Side Note

This morbid start-up is bringing us one step closer to a Black Mirror reality

Sometimes I feel like Silicon Valley is actually taking cues from Black Mirror, a show about how human harness technology toward seemingly banal, actually evil ends. An example: A new startup called Nectome wants to kill you and upload your brain to the cloud for all eternity, just like in “San Junipero,” about two women who fall in love after they take advantage of a similar service.

“You can think of what we do as a fancy form of embalming that preserves not just the outer details but the inner details,” co-founder Robert McIntyre told Business Insider. The company plans on connecting people with terminal illnesses to a heart-lung machine while they’re under anesthesia and pumping them full of embalming chemicals to preserve their brains. There’s already a 25-person waitlist, which you can pay $10,000 to join. (You can get a full refund if you change your mind, which is very nice.)

Nectome will embalm your brain and upload it to the cloud... eventually

The real question, though, is whether it actually works. The company was recently awarded an $80,000 prize for preserving a pig’s brain, but as Business Insider notes, there’s still no evidence that memories can be found in dead tissue. In other words, Nectone may let you preserve your brain for all eternity, but there’s still no proof that your preserved brain will be uploaded to a beautiful beach paradise where you find the love of your life. Not yet, anyway.

The product is “100 percent fatal.”
Robert McIntyre, Nectome co-founder