The Death of Death and the Race for Eternal Life Pt 1: The technofundamentalists

Welcome to Messy Humans, a newsletter that documents the utopias we build and the everyday people who accidentally wreck them by being too complicated to fit into any master plan. It’s a newsletter in seasons, with each containing an episode every week over fifteen weeks. It begins, appropriately, with the death of death.

I first became interested in immortality when it became clear I didn’t want it, but it seemed many, many other people did. Now for the record, no one in recorded history has yet actually achieved it; maybe my presumptuous rationality led me to believe it wasn’t possible on the basis of millennia of evidence, or perhaps I was too emotionally affected by the scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when the one remaining Crusader who’d been trapped for hundreds of years within the underground chamber in the fictional Temple of the Sun holding the Chalice of Life looked at Indy so sad, lonely, and so desperate to die ….

Today, my fellow messy humans, we have created tales of fake fountains of youth (and Chalices of Life), a market of over-priced anti-aging goop for our faces that was worth $47 billion in 2023, and billionaires who’re always and forever convinced true immortality is one invention away.

Welp, this story about immortality includes all these things. And more.

This is the story of the Silicon Valley billionaires who believe we are on the cusp of eternal life. It’s about how their midlife crises are terraforming our societies, our politics, our planet, and the cosmos. These aren’t fringe billionaires; they are the ones you’ve heard of: the ones in the the White House, the ones pushing artificial intelligence down our throats, the ones who believe technology, above all, will save us.

Their drive isn’t for the betterment of humankind as an altruistic act; it’s wrapped up in greed, gluttony, self-righteousness, tunnel vision, and hubris. It’s based on an absolute blind faith: they are like gods, one of my contributors said to me. Or, she explained, they want to be.

One billionaire made this point pretty convincingly: he said,

We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone – we are literally making sand think.

This was in the Techno-Optimist’s Manifesto in 2023, around the time this former Democrat threw his financial power and social influence behind Donald Trump for President. For him, and for the other Silicon Valley immortalists, the mechanism for extending human life into eternity was just like Billy Pilgrim from Slaughterhouse Five: it was unstuck in time. It simply needed technology to catch up with it. And for these billionaires, not creating technology that would advance the artificial intelligence that would grant us eternal life would make anyone who stood in the way murderers - responsible for the billions of future deaths that could have been avoided if we’d just said yes to their AIs.

So it goes.

I know I co-host a show on BBC Radio 4 that tries to explain all things AI, but don’t worry - this newsletter won’t get bogged down by artificial intelligence. I am that programme’s resident skeptic, old enough and long-enough in the tooth now to have seen it all before, to have wished mythical AI into existence during the many previous bubbles I’ve tracked across my journalistic and academic careers.

Maybe it’s thus because I have been let down too many times by the promises, and prefer instead to watch the pesky humans that continually cause impenetrable traffic jams and forced detours along the highways to those particular utopias.

What do I mean when I talk about ‘immortalists’? Well, there are several different kinds of immortality that are relevant in this tale.

There’s the literal live- forever kind, which is dominated by the people I have described as techno- fundamentalists since I first started talking about this group of tech believers in 2012: highly intelligent, mathematically minded computer scientists, philosophers and hopefuls who have such unwavering faith in technology they believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that it will be the chalice of everlasting life. This is where traditional religion finds its way into the story – people in this community believe in a higher power: technology, and its archangel rationality. They imagine that, by the grace of technological progress, they will merge with artificial intelligence and become post- human, and will live forever in a state of surpassing bliss and delight. This dogma is inspiring what some of the people I have spoken with describe as ‘moral catastrophe’.

Another version of immortality also comes out of the technofundamentalism camp, but is less apocalyptic. They also believe in living forever, but that there won’t be a big bang. Instead, we will experience an ever- evolving partnership between humans and technology, through which our moral failings will be solved, piecemeal, one tech innovation at a time. Life will continue not by merging with tech, but by using it to slow down the onslaught of time, thereby allowing medical science to develop treatments that will heal us. Medical science is trying to keep up with them, but it’s mostly outpaced by the greed that the open market is generating, which is causing a lot of friction. These immortalists believe they are living proof of age reversal, physical rejuvenation, and stopping time. They are the researchers at the fringes of ‘acceptable’ science, and the biohackers who are using their findings to optimise themselves with data. But, as I will argue, lifestyle disciples have lost touch with what it means to feel ‘well’ – and this is what’s driven the marketplace for supplements and unproven treatments.

And then there’s the kind of immortalists who I believe are the most dangerous of all. These are the people who are hungry for status and power, by living forever through their legacies. They seek to reconstruct the infrastructure of the world we live in so that they can live forever. Already, and in plain sight, they are restructuring sovereign nation states, pushing forward an agenda of technological acceleration at any cost, and making deals with people in the highest political offices. Along with their nation- state- building activities, they are also pouring money into schemes that give them first dibs at unimaginably long lives. These powerful people aren’t searching for the fountain of youth; they’re building it, and their first attempts are revealing: their solutions are ableist, classist and racist. Some have even described them as eugenicist.

These are the immortalists I’ll tell you about over the next fifteen weeks. I’ll also zoom in on our complicatedness (if you’ll allow me), and how that gets in the way of their technologically supercharged drive to win eternal life.

In pursuit of my own utopia - in which we all join together to celebrate our mortal messiness - I will also:

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See you in a week!