Microsoft too.
Control of your iPhone (a physical/digital asset) is shared between you and Apple. Arguably, Apple has more control of it than you do.
Control of your password manager (a digital asset) is hopefully not shared with anyone. SaaS password managers maintain a minimal level of control even with proper end-to-end encryption.
As you might imagine, the less control you have, the more control they have. At a certain point, that leads to adverse outcomes for the user, which is bad. The key is to strike the right balance between control and features/conveniences.