“Become virtually immortal”. That is one of the slogans found on the hauntingly cheerful website for Eternime – a startup firm aiming to let you store your memories and your personality in digital form past your physical expiration date (also known as death). They hope to feed the data into chatbots that will allow us to “speak to the dead”. This is illustrated through a shoddy photoshop of a bearded man’s head floating inside a laptop. It’s a bit like Jambi, the bodyless genie in the box from Pee Wee’s Playhouse. Enjoy having a chat with that, if you can.

The website goes on to describe the service as “a library that has people instead of books”, which truly does add new meaning to the phrase “I’m checking you out”, doesn’t it? Crack open your MacBook, and hey, there’s your old pal Odd George from the bar around the corner. He’s been saved in exacting digital detail for you to enjoy, while his actual body gets chewed up by insects.

Will a service like this ever exist? Who knows. But people become intrigued by these ideas. What companies like Eternime understand is that few of us ever get sick of hearing about how technology is going to change our conception of human existence. Elon Musk isn’t just famous because he builds cars rich people queue up to buy in droves. He’s also famous because he pops up in the news every few months with a new tantalizing scheme: the Hyperloop, benign artificial intelligence, privately funded space exploration. Each and every time he reveals a new seemingly implausible or absurd project, we eat it up because he’s confident and wealthy enough that he might pull it off.



While Musk offers himself as a savior from Armageddon, Eternime drums up excitement through a far more personal issue. It’s not about the death of the whole planet, it’s about the death of one person you love. Their service suggests there’s a way for every human being, even the non-famous ones, to be remembered for as long as Eternime’s server bill is paid.

Black Mirror already covered how this could have unintended negative consequences. The people left behind to talk to your floating head on a computer monitor might get so wrapped up in memorializing you that they never take the time to live their own life. Or worse, the artificial intelligence develops its own personality and its own desires independent of the dead person. It’s not as simple as, say, an app that hails cabs for you or orders someone to come pick up your dirty underwear. Eternime is trifling with someone’s most intimate emotions.

Still, their website claims more than 31,000 people have signed up to have their identity uploaded into the cloud. That’s not a ton of potential customers, but it’s a pretty solid effort for a company offering a service that disrupts our received notions of how the end of our lives will play out. The way people deal with death has never been rational. Some talk to gravestones or bowls of ashes. Others keep their loved one’s clothes in a box long after they’ve passed away.

Human civilization is littered with belief systems based around how we die and what happens to us after it happens, inventing fantasies of resurrection for the purposes of giving it all some kind of meaning. Who’s to say that talking to a chatbot version of your dead husband is any stranger than having a full-on argument with his chewed-up old loafers?



The grieving process isn’t something we understand, it’s something we endure. Flashy startups like Eternime come and go, but then again, so does everyone and everything. Society will probably never solve the problem of death, but it remains to be seen if it’s actually a problem that needs solving. All I know for sure is that we’re not going to stop trying any time soon.