Johnson’s bio on X, where he has 1.8 million followers, reads “conquering death will be humanity’s greatest achievement.” He is now best-known for his quest to defeat age and achieve immortality, which he has branded as Project Blueprint, and for the various tech initiatives and companies he has founded or financed to help others do the same. But his original fortune came from Braintree, an online payment company, which he founded and which later acquired Venmo; the combined product was sold to PayPal for $800 million in 2013. 

The immortality influencer has dark hair, marble-white flesh, and a neutral, Tom Cruise-ish affect. His physique reflects rigorous daily workouts; he seems to have created a body much younger than his 48 years. And his posts on X are intentionally, I think, provocative: he gained notoriety most recently by posting in praise of the health of his girlfriend’s “vaginal biome.” 

In a viral post this past month, however, Johnson announced that he is suffering from a rare autoimmune disorder, AIG (autoimmune atrophic gastritis), in which the stomach lining consumes itself. AIG isn’t a death sentence, but it is a bad sign for someone who doesn’t plan to die. On July 29, Johnson made headlines again, by posting on X: “been thinking things over and wonder if I’ve taken this whole longevity thing too far.” 

Before Johnson’s diagnosis, I had already begun to see him as a tragic hero in a classical sense: larger than life but also susceptible to the kind of tunnel vision the gods punish their heroes with. So his illness, which he insists he will find a cure for, is cosmic irony. AIG increases inflammation, abhorred by biohackers, and prevents the absorption of critical nutrients like iron and B12.

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The end of going out

By Matthew Gasda

In my own play, I didn’t write a tragic ending where the Bryan Johnson character gets sick or dies, nor do I think anyone should wish for Johnson to have an encounter with death to learn his lesson. Rather, I think that we should take the ups and downs of Johnson’s immortality “journey” as early feedback on a philosophical experiment that is just beginning, and that may soon become a global, radicalizing phenomenon. 

Johnson isn’t the first techno-utopian to be an immortality influencer: Google language-recognition expert Ray Kurzweil has been a transhumanist since the 1990s. But Johnson represents the migration of these ideas to the mainstream. I know someone writing a book about Próspera, an island off the coast of Honduras that is attempting to create a year-round life-extension clinic, an immortality spa, if you will. And unlike early transhumanists, Johnson’s message arrives at a time when technology has visibly accelerated in radicalizing ways. No one used AI four years ago; now it is everywhere in everything. Many of Johnson’s posts regard therapeutic breakthroughs and many of these breakthroughs are driven by supercomputers solving problems exponentially faster than any human laboratory could solve them. 

Whether normies know it or not, elites are planning to live for a very long time; the effort is already well underway to radically alter the destiny of the human body, or at least some human bodies. Autocrats like Xi Jinping and Putin are on advanced therapeutics, it’s safe to say. They will live as long as they can, and will rule as long as they live. Business leaders, thought leaders, and athletes are having longer primes, eventually, maybe, they will have indefinite ones. Tom Brady, Lionel Messi, and LeBron James have already demonstrated that the window for elite athletes can be longer with the right practices. Getting to see our favorite athletes play longer doesn’t seem so bad; ageless autocrats, however, are less desirable.

Bioscience is also offering women the opportunity to have children much later in life. Celebrities with access to expensive health care, like Anne Hathaway, now regularly have children in their 40s; the next horizon is childbearing in the 50s.

Our quest for immortality may be active, in the form of broscience, next-generation supplements, and extreme fitness, or passive, via surgeries and organ replacement. But soon, or perhaps even now, there will be a marked distinction between those who are intending to die — and refusing any enhancements — and those intending to live. 

What this amounts to is a secular immortality cult that replaces heaven with perfected existence forever on earth — and former heaven-focused mortal activities such as prayer and religious practice with constant techno-biological self-enhancement. Among the rich and soon the merely affluent, an extremely deep piece of cultural memetics — the ultimate acceptance of mortality — will start to fade. And whether or not anyone succeeds in radical life extension, the cascade of trying will result in a change of belief.

Johnson’s announcement of his chronic illness made headlines around the world. This reflects, I think, the extent to which he has already succeeded as an influencer and quasi-philosopher. His is the first announcement from a future that believes it’s a surprise to get sick and die at all.

It is impossible to overstate how much of a change this presents. The supreme value in a society that accepts mortality is to pass something on to the future. In one that doesn’t, the direction of human activity boomerangs back upon itself. The point of life becomes biological self-maintenance. Moreover, the transhumanist ideal threatens the monopoly of all mortality-derived wisdom — and mortality-backed experience, altogether.

We can’t experience the same moments, works of art, highs, or griefs over and over, without fundamentally changing their impact on us. It may be that life is rich because it is limited, and extended life becomes a form of torture. It may also be that our cognitive hardware is well adapted to our natural lifespans, and that experience does not get better with time. For some of the characters in my as-of-yet-unstaged play, life becomes unbearably lonely as some choose to die and others choose to live out enhanced lifespans.

Longer lifespans, or the promise of longer lifespans, will also change the calculus between parents and children, and the decision-making of prospective parents. If you believe you may escape death, why have children at all? On the other hand, bringing children into a world with less death may also be an incentive to have children; but the globe cannot, in the long run, support a world with life and no death. Something will have to give.

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The most laudatory thing that one can say about Johnson’s moral framework is that it is a moral framework, and that it is not nihilistic, even if it is arguably narcissistic. He uses his own resources and he has defined his own values. It would be hard to argue that he is hurting anyone, and his self-experimentation, even if it doesn’t yield immortality, will likely end in useful therapeutics for the rest of us mortals.

But it is also likely that his Faustian quest commences a Faustian epoch — anything short of total control over our bodies, down to the level of not only cells, but maybe subatomic particles, will be considered a failure.

In the face of such a terrifying prospect we will need powerful — and not entirely rational — protection.

Johnson was raised Mormon, and it is hard not to see that his vision of an immortal, multi-planetary species with extended consciousness resembles the multi-planetary heaven of Mormonism. In general, his message of “don’t die” is part of the message of the later phases of Abrahamic tradition; to never die is to constantly “resurrect” the youth of the aging body. 

All cults promise some kind of immortality, whether through forgiveness, salvation, consciousness-raising, bodily resurrection, or in this case, scientific super-enhancement. Thus, even if Johnson himself is having doubts, his announcement of a chronic illness, instead of discrediting his philosophy, takes part in the miraculous. He is now a prophet, attempting to perform the miracle of healing or raising the dead. And he has the world’s attention.

It is another irony that the lucid, rational promise of secular immortality seems guaranteed to produce mysticism. Transhumanism offers salvation through the supposedly knowable, but it confronts us with existential shocks. The Christian faith, which offers salvation through faith — the fundamentally unknowable — has been more stable. 

For better or worse, the latter half of this century seems like it will be more existential than the first half — and more existential than technological. Technology will be merely the foundation for a revision of what it means to be human. Casual agnostics and atheists may soon find that to not think about mortality or immortality with greater intensity and purpose is considered extremely strange or bad. And established religions may turn toward the supernatural and “proofs” of eternal life, to compete with the promise, backed by data-driven therapeutics, of indefinitely extended life.

Pascal’s Wager argued that faith was the best bet based on probability, especially considering the possibility of eternal damnation. Johnson’s Wager, on the other hand, asserts that there is no downside to seeing how far you can take biological life.

But like any philosopher, Johnson is liable (and free) to change his mind, when the thought experiment becomes a real experiment. We’ll see what the next phase of his immortality, or mortality, brings us.

When the Enhanced Games were first announced in 2023, the reaction was derision. Travis Tygart, CEO of the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) called them a “dangerous clown show that puts profit over principle”. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) condemned the concept as “dangerous and irresponsible”. Lord Sebastian Coe, head of World Athletics, offered the bluntest verdict: “Well, it’s bollocks, isn’t it?”

The early coverage reinforced the freak-show narrative. Australian swimmer James Magnussen, the 2011 and 2013 100-meter freestyle world champion, promised to “juice to the gills” and break the 50-meter freestyle world record. He gained 50 pounds of muscle and became so large that it took four people 30 minutes to squeeze him into his racing suit.

Two years later, it doesn’t look like bollocks. Athletes are signing contracts and cashing checks — the most money many have ever earned, given the modest pay available to amateur competitors.

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The Nelk Boys are useful idiots

By Oliver Bateman

At an Enhanced Games-sponsored event in February 2025, Magnussen lost a $1 million prize to a leaner Greek swimmer, Kristian Gkolomeev, who had been on performance-enhancing drugs for only eight weeks and swam 20.89 seconds: 0.02 seconds faster than the existing world record. Gkolomeev’s wife had written that he earned “as little as $5,000 a year” as one of the world’s top swimmers competing by the rules. In those 20.89 seconds, Gkolomeev changed his life.

The Enhanced Games debut on 24 May 2026. What began as a laughing stock is becoming something harder to dismiss. The organization now has around 50 to 60 athletes on its payroll across swimming, track and field, and weightlifting — including Hafþór Björnsson, the Icelandic strongman who played The Mountain in Game of Thrones, who will attempt to exceed his own 510kg deadlift record while competing against longtime rival Mitchell Hooper — with 40 participating in supervised clinical trials. Athletes who choose to enhance will travel to the UAE for four months of supervised training starting in late January, with protocols managed by a global clinical trials organization for health, safety, and performance reasons. The permitted substances include testosterone replacement therapy, approved steroids, estrogen, peptides, and sleep aids. Cocaine and heroin remain prohibited.

It helps that there’s serious money behind the venture. Don Jr announced his backing in February 2025, declaring that the Enhanced Games represent “the future — real competition, real freedom, and real records being smashed”. He linked the venture explicitly to the administration’s broader agenda: “This is about excellence, innovation and American dominance on the world stage — something the MAGA movement is all about.”

The Trump family’s involvement raises uncomfortable questions. Michael Duff, a labor law professor at Saint Louis University and former trial attorney with the National Labor Relations Board, told me the arrangement “meshes all-too-well with transhumanism, which is what these games seem to represent”. He drew a comparison to other instances of presidential relatives shrewdly monetizing proximity to power: “To me there is not a whit of difference between the Hunter-Joe Biden and the two-Donalds pairings. It is a form of dynastic aristocracy that goes back a long, long way.”

The timing is notable. The US government has been withholding $3.6 million from WADA over a Chinese doping scandal involving dozens of swimmers. Enhanced Games founder Aron D’Souza has publicly welcomed what he calls an “age of disruptors” in the White House, and has framed the event as a populist challenge to corrupt international bureaucracies. “The IOC president flies around the world in a private jet. He lives in a palace,” D’Souza has said. “The IOC system is designed to benefit bureaucrats, not the athletes.” WADA’s Witold Bańka has called on American authorities to prevent the event from happening. The Trump administration — skeptical of international bodies and with the President’s son heavily involved financially — almost certainly will not comply. A Truth Social post from the President endorsing the Enhanced Games would be worth more than any advertising budget.

There is an irony here: even as Trump celebrates the United States hosting the 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Olympics and the 2034 Winter Olympics, his son is investing in a venture that seeks to undermine conventional sport’s entire legitimacy.

The organizers have studied another recent transformation of vice into mainstream entertainment. Christopher Jones, the Enhanced Games’ Chief Communications Officer, previously worked at FanDuel, the sports betting platform now valued at approximately $31 billion. Some of the same people who helped legitimize one previously stigmatized industry are now trying to create another. “Look at the investors involved,” Jones told me. “They do not get involved with losers.”

And those investors want to make money. Jones described the Games as “the kickoff to a consumer products division”. The organization is already selling testosterone therapies, peptides, and enhancement protocols on its website, using social media clips and athlete testimonials as proof points. Clinical data generated by athletes could support an FDA approval process for additional performance and recovery products aimed at the general public. The billionaire businessman Mark Cuban once funded his own study into the effect of human growth hormone on injured athletes, telling me there was simply no other way to gather such data legally. The Enhanced Games hope to generate far more.

The organization has announced plans to go public in 2026 at an enterprise value of $1.2 billion — a valuation tied up primarily in their pharmaceutical business. To understand what’s at stake, consider the comparison: the global market for GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy is currently worth around $70 billion and is projected to exceed $200 billion by 2033. The Enhanced Games are betting that testosterone, peptides, and performance-enhancement protocols could capture a meaningful slice of that demand — pharmaceutical self-improvement marketed with the same slick simplicity as a Hims & Hers subscription.

Shane Ryan, a 31-year-old, three-time Irish Olympian and world medalist in swimming, described the arrangement as something closer to a tech startup than a sporting body. “It’s a business,” he said. “Once you learn how much money is actually invested in it, you realize it’s not going to go away.”

Ryan joined the Enhanced Games after retiring from traditional competition. “I made like $20,000 or €18,000 a year,” he said of his time competing for Ireland. “You can’t live on that.” The Enhanced Games offered him a salary, comprehensive recovery support, and the chance to see how far his body could go.

Whether any of this truly succeeds may depend on Kerley’s race. Given that the 100-meter record is the one thing even the most casual of fans will understand, the Games will remain a curiosity until enhanced athletes run faster than clean ones. A USADA official who spoke on condition of anonymity put it plainly: “If somebody breaks that record, everything changes.”

The official identified a specific scenario the organization might be hoping for: a white sprinter breaking the record in a discipline dominated by athletes of West African descent since Jim Hines first broke 10 seconds in 1968. “If the first iconic Enhanced sprint record comes from a white guy, the marketing machine goes into overdrive,” he said. Only two white athletes have ever run under 10 seconds — France’s Christophe Lemaitre (9.92 in 2011) and Virginia Tech’s Cole Beck (a wind-aided 9.87 in 2023) — and neither is currently signed with the Enhanced Games. But the USADA official argued the commercial potential would be, in Trump’s colorful turn of phrase, “yuge”.

Anthony Roberts, author of Anabolic Steroids: Ultimate Research Guide and a fitness journalist who has broken major steroid stories for The New York Times, offered a realistic view. “The Enhanced Games stick around as long as rich people fund it,” he told me — and in my conversations with the Enhanced Games team, it is clear they have a great deal of financial runway, carrying them through multiple iterations of the signature event. “Because it has mostly attracted retired athletes off the podium, I can’t see it becoming popular at the mainstream level. The top sprinter in the Enhanced Games isn’t currently faster than the top sprinter at the Olympics.”

The USADA official was similarly doubtful about the Games supplanting traditional competition. “The Olympics are baked into national identity, government funding pipelines, and a century of habit,” he said. But he acknowledged the organizers had put serious money in. His primary concern was the message the event sends to young athletes, most of whom are already experiencing money pressures in their chosen sports. “We already fight a constant battle to keep kids from thinking they need drugs to chase a scholarship or a pro contract.”

The organizers are not, as they explain it, trying to destroy the Olympics. They are trying to piggyback off conventional sport’s legitimacy while building a pharmaceutical empire on the side. Even so, the Games arrive at a time when moralistic conventions are under threat. Sports betting, once viewed as dangerous and confined to the shadows, is now embedded in all major broadcasts. GLP-1 drugs have made pharmaceutical weight loss mainstream, rapidly supplanting the more respectable custom of dieting. The Enhanced Games are betting that performance enhancement will follow the same trajectory, going from taboo to tolerated to normal: a future in which ordinary consumers pay for testosterone, peptides, and recovery protocols to get stronger, leaner, and younger-feeling. The long-term health consequences of mass-market hormone use remain largely unstudied, but the Enhanced Games are wagering that demand will outrun caution — as it did with sports betting, and as it is doing with GLP-1s.

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Importantly, they are also a post-national venture in a time of declining trust in and identification with nation-states. Athletes will not represent their countries; there will be no anthems, no medal counts by nation. Whether audiences will care as much about competitors without flags remains an open question, but the organizers are wagering that records and spectacle will prove sufficient.

For athletes like Shania Collins, a 29-year-old retired American sprinter and former US Indoor Champion, the appeal is transparency. She competed for six years as a professional, earning what she described as the bare minimum. “I had confidential sources and I’ve seen things that led me to believe that [competitors] were taking performance-enhancing drugs,” she said. “It always felt like an unfair playing field.” Her mother has taken to calling it “the honest games”.

Come May, amid the manufactured glitz and 24/7 gambling of Las Vegas, enhanced athletes will get to chase — and possibly exceed — times that clean competitors have never approached. If Fred Kerley breaks Bolt’s record on a global broadcast, investors such as Don Jr will have seen an early return and the Enhanced Games will have proved their thesis: that the appetite for superhuman performance outweighs any squeamishness about how it was achieved.

If no one does, they will at least temporarily remain what their critics have called them — a well-funded sideshow still awaiting its big moment. Either way, the answer will come down to a fraction of a second.

This Californian elf, now the Golden State’s avatar, is the work of generations, refined over time from early Hollywood to Silicon Valley today. It’s tempting to see this mythologization as an act of idle self-absorption, a preening in the style of Barbie and Ken. But the truth is far more mercantilist. California is a massive economy, and its most defining exports are not hard goods or clear-cut services but fickle ideas.

The myth began modestly, with health seekers heading west in the late 1800s to find relief from tuberculosis in the dry air. Over time, “Go West!” became almost rote advice for chronic illness, as if the very place itself could heal. But these primordial associations weren’t enough to transform California into a global myth. The state needed a dream machine and it found one in early Hollywood.

By the Twenties, Hollywood was the face of American cinema, resplendent with all the glamor and scandal it would soon embody. Movie stars, not just movies themselves, were some of its most potent domestic exports. Studio executives understood that selling California as a paradise was essential to their business model, and they took to the task with profit-minded aplomb. Every palm-lined street, every sun-drenched beach scene, and every impossibly beautiful actor stepping out of a convertible advertised the way of life that the silver screen offered for the mere change in your pocket. 

In our day, Silicon Valley represents the latest iteration of this very same mythmaking engine. By the Eighties, Silicon Valley had surpassed Route 128 outside Boston to become the center of the technology universe, drawing brilliant founders and scientists to the beach with the very same allure that had given rise to the motion picture industry before. The visionary founder joined the starlet, and the IPO became as important as the premiere, but the underlying promise remained: California is a place that transcends humdrum human life, and if you buy its products you can get a taste.

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As we in marketing like to say, it’s “aspirational”. Even New York, the state most capable of rivaling California in cultural power, whispers about the golden elves. In Mad Men, the New York ad man Don Draper dreams of an escape to mythic California, ending the series in a wellness retreat there where meditation inspires him to make the iconic Coca-Cola “Hilltop” ad. The show uses California as an outlet for Don’s recurring fantasy of reinvention, a place where the damaged protagonist could shed his skin and emerge transformed. That’s why Don’s trips to California often involve surreal, dreamlike encounters that feel disconnected from reality. California as an idea is a constructed, aspirational export. 

And what’s more aspirational than wanting to live forever? Behold the grandest of Californian extravagances yet: immortalism, a movement of scientists and eccentrics quite literally trying to never die. Like Hollywood’s promise of stardom or Silicon Valley’s promise of money, the immortalist movement offers the ultimate Californian product — the transcendence of the one true human limitation.

Aleks Krotoski, a social scientist based in New York, has written an account of her years-long investigation into the entrepreneurs and inventors currently searching for eternal life. The Immortalists is a survey of transhumanists and their efforts: a loose confederation of scientists, entrepreneurs and true believers united by the conviction that aging is a disease to be cured. These tech elites see themselves as successors to earlier “seekers”, armed with wealth and engineering confidence, approaching death as another problem yet to be disrupted by the application of capital and expertise. Their goals are straightforward if audacious: extend lifespan by preventing typical causes of death, while extending their vital “prime years” so they can remain young forever. The connection between the latest trend and broader Californian mythmaking is clear to behold throughout the book’s pages. 

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It’s obvious why such an initiative would make its home in California. For one, the state has a high concentration of extant scientific talent, with one third of the nation’s aerospace companies headquartered there. The balmy beachside lifestyle attracts reliably high earners, while Silicon Valley provides both the capital and the risk tolerance necessary for a moonshot venture like overcoming death. But there’s also a mixture of cult experimentation and alternative medicine which led to the boom of the wellness industry from the Seventies onwards. In the last few decades, the wellness craze has taken hold of Los Angeles. Erewhon, the upscale organic grocery chain, is now basically a temple, with $20 smoothies you’re supposed to be seen consuming. The logical next step after trends such as sound baths, micro-dosing and therapeutic IV drips, was always going to be living forever. 

In The Immortalists, Krotoski floats from oddball to oddball, listening intently and giving each person their due when it comes to their views on mad science, but there’s one recurring star who sits above the rest: the entrepreneur Bryan Johnson. He has gained significant online fame largely by posting provocative erection-related statistics and cultivating a vampiric look. He has smooth, hairless cheeks, a piercing gaze, and much plastic surgery. He has turned himself into the vampire king of California, obsessed with rare elixirs and draining blood from the young. 

Krotoski spends so much of the book quoting Johnson verbatim. It’s easy to see why: “When my body, when my mind is like, let’s go eat pizza or let’s go drink… that’s non-cooperation. I relabel those things to violence.” You can almost hear the California dialect just from the words on the page. It’s a particular blend of tech-speak optimization language and therapy-influenced self-actualization rhetoric and rapport, part Silicon Valley efficiency gospel and part Venice Beach spiritual woo. Simultaneously earnest and performative, vulnerable and branded, there’s nothing else like it, and that’s partially the point.

Krotoski’s mocking portrayal of her subjects, as vain, anxious or bored in their pursuit of immortality, is probably fair. But it misses something key in its portrayal of Californian weirdness: it’s all embellished. She doesn’t fully capture, and may not even realize, that her Californian subjects are fully aware of what they are. In reading Johnson’s words, one can find a detectable wink to the audience in everything he says. He has made himself into the character, physically and verbally, to get attention. Take his vampiric appearance. In one telling exchange with Elon Musk on social media, Johnson wrote: “the difference between Elon and me: I’ll nourish you and drink your blood; he’ll fire you and leave you to die” — a tongue-in-cheek reference to his publicized blood transfusion experiments. The darkness of the imagery, perhaps as a shield against criticism, is part of the performance.

Johnson is not the first to do this, and he won’t be the last. The routine is commonplace, especially in the health space. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, after all, knowingly markets products like “This Smells Like My Vagina” candles, a deliberate provocation that generated discourse (and thus notoriety) far in excess of the actual candles sales. The entire “Valley Girl” phenomenon of the Eighties was both authentic dialect and conscious performance, with Frank Zappa’s daughter Moon Unit simultaneously embodying and parodying the accent in her hit single. Even the garage startup myth acknowledges its own absurdity while simultaneously perpetuating itself. The mythology of the billion-dollar garage startup has become an exportable, addictive idea that drives many to apply to places like Y Combinator each year.

California has always needed to find new dreams to sell as the old ones lose their luster. Film’s cultural dominance has waned with the rise of streaming and global production. New York has been aggressively courting film production back from California with tax incentives, and other cities like Atlanta have successfully challenged Hollywood’s monopoly. As traditional Hollywood loses ground, new innovations in the myth are needed to keep it both economically relevant and socially potent on the world stage. Californians understand this, and this is why there is such an effort to continue the myth creation. 

The immortalist movement may succeed in refreshing the California myth for another generation, proving that the state can still produce world-changing ideas. On the other hand, if it spectacularly combusts, it may reveal the myth’s exhaustion, showing that we’ve reached peak California, where the only frontier left is literally trying in vain not to die.

The truth is that California has always sold impossibility. From the gold rush’s promise of instant wealth to Hollywood’s promise of stardom to Silicon Valley’s promise of changing the world with an app, the state’s primary export has been dreams that statistically just won’t come true for most people. Yet, occasionally, just often enough to make the news, someone actually does strike gold, become a star, or build a billion-dollar world-changing company. As such, the myth rolls on, renewed.

The immortalists represent the logical endpoint of this tradition of gambling for glory. They’re selling the ultimate prize of all with just enough scientific merit to make it seem faintly possible. Whether Johnson and his cohort achieve immortality matters less than what their quest reveals about California’s enduring power to make fortune seem inevitable, to turn personal neurosis into cultural movement, and to perform transcendence so convincingly that performance itself becomes a kind of truth.

In the end, Krotoski’s book captures California early in the act of creating its next great myth. Like all the best California stories, it’s obviously fake yet somehow real. The author herself, by taking these eccentric immortalists seriously enough to write about them, becomes part of the myth-making machine she observes. She’s another New Yorker drawn into California’s orbit, unable to look away from the golden elves even as she rolls her eyes at their antics.

It’s a very old story. Johnson and his fellow immortalists are the people who went West seeking transformation and in the end decided to put on a show about it. The fact that their particular show involves blood transfusions and supplement regimens rather than surfboards and sunshine doesn’t change the fundamental dynamics. They are performing California, and in performing it, they make it real.

The brainchild of Tim Gray, a professional podcaster with over 600,000 followers on Instagram, the Summit’s watchword is a concept called “biohacking”. Gray himself simply describes the idea as health optimizing, but others see it as using technology to “hack” the natural body, while some regard it as a transhumanist endeavor littered with futuristic tech to escape mortality. Regardless, biohackers belong at this conference, where nutritionists, wellness influencers and DIY scientists all show off, and ultimately hope to sell, technology that’ll let you live forever, or at least a few years longer.

This is new. For years, biohacking was the domain of billionaires, who’d happily splash out millions in an attempt to extend their lives indefinitely, using their wealthy bodies as test subjects. Bryan Johnson, probably the world’s most famous biohacker, is known mostly for injecting himself with his 19-year-old son’s blood, and monitoring the length and strength of his erections. At the conference, toys for the billionaires aren’t hard to find. One hyperbaric oxygen chamber I spotted costs a sweet £200,000. Fully customizable, it features a bench press and a TV.

As the presence of the gym bros implies, however, biohacking has now come for the masses. Technology is clearly part of the appeal here, and certainly helps explain how the sector reached the $24 billion mark last year. In the end, though, I couldn’t help returning to those humdrum attendees, and how biohacking feels just as much a displacement exercise as their up-to-date LinkedIns. Far from helping you live forever, the Health Optimization Summit is more about enduring the here and now — especially as its precepts only continue to enter the mainstream.

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The underlying philosophy behind biohacking is a skepticism, depending on who you ask, towards an underfunded NHS; a greedy pharmaceutical industry; or the entirety of Western medicine. Regardless, this flouting of the health industry’s norms leans towards a radical, unorthodox practice. Quite aside from the gyros and the saunas, this was clear in the Summit’s talks. At one point, a speaker promised they could “reverse” incurable diseases. Elsewhere, someone gave a talk on why peptides, the building blocks of protein, demolish the fraudulent history of mainstream medicine.

Where did this manic blend of conspiracy, commerce and healthcare ultimately stem from? Most vendors I speak with have been selling their products for around a decade, but all agree that the pandemic propelled the biohacker movement into the limelight. Since Covid, says Kayla, hawking her wares at an IV-drip stall, “people want to be the best version of themselves”. She isn’t alone. Indeed, in a sense the entire conference feels like a symptom of Long Covid, as every attendee points to 2020 as the moment that catapulted their niche field to prominence.

Yet if Covid was the spark, the divisive legacy of lockdown suggests this is about something more than mere medicine. Consider, for instance, talks with names like “Ten Relationship Tools to Maximize Compatibility and Avoid Conflict” or “Finding Your People: How to Attract Relationships that Match Your Growth” — hardly topics your GP can help with. To me, at least, it all suggests a desperate attempt to reassert not health so much as control. Facing climate change, financial instability, and even just the bewildering future itself, many here seem to be turning inwards, with the technology merely a means to an end.

I get the same impression from Gray himself. In his mid-40s, covered head to toe in Boohoo menswear, his salt-and-pepper hair somewhat contradicts his claimed biological age of 24. His supposed biological youthfulness is thanks to his meticulous biohacking routine, which includes drinking hydrogen-infused, reverse osmosis water, and blood tests every 10 to 14 days. Yet throughout our interview, the Summit’s founder seems equally keen to distance himself from some of the more radical technology on display. He talks in staccato phrases, but repeatedly offers a straightforward message: “Eat well, sleep well, hydrate well, sun well, ground well.”

A fair point. But with the cage gyro whirring nearby, that only begs another question. For if Gray is right, and biohacking is more about routine than revolutionary technological change, do I really need blue light-blocking glasses before bed, or should I just avoid using my phone? Do I really need a hyperbaric oxygen chamber in my flat — or should I just do more morning stretches?

It’s a contradiction that arguably runs through the whole biohacking scene. A simple message of improving daily life becomes absorbed by corporations, and spat out in the form of pricey red-light face scrubs. And if there’s a clear financial aspect at work here — turning big tech into a must-have is good news for firms hawking £4,000 vibrating mattresses — the longer I spend at the Health Optimization Summit, the more the machinery blurs into the background: replaced, again, by that desperate need of control, whether independently or as a larger collective.

I’m thinking, here, of the presentations, which seem to transcend the whys and wherefores of aging to become almost religious events. There’s murmuring agreement, nodding at every line, and desperately taking photos of every slide. As Gary Eckles, a pal of Joe Rogan revered for his supposed miracles solving chronic health issues, begins his hour-long talk on how genetics and supplementation can optimize your health, one chap seems overwhelmed. “Let’s go!” he cries, amid roars of applause.

It goes without saying that mainstream medicine is unimpressed by all this. Critics cite the lack of scientific accountability, a modern-day snake oil industry, without the scientific rigor and clinical trials typically required for health practices. When I ask Gray about this, he distances himself from some of the more extreme views of his speakers, explaining that Western medicine and the pharmaceutical industry do, in fact, serve a purpose. The pharmaceutical industry and biohacking, he says, “go hand in hand like this” — as he clasps his hands together.

Gray is similarly cautious when it comes to politics, snapping that he’s “not interested in discussing that” when the topic comes up. Not everyone is so diffident. Across the Atlantic, after all, health has become closely linked to the political Right. Robert F. Kennedy and his “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement are supported by many US biohackers, including Dave Aprey, whose policy in the Trump administration is based on much of biohacking’s anti-Big Pharma sentiment.

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And at the Summit itself, the fervor of MAHA’s manosphere-adjacent podcasters is palpable. Attendees are eager to tell me how much they admire Joe Rogan, Andrew Huberman, and UK-leading voice Steven Bartlett. Yet if Aprey, a friend of Gray’s, invested in the conference, there is no real overt political sentiment to the event in most of the talks I listened to. Certainly, no British politicians openly support the biohacking movement.

Could this change? The numbers are suggestive, with many Britons increasingly mistrustful of mainstream medical science. As far as politics is concerned, the obvious comparison to make with America, given its populist frontman and the anti-establishment sentiment, is the Reform UK party. At their latest conference, RFK adviser Aseem Malhotra gave a speech titled — you guessed it — “Make Britain Healthy Again”: where he claimed mRNA vaccines could alter genes and that the World Health Organization had been captured by Bill Gates. In the event, though, the party soon distanced itself from its guest speaker, stating it doesn’t endorse his radical views.

It’s hard to imagine the pint-loving Farage taking up biohacking, let alone railing against mainstream healthcare. Quite aside from his own common-sense persona, Britain’s obsession with the NHS means that if Reform might flirt with privatization, the party’s leader ultimately knows that attacking the saintly caste of doctors and nurses would backfire.

In other words, then, British biohacking will likely remain a medical rather than a political project, especially when new variations are constantly appearing. With obesity-management jabs like Ozempic increasingly popular for managing weight, they’ve also become the latest frontier in DIY science, complete with a thriving black market and counterfeit prescriptions. Combined with the continued popularity of cold plunges and breathwork — and, yes, those famous gyros — it seems clear that biohacking will only seduce more of the sort of people I saw at the Summit: regular folk, whether corporate girlies or gym bros, eager for that elusive sense of control. And what could be more normal than that?

Eugenics, a policy that seeks to “improve” humanity, dismisses the importance of bestowing a sense of worth and dignity to all individuals in the quest of breeding only “the finest”. Today, our expanding knowledge of genes and demographics has created eugenic possibilities far beyond those of the last century. Once rejected largely due to Nazi atrocities, eugenics is being embraced by both the Left and Right. Yet its beating heart lies not in politics, but in tech-driven approaches that reflect, as New York Marxist academic David Harvey called it, “a fetishism of technology” that transcends conventional politics.

In a way that past eugenicists could only dream, technology now opens the possibilities of engineering something far more radical than sterilizing the weak and giving bonuses to those with the right genetic inheritance. Instead, the looming prospect of an entire biological transformation emerges. For half a century, scientists have been dreaming of engineering humans to better specs before conception, as they look to edit genes to produce “superior” offspring.

New technology — from “gene editing” to in-vitro birthing and cloning — provides new ways to create “the better human.” One big difference from 20th-century eugenics is that today’s effort is a largely private matter, at least until now, shaped not by the state, but the technocratic elite. What’s emerging is a modern version of John Calvin’s Protestant “Elect,” based not on faithfulness but measurements of IQ and ability. This new dominant class, as Daniel Bell predicted some 50 years ago, can employ “new intellectual technology” as a means of “ordering the mass society.”

Promoted by technologists, these efforts tend to be intrinsically “dehumanizing,” as the late British chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks warned. Eugenic technology, Sacks argued, operates “in detachment, driven by analysis, the breaking down wholes into constituent parts.” In this emerging world, we see the expansion of technology imposed on masses that have become less intelligent not despite but because of ever greater exposure to social media and increasingly, to artificial intelligence.

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Don’t worry, at least that’s what those who benefit the most from this shift suggest. Their answers boil down to this: let us lead you into the perfectly honed future. Masayoshi Son, the founder of Japan’s influential Softbank venture fund, recently suggested that artificial intelligence would lay the foundation for the creation of the “superhuman.” Not satisfied with making life better, Son now “really wanted to become an architect, to design the future of humanity,” as the Financial Times reported.

Politically, the current neo-eugenics movement spans the gamut. Ray Kurzweil, longtime head of engineering at the painfully progressive Google, is perhaps the best-known advocate of creating a “posthuman” future, with human behavior and attitudes shaped by the interface with machine technology. Sam Altman, generally a supporter of Democrats, wants AI bots to serve as “super assistant” for every dimension of life, supplanting the roles once played by parents, friends, teachers, ministers and neighbors. Mark Zuckerberg, a long-time donor to Democrats, thinks human contact can be supplanted by properly customized bots in his Metaverse.

Similar thoughts about automating humanity also come from Trump-leaning oligarchs like Elon Musk, who uses genetic screening before impregnating women who meet his criteria in order to create his “kid’s legion” of superior babies. Peter Thiel, an influential figure on the so-called Tech Right, warns darkly of “a deadly race between politics and technology,” with technology deemed superior to democracy. Thiel embraces the notion that cognitively gifted represent the future of society, and is a key investor in Orchid, a gene-editing IVF firm. He’s also, like Kurzweil, an enthusiastic backer of transhumanism.

The techno-elite’s vision constitutes a call for a scientifically ordered society detached from marriage, family, religion, and the broad sense of community. In its most extreme form, the eugenicists embrace “transhumanism” like Thiel — searching for extended mortality through technology. Today, we witness Silicon Valley’s obsession with efforts to extend life through the use of drugs, technology, and rigorous exercise, a kind of techno-Spartacism lacking that culture’s strong sense of communal obligation and honor. But this is just the beginning. “The rise to power of net-based monopolies coincides with a new sort of religion based on becoming immortal,” writes Jaron Lanier.

Potentially the most radical and far-reaching of the emerging creeds, transhumanism offers a distinctly secular approach to achieving the long-cherished religious goal of immortality. The new tech religion treats mortality not as something to be transcended through moral actions, but as a “bug” to be corrected by technology. The aim is to, in the words of tech engineer Anthony Levandowski, “develop and promote the realization of a godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.”

Ultimately, like their early 20th-century predecessors, the new eugenicists have little time for traditional religions, with their focus on the essential equality of people and acts of charity and concern for the less fortunate. They want to abandon the teachings that have underpinned much democratic and egalitarian thinking in the West. They’re trying to make a religion of their own.

In contrast, transhumanists reject Judeo-Christian egalitarianism. Yuval Noah Harari sees instead a future where “a small and privileged elite of upgraded humans” gain control of society and use genetic engineering to cement the superior status of their offspring. The new eugenicists are not going to “wait patiently for natural selection to work its magic,” he notes. Instead, bioengineers will rewrite its genetic code, rewire its brain circuits, alter its biochemical balance, and even grow entirely new limbs. He concludes: “They will thereby create new godlings, who might be different from us Sapiens as we are different from Homo Erectus.”

Some of the new eugenicists have a disturbing influence on the current Administration. Curtis Yarvin, a far-Right gadfly with ties to Vice President JD Vance, embraces the so-called Dark Enlightenment and favors ending democracy and imposing a tech-led monarchy. Like eugenicists of the last century, he has advocated for measures to keep down those deemed inferior. He seems also to have a soft spot for slavery, suggesting black people might have been better off without abolition.

Such thinking undermines the MAGA agenda, which draws its strength from the multiracial working and lower middle class. Some Right-wing nativists, like Steve Sailer, even think Republicans should ignore non-whites, even as they become an ever larger part of the electorate. These views get validation from Razib Khan, a science popularizer with links to Right-wing eugenicons like Sailer and Ron Unz. He wants race science to inform a reshaping of society, for example suggesting men “import” more East Asian women to marry the often not appealing — at least to Western women — nerdish types.

Yet it would be misleading to see the new eugenics drive as exclusively a phenomenon of the Right. In the last century, many on the progressive Left openly embraced eugenics, including leading lights like Margaret Sanger and Jane Addams. For them, the need was to curb the breeding of inferiors, largely Eastern and Southern Europeans, while encouraging childbirth among the superior, enlightened people, mostly Anglo-Saxons like themselves.

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This notion of “salvation by science” also appealed to some on the European Left. The famed Swedish sociologists Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, backed the sterilizations that were part of government policy till the mid-Seventies. This reflected the notion that socialism required a population that culls the genetically flawed. In 1941, Alva Myrdal wrote in Nation and Family that “In our day of highly accelerated social reforms the need for sterilization on social grounds gained momentum. Generous social reforms may facilitate home-making and more childbearing than before among the groups of less desirable as well as more desirable parents”.

A similar stance was advocated by The Webbs, the British inventors of Fabian socialism, who considered a policy of encouraging “the healthy” to have more offspring while blocking, as Sidney Webb put it, the “breeding of degenerate hordes of a demoralized ‘residuum’ unfit for social life.”

The conception of those “unfit” for social life resonates with some among the anti-MAGA crowd because it reflects the Democrats’ dependence on educated professionals. Elon Musk may be an object of hate for Leftists, but a defense of elite institutions is now mandatory on the Left, which demand protection from the populist masses as the repository of superior thinking. From all this, notes historian Michael Lind, comes the notion, popular on the Left, that the red states are “filled with inbred, knuckle-dragging, white nationalist Neanderthals plotting to overthrow democracy.”

Whether on the Right or Left, the core belief of all eugenicists lies in the assumption that we should shape and cull the human herd to fit a particular vision. This idea is gaining influence, particularly from the wealthiest and most powerful forces of our age. Threatened are our longstanding notions of morality, family, and self-governance critical to democracy and our flourishing as humans.

By the Nineties, the project slumped into embarrassing failure, from the end of modernist town planning to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The results of the 20th-century experiments were stagnation, famine, gulags, censorship, and eugenics.

Unfortunately, the Californian counter-culturists who fled the collapse of the Sixties dream and found refuge in Silicon Valley didn’t get the memo. Locked in their rooms, with their rudimentary computers, they set about creating a non-earthly utopia. They dreamed about other worlds and other intelligences, fusing anarchism with New Ageism and libertarianism with science fiction.

So began the tragi-comic rebirth of utopianism. Since then, the ideology has evolved with the growth of AI and cybernetics. It is now mainstream right across the tech world, with adherents including tech guru Ray Kurzweil, and billionaires Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen. Today’s pioneers of repeating-the-past predict a future of unbounded technological and economic growth.

The “Tech Utopians” have two main projects. The first is abundance: an end to poverty, hunger, sickness, and back-breaking labor. This will supposedly be achieved through vast social engineering projects, masterminded by an elite class, and with the aid of genius machines.

The second is the improvement of humans through scientific progress. A perfect “blank slate” human will be created for utopia 2.0, and they will be morally, intellectually, and physically enhanced. Humans won’t just be cured of illness. They’ll be cured of mortality itself.

These ideas, however, are hardly new. They appeared in nascent form as far back as Plato. Then, during the Enlightenment, they grew stronger, with the promise of a blank-slate society built upon rationalism and science, in which a better type of human would emerge. Today’s Tech Utopians, though mostly claiming to be libertarians, are attempting the same projects — only this time they plan to use AI and biotech to achieve their goals. Elon Musk, for one, envisages a “future of abundance” once AI reaches human-level intelligence (so-called AGI).

At the moment, there is a split between so-called libertarian accelerationists (like Musk and Peter Thiel), the technocrats (like the late Klaus Schwab) and the Left-accelerationists (like Aaron Bastani) over the question of how exactly abundance will be brought about. At one extreme, you have Bastani’s Left-accelerationist “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”, with its vision of a robotics-enhanced society, with Universal Basic Income and free housing, food, education, electricity and healthcare for all. On the other you have Thiel and the Effective Accelerationism plan to destroy all bureaucracies and to replace democracy with a “cognitive elite” of tech specialists who will rule autocratically over newly formed city states.

Uniting the two sides is the idea that the abundance problem will be solved by complex-systems analysis, powered by exponentially growing AI superintelligence.

Is this progress? Alas, no. Even in 1810, French socialist Charles Fourier envisioned a vast “calculating machine” that could solve all human problems. This machine would organize labor, reward undesirable work with tokens, and even assign optimal sexual partners for better offspring and enhanced pleasure. In this way, the “machine calculante” would ensure universal happiness. Perhaps not incidentally, Fourier also believed that his perfect society could turn the sea into lemonade by using gigantic parabolic mirrors to focus moonlight on the waves.

Fourier’s ideas may have been insane, but they were part of a growing faith in the ability of “systems” to deliver harmony and abundance. These ideas were tested in the many agrarian socialist collectives of the 1880s, and then later in the planned economies of communism. Within the USSR, for instance, there were repeated attempts to link military computers with civilian ones, to make a totalising “Automated System for State Planning”.

The National Socialists also hoped to realize their dream of an abundant New Germania through calculation. Hitler himself envisaged a Crimea rich with fruit and cotton, and a Black Sea inexhaustibly full of fish. Yet Hitler’s fantasies had darker echoes too: according to one historian, the Nazis worked with IBM to devise a computer system that organized the transport of millions of people to the gas chambers.

When Tech Utopians tell us that AI will guarantee abundance, then, they are unwittingly pushing us back into the dangerous utopian delusions that emerged from the 19th century — and that failed so catastrophically in the 20th century.

Some might argue that the reason utopia failed in the past was that we didn’t have a super-intelligent computer. Now that we’re close to creating one, all our problems will soon be solved. But such an argument is built on the fallacy that humans are no more than rational beings in cages of flesh. Therefore, all interactions can be planned, all diseases cured. This couldn’t be more wrong.

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Then there’s the question of improved humans. If you’re going to create a perfect society, you need to enhance people, or else they will bring with them all of the flaws of biology and history — suffering, jealousy, hatred, genetic sickness. As American transhumanist Zoltan Istvan said: “Death is the first major challenge for the species to overcome to truly transcend our biology. There’s nothing in the way out there saying we must continue to die.” Meanwhile entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt, who is working on a technology called “Mindcloning”, says: “We’re able to put into computer form people’s mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs attitudes and values and keep them alive in a cyber form, looking forward to the future when their minds might be able to be downloaded back into a regenerated human body.”

In a similar spirit, Tech Utopians are now pushing for CRISPR DNA improvements in babies to prevent genetically inheritable diseases, such as sickle cell disease. The next step, for some, is “designer babies” — which, while legally controversial, is now technically possible.

Meanwhile, the transhumanists intend to use AI, genetic engineering, bio-tech, and cybernetics to create a post-human species which will overcome aging and disease. Transhumanist leaders such as Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom, co-founder of Humanity+, now form a powerful belief-core inside Silicon Valley.

And then there is Musk, whose company, Neuralink, is experimenting with new technologies like Brain Chip Interface (BCI), which enables direct communication between the brain’s electrical activity and computers. Musk hopes to implant surgically installed brain chips into millions of people within a decade. He and his acolytes believe these enhanced human subjects will soon be able to communicate telepathically and download knowledge in an instant. Eventually, they insist, we will see a merger of human consciousness with superintelligent AI, allowing us to achieve digital immortality.

Are these utopian technologies leading us forward? Once again: no. Rather, they are regressing back to dogma found in Plato’s Republic, where selective breeding is proposed to create the “guardian class” of philosopher-kings to run the ideal society.

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There are even echoes of Stalin’s scientists, who sought to achieve a breakthrough in human evolution in the form of the “New Soviet Man”. To this end, Soviet scientist Ilya Ivanov tried to create a super-strong human-chimpanzee hybrid, while Alexander Bogdanov sought immortality through blood-transfusion experiments. It’s an experiment that we’ve recently seen repeated by “longevity biohacker” and transhumanist guru Bryan Johnson, who took blood from his teenage son in the attempt to stay young.

This is not the only poignant parallel. Nikolai Koltsov, a Soviet-era biologist, developed eugenic “sperm banks for geniuses”. Nowadays, one of the goals of transhumanist organization Humanity + this decade is to use technology “to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities”.

Such connections are arguably not coincidental but causal. According to tech historians and activists Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, leaders of the AGI movement “subscribe to [a] set of ideologies which have emerged from the modern eugenics movement and therefore have inherited similar ideals”. They say that the Tech Utopians are guilty of discriminatory attitudes around racial differences in IQ, and that the Tech Utopian goal is “to create a superior being akin to a machine-god”, a process which is resulting in experimental technological “systems that are unscoped and thus unsafe”.

There is evidence for this in the degree of suffering caused in the Brain Chip Interface experiments. Neuralink is currently under federal investigation for the claim that 1,500 animals died during surgical BCI experiments, with the company accused of “causing needless suffering”, related to “Musk’s need for speed research”.

The transhumanist mission will inevitably require a large number of human test subjects. After all, Tech Utopians, with their belief in “long termism”, tend to view short-term sacrifices as essential to the attainment of their transcendent future goals.

Yet as history shows, utopianism always demands its blood sacrifices in the name of the distant paradise. It excludes those deemed unworthy, or it uses them as its lab rats in the name of “improvement”. In other words, today’s Tech Utopian visions aren’t about progress. They are a regressive repeat of history, born out of a willful blindness to the past. We are accelerating backwards into preventable disasters we thought we had left behind.

I could see why Edward was interested in the play. The AI community, to which he belongs, is driven by these kinds of future visions: utopian, quasi-divine abundance and control over nature — regardless of whether that outcome is wanted, or whether we will destroy ourselves trying to bring it about. Already, their capital, San Francisco, is marked by this worldview. The technology that’s generated in “SF” is itself the product of a rationalist eschatology that sees the human as a “bootstrapping” mechanism (in the words of Elon Musk) for higher forms of life and intelligence.

Beneath this apparent rationalism lurks a profoundly religious sensibility that seeks to reconfigure the human past the point of recognizability, all in service of generating a sort of machine-angel synthesis. SF, then, isn’t just a place. It’s a theological state of mind.

In the city’s techno-rationalist circles, the answer to the question of whether we should want to live in The Culture is: “Yes, if possible”. ChatGPT founder Sam Altman, for instance, is one of many technologists with a serious interest in life extension (the pursuit of extending human lifespan), biohacking (modifying one’s biology through various interventions), and merging human cognition with artificial cognition (often called brain-computer interfaces).

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Peter Thiel invests in parabiosis, the experimental practice of transfusing young blood into older bodies in pursuit of eternal youth. Elon Musk is building brain implants. Ray Kurzweil takes hundreds of supplements a day. Jack Dorsey fasts for days at a time. Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison quietly fund longevity startups. If, as the existentialist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued, “we perceive the world with our body”, then the high priests of the SF cult are building not only new bodies, but new perceptions. Out of these new visions will presumably emerge new ethics.

If the members of a technologically optimized overclass see, hear, and move differently — how will they see the rest of us, the non-optimized?

Accelerating integration with technology changes how you experience the world. While in SF, I took Waymos (autonomous vehicles operated by a Google subsidiary) everywhere, rather than traditional taxis or Ubers. There was a particular feeling as the cars passed through areas of squalor. In Frisco (the old working-class name for the city), I felt like I was living in a completely gated experience, a protected techno-bubble. The experience was seamless and efficient, and it changed my behavior. Because there was no driver, I found myself feeling weirdly liberated: like I was passing through material reality like a god or alien observing humans. Somehow, I believed the car could and would protect me.

I liked my Waymo rides to the food co-op, because they spared me from having to mentally and emotionally engage with the bad neighborhood surrounding the health-food store. I could close my eyes as I left the “hacker house” where I was staying — and then open them in an enormous, shiny store offering food designed to optimize my body. You start to like rationalist civilization. AI does the legwork of maintaining homeostasis. There’s no real existential pressure; you start to forget that you live in a fragile, mortal body; you start to feel like you should have total control over everything that happens to you.

The future is here, it’s arriving a little more each day, and it’s concentrated in the Bay Area. If we want a preview of what happens when techno-futurism becomes a ruling-class ideology, if we want to understand what future culture will feel like, we just have to look at rationalist-utopian, accelerationist, godless, and increasingly childless San Francisco.

Bay Area techno-rationalist culture resembles — and, in many ways, is — the rebirth of the Shakers. The 19th-century sect similarly believed that the end times were imminent, and consequently emphasized self-discipline, radical environmental redesign, and withdrawal from the world. Techno-rationalists are Shakers without God. Or rather, theirs is a god who has yet to be built, but the project is coming along nicely.

San Francisco is almost like someone took parts of Davos and placed them inside Naples: a clean, efficient, rational minimalist elite lifeworld nested inside social decay, nested inside breathtaking natural beauty. Life is absolutely pleasant in San Francisco, if you live on the upper edge of the K-shaped economy. Of course, all American cities have this feature to some degree: the affluent live differently than everyone else, everywhere.

But in San Francisco, there is a deeper feeling that this is simply a necessary part of the social Darwinism entailed in transhumanism: that the poor and the “bad” will die off while the techno-affluent live longer, healthier lives, protected by AI.

An astonishing amount of human energy has been spent building this increasingly automated techno-empire, and the end result seems to be something like redemption for a very few, elimination and redundancy for the many. Everywhere I took a Waymo, I saw billboards advertising AI labor — replace your real workers. Soon it will be: replace almost everyone. This is the vision: a priestly, self-medicating, self-optimizing, transhumanist class that lives a life of leisure on an automated grid, protected from the decay around them and from the downsides of the civilization they have built.

San Francisco is also the first city, I think, where a non-negligible portion of the population —  and certainly the most rich and powerful portion — is planning, if not to live literally forever, to live beyond our biological lifespan, confident that technology can build a heaven on Earth for some.

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The Golden State has always been an incubator for cults and prophecies. The rocket geeks who built Cal Tech and turned the state into a defense and aerospace Mecca also indulged strange and occult visions, as the Marxist geographer and California writer Mike Davis reminded us. The latest cult has supplanted ballistics aimed at the Soviets with moonshots to eternal life. For example, Bryan Johnson, tech entrepreneur known for his extreme anti-aging regimen, tweeted recently, “I am building a religion”, adding: “First, here’s what’s going to happen: + Don’t Die becomes history’s fastest-growing ideology. + It saves the human race. + And ushers in an existence more spectacular than we can imagine. It is inevitable. The only question is: will you be an early or late adopter”?

And what if you dissent? What if you don’t want to optimize? What if you still prefer the old religions to the new? What if you have no interest in building a killer app or tracking your biomarkers every day? For now, you won’t be punished. You won’t be called a heretic. But as this cult expands — as I believe it will, because of what it promises — and as caste differences sharpen, tensions will inevitably rise. Refusal will begin to look like a threat. Noncompliance will read as dysfunction.

It isn’t hard, for this reason, to imagine a future where AI-driven cars have humanoid robots in the front seat—not as drivers, but as bodyguards: to protect the transhumanist overclass from the dissenters and neo-Luddites who have been left behind (or were never invited to join the revolution). And it’s also hard to imagine that those bodyguards won’t, at some point, be necessary.

Welcome to 2023. 

But what can we do when there’s nothing left to conserve? The answer depends on what you were trying to conserve in the first place. In Britain, which has been at the speartip of the modern revolution for centuries, all that was solid has been melting into air since at least since the Enlightenment, and the consequence has been the loss of almost everything that the likes of Edmund Burke, who already had his back up against the wall two centuries ago, would have considered worth conserving. Across the modern world, the process has been the same: something I have described as a great unsettling. 

In this unsettled world, the notion that the West is declining, collapsing, dying or even committing suicide is reaching a crescendo. Multiple reactions are underway to try and shore it up. The chickens of modernity, which the West created and exported, have come home to roost, and we are all increasingly covered in their guano. 

But if you want to argue about how to conserve or defend “the West”, you first have to know what it actually is. And to do that, you need to revisit its origin story.  

This story starts in a garden, at the very beginning of things. All life can be found here: every living being, every bird and animal, every tree and plant. Humans live here too, and so does the creator of all of it, the source of everything, and he is so close that he can be seen “walking in the garden in the cool of the evening’’ an image I’ve always loved. Everything, here, is in communion with everything else. 

At the centre of this garden grows two trees, and one of them imparts hidden knowledge. The humans, the last creature to be formed by the creator, will be ready to eat this fruit one day, and when they do they will gain this knowledge and be able to use it wisely for the benefit of themselves and of all other things that live in the garden. But they are not ready yet. The humans are still young, and unlike the rest of creation, they are only partially formed. If they ate from the tree now, the consequences would be terrible.

“Do not eat that fruit,” the creator tells them. “Eat anything else you like, but not that.”

We know the next part of the story because it is still happening to us on an hourly basis. “Why should you not eat the fruit?” asks the voice of the tempting serpent, the voice from the undergrowth of our minds. “Why should you not have the power that you are worthy of? Why should this creator keep it all for himself? Why should you listen to him? He just wants to keep you down. Eat the fruit. It’s your right. You’re worth it!”

So we eat the fruit, and we see that we are naked and we become ashamed. Our mind is filled with questions, the gears inside it begin to whir and turn and suddenly here is us and them, here is humanity and nature, here is people and God. A portcullis of words descends between us and the other creatures in the garden, and we can never go home again. We fall into disintegration and we fall out of the garden forever. The state of questless ease that was our birthright is gone. We chose knowledge over communion; we chose power over humility.

The Earth is our home now.

This Earth is a broken version of the garden. On Earth we must toil to break the soil, to plant seeds, to fight off predators. We will sicken and die. Everything is eating everything else. These are the consequences of our pursuit of knowledge and power, but we keep pursuing them because we can’t see any other other way out, and anyway we need something to do with our big questing brains. We keep building towers and cities and forgetting where we came from. We forget the creator and worship ourselves. All of this happens inside us every day.

There comes a time when the creator takes pity. After so many centuries of humans eating the fruit again and again, He stages an intervention. He comes to Earth in human form to show us the way back home. Being human, we react first by torturing and killing him. But the joke is on us, because it turns out that this was the point all along. The way of this creator is not the way of power but of humility, not of conquest but of sacrifice, and his sacrifice gives us a path back home. If we follow that path, we can come back into communion again, and be as we were intended to be, which is to say holy — a word derived from the Old English halig — which means whole.

That’s the story. Now imagine that a whole culture is built around this story. Imagine that this culture survives for over a thousand years, building layer upon layer of meaning, tradition, innovation and creation, however imperfectly, on these foundations.

Then imagine that this culture dies, leaving only ruins.

If you live in the West, you do not have to imagine any of this. You are living among the ruins, and you have been all your life. They are the remains of something called “Christendom”, a 1,500-year civilisation in which this particular sacred story seeped into and formed every aspect of life, bending and changing and transforming everything in this story’s image.

But we can’t live for long among ruins. Humans are builders, and Nature abhors a vacuum. God abhors a vacuum too, I think, and whether we like it or not  and mostly these days we don’t — humans need God. This is why every human culture, forever, everywhere, has directed its gaze towards the divine. 

This is what we should understand if we are going to think or talk about “conserving” or “returning” or “restoring” anything. If you want to “defend the West”, you are talking about defending Christendom and the values it created, and/or the post-Christian liberal culture it gave birth to, which itself was based upon those values.  

Every culture is built around a sacred core. When it begins to rot, as all cultures do, it is because that core has been neglected. Usually its people have taken their eyes off the sacred centre and directed them somewhere else; towards false gods, golden calves, or their own dolled-up image in the mirror. Chesterton, again, took issue with Marx on this one. “The truth is that irreligion is the opium of the people,” he wrote. “Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world.” This is the process which Christianity used to condemn as “idol worship”, and today’s West is at it in spades. 

A lot of people who talk about “defending the West” these days are either trying to defend red in tooth and claw capitalism — the system which has done more to destroy culture and eternal values in the West than anything else — or they’re trying to defend free speech, individualism and the right to be rude on the internet. I would suggest that these things in themselves were the results of a settlement designed, in the process now known as “the Enlightenment” to replace the West’s original sacred story with a new, human-centred version. 

This was the liberal settlement. It assumed that humans were disaggregated individuals who could roam the world speaking freely, consuming freely and imposing a rational science-based order on the world, the better to achieve progress. It combined the moral values and universalism of Western Christianity with rights-based individualism and a faith in science and technology, and it brought with it a new origin story, to replace the one about the garden and the snake.

This new story told of how we were saved from superstition and ignorance by the holy trinity of modernity: Reason, Science and Technology. Along the way, we stopped believing silly stories about gods and monsters, which had been made up by our ignorant ancestors before we could see the harsh but bracing reality that the universe is just a meaningless swirl of matter-energy which came from nothing for no reason, and human beings are just gene-replicating machines. Now here we are, working out how to rationally manage the whole show. Now, here we are, a new kind of being: post-religious Man.

I grew up sort of believing this story. I thought religion was over and we had moved beyond its stupid superstitions. I don’t believe that anymore. Now I believe something else: that in a significant sense, everything is religious. 

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The West needs to grow up

By Paul Kingsnorth

I became a Christian — an Orthodox Christian — in 2021, much to my own surprise and initial horror, after a very long search for truth. The subsequent immersion in the Christian story gave me a much clearer sense of what was happening around me in the 2020s. Most of all, they gave me an understanding of the sacred underpinning of human culture. Marx claimed that the history of all hitherto existing society was a history of class struggle, but it looks to me more like a history of religious belief. “Belief”, in fact is the wrong word. A better one might be “experience”, or “immersion”.

The more I attended the divine liturgy, the more I realised that what I had once dismissed as silly superstition was in fact the stuff of life. In the the pre-modern West, as in much of the world today, there was no such thing as “religion”. The Christian story was the basis of peoples’ understanding of reality itself. There was no “religion”, because there was no notion that this truth was somehow optional or partial, any more than we today might assume that gravity or the roundness of the Earth are facts we could choose to engage with only on Sunday mornings.

Again: everything is religious. The only people who believe otherwise, in fact, are a few people in what we liked to call our “secular” corner of the world. We once thought that by abolishing religion we had got ahead of the rest of the world. But suddenly, this story is being told less confidently. The wind has changed, and secular liberal modernity no longer looks like a good bet for winner of the End of History board game. 

So if everything is religious, but our old religion is dead, and the thing we tried to replace it with — rational, secular, humanist progress — is failing because it doesn’t meet real human needs, then where are we? What is coming next?

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Can the nation survive Elizabeth?

By Paul Kingsnorth

A good person to ask is the perennialist thinker René Guenon, a favourite of our new king. Guenon was a Frenchman who became a Muslim, migrated to Egypt and dedicated his life to trying to save the West from its own materialism. He predicted that, save for a turn back to religion, the early 21st century would see the arrival of what he called the “Reign of Quantity”: the age of pure materialism in which we now live, in which every aspect of life would be be measured, quantified and subject to scientific assessment and technological management. 

Crucially, in the Reign of Quantity, religious feeling would become quantitative too. Humanity will never be able to shake off its desire for transcendence, but it will become unable to manifest that desire on any level other than the material. The object of worship during the Reign of Quantity, then, will not be some mysterious, untouchable, numinous force outside of creation: it will be the force of will in the material realm.

This, I think, is where we are today: the religious impulse is manifesting in material form, primarily through the use of technology to promote the human will. This phenomenon, which I like to call the Machine, is a material manifestation of the human desire for liberation through technology, in which all forms are dissolved in favour of the final and only sovereign: the independent rational individual, freed from the obligations of history, community and nature.

In the Orthodox Christian worldview, all of us are icons of God. Humanity was made in the image of the creator, and even though we endlessly fail to live up to this responsibility, it  gives us a clear point of reference. We know what humans are, and what the world is for. Once that story goes, what is the still point of the turning world? Nobody can agree. The only reference point in the post-Christian, post-liberal West is whatever we happen to want or feel. And since consumer liberalism has taught us that desire is not something to be transcended or controlled, but something to be surrendered to immediately and then valorised, reality itself becomes open to endless redefinition. Who’s to say what’s right or wrong or real? 

But let’s go back to our founding story again: back to the garden. What does our current state look like from that perspective? To me it looks simple enough, and I think it would have done to a citizen of Western Christendom too. We are following the path of the snake rather than the path of the creator. This is hardly a new development: the Bible is effectively an 80-book warning against it, and most other religions have their own cautionary tales. Once you reject God, you are fated to try and replace him.

This is where our path is now leading us, and it is, I think, the main reason that the waters of age seem so disturbed. Transhumanism, artificial intelligence, the “transcending” of everything from gender to biology, the growing of food and babies in labs: openly now, we seek to break all given limits, remake nature, build the world anew. We seek to become gods. The people who are building our new digital Tower of Babel are very open about what they are up to. If you don’t believe me, let them explain it for themselves. 

Transhumanist writer Elise Bohan, detailed a conversation she once had with a biologist at a conference on the future of transhumanism. “He looked me in the eye,” she says, “and whispered to me: ‘We’re building God, you know,’ … I looked back at him and I said: ‘Yeah, I know.'”

Similar sentiments are expressed by transhumanist philosopher Martine Rothblatt, who claims, “We are making God as we are implementing technology that is ever more all-knowing, ever-present, all-powerful and beneficent. Geoethical nanotechnology will ultimately connect all consciousness and control the cosmos.” Ray Kurzweil, Google’s head of engineering and philosopher-general of of the robot apocalypse is more succinct. “Does God exist?” he asks. “I would say: not yet.”

To return to where we started, we might say that transhumanism — the silicon manifestation of our new faith — aims not so much to eat from the tree of life, as to genetically engineer a new one, and plant it wherever the hell we like. We are on the verge of a revolution now, and it may make the Enlightenment look like a tea party. The entire basis of reality is being rewritten, or so we tell ourselves. Whole generations are growing up with a closer relationship to screen-based abstraction than to manual work or to the natural world. They have been convinced that the world is our playground, and that everything from history to human nature to sexual dimorphism can be changed at will. 

We are consciously making ourselves post-human, even as we strive to make the world post-natural and post-wild. If the age you live in is starting to take on the flavour of a war over the very meaning of reality itself — which is to say, a religious war — well, that’s because it is. 

What, in this world, can we possibly “conserve”? Nothing. In a culture which does not agree that nature exists, or that we have some basic, shared assumptions about reality, the question barely even makes sense. The challenge now is not to ask what we can “conserve” or “restore”. We have to go much further back. We have to dig down to the foundations. 

Our challenge now is to choose our religion. Try to avoid the challenge and your faith will be chosen for you: you will be absorbed by default into the new creed of the new age: the quest to build the digital Tower of Babel. The attempt to “build god” and replace nature through technology. The path of the snake.

What can we do when there’s nothing left to conserve? Pray.

Today, however, the rich are separating themselves in perhaps the most obvious way of all: by perfecting their bodies, rather than what they put on them. The rich are fit and the poor are fat: reams of research confirms that the prevalence of obesity decreases as income increases. In the United States, where 41% of the entire population is obese — compared with 25% in the United Kingdom — it is a rare wealthy person who is morbidly overweight (blimp-sized Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker and portly former New Jersey governor Chris Christie are outliers). Increasingly, the rich in late middle age have come to resemble Jeff Bezos and Sarah Jessica Parker: ripped to shreds and almost certainly “enhanced” with various anti-ageing drugs and techniques, ranging from steroids and growth hormones to Botox injections and liposuction. 

Into this mix comes semaglutide, an antidiabetic medication better known by its trade name Ozempic. Sold by pharmaceutical manufacturer Novo Nordisk, the drug, which reduces food intake by curbing appetite and slowing digestion, was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to treat obesity in 2021. Since then, celebrities and fitness influencers have routinely shared before-and-after pics captioned with details of their courageous weight-loss journeys, which entailed jabbing themselves with a 1.5ml pen that contains a month’s worth of doses and costs roughly $900 without insurance.

Predictably, stories about Ozempic have proliferated in the tabloids and on social media. Some see the drug as a challenge to the celebrity movement that touts “fat acceptance”, and brought us the “slim-thick” era of curvy female superstars. They argue that Ozempic may work hand-in-hand with the return of the “heroin chic” look of the late Nineties. As interesting as it is to consider where these mixed messages might lead us — to a culture in which poor people are told it’s fabulous to be obese, while the rich get ever thinner and fitter — if this is a conspiracy, it’s not a new one. The rich have lusted after youth, beauty and fitness, in others and themselves, since time immemorial, always keeping the poor as downtrodden as possible while pacifying them with bromides about equality, liberty and fraternity. Ozempic, then, is not simply the key to thinness; those who pay for it are buying even more distance between themselves and the hoi polloi. 

In short, this appears to be yet another sign that the elite are headed toward some sort of crude transhumanist utopia, complete with gene therapy and designer-baby selection. Some may scoff that this is science fiction, but this future looms: once they’re sufficiently fine-tuned, gene editing tools will likely eradicate heart disease, muscle wasting, neurodegenerative disorders, and other conditions in embryos that are still in utero — but their price will be nothing short of staggering. Similarly expensive gene therapies will enhance the overall performance of already-healthy humans, raising ethical questions about whether these procedures should “improve” a person or merely “fix” a condition. The rich, of course, will leave those debates to the philosophers and pay upfront for the best bodies that their considerable resources can buy. Already, news stories abound of billionaires pursuing immortality, with a few commentators trying to sanitise the pursuit by arguing that the research will somehow benefit even the least of us.   

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Steroids won't cure toxic masculinity

By Oliver Bateman

I have first-hand experience in the big-bucks world of anti-ageing science, and I can state unequivocally that the most compelling benefits are not going to trickle down. In 2017, I worked for a transhumanist medical organisation, producing marketing content related to stem-cell therapy and other forms of anti-ageing medicine. I received several treatments myself, and while I can only speak anecdotally, they significantly relieved decades of aches and pains related to hard training. And these were one-off procedures, not the monthly “Cadillac plan”, which involved steroids, growth hormones, and Botox. Wealthy clients would walk in as untrained, middle-aged slobs and, less than a year later, boast gym-hardened physiques that might take unenhanced trainees a decade to develop. 

The organisation’s telos was the stuff of nightmares: the acquisition of a yacht to serve as a floating hospital so that various procedures that are illegal in North America could be performed in international waters; or the same-day infusion of stem cells harvested from a delivery of rich clients’ babies. Although peer-reviewed research has shown no difference between using frozen and freshly-harvested stem cells, there was marketing value in promising clients the freshest ingredients possible. It allowed for a considerable markup in the price of the procedure. It wasn’t the “these vampires want to drink baby blood” of conspiracy-nut ramblings — but it did resemble them. 

So, when I see discussions of Ozempic’s social impact, I don’t think about plus-sized singer Lizzo and skeletal commentator Ann Coulter trading barbs about the ideal female physique. That sort of chatter is all a sideshow for the general public; the rich clients doping themselves to remain forever young do not much care about how the poor and middle class choose to identify (be it fat or fit) as long as few have the money to identify as rich. Without truly high-end gene editing that might enable skeletal and organ reconfiguration — still a way off, though one never knows — the rich are limited to the basic shape and size of their natal bodies. But being able to invest tens of thousands of dollars per annum in upkeep will nevertheless produce an optimised body utterly unlike that of the poor American.

The culture of fitness influencers and body performers is downstream of this. Their bodies represent an investment that will yield riches, which can in turn be reinvested in the upkeep of those bodies. They are selling you a picture of health that doubles as a picture of wealth, often lying about just how much they spend on effective drugs. In the marketing of bodies, deception is the key to the kingdom. You might, for example, promote your Ozempic transformation on TikTok while failing to mention the $6,000 “micro-liposuction” procedure you’ve used to improve problem areas, because you’re sponsored by an online clinic that writes prescriptions for the drug. Or you might fail to mention your Ozempic and steroid use completely, touting instead a diet that is far less effective in the absence of all these chemical crutches, but tied to prepared meals and meal-replacement shakes you’re being paid to promote. 

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Western society is built on stigma

By Lionel Shriver

As a lifelong strength athlete, I have toiled in filthy gyms and basements to maintain my own physical condition. I would like to say that remaining “natural” or practising intense physical discipline offers some intrinsic reward. Unfortunately, it does not; it is a hard-to-follow path made more tortuous in my case by my stubborn unwillingness to take any effective shortcuts (even though the stem cell injections I received worked like a charm). But a resistance to emptying my wallet, and an aversion to some of the side effects from these drugs — cancerous tumours in the case of Ozempic — has hindered my route to body optimisation.

For me, glorifying the “natural” in and of itself, then, is little better than writing some trite ode to manual labour. There are loads of people, nearly all of them poor and sick, whose bodies are relatively resistant to weight loss. For them, the simplicity of the Ozempic jab — as opposed to the creation of a stomach pouch via laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery — might offer an improved quality of life in much the same way that cheaper insulin and other band-aids help ease the pains associated with sedentary, unhealthy lifestyles.

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How to get ripped and alienate people

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But the rhetorical appeal of this medicine — that it will produce gains that will “trickle down” from the upper classes to the masses — is an old lie. Time is a thief, stealing each passing minute from us, but as money proves able to purchase ever-increasing amounts of it, it will be disproportionately hoarded by those rich people who are already proficient at squirrelling away their money. Whether by violent nature or scientific nurture, the body is merely something to be overcome. And if you’ve the money to opt for the latter, why wouldn’t you?

In the meantime, those of us doomed to remain mere humans can only watch this process unfold while the rich become superhuman. Consigned to increasingly rare “normal” bodies that are both temples and tombs, the middle class must study this journey from the sidelines, watching on as a vast array of battered, bloated and ruined bodies are left in the wake of a transhumanist train that goes in only one direction. 

Deets wasn’t exactly deceiving her fans. She left older, less manipulated images available, and described her work as “art”. Even so, some accused her of “pedo-baiting”. But just last week, a story that seemed a perfect 21st-century blend of self-commodification and AI-assisted digital unreality took a darker note, when news broke that Deets had taken her own life.

The callous response by extremely online rubberneckers to someone’s obvious suffering exposes two recurring themes in current-day culture.

First, that we have wildly underestimated how completely the shift to a digital-first culture is unmooring us — or, at least, some of us — from material reality. And second, that this has accelerated a transformation that has been under way for over 50 years, in which commerce and innovation turn inward from exploring (and exploiting) the world towards doing the same in the human body, and the human soul: the transhumanist revolution, that began with the contraceptive pill.

In Feminism Against Progress, which is published today, I have argued that these revolutions take aim at aspects of embodied human experience that were previously treated as natural and immutable: for example that men and women exist, and can’t change sex; that most are heterosexual, and the point of sex is, ultimately, making more people. It even takes aim at the fact that only women can have babies, or that puberty is “natural”.

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By Mary Harrington

Instead, since the contraceptive revolution, “progress” increasingly entails waging war on human nature as such. And this is justified on the utopian basis that it is a fallacy to claim that anything about us is “natural”, and these claims mostly serve the patriarchy, or white supremacy, or some such boogeyman.

But doing so doesn’t actually free us from human nature, so much as open up aspects of that nature to the market. So, for example, in theory the sexual revolution freed women from pregnancy risk, liberating us to be as sexually voracious as men; but, in practice, men and women still approach mating differently. And if separating sex from its reproductive consequences enabled us to treat sexual behaviour as a purely private matter for the first time, so with that came the defence of pornography and prostitution on libertarian grounds.

We’ve been taught to view such changes as “progress”, and as inseparable from “feminism”, understood as the pursuit of ever greater freedom, underwritten by (usually for-profit) technology. I bought into that myself, until I had a child. But as I’ve set out to understand the under-counted costs of seeing women’s bodies, and women’s interests, in these terms, I’ve come to see the costs of setting out to emancipate ourselves from our own bodies as especially steep for women — especially women outside the elite.

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Why society still needs the family

By Mary Harrington

Feminism Against Progress looks at this through the prism of sex, a basic organismic pathway for many species as well humans, and yet now under all-out assault by those who would liberate us from it — such as trans activists, campaigners for “fertility equality” or scientists hunting for ways to create embryos without gametes. Meanwhile, male desire and female beauty haven’t gone away so much as been marketised; and in Deets’s tragic story, this marketisation fused with another irreducible fact of the human condition, also under all-out transhumanist assault, but also as yet immutable: ageing.

I was never more than average-looking, even in the flush of youth; even so, the ravages of time on my face still cause the odd pang now I’m middle aged. What is it like for someone whose face and body are their fortune, to see this happen? Here, too, the market wants to help: many celebrities with the money to do so respond by leaning into for-profit “freedom” and going under the knife — sometimes with eerie results. Further down the food chain, “tweakments” are now so normalised, that women are left feeling like freaks if they don’t get on the train. And if this all began decades ago, it’s been wildly accelerated by the digital transformation — for with this has come the power to sculpt our own ideal “selves”.

Last week, for example, the internet was full of videos of women crying because they turned on a TikTok filter that did, in essence, what Deets was doing to her own images with the Coconutkitty persona: turned their faces back to a “teenage” version. This gap between customisable virtual selves and unfiltered “IRL” existence is now a well-documented source of distress for many — especially young women.

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How robots make us human

By Mary Harrington

One poll reported that 71% of respondents would never post a photo without editing it. Others show a straight line between editing your virtual self, and longing to do the same thing to your flesh. Some plastic surgeons report “they now regularly have patients come in with photos of themselves that have been so heavily Facetuned they would be anatomically impossible to replicate”. In other words, the seeming ability to dissolve and re-make our appearance, online, is normalising a belief that we can do so in the real world as well.

Twentieth-century cultural theorists saw this coming a long way off — or, perhaps, encouraged it. In an influential 1949 paper on the “mirror stage”, the psychoanalyst and cultural critic Jaques Lacan argued that we arrive at adult selfhood by coming to recognise idealised “mirrored” versions of ourselves, whether literally reflected in a mirror or as “reflected” in another’s gaze.

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality” wrote TS Eliot in 1935 — words echoed in Lacan’s 1949 paper, where the real, material world was described as only ever indirectly accessible. Encountering the Real was, Lacan thought, always traumatic: a perspective that makes sense, perhaps, in the light of the brutal realities Europe had only recently endured. And while Lacan’s theories don’t feature heavily in modern psychotherapeutic practice, the psychological flight he theorised away from reality into mirrors, language and identification has been wildly influential, via someone even less willing than he to bear very much reality: the queer theorist Judith Butler.

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Judith Butler argued that there’s never a point when we can encounter material reality save through language and ideal — and that language and ideal also shape material reality. And this has implications even in the supposedly “natural” and irreducible domain of sex: something that, Butler argued, isn’t “natural” at all but as it were performed into existence.

A much-reduced pop-Butlerism has long since percolated from the academy into popular culture — not least because our increasingly digital-first social lives make it seem plausible. Online, everything really is so disembodied you can feel as though it might be possible to “LARP” anything into existence in the real world; and pretty much everyone younger than me has been socialising partly (or in some cases almost exclusively) in virtual spaces, some since childhood. Online, we all live in Judith Butler’s world: a space where “performance” and reality are, effectively, the same thing.

Increasingly, wave after wave of young people reaches adulthood armed with pop-Butlerism via university and Tumblr alike. No wonder growing numbers long to edit their meat avatars as they might their online ones, and that this isn’t confined to young girls pursuing unattainable beauty ideals. Reddit hosts anecdotal reports from individuals who decided to transition after using the digital funhouse mirror to feminised themselves, and deciding they liked that look better.

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By Kat Rosenfield

But the trouble is that this is only true until you log off. The digital age holds out a promise of total emancipation from material reality — one that, in politics, is now driving an increasingly bitter divide between those who can sustain this illusion and those still forced to deal with the real world. And, implicitly, we’re told we can apply this digital Prometheanism to our bodies, too. But it doesn’t work: the gap between protean sex-swap fantasy and sutured, bleeding, often complication-filled reality can be the stuff of nightmares — one that’s now prompting a surge of lawsuits. All that happens is that we open up a new, futile (but still highly profitable) war of attrition against our own nature.

The multimillionaire transhumanist and trans activist Martine Rothblatt may claim that the results of sex change surgery are “so persuasive that rarely can a “new man” or “new woman” be distinguished from a biological original”. But even if this were true (and it generally isn’t), no amount of Woman of the Year awards will change the fact that the individual formerly known as Bruce Jenner remains male down to the cellular level.

Today, Big Tech billionaires are throwing vast sums into the war on death — while the middle classes, and women in particular, find ourselves pressured to submit to expensive procedures aimed at approximating our flesh to the digitally-tweaked ideal in our pocket funhouse mirror. But no amount of “you go, girl” celebration of Madonna’s increasingly bizarre look alters the fact that it’s no more possible to halt the passage of time than it is to change sex.

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By Sarah Ditum

Lacan envisaged a world where our reflections structure our worlds, and reality is at best a shadowy intermittent interruption. But he never imagined a situation in which we don’t just receive the reflections that shape our self-images, but claim the power to control them. In this world, the magic mirror offers unreal ideal selves to order: the “me” we would like to be, whether thinner, prettier or the opposite sex. And the upshot is that humankind can bear ever less reality — even as we throw ever more of our resources at paying to defy it. Now, with young people reaching adulthood having never known an age before the editable online mirror, we shouldn’t be surprised that so many believe the only compassionate response to an unwanted reality is to dissolve it — digitally, or medically, or both.

But it’s a scam. In practice, “liberating” ourselves from the reality of our bodies amounts, without fail, to increasing our dependence on for-profit services. As 51-year-old fashion director Anna Murphy points out, in explaining why she’s rejected “tweakments” route, it’s a “one-way street”. One procedure leads to the next, and eventually “your face becomes a jigsaw puzzle that doesn’t quite fit together any more — unless you pay someone else to do it for you”.

And for those who can’t quite afford the payments, there’s always the digital-only filter option. But this comes at a terrible cost. For as the gulf between mirror and matter widens, many find the gaze of the other reflects a reality they’d rather not bear.

Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress (Swift) is out now!

Psychedelic trips have played a part in mystical traditions for millennia, but their revival comes at a time when our old religions are endangered. The march of Reason and Evidence has left a gaping void; we are surrounded by a bubbling sea of Unreality. Television, billboards and newspapers first threatened the dam between dreams and waking consciousness; Twitter, Netflix and the smartphone, always there and nudging away, have blasted it asunder.

In place of structural changes, or indeed religious ones, the system defaults to plaster solutions, offering mere jolts of aliveness. The “altered states economy”, now generating as much as $4 trillion worldwide, offers a range of techniques to tap into the Real, or at least muffle the Unreal. There’s alcohol and disposable vape pens, video gaming and high-intensity sports, breathwork, meditation apps — and now, the legal psychedelic drug, perhaps the most significant launchpad to sacred states yet.

Medical authorities in Oregon are set to roll out psychedelic therapy this year, while many cities and states in the US have, to various extents, decriminalised the drugs. Meanwhile, Mexico is tapping into the market for psychedelic experiences still illegal in the US: the Guardian reported yesterday on clinics set up just over the border that offer courses of the powerful psychedelic ibogaine as treatment for trauma.

The faith we once put in transcendent states has been swiftly industrialised. A scan of the current psychedelic market reveals a strange mix of Big Pharma and young start-ups, such as ATAI, a Peter Thiel-funded firm. Its founder, Christian Angermayer, has been accused of manoeuvring to dominate the psychedelic market through zealous patenting strategies. He envisions his trials as perpetuations of mystical traditions from Ancient Greece. More than 2,000 years later, though, “profane illumination” is now under the microscope, dissected, refashioned as a tool. Only when validated in scientific, psychiatric discourse is it taken seriously. The industrial boom has happened in tandem with an enormous amount of research, much of it funded (with likely biasing effects) by profit-driven entities.

Whereas psychedelic culture used to be defined by its naive subjectivism — you have to take it to know what it’s like, man! — a kind of naive objectivism has taken its place. On a scale of one-to-five, the Mystical Experience Questionnaire asks trial participants, how would you “sense that [your psychedelic] experience cannot be described adequately in words”?

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By Ed Prideaux

Our grasping search for the Real is heading for more disturbing developments still. As documented by the scholars Maxim Tvorun-Dunn and Tehseen Noorani, efforts are underway to render “psychedelic medicine” continuous with growing suites of “digital therapeutics”. Some firms plan to substitute post-trip in-person therapy for an app. Other companies intend to track and harvest data from clients’ voyages, via wearable devices that “personalise” and “facilitate” the “clinical experience”.

The ketamine market in the United States offers a terrifying glimpse at this future of runaway capital. In some so-called “McKetamine” clinics, users are shuttled through a pricey yet cost-minimised production line of “profane illuminations”, with little after-support — despite serious risks of addiction, psychosis, and permanent visual disturbances. One such company, Peak, thankfully shut down its operations amid a backlash to its flagrant promotional strategy, which included online consultations lasting two minutes and promises to “cure depression forever”.

Such absurdly utopian rhetoric abounds among the proponents of psychedelics, who include many powerful people in the tech world. Certain transhumanist thinkers in Silicon Valley have called for more research into drugs that produce permanent bliss states without side effects; theirs is an “abolitionist” ideology that seeks to eliminate all conscious suffering from the universe. Meanwhile Elon Musk, who hints strongly at a taste for psychedelics like the aforementioned DMT, has expressed hopes of “extend[ing] the light of consciousness to the stars”, in tandem with technology: his Neuralink brain-machine interface is set to commence human trials in 2023.

This language goes beyond aspiration, or even idealism: it’s a simulated religion. Inconveniently, there are dangers in viewing our search for God as a technical problem — one that can be solved through human ingenuity. The current psychedelic landscape is greatly influenced by Carl Jung, whose acolyte Stanislav Grof administered LSD in more than 5,000 sessions in communist Czechoslovakia. Yet Jung was famously suspicious of what he called “the pure gifts of the Gods”, described and promoted by early “psychonauts” such as Osmond and Huxley. More than anything, Jung suggests, we ought to engage with the psyche on its own terms, as a mysterious and subterranean layer of reality that can’t necessarily be gauged in the terms of Reason that govern our everyday lives.

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Similarly, indigenous and mystical traditions have warned the West against conquistador exploration of ecstatic states for centuries. The Eastern Orthodox tradition, for instance, has a rich literature of prelest, a spiritual malaise in which the seeker of private mystical experiences becomes possessed, obsessed, deluded, or corrupted by egotism. It’s hard not to see a grain of truth in the old Christian warning against demons: a warning levied by various Iberian conquerors against peyote and ayahuasca centuries ago, and now being revived by religious communities alerted to the psychedelic trend.

Despite these warnings, there are growing communities of self-declared “psychonauts” heading deep into DMT space for hours before sharing their experiences on online messageboards. And people do often return from that space with entirely different metaphysical paradigms, with users convinced that the entities they saw were very Real. Yet in an era when the idea of evil has lost much of its cultural currency, it is curious that many report encountering entities that are exceptionally malicious — or, indeed, demonic. So wedded are we to the idea of Reason, we might laugh and pat the heads of these omens, or reduce them solely to psychic projections. But here we fall for a transhuman fallacy: that humans are in control of what’s real. No wonder: it’s easy to fall for that fallacy when you’re in an transcendent state, if it’s a state provoked by a drug humans made (and patented).

Part of the problem is the decline in “ecstatic literacy”: we just don’t know how to discuss or understand — or draw non-delusional conclusions — from “profane illumination”. While the proliferation of psychedelic products has changed the game by normalising such extraordinary experiences, we lack the language, the elders, the tradition that helps us make meaning of them.

Indeed, the ancient roots of psychedelic use, which might have guided their explosion, are in grave danger. In Peru, fully onboarded to the ayahuasca tourism trend, the influx of gringos has fuelled a rise in “pseudo-shamans” who adulterate their brews for extra kicks. Peyote and the bufo alvarius frog, whose venom contains the powerful compound 5-MeO-DMT, are now endangered, and the sustainability of ayahuasca reserves is now a “legitimate concern”. The price of ayahuasca has spiked as much as ten-fold. Where once its sale was fiercely guarded, it’s now touted in Coke bottles by impoverished rickshaw drivers who need extra cash.

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The emergence of the psychedelic industrial complex only accelerated the up-rooting that globalisation has been enabling for decades. Filament Health, a firm whose USP is to use “natural psychedelics”, made headlines recently for its creation of “ayahuasca in a pill”: an absurd peak for an industry long-trained in extracting, stripping and distilling the fruits of the natural world. Anthropologists observe that the whole “healing” paradigm predominant in ayahuasca tourism in Peru is an exotic distortion, with “shaman” itself described as a “made-up, Western category”.

“Start your own religion,” Timothy Leary told his followers in the Sixties. Many tried, although their operations would swiftly descend into power-sustained cults. There recently came allegations of a similar cultishness emerging in a corner of Silicon Valley, at the Centre for Applied Rationality and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute; one of the problems cited was frequent drug-enhanced “debugging” rituals. This is further evidence that attempts to wrench the numinous from its roots, then commodify it, are archetypally foolish — or, in the unfashionable language of religion, sacriligeous. While attempts are being made to draw psychedelics into existing traditions like Judaism and Christianity, it’s not clear how these religions can guide us through the epistemic and personal challenges of still relatively little-researched drugs that spur such swift ascents.

Little in life is really reducible to Damascene moments, but a trip at its best can unlodge something: cause us to remember something we forgot. Yet rather than set us free, the release offered by the psychedelic state — in the absence of any real programme or tradition, or “container” in the current language — seems to dissipate without leaving a meaningful trace. Even those who do experience relief from depression through psychedelics, for instance, reliably relapse after a few months.

Perhaps it is worth heeding what acclaimed psychonaut Aldous Huxley said, while lying on his deathbed in November 1963. He requested a dose of 125 micrograms of LSD to ease his passage to the afterlife, and while it’s said that his passage was uniquely peaceful, his final words are telling: “It is never enough. Never enough. Never enough of beauty. Never enough of love. Never enough of life.”

The Embrace, a new statue unveiled in Boston to honour Martin Luther King, brought exactly this to mind.

The 20-foot bronze is intended to depict the moment King learned he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s inspired by a photograph of him embracing his wife, Coretta Scott King. But it doesn’t depict the pair enjoying a hug. It’s just the arms, joined by immense, amorphous, organic-looking tubes that evoke tentacles, raw sausage, or perhaps a length of colon. Even, as many suggested (including one of Coretta Scott King’s descendants), a giant penis.

Nor was the derision solely from conservative quarters, for all that it was louder there. Even Karen Attiah of the Washington Post fretted at these two important figures in the civil rights movement “reduced to body parts”, denouncing it as a “dismembered” and “de-racialised” symbol of anodyne “love”, shorn of King’s true radicalism. But this is, in fact, precisely the point. The Embrace captures a peculiar dilemma of the emerging post-human political order. How do you wield the power of public art as a way of signalling shared meanings, when your claim to rightful rule is based on the idea that all shared meaning is by definition oppressive?

It has always been the prerogative of ruling elites to determine the nature, placement and aesthetic of public monuments. From ancient Rome to the British Empire, or indeed the Soviet Union and beyond, one may infer a great deal about ruling moral and political priors from what gets a big statue. In 2020, for example, the president of Turkmenistan unveiled a surreal 19ft gilded statue of an Asian shepherd dog, symbolising the country’s heritage. Other monumental works of the last half-century or so may be religious, such as Japan’s 120m Ushiku Daibutsu Buddha statue, completed in 1993. Or, often, they are nationalistic, such as Russia’s 85m The Motherland Calls, completed in 1967, or the 182m statue of Vallabhbhai Patel unveiled in 2018 in Gujarat, as a symbol of Indian unity and independence.

And as one power falls and another rises, so too the older monuments will be at risk: images of Saddam’s giant statue toppling in 2003 are an iconic part of the Iraq war, while (on a smaller scale) the fall of Edward Colston into Bristol Harbour was a similarly iconic moment in the modern statue wars.

And even if fallen statues are preserved, it matters a great deal where. A giant gilded dog on an important thoroughfare in Ashgabat is infinitely more honoured than the likenesses of Stalin that now dot Grūtas Park in Lithuania, informally known as Stalin World. Here, tourists may view a huge collection of toppled Soviet-era monuments, the lack of reverence in their placement underlined by juxtaposition with a children’s playground and mini-zoo.

But what the statue defenders perhaps don’t realise is that we all already live in Grūtas Park: a semi-ironic display of relics from a civilisation and political order that died in the 20th century. For it is not a coincidence that every instance of large, figurative monumental art of the kind described above is located in a non-Western country. In Western Europe, that style was largely abandoned after 1945: too many blamed the high culture of the 19^th century, including its Christian faith, for the horrors that killed millions. In response, tastemakers turned away from figurative works – and as for heroic idealisations of the human form, forget it: just a bit too Nazi.

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Instead, postwar art mavens embraced abstraction, clean lines and planes, exemplified by the “modern, forward-looking and contemporary” Festival of Britain. Sculptors such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth reflect that commitment to a world stripped bare of anything too heroic, figurative, or ideological: one that had shed its dangerous fixation with the past, and pointed only toward a clean, innovative, universalist tomorrow. Public art was best when it didn’t really say anything. Traces of the older order, meanwhile, were for the most part politely ignored, or (increasingly) treated as relics.

But that intermezzo is over. As the End of History has come to an end, public art has once again become a site of explicit moral statement: not spaces filled with abstractions where no one mentions the war, but increasingly the battlefield itself. Gone are the carefully neutral, antiseptic abstracts. Now, public art must have a message.

But what should it say? The old order knew what it drew on: broadly speaking, in the contest over what we memorialise, one side stands for the long, messy history of the West – including the Christian humanist vision of human nature and dignity, and the common good, that Martin Luther King, a preacher, drew upon for his civil rights activism. But as far as the West’s cultural elites are concerned, that order died and was buried by 1945, along with that vision of what humans are, and the idea of nations as such.

And yet what’s replacing it is also, in a sense, dead. The old regime is denounced for being inadequately concerned with the suffering of victims – such as in Afua Hirsch’s call for Nelson’s Column to be pulled down, on the grounds that Nelson “was what you would now call, without hesitation, a white supremacist”. But when the time comes to fill those plinths with positive representations of its own sacred values, a new regime whose only sacred value is individual autonomy finds that representation runs the risk of excluding someone.

So any sculptor tempted to make something beautiful is on shaky ground. As the Nazis knew all too well, an idealised human form implies a hierarchy of values. This is dangerously exclusionary. Thus, inasmuch as heroic figurative works are still permitted, these are almost always what the sociologist Philip Rieff called “deathworks”: anti-monuments whose aim is principally not to uphold but negate sacred values. The prewar figurative register for public art still exists – but only in subjects that invert or negate a trope from the old order: Medusa holding the severed head of Perseus, for example, or a dreadlocked man in a hoodie astride a prancing horse.

In other words: it’s not that we no longer have skilled artists making beautiful, proportionate, figurative work. It’s just that, the class with its hands on the purse-strings doesn’t care. For what this class seeks to represent — the class that dominates media, NGOs, universities and the like — is its own form of power: one which I have elsewhere called swarmism.

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Swarmism is power without a head, which is to say without accountability. It operates instead via “overlapping partnerships and networks”, as the foundation which funded The Embrace describes itself. And it is power without a heart: in place of fallible, capricious human feeling, including human mercy or relationships, it offers bureaucratic compassion via algorithmic taxonomies of “intersecting” victimhood.

For the swarmist vision of human flourishing has no shared meanings. Instead, all we really have in common is individual freedom, our technologies, and our physical bodies. And if this is true, and if it is also true that all hierarchies of values are exclusionary, there is nothing to aspire to beyond this life. There is nothing admirable about humans. The best we can aspire to is probably to re-engineer ourselves into something superior.

This bleak vision, combined with the most vigorous possible negation of Christian humanism, overlaid with anxious posturing about “marginalised groups”, forms the backbone of the swarmist aesthetic — and nothing could be more swarmist than the unaccountable committees who now commission public art. The Embrace, for example, was commissioned by a nonprofit (one swarm) with support from a foundation (another swarm). It is indeed fitting that Martin Luther King, a man fired by a Christian belief in universal human dignity, should have his legacy reworked for the headless, heartless, swarmist order, by representing his moment of triumph in an embrace without either a head, or a heart.

After close to a century of careful, antiseptic abstraction, then, the swarmist monumental style has arrived. It memorialises its moral taxonomies in deliberately beautiful deathworks, and deliberately ugly, posthuman artworks. In sculptural form, it produces something akin to a deification of nihilism, that alternates between feasting on the carcass of the previous regime and creating swarm-approved monuments to a posthuman future. It is a queasy mix of genuflection to any visual tradition save the Western one, combined with a Cylon-laboratory celebration of distorted, protean flesh.

We get the high culture we deserve. Our journey to this point didn’t begin with the two world wars, but rather completed its trajectory there. Now, after a mid-century intermezzo of abstraction, we appear to have accepted that the Christian age is over, as too is industrial one, and our period of mourning for its demise. And as the WEF’s grandees meet in Davos to discuss how best to embrace the Fourth Industrial Revolution that will transform us into cyborgs, the culture swarm has settled on a style of monumental art to suit. Welcome to the flesh factories.

Listen to Matthew Crawford’s UnHerd lecture. 

We feel gratitude when someone does something for us outside the realm of exchange. One wants to mark it, this arrival of something that overflows what is expected, and recognise the source of it. In acting outside necessity, our benefactor shines.

Or one may feel gratitude without a counterparty to receive it, in response to some fortunate condition that could have been otherwise. Having good health or good looks, for example. Life itself. Something for which we are not responsible, a gift.

Whether in response to good fortune or to some identifiable benefactor, in taking note of this gift one feels that one has regained a proper coordinate system. It is a calm feeling. One shucks off that irritable, constant background sense of not receiving one’s due — the sense of a self inflated beyond its true proportions. For it does feel like a little dose of truth, this moment of reorientation. Seeing oneself from the outside as one who receives rather than demands is also liberating — from resentment, entitlement, grievance. You feel lighter, as well as smaller. And more ready to act with grace toward others; that is, to be larger. For grace and gratitude have the same root, whether one is speaking etymologically or psychologically.

I think our condition as modern people makes the experience of gratitude especially elusive, so when we feel grateful it has an effect that is all the more powerful, bumping us out of a deep spiritual rut. I believe that is because it is an experience that cannot be made sense of in a way that accords with the grand metaphysical picture that we live within most of the time. If we can understand why this is so, it will give us a critical vantage point from which to view our historical moment. It may also help us identify the source of our sourness, and point the way toward something better.

Most simply, gratitude requires that there be another, an outside world that is not under one’s control and not of one’s own making. Of course, it is simply the case that there is such a world. But there are different ways of responding to this fact.

The English philosopher Michael Oakeshott wrote two essays which, if you put them side by side, offer a contrast between two personality types, one he called the rationalist and the other he called the conservative. Here, “conservative” does not refer to a political ideology. Instead, it names a disposition. What distinguishes the conservative is not hankering after the past, but rather affection for the present; for what actually exists. He has an eye for all the ways his surroundings afford a good life, or provide raw materials for the building of such a life. He wants to preserve the present world, not out of fearful, small-minded rejection of the possible, but because he has a greater awareness of the resources of the actual, which may be lost if we are not careful. In other words, he feels gratitude for the world, and a sense of obligation to it.

The rationalist by contrast looks at the world and is offended by the waste, the inefficiency, the chaos, the suffering, the grotesque failures of optimisation, and wants to set it right. He has a vision of a better world, and that is where he lives, in devotion to his vision.

Probably you need both types, to have a healthy society. But in the present order, one of these types is full of confidence and speaks well into a microphone, while the other is apologetic and defensive. One has the wind of history at his back, and is well capitalised. The other sometimes doubts his own sanity.

Our own time has seen the emergence of a third type, the transhumanist, who is perhaps just an over-the-top caricature of the rationalist. Like most caricatures, it brings into relief the defining features of the original through exaggeration.

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Here is a quote from a prominent transhumanist, speaking to Paul Kingsnorth (via the Substack Upheaval by N.S. Lyons):

“I’d like to bring your attention to the issue with nature and biology that transhumanists have: that it’s fundamentally flawed, and likely even immoral to perpetuate, given its tendency to predation, disease, and death. Simply said, all nature and biology, from plants, to wildlife, to people, are something to be overcome and totally replaced with the synthetic. No one with even the slightest bit of compassion would ever create a world like ours, filled with so much suffering. It must all be undone, and remade with technology, justice, and equality.”

Clearly there is a theological point at issue here. It is not clear to me if this transhumanist is saying there is a creator (and he is a real bastard), or there is no creator, and nature itself is a real bastard. In any case, the so-called created order is no order at all, but a filthy and cruel chaos. He says it would be “immoral to perpetuate”.

So, the transhumanist speaks as a moralist. He appears to be animated by what Nietzsche called ressentiment, the opposite of gratitude.

In the Gnostic heresy, the world was created, not by God, but by his evil twin (roughly). It must be rejected and overcome through human effort. Doing so requires special knowledge, gnosis, which is to be cultivated in a priestly class. This finds its equivalent in today’s technocratic managers and moral visionaries of equality, aflame with a vision of life beyond suffering that will arrive when the givens of life are “totally replaced with the synthetic”, as our transhumanist put it. The point is to bring about salvation here in this world — Voegelin’s famous “immanentising the eschaton”.

As many have noted, the transsexual ideology is a version of transhumanism, pungently named by Mary Harrington as “meat Lego gnosticism”. From the beginning of the modern rationalist project, the body has been the thorn in the side of it. The creative freedom of the will is compromised by its entanglement with a body subject to natural necessities not of one’s choosing. But if we reconceive the body as raw material — meat Legos — and make man himself a technological project, then we can escape this subjugation to necessities that impinge from outside the will.

But you don’t have to look to the exotic fringe of transhumanism to see this. The whole movement of the present is to bring the world under rational control. For example, substituting algorithms and mechanised certainties for the frailties of human judgment (as in the push for driverless cars and whatnot), or replacing the unclean clamour of democratic politics with expert administration.

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We may even take up this approach in relation to ourselves, for example when we seek to eliminate the element of chance and serendipity in love through dating apps that [computer voice:] optimise through personalised search criteria and cross-platform social media integration.

This isn’t quite the madness of Eros, the divine folly, a consuming flame one is cast into by the god despite oneself, to be magnificently destroyed at the feet of one’s beloved, giving thanks all the while from a heart that is glad. Compared to that, life on the dating apps looks like a half-life of prudish solipsism, however many orgasms it may yield. A life fully under control is a life of solitude, from which the possibility of serendipity has been excluded. Serendipity is perhaps the secular name for grace.

The push for rational control has been with us for some centuries, but has lately entered an especially frantic phase, and a jealous determination to leave no area of life untouched by this libido dominandi. Indeed, to trust in fate, or divine providence, or fortuna, is to be downright irresponsible. It’s not safe, for one thing. There is a fearful timidity to the rationalist soul.

***

One way we try to bring the world under our control is by substituting representations for reality itself. The difference is that representations are addressed to us. They are for us; they place each of us at the centre of a little “me-world”, as Thomas de Zengotita points out in his beautiful little book Mediated, whereas dumb nature just sits there, indifferent to us. Nature is genuinely other, a real outside-the-self.

Of course, we are inherently self-centered, quite literally. We inhabit bodies, in particular places, and this gives rise to the spatial categories we use. One carves up the surrounding world along an axis of proximity and distance. The world within reach is the most salient to us. This idea of orientation around a bodily centre helps us to see how the attentional environment that has emerged in contemporary culture is novel and somehow centreless. The basic concept at the root of attention is selection: we pick something out from the flux of the available. But as our experience comes to be ever more mediated by representations, which remove us from whatever situation we inhabit directly, as embodied beings who do things, it is hard to say what the principle of selection is. I can take a virtual tour of the Forbidden City in Beijing, or of the deepest underwater caverns, nearly as easily as I glance across the room. Every foreign wonder, hidden place, and obscure subculture is immediately available to my idle curiosity; they are lumped together into a uniform distancelessness that revolves around me.

But where am I? There doesn’t seem to be any non-arbitrary basis on which I can draw a horizon around myself — a zone of relevance — by which I might take my bearings and get oriented. When the axis of closer-to-me and farther-from-me is collapsed, I can be anywhere, and find that I am rarely in any place in particular. To be present with those I share life with is then one option among many, and likely not the most amusing one at any given moment. It’s hard to be grateful for loved ones when they keep interrupting my feed.

Accepting limits to one’s reach and to the size of one’s world may be necessary if one is to see the gifts that are at hand, if only one has eyes for them. I curse myself for every cheaply squandered opportunity to look into the eyes of my children with the fullness of attention that sees good. That is what is called love.

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***

Consider a different kind of attention, which likewise sees good. In a skilled practice, whether it is martial arts, music, or some craft tradition, one enters into an ecology of attention in which one’s perception is tuned to affordances that show up only within this practice. An affordance is a relation of fit between an agent and his or her environment, often mediated by some tool. These affordances are good in the narrow pragmatic sense of being good for some purpose of the agent, not in an ethically laden sense. But they provide the points of contact between the world and a human being who strives for excellence in his or her practice. They create the field of possibilities within which such striving is structured and given form.

If we give due attention to the experience of skilled action, it can give us some critical distance on the ideal of autonomy. Consider music, for example. One can’t be a musician without learning to play a particular instrument, subjecting one’s fingers to the discipline of frets or keys. The musician’s power of expression is founded upon a prior obedience; her musical agency is built up from an ongoing submission. To what? To her teacher, maybe. But there is such a thing as the self-taught musician. Her obedience rather is to the mechanical realities of her instrument, which in turn answer to certain natural necessities of music. For example, halving the length of a string under a given tension raises its pitch by an octave. These facts do not arise from the human will, and there is no altering them. Progress in excellence is only possible if one is capable of enduring a lot of tedium and frustration. I believe the example of the musician sheds light on the basic character of human agency, namely, that it arises only within concrete limits that are not of our own making.

These limits need not be physical; the important thing is rather that they are external to the self. Consider the experience of learning a foreign language, beautifully described by Iris Murdoch:

“If I am learning, for instance, Russian, I am confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect. The task is difficult and the goal is distant and perhaps never entirely attainable. My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me. Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality. Love of Russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something which my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal.”

In the Platonic tradition, one speaks of such striving as an erotic phenomenon. We are drawn out of ourselves toward beauty. I am reminded of my friend Talbot Brewer’s description of listening to Billie Holiday sing. She tries different phrasings in a given passage, combining them with subtle inflections of pitch, reaching toward some ideal that isn’t fully clear to her as yet, as it comes into view only in the course of her pursuit of it, progressively — in rehearsal presumably, but even during a performance, in real time. To witness this from the audience is exhilarating. The beautiful thing we feel privileged to witness is the music itself, but also the presence of a human being engaged in this striving toward the music that wants to be born. Offstage, as it were, outside the focus of her own attention which is entirely on the music, but visible to us from the audience, we see that she strives also toward a better version of herself, the one who has approached closer to the perfection of her art by pushing beyond the realm where she is certain of the outcome. You feel you are watching a high-wire act.

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The risk of failure is intrinsic to the nature of play. Here I am talking about the most serious kind of play, such as music or sport. In his indispensable book Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga convinces us that in play lie the origins of civilisation. He writes: “To dare, to take risks, to bear uncertainty, to endure tension — these are the essence of the play-spirit.” Thus understood, play sits uncomfortably with the contemporary taste for order, and our attempts to bring the world fully under rational control.

One way we do that is, again, by filtering reality through representations. The deep origins of this tendency lie in early modern thought. Very briefly: Descartes worried about the very existence of an external world. The only secure beginning point for knowledge is awareness of one’s own process of thinking. This is a turning inward. The ensuing revolution was perfectly captured and compressed by Giambattista Vico, who said, “we know only what we make”.

This epistemological anxiety about what we can know was resolved by turning it (tacitly) into an ontological posit about what is. Makeability is the ground of intelligibility, and anything lying outside this circle dops out of consideration. If we can’t make it, then we can’t know it and we have no power over it. It may as well not exist. This was a fundamental shift in man’s relationship to the world.

The most powerful expression of this revolution is mathematical physics. Mathematics is a pure product of the human mind. To do math on nature requires that the world first be rendered more intellectually tractable, by passing it through idealisations such as the frictionless surface, the perfect vacuum, the point mass, and the perfectly elastic collision. As Heidegger put it, this may be understood as “a projection of thingness which, as it were, skips over the things”.

What is made has primacy over what is given directly to experience. That is, what is received. Human beings have always used tools and made things through techne (skill), transforming their environment. The word “technology” names something new. It is a way of grasping the world in which knowing and making are one.

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All of this is perhaps very abstract. Let me illustrate it with an example from children’s television. In the old Mickey Mouse cartoons from the early and middle decades of the 20th century, you still get a depiction of the world in which reality has some stature of its own. By far the most prominent source of hilarity is the capacity of material stuff to generate frustration, or rather demonic violence. The tendency of things to thwart the human will is exaggerated, and through exaggeration a certain truth gets brought forward. The slapstick sufferings of Donald Duck acknowledge, and thereby seemed to affirm, the human condition as it is, beneath the various idealisms that would transport us out of that condition.

The Disney cartoon franchise now has many departments. One of them, Mickey Mouse clubhouse, on the Disney Junior network, retains the same characters. But the difference in how material reality is presented could not be more stark, and in this difference a shift in the relation between self and world becomes evident as well.

The clubhouse is filled with amazing technology that always works perfectly. Each episode is built around solving some problem. One does this by saying, “O Tootles!” This makes the Handy Dandy machine appear, a computer-like thing that condenses out of the Cloud and presents a menu of four options on a screen, by the use of which the viewer is encouraged to be a “Mouske-Doer”. There are four problems per episode, and each can be solved using one of the four tools. This assurance is baked into the initial setup of the episode; no moment of helplessness is allowed to arise. There is never an insoluble problem, that is, a deep conflict between the will and the world. I suspect that is one reason these episodes are not just unfunny, but somehow the opposite of funny. What we are watching is the substitution of manufactured experience for a direct encounter with the world. With this comes the construction of a more fragile kind of self, and a more manipulable one. He makes things happen in the world by pressing a button. Which means that his will has been channeled into some “choice architecture” that has been constructed for him by unknown others.

To be a Mouske-Doer is to abstract from material reality as depicted in those early Disney cartoons, where we see the flip side of affordances. Perhaps we should call unwanted projectiles, demonic springs, and all such hazards “negative affordances”. The thing is, you can’t have the positive without the negative; they are two sides of the same coin. The world in which we acquire skill as embodied agents is precisely that world in which we are subject to the frustrations of things; the hazards of material reality. To pursue the fantasy of escaping this through abstraction is to give up on skill, and therefore to substitute technology as magic for the possibility of real agency.

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How does any of this bear on the question of gratitude?

Affection for the world as it is could be taken as the motto of a this-worldly ethics. There are, in addition to the slapstick, moments of real physical grace in those old Disney cartoons. When Donald Duck is skating on a frozen lake in one episode, he recruits overhanging branches and snow drifts, incorporating their affordances into a ballet-like performance in which he is able to do amazing things. His skating is amazing, but not fantastical or magical; it is a heightened version of what you admire when you watch a real skater. To watch it is to be surprised and delighted by the real. At such moments, the possibilities for beautiful human action in the world as it is — the undiscovered possibilities of fit — seem inexhaustible.

This can inspire wonder and gratitude; intuitions we associate with religion are available within a this-worldly ethics of attention. For there does seem to be something benevolent in the disposition of things, relative to us. Such are the rules of gravity and buoyancy that surfing is possible. That’s the kind of universe we inhabit. Being alert to such possibilities, and giving their occurrence in the world their due in wonder: to encounter things in this way is basically erotic, in the sense that we are drawn out of ourselves toward beauty.

Such experiences mark the primacy of receiving over making, and require a kind of courage. It is that of entrusting oneself to that which has not been made by oneself, and never could be made, but which supports and makes possible all of our making and doing. If we call such entrusting “faith”, notice that it has the same spirit as play: “To dare, to take risks, to bear uncertainty.”

I like the example of surfing because the ocean is something truly alien and inscrutable. The surfer throws himself into it. Every wave is unique, a gift that can never recur, and they are exquisite. The surfer receives it and does what he can with it. Rarely does he feel adequate to its possibilities. He is not in the right spot when it arrives, due to a failure of paddling strength. Or, if he does catch it, he doesn’t adequately perceive what this particular wave is going to do and he botches it. Or he has a failure of courage, if the wave is big and murderous, and he hesitates. Surfing is 95% frustrated eros, for me at least, due to my own limitations. Oh, but that other five percent. To watch a Kelly Slater is to be forced to recalibrate one’s sense of what a human being can do.

So there’s one datapoint, surfing. Another would be, quite simply, the existence of women’s breasts. Now we have two datapoints, each of which by itself offers full and sufficient proof that there is a God, and that he loves us very much.

The accusation against religion is that it removes us to a different, invisible realm, and is for that reason corrupting. But sometimes you have an experience of God’s love saturating this world, and it is essentially psychedelic. You feel you are gaining perceptual access to the most fundamental layer of reality, the ground of grounds. Quite preposterously, this turns out to be something like love. The effect of such moments is to place you more fully in the actual. With this comes a renewal of our faculty of gratitude. For I do believe it is a faculty, one of those endowments by which a person grasps his true situation.

Matthew Crawford delivered his UnHerd lecture at Old Queen Street on January 9, 2023

Those untroubled by bourgeois moral shibboleths would probably explain their instinctive revulsion to a two-headed dog by simply saying “yuck, that’s unnatural”. This is, of course, true, but those who try to stick to elite moral orthodoxy will struggle to make the same point. For today, the idea of “natural” is highly politicised.

This leaves us on the back foot, in responding to the accelerated advance of biomedical technology. Many of the advances it brings take less obviously grotesque forms than a two-headed dog; but even (or especially) where they come dressed as wins for civil rights, the unease is as deep as it is difficult to articulate.

One such uneasy debate erupted over the weekend, when the Guardian carried a long article about Corey Briskin and Nicholas Maggipinto, two New York men who have filed a class action complaint with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) against the City of New York. They argue that, unlike female colleagues, their health insurance doesn’t cover IVF or surrogacy in the case of infertility, and that this constitutes discrimination. In their view, the fact that both parties are male amounts to “situational infertility”, and as such their healthcare should fund the cost of gestational surrogacy.

Surrogacy is a sensitive topic, especially where it concerns same-sex couples. There are, after all, real living human children in question, and loving parents. To complicate things further, asking questions can easily be read as – or actually tip over into – overt attacks on gay and lesbian people.

But the subject needs to be addressed. For what Briskin and Maggipinto are calling for, in the name of equality, goes much further than fulfilling the longing for a family. It’s a radical transformation of what medicine is, from a discipline that seeks to restore normality, to one that treats normality as a problem to be solved. And when we look closer, this transhumanist shift in fact attacks the conceptual foundations of gay rights themselves.

One reason “that’s unnatural” doesn’t hold much water today as an objection is that “educated” moral consensus views claims of “naturalness” largely as stalking-horses for bigotry. And this isn’t wholly baseless: histories of, for example, racial justice afford plenty of scientific-sounding justifications for why convenient imbalances of power were in fact “natural”.

But does it follow from this that the inverse is true, and, as Simone de Beauvoir claimed in The Second Sex, “Nothing is natural”? In effect, this is the elite consensus. The problem, though, is that some kinds of “natural” are far from socially constructed, arbitrary, or invented by chauvinists to oppress women or minorities.

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Peter Thiel on the dangers of progress

By Mary Harrington

Humans, like other species, have many consistent physiological features, developmental patterns and behaviours, evolved over millennia. Disciplines such as ethology and phylogenetics study such patterns, and the overall form of an organism is sometimes referred to as its “bioplan”. And humans, just like other organisms, have a bioplan.

We may dispute its outer reaches, but the overall pattern is evident to even little children. Indeed, what “normal” looks like is usually inferred from observation long before (as most parents wincingly discover) toddlers can be taught not to make loud comments about outliers. Nor is it just about what shape we are. Some patterns are developmental, such as puberty, and some, such as sex dimorphism, are fundamental to our continuation as a species. The human bioplan, under normal circumstances, requires a small and a large gamete to make a new human – plus a nine-month gestation period within a living human woman.

Briskin and Maggipinto are asking that something conventional medicine would treat as normal – the fact that they can’t gestate a baby, because both of them are male — be viewed not as a natural limitation but a healthcare issue deserving of treatment.

I don’t want to rehash debates over whether any of us has a “right” to genetic offspring. What concerns me is how the wider field of medical science changes, when you reframe the bioplan itself as a medical problem. In effect, you’re turning medical science inside out, so the human “normal” is no longer a guide to the desired end-state of medicine. Rather, it’s an obstacle to the limitless outworking of human desire.

In its tech-optimist, right-libertarian form, this premise underpins Elon Musk’s experimental Neuralink technology, which Musk says will eventually be like “a FitBit in your skull”. Similarly, it underpins the US Government’s recent decision to funnel $2bn toward biotech research that will be able to “write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers”.

In its progressive, radical blank-slatist form, overcoming the human (sexed) bioplan is a core premise of transgender rights, as, for example, where advocates talk about children undergoing “the wrong puberty”. And it also underpins social justice arguments for “fertility equality”, in which surrogacy is viewed as a legitimate use of technology to overcome unjust limits imposed by normal human physiology.

What both the tech utopians and the social-justice kind overlook (or choose to ignore) is that viewing the normal human organism as a set of medical challenges comes with a hierarchy of money and power baked in. Cutting-edge experimental medicine comes at a cost — both to its prospective customers, and also sometimes for its test subjects, as with the young person who died of necrotising fasciitis after an experimental surgery to craft him a neovagina out of his own colon.

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The unhappy truth about surrogacy

By Julie Bindel

Specifically in the case of surrogacy, this means rich men and women, such as Briskin and Maggipinto (or indeed Elon Musk’s baby-momma, the singer Grimes) can take advantage of the potential opened up by limitless, transhumanist medicine, to evade their own physiological constraints or simply (as in Grimes’ case) outsource the gruelling and risky aspects of “normal” maternity to someone else. Meanwhile the “work” of gestation, along with its non-trivial risk of invasive surgery, lifelong subsequent complications, or even death, gets outsourced — usually to poorer women, and often under exploitative conditions in developing countries.

These asymmetries aren’t exclusive to same-sex commissioning parents, of course. Surrogacy is always at risk of propagating such abuses, even where the commissioning parents include a woman. But if surrogacy combines commerce and medicine in ways that are fraught with ethical issues and highly vulnerable to exploitation, its transhumanist re-founding structurally presupposes the existence of surrogacy. Within the transhumanist frame, where there’s an all-male couple that longs for genetic children, the “cure” necessitates a fertile uterus – and how women feel about this is largely beside the point.

But surely we just need safeguards so only consenting women are involved? Briskin and Maggipinto draw an analogy from prostitution to make this argument. Against this, though, 50 years of the sexual revolution should have taught us how flimsy a defence “consent” is, against power asymmetries. There’s no shortage of testimony out there from survivors of the sex industry, on the horrors many have endured in the course of ostensibly “consensual” activities. And a glance back over the recent outpouring of MeToo should remind us that where vast disparities in wealth and power exist, “consent” is often a rogues’ charter even outside commercial transactions.

It doesn’t take much thought to extend the MeToo dynamic to fertility “services”. Nor does it take much more to see how it applies to “consensual” commodification of other body parts. Women already sell their eggs to the fertility industry; why shouldn’t we sell a kidney or part of their liver, provided everyone has consented?

If we accept the basic justice of transcending biophysical limits, there are no theoretical boundaries at all on what we can do. We can’t object to the Brazilian surgeon constructing neovaginas for trans women out of fish skin – for we’ve already accepted that “unnatural” is merely a stalking-horse for bigotry. And from here we have very little ground for objecting to “upgrades” that far more radically alter the human “normal”.

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The rise of castration anxiety

By Mary Harrington

You may scoff that this is all just hysteria. Recall, though, that the “slippery slope” argument on euthanasia was once dismissed as hyperbole. And yet based on cases from Belgium and Canada, those arguments weren’t just accurate but not nearly hyperbolic enough.

Surely, though, it’s worth the risk, for the sake of equality and family life in same-sex couples? On the contrary, we should beware transhumanist arguments that seem to be grounded in gay rights. For the abolition of “nature” at the root of this worldview is already coming back to bite those gay men and women who first cheered on the change.

Gay rights is grounded in the claim that same-sex attraction is natural and innate. But if there’s no such thing as “natural”, this justification is abruptly eliminated, leaving gay men and women once again vulnerable to pressure to change their behaviour. And indeed, this is already happening, via trans activism: there, gay and lesbian people are now routinely accused of bigotry if they reject “gay” partners of the opposite sex, while their (natural, normal) same-sex orientation is reclassified as a “genital fetish“.

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Peter Thiel on the dangers of progress

By Mary Harrington

Most people, gay or straight, who resort to surrogacy do so to satisfy their longing to love and care for a child. We should recognise that this is at root a deeply human desire. But if love is the glue that holds human communities together, it can also drive choices with wider negative impacts. Surrogacy, and particularly surrogacy as a “cure” for normal biological limitations, is such a choice.

It opens the door to a limitless, profit-driven drive to deregulate the human organism — a drive that will, in the last count, mostly benefit Big Biotech. And this pathway only stays in the warm light of love and normalcy for a few steps. After that, we’re into the realm of monsters: mutilated children, human/animal chimeras, gamete and organ harvesting and medical experimentation, to name but a few already-existing examples.

If we continue down this road, gay men and women will end up losing the (only recently acquired) right to be naturally gay. And if this is bad enough, it will come to seem trivial next to the triumph of commercial biomedicine, and the swarm of protean horrors that comes slithering in its wake.

Now, what was once an abstract idea in philosophy has become disturbingly real. Where we used to maintain that reality provided us with certain givens, many now argue that we can uncouple ourselves from those givens, and construct ourselves with reference to our will alone. The obvious example is the debate around sex and gender. We used to think that biological sex was a kind of given; now, increasingly, some think of it as something that has been merely “assigned”. And that our gender, our self-image, is to be taken as metaphysically primary. It used to be the case that a transexual would live out their life as if they were of another sex; now, the claim is that they are that other sex, a change brought about not by biology but by will, by wanting it. Reality — truth — used to be something we had to adjust ourselves to, to deal with. These days, reality is second fiddle to will, just as Nietzsche predicted.

Nietzsche believed in self-ID of the most radical kind, long before it was fashionable. Indeed, the extreme version of this is not transexualism but transhumanism. Nietzsche predicted the rise of the Ubermensch, the super-human whose capacity exceeded the limitations of the merely human. “Dear Mother Nature,” wrote the transhumanist Max More in 1999, “we humans — your offspring — come to you with something to say. No doubt you did the best you could. However, with all due respect, we must say that you have in many ways done a poor job with the human constitution.” Human nature is not fixed but needs to be improved, even overcome, with science, technology and an ethics that is built around individual freedom.

Just as we have thrown off the tyranny of the Father God, so too we must throw off the tyranny of Mother Nature. We will be the masters of our biology, not the other way round. Nietzsche’s Ubermensch is like an artist making himself up as though he were a work of art. Nothing can interfere with his or her unfettered creativity, not even biology or reality itself. “Man is something that shall be overcome”. Thus spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s prophet of the Ubermensch. The only thing Nietzsche didn’t predict is that technology would be the agent of this revolution in what it is to be human.

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How pasta made me a Terf

By Giles Fraser

In the early years of Nietzsche studies, it was assumed that because the Nazis were drawn to his ideas, then Nietzsche himself must have been some sort of fellow traveller. He wasn’t. But part of the reason that fascists found his views so congenial is that he emphasised the concept of will and power over truth. If truth is simply a mobile army of metaphors — rather than something out there, fixed, waiting to be discovered — then what counts as truth is established through power and assertion, not dispassionate observation or careful listening. We used to call it lying. But for Nietzsche, the truth is what I assert it to be. Here, then, is where Donald Trump or Boris Johnson intersect with the woke Left. For all their superficial antipathy, they share a very similar metaphysical space.

And this philosophy similarity should alert us to the fact that the trans movement — broadly understood as the overcoming of Mother Nature — is not necessarily a Left-wing or progressive idea. It could just as easily be purloined by the Right. Wearing black balaclavas, angry men shout hateful obscenities at women, silence those whose words are deemed unacceptable, and whip up a mob. On the new Left there’s an ambivalence towards free speech, even a fierce antipathy towards Israel. Everyone is calling everyone else a fascist these days, but the new Left looks more and more like what we used to think of as fascists. Both admire Nietzsche.

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You can't be born in the wrong body

By Ellen Pasternack

Of course, there is one big difference between Nietzsche and woke culture: Nietzsche despised victims. He insisted that the resentful powerless — typically Christians — had used their imaginations as a weapon against the strong by upending what we normally think of as good. This is what the victim mentality maintains:

“Only those who suffer are good, only the poor, the powerless, the lowly are good; the suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly, are the only pious people, the only ones saved, salvation is for them alone, whereas you rich, the noble and powerful, you eternally wicked cruel, lustful, insatiate, godless, you will be eternally wretched, cursed and damned.”

That this passage could be taken as a manifesto of new Left politics shows how Nietzsche’s mobile army of metaphors can destabilise our current understanding of the political spectrum. If truth is a contest of wills, a feature of the culture war so to speak, and political assertiveness is what public will looks like, then there is no reason why the Left cannot out-shout, out-manoeuvre, out-intimidate and out-march the old “aristocratic” values that Nietzsche so admired.

When Nietzsche declared the death of God, he wasn’t just declaring religion to be over; he was also burying the very idea that truth is something fixed. Following Nietzsche, generations of progressive activists have come to believe that truth is something made not found. Something to be created in the cauldron of technological ingenuity and political assertiveness.

At the present moment, this philosophical position is supporting a kind of Left-wing run. But it won’t always do so. And when Nietzsche renews his conjugation with the Right, we may well descend even further into antipathy and madness. When truth with a capital T dies, all we have left is the struggle for dominance.

Might is right. Which is why, as the culture wars deepen, you will find me in church, on my knees, before my dead God. A dead God who, Nietzsche would be disappointed to hear, refuses to die.

The former are often younger, single people who have left the bosom of their families. Without work to get up for, and experiencing extended periods of introspective solitude and perhaps even loneliness, the night demons are free to do their worst. During lockdown, questions of what life is all about have pressed down hard on the single bedroom in the flat share. What is the use of having all the freedom in the world to make one’s own life choices, when all the options available look equally empty? From this perspective, death contains a kind of debilitating terror that can be dwelt upon, often over and over.

Those of the latter type have literally no time for such existential worries. Especially mothers with young children. Without the support and respite provided by nursery schools or childminders, the day and the night are dominated by a continual concern for the welfare of their dependents. As weeks turned to months, the constant and unrelenting responsibility for children or elderly and vulnerable adults has left many exhausted, drained and feeling like they have lost themselves in the care for others. There is a form of death in this experience, too — a loss of self that is often what the fear of death amounts to. “There is no me left,” as one of my congregation and mother of three explained to me the other week.

Further reading

Let's all meet up in the year 3000

By Tom Chivers

It was with her words ringing in my head that I read Tom Chivers’s intriguing piece in UnHerd about those who desire to live on and on, if not forever, then for a much greater length of time than our bodies presently allow. “Literally everything gets me thinking about death,” he admits. “I could be eating a Dairy Milk and think something like ‘Gosh, I wonder if I’ve already eaten the majority of Dairy Milks I will eat in my lifetime.’” I have a number of congregants who have expressed similar feelings.

Nonetheless, I wondered what that exhausted mother of three might make of this? Between wiping chocolate off the sofa for the umpteenth time, and stopping the children fighting with each other, and preparing their tea, would she be counting down Dairy Milks? I know, it’s not a fair comparison; Chivers was deliberately sending himself up. But even so, it got me thinking about how we approach death.

Martha Nussbaum, in a brilliant essay on why the immortal Greek gods sometimes fall in love with mortal human beings — Calypso with Odysseus, for example — explains that there are certain attractive virtues that the gods, being immortal, are unable to manifest precisely because of their immortality. Top of the list is sacrificial love. What sense can be made of sacrificial heroism, risking one’s life to save another, if one’s life is never really in danger? Odysseus risks everything for the one he loves, even his own death, and that makes him so much more attractive and commendable. And what sense can be given to the motherly love of the immortals, she questions, when there are never any issues about the welfare of their immortal children? Mrs Zeus is not bothered that the stair gate is closed. Her one-year-old wouldn’t hurt himself if he fell, so what’s the worry? Mrs Zeus wouldn’t say “there is no me left”. She would happily and calmly have her nails done as her kids played with matches and the petrol can.

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The bright side of death

By Giles Fraser

In other words, so much of what we value about human life — and sacrificial love especially — is bound up with intrinsic human vulnerability. What makes human beings so beautiful is precisely their willingness and ability to sacrifice themselves, their time, their health, their sanity, for others. As Chivers concludes: “you-cannot-die immortality is likely a curse, not a blessing. No one reads vampire stories or ghost stories – souls forced to wander the earth long after all their loved ones have died, unable to rest – and thinks ‘Yup, gotta get me some of that’. Immortality is the archetypal monkey’s-paw wish-that-goes-wrong.”

There are, of course, plenty who are ready to die. Those who have a sense that their time has come. But I think there’s another sort of death experience that’s worth pointing out: the giving up of oneself in such a way that all the self-focused anxiety of what-will-become-of-me seems to drop away.

Towards the end of the piece Chivers wonders: “Maybe this [cryogenic technology] is all just a nerd’s version of praying for the afterlife, although I think not.” And he is right to think not. In Christian terms, eternal life is not a life without death or one that has developed some curious mystical technology to avoid it. “Those who lose their life will find it” is an invitation to find liberation from the Dairy Milk problem by dissolving oneself in the love of others – an invitation of which motherly love is the most obvious and impressive example.

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My eulogy for Boris

By Giles Fraser

When St Paul writes that death has lost its sting, he is claiming that there is a glorious kind of freedom to be enjoyed when one gets beyond the obsessive anxiety of endless self-preservation. For those who have placed the centre of gravity of their lives outside of themselves, then the prospect of one’s own death can never be as it was before. Death loses its sting.

Most of us, though, experience the problem of death on a number of levels at once; both as a threat to our own singular unique existence and as the loss of self that takes place as we care more about things other than ourselves. Only those we call saints are able to travel fully beyond their own existential anxieties by losing themselves in the service of others.

I have met a few in my time. My old boss, the priest who trained me to become a priest, died a couple of months ago. An extraordinary man, he once told me – and I completely believed him — that he was totally uninterested in the question of what would become of him after death. That claim made a lasting impression on me, and still seems to be the mark of someone who has been liberated in just the way St Paul described. The more my old boss gave away of himself, the more of his own needs that he abandoned and set aside, the more he seemed to grow into a kind of serenity. And he met death with the same composed equanimity.

The transhumanist approach presumes too quickly the only answer to death is for us to go on and on forever — or, at least, for such an extended period of time that we will eventually choose death as a welcome relief. But I wonder whether all this desire for just more time isn’t itself a part of the problem, and indeed that it represents a kind of fearfulness that deepens our anxiety rather than deals with it.

I have known people smile as they die. I want what they have.

His work plays with the boundary between man and machine. In one piece, he gave members of the public control over his limbs via electronic muscle stimulators. In another, he designed a system that enables a physical body to animate a virtual body as it moves through cyberspace. In 2007, Stelarc had a cell-cultivated ear surgically attached to his left arm, with the hope of one day attaching a wireless listening device and allowing others to listen in, hearing as Stelarc hears. He dreams of a world in which we are no longer limited by our animal forms: “life would no longer commence with birth and end with death! Life would become a digital experience.”

Reading a recent piece in The New York Times titled ‘The Fight for Fertility Equality’, it seems that a new movement of pro-surrogacy campaigners are thinking along distinctly Stelarcian lines:

Still in its infancy, this movement envisions a future when the ability to create a family is no longer determined by one’s wealth, sexuality, gender or biology… They argue that people — gay, straight, single, married, male, female — are not infertile because their bodies refuse to cooperate with baby making.

Ron Poole-Dayan, the founder and executive director of an organisation called Men Having Babies, sees his movement’s objectives as simply the next logical step in the fight for equality, following on from the successful campaign to legalise gay marriage in America. He argues that the barriers gay men face in having children are social, rather than physical, and that assumptions to the contrary are bitterly “hetero-centric.”

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Poole-Dayan and other fertility equality campaigners insist not only that commercial surrogacy should be fully legalised, but also that medical insurance companies should cover the costs. Some employers already offer so-called ‘fertility benefits’, paying for egg freezing, IVF, and surrogacy — a perk that is increasingly common in the tech sector. Fertility equality campaigners would like to see this extended, thereby allowing anyone, no matter their income, sex, sexual orientation, or relationship status, to have a child that is genetically related to them.

The word ‘woman’ does not appear once in The New York Times piece. Nor does the word ‘mother’. There is a brief mention of feminists pushing back against the expansion of the surrogacy industry, including famous figures like Gloria Steinem and Phyllis Chesler, the latter protesting against the anti-materialism of it: “Some people want to do away with reality, but biology is real, biology exists — and biology is what will get you pregnant.”

When I interviewed Chesler last year, she spoke about her efforts to resist the campaign to legalise commercial surrogacy in New York State, a campaign that Governor Andrew Cuomo later titled ‘Love Makes a Family’. Since then, Cuomo has succeeded in pushing through his proposed reforms, meaning that commercial surrogacy will become legal in New York State in February 2021. The feminist resistance has, for now, failed.

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It’s often forgotten that most people who seek out surrogacy services are not gay men, but rather heterosexual couples. A minority are infertile as a result of illness or disability, but a much larger proportion are unable to conceive as a result of the woman’s age. As delayed childbearing has become more common in the modern world, so has age-related infertility. The proportion of 20-year-old women who will not have a live birth when trying to conceive is about 2-3%; for 40-year-old women, the figure is more like a third; for 45-year-olds, almost 90%. Gay men are not the only people whose “bodies refuse to cooperate with baby making” — older women are in the same situation, albeit as a result of the passage of time, rather than their biological sex.

It feels almost unkind to point out that age is so closely related to fertility, given that finger wagging comments about the ‘biological clock’ can feel so pointed and so personal for women entering their mid-thirties. But, as the journal Gynecological Endocrinology bluntly puts it, women “are falsely reassured by popular beliefs that advances in new reproductive technologies can compensate for the age-related decline in fertility, but science cannot beat the biological clock.” Phyllis Chesler has it right here: “biology is real, biology exists.”

Perhaps we’d rather it didn’t. There are trans-humanists like Stelarc determined to leave behind these meaty, restrictive bodies of ours and step into a new cyborg future. Maybe one day they’ll achieve their ambitions and it will be possible to grow babies outside of the human body, halt the ageing process, or even conquer death by uploading our minds to the internet.

But we’re not there yet. Stelarc’s most stunning achievement to date is transplanting an ear onto his arm. But the ear doesn’t actually work: it can’t hear a thing, since it does not have the necessary connection to the brain. It’s a flashy, attention-grabbing piece of art, not a true transformation of the human form.

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The disturbing history of 'artificial mothers'

By Louise Perry

The truth is that, in the here and now, babies still need mothers, whether or not we refer to them by that word. And those mothers are startlingly absent from the discourse on surrogacy. In the early days of the industry, all surrogacy arrangements were of the so-called ‘traditional’ variety – the woman was paid to be inseminated by the commissioning father’s sperm. She gave birth to a child who had not only grown inside her body, but was also genetically related to her. She was, in every possible way, that child’s mother. The payment she received was in compensation for relinquishing all custody rights.

That system resulted in a lot of lawsuits. As Julie Bindel has written recently for UnHerd, surrogate mothers often suffer terribly when parted from the babies, and a woman who has taken part in ‘traditional’ surrogacy can more easily make a legal appeal on the basis of her genetic connection to the child. Nowadays, ‘gestational’ surrogacy arrangements bypass that problem by using an egg extracted from a different woman. Hence the surrogate mother becomes, supposedly, nothing more than a vessel.

In this way, the surrogacy industry has attempted to gradually erode the link between the two people at the centre of the drama: the mother and child. The industry’s vocabulary has been part of that effort, as over the decades the word ‘mother’ has gradually been dropped from the end of the term ‘surrogate mother’, removing this woman and her precious body from sight.

The people who seek out surrogacy services are desperately straining at the natural limits placed on us as human beings. The vast majority want to defy their age or their sex, and they want that act of defiance to be enabled by others: by the state, medical insurers, and – above all – the women who act as surrogate mothers.

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By Julie Bindel

The surrogacy industry — an ever-growing network of lawyers, doctors, and other middlemen — sells to them the idea that anything is possible, as long as you’re prepared to pay. And the political ideology of liberal individualism tells them that their freedom is to be prioritised above everything else. Given this, why on earth wouldn’t they demand the ‘right’ to have a child? It is, as Ron Poole-Dayan, high priest of the church of liberalism, so succinctly puts it “about society extending equality to its final and logical conclusion.”

But the existence of the fertility equality movement highlights the problems inherent to a liberal doctrine that promises self-fulfilment while neglecting the ways in which we are interdependent: bound to one another as members of society, rather than free-floating individuals. These campaigners are determined to pursue a form of freedom that shrugs off the constraints imposed by material reality. But there is no way (yet) of growing babies in bottles. Their project is an individualist one, but it is not something that they as individuals can accomplish on their own. So, to get what they want, they have to demand that other people give it to them.

And those other people are then made invisible. Fertility equality campaigners ask us to forget the existence of the woman who — despite all the sophisticated technology used for conception and implantation — does the same thing that any mother does, and has done for a billion years. A low tech, still mysterious task that no one else can perform, however much they might want to. Because, as the women used by the surrogacy industry know only too well, “biology is real, biology exists.” However much we insist otherwise.

Hers is a weird and engaging and extremely funny take on Shelley’s classic. It bounces between past and present and imagines where our current obsession with identity – and its reconstruction – will end as technology opens up endless possibility.

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The birth of the transsexual empire

By Julie Bindel

There are two Marys narrating this story. The first is Mary Shelley, back in the 19th century, recounting how she came to create her own tale of Frankenstein and his monster; the second is Ry (short for Mary) Shelly, who stars in the modern version.

Ry is a transgender – or “hybrid” – doctor experimenting with the idea of what a human is. Half-male, half-female, “they” (preferred pronoun) describe themselves as “liminal, cusping, in between, emerging, undecided, transitional…” Ry is keen to explore what might come next.

Enter Victor Stein. The celebrated tech visionary and modern-day monster maker is working at the cutting edge of the discipline of “accelerated evolution”. He wants to create a superior species, which would be unaffected by distinctions such as race, gender and sexuality. “You aligned your physical reality with your mental impression of yourself,” Stein says to Ry. “Wouldn’t it be a good thing if we could all do that?”

Stein’s aim, though, is to go beyond Ry’s mere transgenderism. He’s more interested in transhumanism: the idea that human beings should be able to so thoroughly augment their bodies that they become superhuman. Gender identity is the leaping off point for Winterson’s book. It then poses the question: where should we stop? Once we have transcended gender, where next?

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By Julie Bindel

One step behind Stein is Ron, his dodgy business partner, who sees bodies as having an essential purpose: for sex. So he is building sex bots – they are all “girls”, with “top-grade silicone nipples” and “extra-wide splayed leg position”. They lack humanity but are “indistinguishable from the human form”.

He may be an unreconstructed sexist, but Ron has the funniest lines. He is determined to make the country of Wales the epicentre for sex bots, and argues that giving men access to silicone women will solve the problem of rape and sexual abuse.

The sexbots are totally compliant, in a way that should send shivers down the neck of any woman who has been the victim of domestic or sexual coercion. Ron says that the sexbots are a very good thing indeed because, horror-upon-horror, sometimes women say ‘no’ to sex.

When these bots are rolled out, human on human interaction will be unnecessary. But what happens when relationships are dehumanised? That, I think, is what Winterson is trying to decipher. And it’s this part of the book made me shudder. I’ve explored this myself, when writing about the effects of paying for sex. It’s dangerous.

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Feminists should support a woman's right to sell sex

By Victoria Bateman

The book hints at unhappy consequences if we replace human life as we know it. “The monster once made cannot be unmade. What will happen to the world has begun,” muses Frankissstein‘s Mary. It suggests to me that if we indulge that desire to change a body, and take it to its limits, then we are heading for monumental disaster.

Winterson clearly had fun writing this book – and parts of it are hilarious. But there are other parts that are dark and difficult. It is obvious to those of us who have been embroiled in debates surrounding the validity of constructed identity, that natal females will not be best served by the implementation of new technologies. Dr Stein’s dodgy experiments point to womb transplants one day becoming the norm for trans women; Ron’s sex bots may soon become the partner of choice for porn-weary men.

In the Frankissstein future, love may not exist at all. Flesh will be a thing of the past, and bodies will be built like machines. The book seeks to shift our perspective on humanity, I think, and the purpose of being. We are, it suggests, close to a future in which humans are no longer the smartest beings on the planet. It also implies we are the architects of our own evolutionary downfall. Technology today is allowing us to shape our notions of sex and gender; tomorrow, it will shape our end.

Suggested reading

The inhuman politics of artificial intelligence

By Jon Cruddas

In a recent interview, Winterson admitted a certain ambivalence regarding gender: “I don’t really think of myself as female or male, I just think of myself as me. I’m not even sure I see myself as human. I don’t feel particularly human.”

I often say I don’t know what being a woman ‘feels like’, usually in response to those who argue about the notion of a gendered brain. I merely feel human, I say. Frankissstein, however, imagines a time when even feeling human will be a thing of the past – and that is monstrous indeed.

Silicon Valley is famous for its technological innovation. It’s less well known for being at the ideological cutting edge.

Two new technology-based ideologies that have been born in the Valley are transhumanism and posthumanism. It is hard to understand one without the other, and the boundaries between these two, still rather rough, sets of beliefs are very blurred.

Transhumanism has been described by Francis Fukuyama as one of the greatest threats to the idea of human equality and says that transhumanists are “just about the last group I’d like to see live forever”. When I wrote about transhumanism for Wired back in 2014, many people thought I was a lunatic. Then, in the 2016 presidential election Zoltan Istvan ran against Donald Trump as the Transhumanist Party’s candidate, and this year, Mark O’Connell’s book To Be a Machine won the Wellcome Book Prize.

It has been shaped by science-fiction, but the origins of transhumanism can be found as far back as the 1900s, or even earlier to the quest for immortality in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the search for the Fountain of Youth. The first transhumanists formally met at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the early 1980s and quickly became the centre of transhumanist thinking. It now is a global movement with Italian Giuseppe Vatinno the first elected transhumanist member of parliament.

Today, transhumanists count among their member’s influential figures such as futurist Raymond Kurzweil, Google’s Director of Engineering, Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and Space X, and Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and the venture capitalist most people love to hate. Oxford University’s own Professor Nick Bostrom is co-cofounder of the World Transhumanist Association and author of the New York Times best seller Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, which has been recommended by the likes of Bill Gates.

If you haven’t yet heard, transhumanism is a rather optimistic set of beliefs – a movement to liberate humanity – clustered around the core idea that technology will take us beyond the physical and intellectual limitations of being human. Technologies like nanotechnology, synthetic biology, robotics, AI and digital brain emulation will transform what it means to be human. Transhumanism of a sort is implied in the soft sell for self-driving cars, virtual reality and any kind of AI.

More from this author

The robodoctor will see you now

By Mark Piesing

Transhumanism, critics argue, has become one of the de facto ideologies of the Silicon Valley establishment in that it justifies the Valley’s culture of ‘move fast, break things and make as much money as possible’ – because ‘hey, what we are doing is liberating humanity’.

What is often left out of this explainer by those who want transhumanism to be taken seriously are the ‘wackier’ elements. The belief that this transformation will occur through the actual physical fusion of technology and humanity by body modification and enhancements. Or the belief that the exponential growth of technology is taking us on a journey far beyond our understanding of what it is to be human today, to a point when, in a literal sense, we become posthuman.

Our posthuman self could be an immortal digital entity able to download its consciousness into a synthetic body of its choice on Earth, or a robot exploring the moons of Jupiter. It could mean that we alter our very biology to enhance our bodies or become a new species of posthuman. Other researchers have wondered if there is the need for an international treaty to save the endangered human.

Transhumanists call the almost mystical moment after which this fusion is possible “The Singularity“.

Further reading

The most influential religion you’ve never heard of

By Peter Franklin

Then there is the belief in the inevitability of an AI takeover. This is a set of beliefs often confusingly called posthumanism. Rather than thinking about beyond humanity, this kind of posthumanism is more focused on the elimination of humanity. It is a darker, more extreme and pessimistic alternative to transhumanism. It shares many ideas with transhumanism such as the exponential growth of technology and a belief in The Singularity. But it removes the human agency behind technological change and believes in the inevitability of the creation of a superintelligent AI that replaces us in a very deterministic way.

According to this way of thinking, technology is evolving at an exponential rate driven by the constant need of capitalism to expand and it is inevitable that at some point along this curve the technological singularity will occur. This is the moment when humans create an artificial intelligence that surpasses the intellectual abilities of men and women, even a genius like Stephen Hawking. It is the last machine that humans will ever make.

With this level of intellectual firepower, the machine acquires the ability not only to reproduce itself but also to improve itself. The resulting “Intelligence Explosion” leads to a runaway cycle of self-improving AI that results in a powerful, superintelligent computer that surpasses all human intelligence. Rather than physically fusing with this technology, the human era comes to an end in the Darwinian nightmare of the human race’s replacement by a superior intelligence that we ourselves have created.

At best we should just give a fatalistic shrug of our collective shoulders to our inevitable self-extermination. At worst, it is a suicide pill, since it is our evolutionary duty, believers argue, to create the AI that will replace us. Some posthumanists would even go so far as to argue that it would be a cosmic tragedy if we stopped this from happening.

Cosmists, as their name suggests, are in the ‘suicide pill’ camp. Computer scientist Hugo de Garis argues that humanity must build these “godlike super creatures”, which they call artilects, even if it risks the destruction of the human species. The assumption behind this is that the life of ordinary humans – whom they call Terrans – is worth less than that of artilects.

Cosmists like de Garis have started to argue that the drive to create these new godlike creatures will lead to the first “gigadeath war” – a war that kills billions of people. They believe that the war will start when ordinary humans try to prevent the creation of these superintelligent machines, and that the only way to survive alongside these new creatures is to become cyborgs.

These crazy-sounding beliefs are not, of course, universally accepted by the technology community, and there are different versions of each. There are also transhumanists like Elon Musk and Nick Bostrom who are aware of the risks of such a process of technological transformation. Others argue that The Singularity is already happening. What matters is that there are transhumanists and posthumanists in positions to decide where investment goes in the Valley and elsewhere.

Further reading

The inhuman politics of artificial intelligence

By Jon Cruddas

Biohackers who try to alter their DNA at home or upgrade their own body with a neural interface may make the headline. But Peter Thiel has invested millions into biotechnology start-ups in search of a way to cheat death. Then there is Neuralink, an American neurotechnology company founded by Elon Musk and eight others. It is reported to be developing implantable brain-computer cyborg-like interfaces that we see in sci-fi movies. It may even help humanity stay in control of AI.

‘Mind uploading’, otherwise known as whole brain emulation, has attracted millions of dollars of investment from the billionaires of Silicon Valley and beyond. A leading venture capitalist told me that he is not worried about the AI research carried out in public in universities so much as the research that is going on in unregulated private laboratories.

In the end, we need to know what the researchers believe because to a posthuman the things that matter to us today, such as the privacy of our data, the health of our democracy and the survival of our local bookshop can too easily be seen as an outdated – as all too ‘human’ concepts. The question is, do you?

Except now there’s something even worse: the ‘Internet of Bodies’, in which instead of machines being networked, it’s living organisms – up to and including human beings.

What would make this possible are devices that can be attached to or implanted within a body. Depending on its sophistication, the device would allow the subject individual to be identified, monitored or in some way controlled via the internet or a private network.

Further Reading

There’s no need to fear a robot taking your job – not if you become one yourself

By Peter Franklin

A basic example, already in widespread use, is the microchipping of pets. Then there are the growing range of medical devices, from implantable pacemakers to robotic prosthetic limbs and artificial organs, that can also be networked.

In a piece for the Wall Street Journal, Andrea M Matwyshyn explores the implications of technology:

“Who controls these “IoB” devices in our bodies? Who can use the body-derived data? Who is responsible for ensuring that the devices work as intended?”

If having a tech company in ultimate charge of your smartphone and the things you use it for, concerns you, imagine if they literally controlled your heart:

“Like most of the tech industry, existing IoB companies rely on end-user license agreements and privacy policies to retain rights in software and to create rights to monitor, aggregate and share users’ body data…  some end-user license agreements have allowed companies to deactivate, or ‘brick,’ a device unless a consumer agrees to changes in privacy or information-sharing provisions.”

Of course, we’re talking about major medical interventions here, that most of us, for most of our lives, won’t need (we might not be able to afford them either, but that’s another issue).

And yet the Internet of Bodies could be coming for us anyway. In a story for the Guardian, Julia Kollewe reports on the microchipping of humans in the workplace:

“UK firm BioTeq, which offers the implants to businesses and individuals, has already fitted 150 implants in the UK.

‘The tiny chips, implanted in the flesh between the thumb and forefinger, are similar to those for pets. They enable people to open their front door, access their office or start their car with a wave of their hand, and can also store medical data.”

Kollewe adds that another such company, Biohax, “is in discussions with several British legal and financial firms about fitting their employees with microchips” .

British trade unions (and the CBI) have raised concerns:

“The TUC is worried that staff could be coerced into being microchipped. Its general secretary Frances O’Grady said: ‘We know workers are already concerned that some employers are using tech to control and micromanage, whittling away their staff’s right to privacy.'”

Human microchipping does have the potential to streamline security procedures – saving employees the hassle of wearing passes and remembering passwords. So, if a workplace-based scheme was voluntary, what would be the problem?

Further Reading

The inhuman politics of artificial intelligence

By Jon Cruddas

I can remember when having a mobile phone (and giving your employer your number) was also voluntary. But by the first years of this century it had become the norm. In the absence of a contractual specifications to contrary, one can still, in theory, not have a mobile phone nor share your number with your employer… but good luck putting that one to the test. Once everyone else is doing it, it becomes really difficult to say no.

Still, it’s only a microchip – just a means of proving our identity in the workplace, something that is already required of us. But there’s more to it than identification. If more advanced versions of such chips allowed a constant connection to a network, then that would allow constant monitoring: of location, of movement and, before long, of other things like heart rate, body temperature and blood chemistry.

Back in May, James Bloodworth wrote an eye-opening piece for UnHerd on the practice and doctrine of Taylorism – i.e. the ‘scientific’ micromanagement of a workforce. He mentioned that in some warehouses and factories, personal electronic devices are already being used to bring Taylorism into the 21st century: Creepy, but at least these gizmos are worn or carried externally. Workers have the physical option (though possibly not the economic opportunity) to cast off their electronic chains. At the very least they can leave them behind at the end of each shift.

Further Reading

'Government Sachs' keeps adopting policies that favour Wall Street

By James Bloodworth

An implant, though, is with you at all times and wherever you go. And what will such things become in future? Beyond identification, beyond monitoring, there is the prospect of direct control. Imagine, for instance, a device programmed to provide a chemical (or electric) jolt of wakefulness should an employee drop-off in the workplace or oversleep at home.

Taylorism is named after its originator Frederick W Taylor, who said this in 1911: “In the past the man has been first; the future the system must be first.” 

In 2018, the prospect is one of cyber-Taylorism, in which the distinction between man and system is erased.

A rocky landscape as viewed through a pair of binoculars; a coach-and-horses rushing through a hastily opened pair of gates; someone looks up – there are two suns in the sky; someone picks up an old-fashioned phone – the line is dead.

Easy stuff. The respective genres are: spy thriller; period drama; space opera; murder mystery.

Okay, here’s one more: A team of scientists are hard at work in a laboratory. One of them remarks on just how close they are to discovering the secret of immortality…

Well, it’s got to be a horror story. In scene two, things will start going very wrong. Or perhaps we’ll fast forward a few years to a zombie-infested future wasteland. Either way, one can be sure the results of the research will prove disappointing.

Still, it’s all fiction, isn’t it? It’s not like anyone seriously expects to conquer death.

Further reading

The most influential religion you’ve never heard of

By Peter Franklin

Actually, they do. From cryogenic ‘suspension’ to cloning to gene therapy, there are well-funded programmes devoted to this age-old quest. Another avenue is to achieve eternal life by digital means. Writing for Quartz, Simone Stolzoff explores the weird world of “augmented eternity”…

“…in which academics and technologists explore ways the human mind might be downloaded, recreated, and transferred into other forms. ‘Eventually the mind will become migratable information, just like files can migrate from one device to another and live in the cloud,’ says Michael Graziano, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University. ‘When the information processor’—the brain—‘goes, you’ll be able to copy [the mind] and implement it in other hardware.’”

Stolzoff concedes that “eventually” might be a long time coming:

“Though there are still technical limitations to the future Graziano imagines—namely the ability to adequately image and map the brain in its intricate detail…”

That may be prove to be the understatement of the year – indeed of the decade, century or millennium (how long have you got?). Even if we accept the materialist assumption that ‘you’ consist of nothing more than meat-encoded information (as opposed to anything more meaningful like a soul), our knowledge of those patterns and how they might generate personality, memories and consciousness is either rudimentary or completely non-existent.

However, what AI probably will be able to do (and soon) is piece together a basic, but convincing, simulation of a human personality – which Stoltzoff refers to as a “digital surrogate”.

An example might be an automated Twitter account, which, after your death, continues to tweet out new statements in the kind of language you used in life. Imagine you-know-who tweeting for all eternity!

Chatbots are getting more convincing all the time – and even if the mysteries of consciousness are not accessible to mere science, it won’t be long before artificial personalities are routinely passing the Turing test (indeed, in some situations they already can).

But if that’s the direction the technology is moving in, it won’t just be used to bring fictional characters to life, but also to bring real people back to life – or, at least, an increasingly realistic simulation thereof.

Further reading

Why humans can't help but love robots

By Graeme Archer

This raises endless questions. One of the most important is about ownership. Simulating a realistic ‘you’ will depend on data: i.e. whatever records exist of your thoughts, your speech patterns, your personal preferences, your relationships and what you looked like.

Who currently controls this sort of information? More than anyone else, it’s the social media giants – above all, Facebook.

You may have thought it was your photo album you were entrusting to Mark Zuckerberg – when actually it’s the shrivelled, post-modern version of your immortal soul.

Look after yourself, but delete your account.

Silicon Valley is famous for its technological innovation. It’s less well known for being at the ideological cutting edge.

Two new technology-based ideologies that have been born in the Valley are transhumanism and posthumanism. It is hard to understand one without the other, and the boundaries between these two, still rather rough, sets of beliefs are very blurred.

Transhumanism has been described by Francis Fukuyama as one of the greatest threats to the idea of human equality and says that transhumanists are “just about the last group I’d like to see live forever”. When I wrote about transhumanism for Wired back in 2014, many people thought I was a lunatic. Then, in the 2016 presidential election Zoltan Istvan ran against Donald Trump as the Transhumanist Party’s candidate, and this year, Mark O’Connell’s book To Be a Machine won the Wellcome Book Prize.

It has been shaped by science-fiction, but the origins of transhumanism can be found as far back as the 1900s, or even earlier to the quest for immortality in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the search for the Fountain of Youth. The first transhumanists formally met at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the early 1980s and quickly became the centre of transhumanist thinking. It now is a global movement with Italian Giuseppe Vatinno the first elected transhumanist member of parliament.

Today, transhumanists count among their member’s influential figures such as futurist Raymond Kurzweil, Google’s Director of Engineering, Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and Space X, and Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and the venture capitalist most people love to hate. Oxford University’s own Professor Nick Bostrom is co-cofounder of the World Transhumanist Association and author of the New York Times best seller Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, which has been recommended by the likes of Bill Gates.

If you haven’t yet heard, transhumanism is a rather optimistic set of beliefs – a movement to liberate humanity – clustered around the core idea that technology will take us beyond the physical and intellectual limitations of being human. Technologies like nanotechnology, synthetic biology, robotics, AI and digital brain emulation will transform what it means to be human. Transhumanism of a sort is implied in the soft sell for self-driving cars, virtual reality and any kind of AI.

More from this author

The robodoctor will see you now

By Mark Piesing

Transhumanism, critics argue, has become one of the de facto ideologies of the Silicon Valley establishment in that it justifies the Valley’s culture of ‘move fast, break things and make as much money as possible’ – because ‘hey, what we are doing is liberating humanity’.

What is often left out of this explainer by those who want transhumanism to be taken seriously are the ‘wackier’ elements. The belief that this transformation will occur through the actual physical fusion of technology and humanity by body modification and enhancements. Or the belief that the exponential growth of technology is taking us on a journey far beyond our understanding of what it is to be human today, to a point when, in a literal sense, we become posthuman.

Our posthuman self could be an immortal digital entity able to download its consciousness into a synthetic body of its choice on Earth, or a robot exploring the moons of Jupiter. It could mean that we alter our very biology to enhance our bodies or become a new species of posthuman. Other researchers have wondered if there is the need for an international treaty to save the endangered human.

Transhumanists call the almost mystical moment after which this fusion is possible “The Singularity“.

Further reading

The most influential religion you’ve never heard of

By Peter Franklin

Then there is the belief in the inevitability of an AI takeover. This is a set of beliefs often confusingly called posthumanism. Rather than thinking about beyond humanity, this kind of posthumanism is more focused on the elimination of humanity. It is a darker, more extreme and pessimistic alternative to transhumanism. It shares many ideas with transhumanism such as the exponential growth of technology and a belief in The Singularity. But it removes the human agency behind technological change and believes in the inevitability of the creation of a superintelligent AI that replaces us in a very deterministic way.

According to this way of thinking, technology is evolving at an exponential rate driven by the constant need of capitalism to expand and it is inevitable that at some point along this curve the technological singularity will occur. This is the moment when humans create an artificial intelligence that surpasses the intellectual abilities of men and women, even a genius like Stephen Hawking. It is the last machine that humans will ever make.

With this level of intellectual firepower, the machine acquires the ability not only to reproduce itself but also to improve itself. The resulting “Intelligence Explosion” leads to a runaway cycle of self-improving AI that results in a powerful, superintelligent computer that surpasses all human intelligence. Rather than physically fusing with this technology, the human era comes to an end in the Darwinian nightmare of the human race’s replacement by a superior intelligence that we ourselves have created.

At best we should just give a fatalistic shrug of our collective shoulders to our inevitable self-extermination. At worst, it is a suicide pill, since it is our evolutionary duty, believers argue, to create the AI that will replace us. Some posthumanists would even go so far as to argue that it would be a cosmic tragedy if we stopped this from happening.

Cosmists, as their name suggests, are in the ‘suicide pill’ camp. Computer scientist Hugo de Garis argues that humanity must build these “godlike super creatures”, which they call artilects, even if it risks the destruction of the human species. The assumption behind this is that the life of ordinary humans – whom they call Terrans – is worth less than that of artilects.

Cosmists like de Garis have started to argue that the drive to create these new godlike creatures will lead to the first “gigadeath war” – a war that kills billions of people. They believe that the war will start when ordinary humans try to prevent the creation of these superintelligent machines, and that the only way to survive alongside these new creatures is to become cyborgs.

These crazy-sounding beliefs are not, of course, universally accepted by the technology community, and there are different versions of each. There are also transhumanists like Elon Musk and Nick Bostrom who are aware of the risks of such a process of technological transformation. Others argue that The Singularity is already happening. What matters is that there are transhumanists and posthumanists in positions to decide where investment goes in the Valley and elsewhere.

Further reading

The inhuman politics of artificial intelligence

By Jon Cruddas

Biohackers who try to alter their DNA at home or upgrade their own body with a neural interface may make the headline. But Peter Thiel has invested millions into biotechnology start-ups in search of a way to cheat death. Then there is Neuralink, an American neurotechnology company founded by Elon Musk and eight others. It is reported to be developing implantable brain-computer cyborg-like interfaces that we see in sci-fi movies. It may even help humanity stay in control of AI.

‘Mind uploading’, otherwise known as whole brain emulation, has attracted millions of dollars of investment from the billionaires of Silicon Valley and beyond. A leading venture capitalist told me that he is not worried about the AI research carried out in public in universities so much as the research that is going on in unregulated private laboratories.

In the end, we need to know what the researchers believe because to a posthuman the things that matter to us today, such as the privacy of our data, the health of our democracy and the survival of our local bookshop can too easily be seen as an outdated – as all too ‘human’ concepts. The question is, do you?

Estimates of UK jobs that could be replaced by AI and related technologies over the next two decades tend to range from 22% to 40%.

We have already witnessed how data analytics can be malignly used in political campaigns. This capacity will become more sophisticated, possibly at the expense of the democratic process itself.

Possibly even more potent is the recognition software being trialled in marketing to detect the efficacy of advertising by judging facial expressions. It suggests business has the potential to reach into our lives in ways Orwell imagined a totalitarian state would do.

More generally, we have seen the filter bubble effect on civic and social life. Social media is feeding us information which aligns with our preconceived notions of the world, and closes us off from challenging information and argument.

Yet the challenges facing the country today appear inversely related to the capacity of politicians and policymakers to discuss, let alone resolve them.

In the face of escalating authoritarian populism, for example, where is the political diagnosis and response? Where is the defence of liberal democracy?

Or, in our post-EU referendum world, where do we consider the issues and feelings that ushered in the result, not just the technical aspects of Brexit?

Further reading

How Disney shows an AI apocalypse is possible

By Tom Chivers

Arguably, politics has lost its ethical grip; reduced to various forms of technocratic administration. Today’s populist uprisings reflect a backlash against such managerialism.

To renew public confidence requires a different conversation. One that addresses moral and cultural questions regarding the lives we wish to live, and how the present disparity between that ideal and reality can find political expression.

The same tension surrounds our limited discussion of robotics and AI. These have the potential to affect all policy fields, from education to the labour market, from policing to health and social care.

Yet current political thinking is reactive – geared only towards ensuring Britain is at the forefront of technological progress. On one level, this utilitarian stance is understandable. But should we not begin by discussing the role technology should and should not play in our lives? A conversation far beyond questions of economic utility.

Restricting public debate to policy rather than ethical concerns is especially problematic when considering AI, for politicians lack technical and scientific expertise in these areas.

Being unable to evaluate the claims of developers means that both politicians and the public are prone to being swayed by either apocalyptic or techno-utopian narratives.

For example, many technologists adhere to ‘techno-solutionism’, the idea that all ‘problems’ which humanity faces can be ‘solved’ using technology. This confidence often goes hand in hand with an innate libertarianism: as the role of technology expands, so should the role of the state contract.

Then there are those who approach these issues from a transhumanist position. This asserts that technological change creates the opportunity to transcend the human condition and that this is to be celebrated. Resistance is deemed parochial or nostalgic. In fact, transhumanism is often tagged as the ‘modern eugenics’.

Further reading

The most influential religion you’ve never heard of

By Peter Franklin

What happens when transhumanist thinking informs the technologists themselves? Nick Bostrom, for example, is both director of H+ – an international transhumanist organisation – and the Future of Life Institute at Oxford University, which regularly produces policy recommendations for government. That is surely a conflict.

Policymakers need to avoid being captivated by the promise of technological progress without an appreciation of the philosophical assumptions that might inform this thinking.

This is applicable to libertarian and transhumanist thinking on both the radical Left and Right. These are deep waters and should be dominating political debate. Yet discussion is virtually non-existent.

We have been warned: the House of Lords’ Report on AI said, “the most challenging point relating to AI and democracy is the lack of choice that is offered to the population at large about the adoption of technology. It is, to say the least, undemocratic”.

But as it stands, the policy proposals to meet these challenges are shockingly weak: that developers undergo training in ethics as part of their computer science degrees, that companies ensure their workforces are diverse and that individuals made redundant, perhaps repeatedly, by AI are enabled to train for a new career.

Further reading

The Left's shameful silence over the degradation of work

By Jon Cruddas

Broader in scale, Universal Basic Income is a more radical proposal floated to ensure that those who lose their jobs are not made destitute. Yet the State would take on a phenomenal welfare burden alongside a shrinking tax take.

To fill the deficit people like Bill Gates propose a robot tax. But trying to define a robot would be a legal and regulatory nightmare. When policy is solely reactive, bending to suit technologists’ goals, it can fast become incoherent.

Instead we should be returning to first principles, and discussing the value we place on work, freedom, privacy, community and justice. In short, about what we want society to look like.

If we do not, policymakers run the risk of slipping into techno-solutionism, elevating technological and economic advancement above an appreciation of how we want to live.

He concluded his 14 minute address with a reference to a Catholic priest who died in 1955:

“Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was arguably one of the great minds, great spirits of the 20th century —a Jesuit, Roman Catholic priest, a scientist, a scholar, a mystic. In some of his writings, he said… that the discovery and harnessing of fire was one of the great scientific and technological discoveries in all of human history…

“He then went on to say that… if humanity ever captures the energy of love, it would be the second time in history that we have discovered fire.”

It is fascinating to see Teilhard’s work continue to exert an influence – and not just within a Christian context. His most famous writings occupy a space somewhere between theology, philosophy and scientific speculation. Their ambition is to fuse Christian thought with evolutionary theory. The central argument is that the universe, including humanity, is evolving through different stages of increasing complexity and consciousness towards the ‘Omega Point‘ – a state of perfect unity that draws all of existence into itself.

Further reading

Free Minds: Robert Sarah, the dissenting cardinal, seeking to save his Church

By Allan Mallinson

This is not exactly mainstream science; it’s not mainstream Catholicism either. Indeed, the church authorities stopped Father Teilhard from publishing his work during his lifetime – and, when they were published posthumously, the Church officially placed them under a monitum (a warning).

The whiff of heresy that surrounds Teilhard doesn’t put off his biggest fans, especially not those in the ever-expanding ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ category. What they might find rather more disturbing, however, is the evidence presented in an article by John P Slattery for Religion Dispatches.

Slattery presents quote after quote that show that Teilhard was a racist who believed that some ethnic groups are more advanced than others. He believed that “as not all ethnic groups have the same value, they must be dominated” though not, he added, “despised” (well thanks, Pierre, that’s mighty big of you!).

Further reading

Could genetically selective societies breed themselves into crippling uniformity?

By Peter Franklin

Furthermore, he was a eugenicist who argued that what he called the “advancing wing of humanity” should use scientific methods to further its biological evolution. Here’s another direct quote:

“We must recognize…the vital importance of a collective quest of discovery and invention no longer inspired solely by a vague delight in knowledge and power, but by the duty and the clearly-defined hope of gaining control (and so making use) of the fundamental driving forces of evolution. And with this, the urgent need for a generalized eugenics (racial no less than individual) directed, beyond all concern with economic or nutritional problems, towards a biological maturing of the human type and of the biosphere.”

Slattery is careful to put Teilhard’s most objectionable ideas within their historical context:

“…before World War II, much of the Western World was, what most of us would now regard as openly racist. Anti-Semitism, anti-blackness, anti-immigration, anti-disability, and misogyny dominated the populations of the United States and Europe. Leaders in science and industry coupled such racism with Darwin’s conception of evolutionary progress to produce horrific decades of enforced eugenic practices.”

Prominent eugenicists of that era include Marie Stopes, George Bernard Shaw, Margaret Sanger, Sydney Webb, John Maynard Keynes, William Beveridge and Julian Huxley – all of whom are held in high regard by progressivies to this day (though not for their eugenicism). Let’s also not forget that nice, liberal, social democratic Sweden had a post-war programme of compulsory sterilisations that didn’t come to a halt until 1975.

Is this the attitude we should take to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – dismissing the bad stuff as ‘of its time’ and focusing on the good stuff?

Further reading

Don't monkey around with the borders of humanity

By Peter Franklin

No, because the ‘good stuff’ provides the basis for the bad stuff. Teilhard’s ideas have something in common with all visions of progress towards an Earthly utopia – the inherent perfectibility of humankind. That might sound like a good thing, but it allows for the idea that some people are fundamentally more advanced than others. It also implies that to make further progress, the inferior specimens have to be upgraded, bypassed or in some way dispensed with. This can be seen in Nietzsche’s concept of the Superman, the communist ideal of the New Soviet man and, of course, the Nazi belief in a master race. In a non-totalitarian form, it is there too in contemporary transhumanism and the Silicon Valley religion of the Singularity.

Further reading

The most influential religion you’ve never heard of

By Peter Franklin

It’s telling that what got Teilhard in trouble with the Catholic Church was his apparent denial of the doctrine of Original Sin. The idea that we’re all flawed (and born that way) is probably the least popular of the core Christian beliefs, but also the one for which the evidence is most glaringly obvious. It is also incompatible with Earthly utopias. If we’re all fundamentally sinful – and irredeemable except through divine grace – then there are no ‘advanced’ and ‘unadvanced’ classes of human being, and no self-propelled evolution towards perfection.

This is why Teilhard had no room for Original Sin in his philosophy. It is also why there should be no room for his philosophy in Christianity.

Further reading

What the Amish and the Shakers can teach us about demographics

By Peter Franklin

The Amish are better known for their rejection of modern technology than their large families (though the latter follows from the former, if you catch my drift). What’s less understood is why they choose to live without cars, televisions and many of the other things that we take for granted. It’s not out of a fundamentalist belief that things invented after a certain date are sinful. Nor is it because the Amish are simple-minded hicks unable to cope with new-fangled gadgetry. In fact, the opposite is true – the Amish are among the most sophisticated users of technology on the planet.

It’s a point that becomes apparent in Michael J Coren’s interview with Jameson Wetmore for Quartz:

“…the Amish [do not] view technology as inherently evil. No rules prohibit them from using new inventions. But they carefully consider how each one will change their culture before embracing it. And the best clue as to what will happen comes from watching their neighbors.

“‘The Amish use us as an experiment,’ says Jameson Wetmore, an engineer turned social researcher at the Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society. ‘They watch what happens when we adopt new technology, and then they decide whether that’s something they want to adopt themselves.’”

Within the Amish community, there are different sub-denominations of various degrees of strictness. Then there are ‘para-Amish’ groups, like the Mennonites, who come from the same Anabaptist tradition as the Amish, but are more accommodating of modernity. And, of course, when the Amish ride their horse-and-buggies into town, they share the same spaces as ordinary Americans.

Therefore, they can observe a wide range of lifestyles from that of the Swartzentrubers (the most conservative of the Amish) all the way through to the completely secular.

It’s a broad spectrum, but not one without clear dividing lines between Amish and non-Amish:

“It’s interesting that the Amish have different districts, and each district has different rules about what’s allowed and what’s not allowed. Yet it’s very clear there are two technologies that, as soon as the community accepts them, they are no longer Amish. Those technologies are the television and the automobile.”

Many of the Amish do use telephones, but they ban them from the home – confining them to phone shanties at the edge of the community. (Mobile phones, however, have confused matters somewhat.)

Further reading

Do you have to be rich not to have a smartphone?

By Peter Franklin

The Amish relationship with technology, therefore, is negotiable – but, crucially, they have developed (retained?) the ability to make the big decisions at a community level – i.e. collectively and locally:

“For the Amish, there are no rules prohibiting new technologies. So typically what will happen is one member of the community will say, ‘You know, I’m fed up with axes. I’m using the chainsaw.’

“So maybe he goes out and begins to use a chainsaw. You might get some stern looks from neighbors, but officially it’s not prohibited. Every six months, the [Amish district councils] sit down and discuss. People are beginning to use chainsaws in our communities: Is this what we want? And then they have a conversation about it.”

In the ‘English’ (i.e. non-Amish) world, we make decisions about technology at the level of the individual and, in some cases, the family. In practice, however, our autonomy is limited. New technology, and the social change that comes with it, is something that just happens to us.

Wetmore mentions the social impact of the motorcar. Streets used to be for people – a playground for children, a meeting place for adults. With the coming of the car, that changed – children were literally driven out, and adults have to watch their step. It was a profound alteration to the everyday life of our communities, but how many of them ever made a deliberate decision whether to accept it or not?

Wetmore quotes the motto of 1933 Chicago World Fair: “Science finds. Industry applies. Man conforms.”

In Amish society, however, man doesn’t conform.

The rest of us need to become technological non-conformists too. The implications of advances in artificial intelligence, robotics and genetic engineering are too big for us to continue as passive recipients of change.

In the end this is not about our machines; it’s about us.

The Amish make conscious decisions about which technologies enable them to remain Amish. Before long, we will need to decide which technologies allow us to remain human.

Further reading

The most influential religion you’ve never heard of

By Peter Franklin

Probably not, but one day you might be – or, failing that, your kids or grandkids. In what is very much a ‘guest’ piece for the American Conservative, Zoltan Istvan – the Libertarian candidate for Governor of California – explains his transhumanist vision:

“…transhumanism is the international movement of using science and technology to radically change the human being and experience. Its primary goal is to deliver and embrace a utopian techno-optimistic world—a world that consists of biohackers, cyborgists, roboticists, life extension advocates, cryonicists, Singularitarians, and other science-devoted people.”

There’s no need to fear a robot taking your job – not if you become one yourself!

Seriously though, Istvan makes a good point when he says that the technology is already redefining our humanity:

“So why are so many people jumping on the transhumanist bandwagon? I think it has to do with the mishmash of tech inundating and dominating our daily lives. Everything from our smartphone addictions to flying at 30,000 feet in jet airplanes to Roombas freaking out our pets in our homes. Nothing is like it was for our forbearers. In fact, little is like it was even a generation ago. And the near future will be many times more dramatic: driverless cars, robotic hearts, virtual reality sex, and telepathy via mind-reading headsets. Each of these technologies is already here, and in some cases being marketed to billions of people. The world is shifting under our feet—and libertarian transhumanism is a sure way to navigate the chaos to make sure we arrive at the best future possible.”

As a conservative cishumanist, I very much doubt that there’s anything “sure” about libertarian transhumanism (and for a corrective to Istvan’s boundless optimism read this response from Kai Weiss, also in the American Conservative). Nevertheless, I think its worth examining the transhumanist argument on its own terms.

For instance, Istvan’s account of transhumanism’s core motivation:

“The future is coming fast, people around the world are realizing, and there’s no denying that the transhumanist age fascinates tens of millions of people as they wonder where the species might go and what health benefits it might mean for society.

“At the end of the day, transhumanism is still really focused on one thing: satisfying that essential addiction to curiosity.”

Not withstanding the fate of the proverbial cat, I’m all for curiosity. I also accept that this is what makes transhumanism tick (thus far). But if the movement is to extend beyond its early adopters then it will have to satisfy other, more basic, motivations. Take self-preservation for instance:

“With science, technology, and a liberty-minded outlook as our tools, the species can seek out and even challenge the very nature of its being and place in the universe. That might mean the end of human death by mid-century if governments allow the science and medicine to develop.”

The word “might” is doing an awful lot of work in that last sentence. Though technology does have the potential to change our societies in some pretty fundamental ways, it also moves much more slowly than we sometimes imagine. It’s not government regulation, medical ethics or religious doctrine that’s holding up the march of transhumanism, but the size of the scientific challenge of, say, extending our natural life-spans.

In all probability we won’t have immortality in our time – not because of red-tape, but because overcoming death is just too difficult.

After all, we’re only human.