Articles by Edward Kinsella,Justin Smith-Ruiu

Technology

Big tech’s futile attempt to kill death

How might technology deliver immortality? Consider the tüktüïe, a carved wooden object, used among the Sakha people of north-eastern Siberia, and believed to host the spirits of deceased loved ones following a ritual transfer at the time of death. These objects do not begin to walk and talk after the spirit moves into them, nor could they ever be expected to pass the Turing test. Yet they are treated in every way as animate entities, and as perpetuating the identity of the relation lodged in them. In fact, devices for preserving personal identity beyond death turn out to be rather widespread across the world’s cultures, and often extremely low-tech. Yet while many cultures share with the Sakha the belief that identity can be transferred into another object, none of the non-Western examples we know of claim that the object harbours the consciousness of the deceased person – that the object becomes the new node from which the person looks out on and experiences the world. All such examples might be held, by sceptical outsiders, to be only symbolic of the former person, not identical with them; they help keep the person close to the thoughts of those who see the memento, but do not facilitate that same person’s own enduring thoughts. So they could not be said to provide the kind of immortality Woody Allen was longing for when he wrote: “I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.” Here, likely unconsciously, Allen committed himself to a philosophy of personal identity that was most famously expressed by John Locke in his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” of 1690: “Consciousness always accompanies thinking, and ’tis that, that makes every one to be, what he calls self.” No conscious thought, in other words, means no enduring selfhood. Or, conversely, no immortality without the survival of consciousness. The Silicon Valley immortalists, too, are Lockeans to a person. They do not want to be remembered; they want to be remembering. They are so certain that the matter of what a person is is so thoroughly settled that we can simply move on to other theoretical questions that confront us in our quest for immortality. Among these is what philosophers of mind call “substrate neutrality”: can our consciousness be transferred from an organic substrate of neurons to a silicon substrate of chips, or even, in principle, to a substrate of suitably arranged toilet-paper rolls and rubber bands? If so, consciousness is substrate-neutral. The commitment to substrate-neutrality is almost as widely accepted as Lockean personal identity, but not so widely as simply to be assumed true. A person, in this reigning metaphysics of Silicon Valley, is a special kind of substrate-neutral code that has the peculiar property of being aware of its own existence. Technology, they believe, can enable us to manipulate that code, to improve on it, and perhaps when the time comes, to transfer it out of a failing mortal coil and into a more robust vessel. Their idea of what a person is, and of what immortality might be, is entirely shaped and limited by the philosophy of liberal individualism: an opportunity to keep on “living one’s best life”, and if possible, of doing so in one’s own apartment. Aleks Krotoski’s fascinating new book penetrates deep into the heart of the Silicon Valley inflection of this now-centuries-old  philosophy. It shows the cultural practices motivated by that philosophy to be really no less strange than the use of a tüktüïe for housing a dead relative’s soul. Krotoski’s vignettes and character sketches amount to a demonstration of the philosopher Bruno Latour’s claim that “we have never been modern”. Far from it, in fact: the personalities, companies and gadgets that are supposed to be at the vanguard of modernity often turn out to be shaped by profoundly irrational beliefs, and driven by fantasies little different from what we might once have heard from a medieval alchemist in search of the elixir of youth. Krotoski isn’t that interested in cross-substrate consciousness transfer, where our organic embodiment is traded out wholesale for a more durable, yet utterly alien, material form. Short of that, there is a vast spectrum of hybrid technologies – implants, prostheses and apps – that are transforming us into cyborgs at a quickening pace: not quite organic, and not quite silicon, but a bit of both. And all of these new technologies function as the central nodes within great swirls of data, which in turn feed the new ideology of what is rightly called “the quantified self”. In a distinctly 21st-century perversion of the Socratic imperative to “know thyself”, Silicon Valley habitually interprets this commandment not, as Socrates did, as the call to prepare for death, or even to recognise that life itself has always been a kind of illness. Rather, today self-knowledge is the sort of thing you can arrive at by keeping a close watch on your blood-sugar fluctuations throughout the day, or by using a sleep app to monitor your snoring. To this extent, the metaphysics of Silicon Valley might best be thought of as the elevation of wellness to something like a transcendental principle. Socrates thought death itself was a cure for the sickness of life; the new immortalists set up the eradication of death as the ultimate purpose of all those activities pursued under the banner of “life-maxxing”. In this way, having what once would have been conceived simply as “good health” – living a good life for just as long as nature permits, and no longer – is now subordinated to the metaphysics of immortality. Intermittent fasting, antioxidant smoothies, olive oil from a shot glass: all of this becomes the ritual dimension of a new church of eternal life. Krotoski’s book is at its best when it rises above the wellness rituals themselves and looks squarely at the metaphysics that animates them: the conviction that the human is decomposable into variables that computation and chemistry can optimise. The author’s reporting around that conviction – its origins in grief and fear, its transmutation into a public liturgy of confidence – is utterly compelling. Krotoski’s treatment of Bryan Johnson, the venture capitalist and tech entrepreneur – and immortalist par excellence – who has been known to engage in contests with his own teenage son to see whose nocturnal-erection monitor was giving higher numbers, captures the quasi-religious tone of the scene: sermons, merch, an audience moved by a promise that computational mastery and self-tracking can make death optional, or at least deferrable. Krotoski’s juxtaposition of this conceit with the oldest literary counsel we have – Gilgamesh’s lesson that mortality is what constitutes life, and that human meaning is borne not by self-perpetuation but by works and by love – gives the book the critical structure and weight it needs: not as an apologia, but a philosophical test of a new creed on the cusp of deifying its own inventions. The book’s main claim is that “immortalism” is not primarily a matter of eccentric biohacking but of political theology. The most influential actors are not supplement peddlers but techno-fundamentalists with the means and will to remodel governance around their interests. In the end, the book’s indictment is not that longevity research is fraudulent, but that the movement’s metaphysics licenses an upside-down distribution of knowledge and mortal risk: those who can afford to be early adopters get to set the terms by privately trialling interventions, while public institutions are nudged to ratify a vision in which the extension of time becomes a status object. What more perfect culmination of the history of Lockean liberalism could there be than to find the self itself transformed into a status object one might buy for oneself – or, better, a subscription that one might decide to extend. The history of metaphysics and the history of political philosophy converge here with dazzling symmetry: in the 21st century, it is consciousness itself that remains the great no-man’s land for tech companies to conquer, and for us to seek to win back, either individually, by paying for it (Silicon Valley’s preferred mode), or collectively, by fighting for it. The Immortalists: The Death of Death and the Race for Eternal LifeAleks KrotoskiBodley Head, 320pp, £22 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops