News Summary

• It’s leading to “an increasingly morbid” digital afterlife industry that uses people’s digital footprints in an attempt to sell “digital immortality” to people..
• Justin Harrison, the founder of the digital afterlife start-up YOV, says his company’s process can involve recording all your conversations with your loved one while they’re still alive in order to recreate their conversational patterns after they’ve passed..
• We learn that all of the film’s subjects are holding on to some form of guilt over their loved one’s passing, from not taking the time to answer the last text message they sent or not being able to save them..
• By Marlow Stern Eternal You, a new documentary premiering at Sundance about the nauseating new world of digital afterlife technology, opens on a woman, Christi Angel, staring into a computer screen..
• There is Mark Sagar, co-founder of Soul Machines, who’s created a digital avatar of his own newborn baby that he spends time training instead of, you know, spending time with his actual baby..
• One of Eternal You’s most telling sequences sees Rohrer, the Project December founder, chuckling as he looks over chat logs from an unsatisfied user whose “dead father” cursed her off when she called him a scam, repeatedly labeling her a “fucking bitch.” Plus, who owns the data?.