The quest for immortality is a perennial fascination for me. The initial impetus for my essay this week was a clip that went viral last year of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping being recorded on a hot mic discussing the scientific prospect of immortality. I took that moment as a starting point for thinking about the prospect of an immortal or radically life-extended elite, and what that prospect suggests about our current civilizational impasse. I hope I’ll be forgiven for saying that it’s a subject that just refuses to lay down and die. Back in 2017, I published a piece in the magazine about Zoltan Istvan, an affable Bay Area former real estate investor who was at the time running as an independent candidate in the following year’s presidential election. Zoltan’s platform was a transhumanist one: He was running, essentially, as the immortality candidate, raising awareness about the need to invest in radical life-extension therapies, driving across the United States in a school bus tricked out to look like a gigantic coffin. (At the time, his candidacy seemed like only slightly more of an absurd long shot than the other former real estate guy turned presidential candidate who wound up winning the thing.) The story about Zoltan and the coffin bus and the whole scientific immortality business was an excerpt from my book that came out the same year, “To Be a Machine,” in which I explored transhumanism as a whole, a movement devoted to using technology to push out the boundaries of the human condition, including eradicating death. Quite a lot has happened since then — including the mainstreaming of the whole radical life extension racket. FEATURES THIS WEEK’S COVER
COLUMNS
FROM THE ARCHIVES Living Forever, on IceBack in 2010, Kerry Howley wrote a story for the magazine about cryonics and the complications in a marriage when one partner is planning on having their brain preserved in liquid nitrogen. The United States is not necessarily an easy place to take up the banner of letting go; we’re likely to call it “giving up,” and there is of course no purer expression of this attitude than the pursuit of cryonics. Heads and bodies stored in steel tanks, awaiting the moment when medicine advances to the point where tissue can be repaired and bodies revived, are pointedly referred to not as remains or cadavers but as “patients.” A stopped heart is seen as no good reason to stop fighting for your life. COMMENT OF THE WEEK When Desk Jobs Were the Kiss of DeathFrom Alex E. on Casey Michael Henry’s essay on how people are fantasizing about boring, 9-to-5 office jobs: These jobs represent STABILITY. I grew up in the ’90s when a desk job was the kiss of death, an idea explored in countless media of the time. With the economy being so awful, I see many of my 20-something friends aspire to corporate life or cling to it — not because it’s cool, but because they know they’d be eking out an existence without it. I’m a 40-something artist who recently stepped away from the struggle, relented and took a hybrid-remote computer job. The peace I’ve felt is almost embarrassing. I mourn the loss of my dynamic former life, but it’s pretty cool to have savings. That’s all for this week. Email us at magazine@nytimes.com with your thoughts, questions and feedback. Stay in touch: Like this email? Forward it to a friend and help us grow. Loved a story? Hated it? Write us a letter at magazine@nytimes.com. Did a friend forward this to you? Sign up here to get the magazine newsletter.
|
