Late into the evening at a modest venue tucked between glassy startups and corner coffee shops, a crowd leans forward, not out of reverence, but curiosity. On stage, a legal philosopher—not a technologist, not a futurist—gently rearranges his microphone. He’s not here to warn about the robot uprising or preach the doom of AI. He’s here to ask: What if the way we die has changed—and we haven't caught up yet?

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It sounds like the stuff of urban legends. A person follows their GPS down a mountain trail, oblivious to deteriorating paths, into the cold. Another drives straight into a reservoir, obeying a disembodied voice insisting this is the route. These tragedies, at first dismissed as digital-era Darwinism or fodder for memes, are now under a more serious legal and philosophical lens.

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And this is where Lonnie enters—soft-spoken, precise, and surprisingly funny. A scholar of legal philosophy, he has spent the last several years probing an unusual question: What happens when the systems we trust to guide us—literally—lead us to our deaths?

He calls it “Networked Death.” And it’s more than a theory.

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Dying Differently

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In forensic pathology, the cause and manner of death are twin pillars. A “cause” might be dehydration; the “manner” might be accident. But what if the chain leading to that death is a digital one? What if, Lonnie proposes, the manner of death isn’t just physical—but networked?

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“It’s not about blaming the GPS,” he says. “It’s about acknowledging that we’re embedded in systems now—data systems, navigation systems, surveillance systems. And when those systems misfire, people die.”

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He’s not alone. An interdisciplinary lobbying group—technologists, ethicists, and legal theorists—has been quietly building a case: that “Death by GPS” deserves official recognition as a cause of death. That it shouldn’t be buried under “accident” in medical examiner reports, nor hand-waved by insurance firms. That it has material, ethical, and societal implications.

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“There’s a rupture coming,” Lonnie says. “We just don’t know where the fault line is yet.”

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Ghost Maps and Invisible Cities

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This rupture is already visible in strange, quiet ways. In Michigan’s Grand Rapids, one neighborhood has reportedly cloaked itself from satellites. Residents there, wary of being mapped, have wrapped their homes in Displacement Veil Modules—technology once used to hide military vehicles from infrared detection. The result is a kind of modern-day Brigadoon: a place that appears nowhere, to no one.

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No one's quite sure why. Lonnie doesn’t speculate much, but notes the implications: if we begin actively hiding from digital mapping technologies, what does that say about our trust in the systems that govern space?

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Or in ourselves?

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“You can laugh about it being a ‘ghost town,’” he says. “But it’s also a cultural response. A preventative measure. And those eventually become tradition. Just like handwashing.”

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The Rise of “Skin Riders”

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It gets stranger still.

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An audience member asks about something called “Skin Riding.” A term, Lonnie says, that started as internet folklore but has taken on eerie resonance in his research. It describes a belief that entities—algorithms, malware, maybe something else entirely—hijack our movements through GPS. Not to kill, necessarily, but to move. The human becomes a vessel. The GPS? A kind of parasite.

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“It’s myth,” Lonnie says, “but myth always points to something real.”

This dovetails with reports of “GeoShadow Hacks,” coordinated efforts to intercept satellite signals and redirect movement—of people, drones, even emergency vehicles. It sounds like espionage, but its implications are existential. Who’s in control when you’re no longer the one choosing the path?

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In one recording, a shadow hacker whispers, “Now I’m riding their skin.”

It’s not just dystopian poetry. If these deaths can be shown to have human intervention, they shift—legally—from accidents to homicides. That would change everything.

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Why This Matters

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To skeptics, it might seem like a philosophical indulgence: parsing the semantics of death. But for those in public health, insurance, law, and ethics, classification determines responsibility. If GPS-related deaths are always ruled accidental, systems remain unchecked, and families may be left with no answers.

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If, however, we begin to recognize networked systems as agents, or at least as environments with agency, then new frameworks emerge. Frameworks for liability. For prevention. Even for grief.

“I’m not trying to sound like a sci-fi theorist,” Lonnie says. “But maybe we need new rituals. New laws. New language.”

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And language, after all, is how civilization codifies what it values—and what it fears.

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A Future of Digital Deaths

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As the lights dim on the conversation, the podcast host turns to the crowd—still absorbing the weight of it all—and jokes about grabbing drinks at the bar. The mood shifts, but the ideas linger.

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Will the 21st century produce its own folklore of death? Its own spiritual hygiene rituals? Its own invisible cities?

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Maybe we’re already living in them.

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And maybe, just maybe, death isn’t what it used to be.

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Not because we’re dying more—but because the map has changed.

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Teagan Carroll is a contributing writer for Hiders Times, covering the intersections of technology, culture, and legal theory.

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