All gone, we had said. Finished.
His cousins’ dog, Woofy, had recently dropped dead from old age, but rather than trying to explain to him that she’d simply laid herself down on the kitchen floor and ceased to exist, we’d told him that she’d failed to be sufficiently careful, and had as a consequence been hit by a car. Bang! No more Woofy.
But now he wanted to know why his maternal great-grandmother was dead.
“Was she not careful?” he asked.
This made us laugh, a little, but it was, in the end, comprehensively unfunny. My wife’s grandmother had been dead for years by then, and I had interacted with her only a handful of times while she was alive, yet I felt a faint and subtle swell of sadness now at her loss, the awful fixedness of it. I tried to remember what she looked like, but could do no better than conjuring a more or less generic image of an elderly woman. Low-sized, white-haired, glasses. A walking cane? The most extreme form of inequality.
We told him that it wasn’t so much a matter of carelessness on her part as a result of her getting very, very old. When people got very, very old, we told him, they died.
And this was news to him. Dying, as far as he’d previously been aware, was what happened to people who got hit by cars, or—more excitingly—what happened to bad guys when good guys shot them.
He wanted to know whether we would get very, very old and die.
Because we felt we had no choice, we told him that we would, yes, eventually get very, very old and die—but not for an extremely long time. So long from now, we told him, that it wouldn’t seem so awful when it did happen. But he was solidly against the idea from the first. He didn’t want us to get very, very old and die. Not even eventually. Not even for an extremely long time.
One evening, my wife was putting him to bed, and he brought up the topic again.
“Do mamas and dadas really get old and die?” he said.
And my wife, feeling he had to be protected from this terrible awareness of how things were, told him that perhaps by the time he got to be Mama and Dada’s age, there might no longer be any death, and so maybe he wouldn’t have to worry about it at all. It was such a long way off, after all, and who knew what might happen between now and then. There were a lot of very clever men and women working very hard on the problem of death, she said, and perhaps they would succeed in solving it.
“You know how Dada has to go to America sometimes, for the book that he’s writing?” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
“Well, that’s what Dada’s book is all about. It’s all about how in the future, when you’re big, maybe nobody will ever have to die anymore.”
We had no access to heaven, but this seemed a useful substitute. Not as powerful or evocative an idea, perhaps, but a release valve, nonetheless, for the psychic pressures of mortality. And it seemed to work. The problem of death had been solved, at least in our house, at least for the time being.
The Wanderlodge of Eternal Life
IN THE AUTUMN of 2015, a man of my acquaintance purchased a forty-three-foot recreational vehicle—a 1978 Blue Bird Wanderlodge, to be precise—and, having made to this vehicle such modifications as would lend it the appearance of a gigantic coffin, set out to drive it eastward across the great potbellied girth of the continental United States. His reasons for doing so were, in certain respects, complex and conflicting, but for now it will suffice to inform you that this voyage was undertaken in order to raise awareness of two distinct but related matters. The first of these was the regrettable fact of human mortality, and the need to do something about it; the second was that of his candidacy in the following year’s presidential election.
This man’s name was Zoltan Istvan, and I had known him for about a year and a half by the time he began his progress across the country—from the Bay Area, where he lived, to the Florida Keys, and thence northward to Washington, D.C., where he planned to ascend Capitol Hill and, in coy allusion to Martin Luther’s delivery of his 95 Theses, affix a Transhumanist Bill of Rights to the great ornate bronze door of the Rotunda.
In an article on The Huffington Post, utilitarianly entitled “Why a Presidential Candidate Is Driving a Giant Coffin Called the Immortality Bus Across America,” Zoltan had laid out his reasons for same. “I’m hoping,” he wrote, “that my Immortality Bus will become an important symbol in the growing longevity movement around the world. It will be my way of challenging the public’s apathetic stance on whether dying is good or not. By engaging people with a provocative, drivable giant coffin, debate is sure to occur across the United States and hopefully around the world. I’m a firm believer that the next great civil rights debate will be on transhumanism: Should we use science and technology to overcome death and become a far stronger species?”
I had first met him at the conference in Piedmont. It was Hank Pellissier who had introduced us. He was constructed on a noble scale, Zoltan, handsome in an irrefutable and yet somehow unserious fashion—like a life-size Ken doll, or a proof-of-concept for an Aryan eugenic ideal. I recognized right away that he was not a typical transhumanist. He was polite and charismatic, and in no obvious sense geeky or awkward.
He gave me a copy of a book he’d recently self-published called The Transhumanist Wager, an unwieldy novel of ideas about a freelance philosopher named Jethro Knights (a character with certain key biographical particulars in common with his creator) who sails around the world to promote the need for life extension research, and winds up establishing a floating libertarian city-state called Transhumania—a haven for unhampered scientific research into human longevity, a regulation-free utopia of tech billionaires and rationalists—from which he wages an atheist holy war on a theocratic United States.
A couple of days later, at a café in San Francisco’s Mission District, he told me of how the novel had not gone over well with any of the 656 agents and publishers he’d sent it out to over the previous year. He’d spent over a thousand dollars, he said, on postage alone. Self-publishing had been the only available option, but he was pleased with how the book was selling, the impact it was having within the transhumanist movement. It was, he said, starting conversations. The book’s cover, which he himself had designed, featured a greenish negative photo of his own face, in profile, staring into the vacant sockets of a human skull. He himself was the first to acknowledge that it was not entirely successful, from an aesthetic point of view.
“It’s supposed to be like Hamlet,” he said. “You know, with the whole Yorick scene? With me facing the prospect of death and all that? But yeah, I’m not sure it really works.”
I glanced down at the book in front of us on the table, and did not disagree. We were sitting in a courtyard at the rear of the café, in blinding midday sunlight. The tables were all occupied, I noted, and yet we were the only people conducting a conversation. Every other customer in the café was alone, and typing on an Apple laptop. As so often in San Francisco, I had a sense of being embedded in some hyperreal simulation of a corporate utopia—or, rather, a heavy-handed parody of such a thing. As a scene, it felt a little overbearing in its symbolism. This is one of the problems with reality: the extent to which it resembles bad fiction.
“I’ve seen worse book covers,” I said, which for all I knew might have been the truth.
With Zoltan, the impression was of a man who, having reached his early forties, was trying to recapture the existential vitality of his youth. In his twenties, having graduated from Columbia University with a degree in philosophy, he’d fixed up an ancient yacht and, alone but for the dozens of nineteenth-century Russian novels with which he’d stocked the vessel, set out to circumnavigate the globe. He had partially funded his trip by making short documentaries for the National Geographic Channel about the remote places he was visiting. Somewhere along the way, he had invented an extreme sport called volcano boarding (basically the same thing as snowboarding, except you did it on the slopes of an active volcano). While reporting on the large number of buried land m
ines still remaining in Vietnam’s DMZ, Zoltan himself came very close to stepping on one of these devices; his guide tackled him from behind as he was walking, and brought him to the ground just inches from where an unexploded mine was jutting from the earth.
In the narrative he had constructed about his life—his origin story—this was the moment he’d become a transhumanist, the moment he’d become consumed by an obsession with mortality, with the unacceptable fragility of human existence. He returned to California to set up a real estate business and, taking full advantage of the permissive finance culture of those years, bought and flipped a number of properties in quick succession. He hated the work, but he was good at it, and made quite a lot of money very quickly. Right before the crash in 2008, he sold half his portfolio, and came out of the deal a millionaire. He hung on to the rest of it, which included a number of houses on the West Coast, some land in the Caribbean, and a straight-up vineyard in Argentina. Forty years after his own parents had fled the Communist People’s Republic of Hungary, he was the embodiment of an American capitalist ideal: the immigrant son with a weird European name who’d become an honest-to-God self-made millionaire. It hadn’t even been that hard. The system worked. Money worked.
And that money was enough to enable him to quit his job, and to dedicate himself to several years of writing The Transhumanist Wager, into which project he channeled all his ideas about the possibility, and the necessity, of achieving physical immortality through science.
That day in the Mission, Zoltan told me of how his wife, Lisa, a gynecologist who worked for Planned Parenthood, had recently started to express a keen interest in his doing something productive with his life. Lisa had, at that point, just given birth to their second child, and, what with the exponentially growing cost of living in the Bay Area, and Zoltan’s reluctance to sell any further properties, she was becoming increasingly concerned about the need to begin saving for their two daughters’ educations. He himself, he said, was reluctant to fritter away money on such things, given that by the time the girls were in their late teens it would be possible to upload the informational content of a Harvard or Yale degree directly to their brains anyway—and at a fraction of what such an education costs today.
Lisa, he said, was largely tolerant of his views, but drew the line at gambling their children’s futures on the fanciful notion of some imminent technological intervention.
“Obviously she’s a little resistant to transhumanist ideas,” he explained, “because in the near future her entire profession will be obsolete. What with actual childbirth becoming a thing of the past. You know, with babies being produced by ectogenesis and whatnot.”
“Your wife sounds like a smart lady,” I said.
“Oh, she is,” he said, finishing his latte. “A very smart lady.”
When, some months later, Zoltan emailed me about his decision to run for president, I immediately called him. The first thing I asked was what his wife thought of the plan.
“Well, in a way,” he said, “it was Lisa who gave me the idea. Remember how I said she wanted me to do something concrete, get some kind of a proper job?”
“I do,” I said. “Although I’m guessing running for president on the immortality platform was not what she had in mind.”
“That’s correct,” he confirmed. “It took a little while for her to come around to the idea.”
“How did you break it to her?”
“I left a note on the refrigerator,” he said, “and went out for a couple hours.”
—
I will admit that I was never as appalled by Zoltan as I should have been. I will admit, that is, that I liked him more than I had any business liking him. This strikes me as an important point, and maybe even a structural one. He was, in many ways, an embodiment of everything that was most questionable about transhumanism—of its extremity, its blindness to human nuance, to anything but the most bluntly instrumental measures of human value.
Once, he told me about a thing that had happened in a coffee shop he frequented in Mill Valley, the upscale North Bay neighborhood where he lived with his family. He’d gone to the coffee shop to get out of the house for a bit, and to do some work on his laptop. A man and his teenaged son came in, and the son, who was profoundly mentally handicapped, slipped free of his father’s grasp, and began to run around the coffee shop, bumping against tables and knocking things over. One of the tables the boy bumped against was Zoltan’s, causing his coffee to spill over his laptop.
The point of the story, as always with Zoltan, was to suggest that technology might be brought to bear on such regrettable human situations. The incident had got him thinking about whether it might not be sensible—better, on the whole, for the boy, and for his parents, and for society at large—that such profoundly afflicted people be cryonically suspended early in life, put on ice, as it were, until such time as we possessed the technology to cure them of their conditions.
The laptop, incidentally, was unharmed.
“The question to ask,” he said, “is this: If you were that individual, would you want that done to you? Would you want to live a life where you can’t think, where you’re just running around crazy all the time? Or would you want society to just rise up and say, you know what? Of course this is very challenging ethically, but we believe that in fifty years we will have the science to make this person all that he can be. So if we cryonically suspend him now, we will be giving him the prospect of a normal life in the future.”
This view seemed a consequence of transhumanism’s extreme instrumentalism, a view of life in which intelligence, pure use-value, took precedence over all other concerns. (I thought of Tim and Marlo, of Anders Sandberg and Randal Koene: their ecstatic visions of ascension to pure mind.) Zoltan saw the boy in his story as a broken machine, a mechanism serving no purpose to himself or others, but whom technology might be called upon to put to rights, to save. It is important to understand that the intended implication of Zoltan’s story was one of optimism. Zoltan was nothing if not an optimistic man.
It struck me that there was something grandly and irreducibly American in the specific gesture of running for president, in the notion that—if only in theory, if only in symbol—it was the right and the possibility of every individual to seek absolute power, absolute influence, in the name of some cause, in the name of himself.
It should be said that although he was a highly ambitious man, Zoltan’s decision to run for president was by no means motivated by a delusion that he would ever make a significant impact at the ballot box, if he ever managed to get that far. It was motivated by another manifestation of unrestrained optimism: that death was a problem to be solved. That we could, all of us, be put to rights by technology.
And this went to the core of what I found so compellingly strange about transhumanists as a whole, about their values and motivations: the idea that, as a culture, as a species, we needed to be shaken out of our complacency about mortality. Not in the existential sense that we should live with an abiding consciousness of death’s inevitability, but in the precisely opposite sense that such a belief in death’s inevitability was itself a form of complacency, an excuse not to address the problem.
I wanted to get as close as possible to this idea, to follow it as it made its way from the Bay Area to the American heartland. And so I made plans to get on the bus.
By the time I joined him on the campaign trail, in late October of 2015, Zoltan’s fortunes had in many respects changed for the better. Due to the media interest his presidential bid was accruing, he was now one of the most prominent figures in the transhumanist movement. Documentary crews from Vice and Showtime had recently been following his progress across California and Nevada, and his personal brand had seen a considerable uptick in value: he had lately entered the promised land of the lucrative corporate speech, the $10,000 conference appearance fee.
That a man who had until so recently been an unknown quantity had risen so swiftly to prominence, and that, bec
ause of his self-proclaimed leadership of the Transhumanist Party, the media had begun to identify him as a de facto leader of transhumanism per se: all of this was causing considerable disquiet within the movement. Among the old guard, there was a growing sense of Zoltan as a usurper, as a man who had come from nowhere and had hijacked the movement, and the term “transhumanism,” for his own ends.
When I joined him on a Friday morning in Las Cruces, New Mexico (the plan being to drive the bus across Texas to give a campaign speech at a biohacking event in Austin the following Monday evening), he had just driven from Phoenix, where he’d met with Max More at Alcor. It was a meeting he’d anticipated with some anxiety, I knew, because Max, along with several other members of the transhumanist old guard—“the elders,” as Zoltan referred to them with no apparent irony—had signed a petition disavowing his presidential campaign, disassociating themselves from him and his party, which, as Zoltan himself was forced to acknowledge, was not really a party in any meaningful sense anyway, so much as just him and a handful of advisors. (At that point, Aubrey de Grey was on board as the campaign’s “anti-aging advisor,” and Martine Rothblatt’s son Gabriel—who had himself run for Congress in 2014—was acting as political advisor.)
That morning, at my hotel in El Paso, I’d gone online and watched a report on Phoenix’s Channel 3 News about Zoltan’s campaign stop in the city. “The plan,” drawled the reporter, “is to drive this sarcophagus on wheels to Washington, D.C., and to convince the White House, as well as Congress, to put more money into immortality research.” The report had covered his visit to Alcor and, from what I could see, it seemed cordial enough.
I met Zoltan outside an empty secondhand bookstore on Las Cruces’s main street. His hair was neater, blonder, than when I’d last seen him seven months previously, and his face and neck were mottled from exposure to the desert sun. He was accompanied by an exceptionally tall and willowy young man with long black center-parted hair and wide, ascetic eyes. This young man held a video camera attached to a tripod in one hand; the other he extended toward me in solemn salutation.
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