Eterni.me – The Online Afterlife Service

Remember that MySpace account you embarrassingly lost the password for before removing all evidence of your teenage years? Life is temporary, but that profile is forever. In this day and age being caught looking a fool on the internet may actually be more humiliating than looking a fool in front of people you know in real life. In many cases, we may feel nauseated at the idea of our online persona floating around in cyberspace for years to come. However, Eterni.me are hoping to put a positive spin on the whole ‘the internet never forgets’ mentality, turning a dire warning into a heartfelt promise, if they are to succeed.

Eterni.me was first heard of in 2014, where it gained mixed responses at the services it offered to provide. It is still slowly but surely accepting new users. In case you missed all the previous hype, here is the lowdown of how it works:

• Sign up at Eterni.me and wait to be allowed access.

• Connect all of your social media, email accounts, upload your blog posts, photos, conversations…

• The service will use algorithms based on all of this information in attempt to create an accurate portrayal of you.

• This means that after you pass away, your friends and family can still talk to ‘you’.

Genius or just plain creepy? Personally, I can’t decide. If you’re wondering whether I signed up, I did. However, I signed up mostly out of curiosity and partly because I like the idea of family who I’ve barely spoken to or future generations of my family being able to get know me if it was left too late – assuming that making an Eterni.me account was to become a popular and standard practise in the future. It would certainly open up a new door for technological advancement if we can sort of speak to the dead – but unfortunately that is something I fear will not sit right with many.

Whilst the practise of using the website is not comparable to literally attempting to speak to the dead and would work more like a personalised chat bot, many would undoubtedly boycott and write off the website as being a symbol of modern technological voodoo because it still emulates speaking to a deceased person, a practice which would be frowned upon by most branches of Christianity, but perhaps what worries me the most is whether it is in fact healthy to interact with memories in this way.

The idea of online mourning is not a new concept. Many online graveyards already exist where photos and memories can be uploaded, with the benefit that those that want to visit are only ever a few clicks away, rather than having to travel to visit a physical tombstone. There are also many websites which have been set up as shrines to the lives of loved ones and even Facebook profiles can be ‘memorialised’, so that people may leave their comments and send messages as necessary. However, these services are only providing one way interactions and therefore do not  potentially encourage prolonged denial towards a person’s state of (no longer) being, nor do they risk making  emotionally damaging errors such as sending an offensive comment on behalf of the deceased.

Are we edging closer to the day when tombstones will be replaced by name plaques with QR codes? Would a world without tombstones seem callous or would it be less depressing? For me, websites such as Eterni.me are a signal of how society is evolving – through a constant conflict over the need to retain emotional warmth, whilst still ensuring that everything runs as efficiently as possible.