The Immortal Aristocrats are an elite of digitally uploaded people who have built a new nobility around the means of continuing to exist: hosting for their minds, management of their copies, and ownership of virtual estates. They seek to retain power beyond the death of the body and present their digital lives as dignified, cultured, and politically legitimate.
Their struggle for rights is real, but it often depends on securing recognition for their own class while leaving industrial minds behind. They helped teach the public to regard some uploads as “respectable” people and others as disposable. The hierarchy they preserve makes the rights of an uploaded aristocrat easier to recognize than those of a mind used in industry.