“I just want to have fun forever,” said Roen at length, guiding a forkful of dry salad leaves toward his pale face. “The twenty years I get from eating the way I do could be the difference between my dying and my getting to longevity escape velocity. I’m holding off on pleasure now so that I can have more pleasure later. I’m actually a total hedonist.”
“You don’t seem even slightly like a hedonist to me,” I said. “You don’t drink, you don’t take drugs. You barely eat. To be honest, you seem like a medieval monk.”
Roen cocked his head to one side, gave the idea some consideration. I didn’t want to raise the topic of sex, but it seemed to hang there, twirling slowly above our heads like the rubber avatar of Death. I didn’t have to, as it turned out: Roen himself brought it up, after his own fashion.
“You know one really cool thing about being alive in the future?” he asked.
“What’s that?”
“Sexbots.”
“Sexbots.”
“You know, like AI robots that are built for having sex with.”
“Oh sure,” I said. “I’ve heard of sexbots. It’s a nice enough idea. You really think that’s going to happen, though?”
“For sure,” said Roen, closing his eyes and nodding beatifically, in momentary reflection upon some distant exaltation. “It’s something I’m very much looking forward to.”
He had a particular way of smiling that was half evasion and half challenge. Out of context, you’d maybe be tempted to describe it as smug, but the effect was somehow deeply endearing.
“The problem I have with sexbots,” I said, “is why wouldn’t you just have sex with an actual person? I mean, all things being equal.”
He said, “Are you kidding me? A real girl could cheat on you, sleep around. You could get an STD. You could maybe even die.”
“Is that potentially a bit alarmist?”
“No way, man. It happens literally all the time. See, a personal sexbot would never cheat on you, and it would be just like a real girl.”
He said nothing for a time, and drank at leisure from his glass of water. He consumed some further forkfuls of salad. He gazed out the window at the parking lot full of trucks, the Interstate beyond, the ever-present vultures hanging in the air.
I said, “Do you mind me asking if you’ve had bad experiences with people cheating on you?”
He said, “I have so far abstained from sex. I have never had a girlfriend.”
“You’re saving yourself for the sexbots?”
He nodded slowly, shrewdly raising his eyebrows. You bet your ass he was saving himself for the sexbots.
“Fair enough,” I said, raising my hands in affable capitulation. “I hope you live that long.”
He said, “I’m pretty sure I will.”
The widening rift between Zoltan and the “elders” was becoming an increasingly predominant topic of conversation on the bus. It was all quite a complicated situation, and there seemed to be several distinct factors in play. In an interview about his campaign for the website Vox, Zoltan had signaled his intention to abandon his campaign at some point before the election and to endorse the candidacy of whoever wound up being the Democratic nominee. Hank Pellissier, one of Zoltan’s earliest supporters, had resigned as secretary of the Transhumanist Party in protest against this revelation, which he claimed was the “last straw.”
Hank’s defection had ignited further dissent from transhumanists who had all along been quietly unconvinced by Zoltan’s campaign. Among these was Christopher Benek, a Florida Presbyterian pastor who was one of the most prominent Christian transhumanists, and who had until recently been on ecumenical terms with Zoltan. (Reverend Benek had raised some futurist eyebrows in 2014 by publicly suggesting that advanced forms of artificial intelligence should be converted to Christianity, reasoning that any autonomous form of intelligence was one that should be encouraged “to participate in Christ’s redemptive purposes in the world.”) Writing in The Christian Post, he had taken issue with Zoltan’s “ideological tyranny,” and his “imperiously appointing himself as all U.S. Transhumanists’ representative,” furthermore characterizing his run as “merely an attempt to globally claim transhumanism as a primarily Atheistic venture which openly rejects organized religion and God.”
Further disquiet had been caused by Zoltan’s announcement on Facebook of his intention, once he’d finished his presidential campaign, to establish “a global political party that embraces the idea of being the leading voice and influence in a worldwide government.” Zoltan had always been vocal about his belief in the abolition of national borders, but he seemed now to be following his libertarian logic to some paradoxically authoritarian ends. It was hard to imagine this surprising anyone who had read The Transhumanist Wager, but the announcement served to further alienate all but the most extreme techno-rationalist of Zoltan’s supporters.
And then had come the petition to disavow his campaign, whose signatories rejected both Zoltan and his Transhumanist Party, “so long as it cowers under authoritarian control, so long as it denies the diversity of Transhumanist values, and so long as it mongers unnecessary hostility toward others.”
His increasing tendency to publicly adopt outlandish political positions was a major factor of this growing dissent. That spring, for instance, he had published an opinion piece on Motherboard, Vice’s technology website, arguing that the $1.3 billion recently budgeted by the city of Los Angeles to make its streets and accessways more wheelchair accessible would be far more sensibly spent on investing in robotic exoskeleton technology. “Let the sidewalks remain in disrepair,” he wrote. “Instead, in the transhumanist age we’re now in, let’s work to repair physically disabled human beings, and make them mobile and able-bodied again.”
When I discussed this with him, Zoltan seemed genuinely not to understand why people with disabilities were so deeply offended by this insistence that it was they who needed “fixing,” rather than the discriminatory attitudes that were manifested in the urban environment, and in comments like his own. The underlying premise of transhumanism, after all, was that we all needed fixing, that we were all, by virtue of having human bodies in the first place, disabled. (I found myself recalling, here, Tim Cannon’s assimilation of the language of transgender experience to the transhumanist context—his insistence that he was trapped in the wrong body by virtue of having a body at all.)
Unchastened by the exoskeleton debacle, Zoltan later went on to suggest that an elegant solution to the debate over the Obama administration’s plan to take in ten thousand refugees from the Syrian civil war would be to implant those refugees with microchips as part of their admittance process. Such a policy, he claimed, would enable the government to track their movements, to determine whether they were plotting terrorist atrocities, and “monitor whether they were contributing to the system, paying taxes or causing strife.” He was aware of the extent to which people found this idea repugnant, but again seemed basically untroubled. His response to concerns about this advocation of unprecedented intrusion of government into the lives—into the very bodies—of human beings was to say that “maybe Big Brother isn’t the bad guy, if he protects us from ISIS.” Besides, he himself had had an RFID chip implanted at a grinder event earlier in his campaign tour, and the procedure had been much less painful than you’d think. Once the refugees were deemed not to be a threat to public safety—after a probationary period of, say, three years—they might even choose not to have their microchips removed, given that the technology would soon enable them to pay for coffee in Starbucks by waving their hands at a chip reader.
To the extent that all this was motivated by any ideology to speak of, it seemed to me to be motivated by an ideology of technology itself: an imperative to increase the merger of humans and machinery by whatever means necessary. (As such, Zoltan often seemed to me like a walking illustration of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s argument, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, that the progress of scientific rationali
sm was always a progress toward tyranny. “Technical rationality today,” as they put it, “is the rationality of domination. It is the compulsive character of a society alienated from itself.”)
In his more expansive moments, he spoke of the possibility—“if this trajectory we’re on holds”—of his eventually surpassing Kurzweil in terms of influence. “I can bring a huge amount of younger people into transhumanism,” he said. “I’m actively trying to build a movement with these millennials, so they’ll change the culture.” He was obsessed with impact, with eyeballs; he spoke of retweets and engagements and Facebook likes and other metrics as though such things were the true currency of the new world, and he made it clear, time and again, that the “elders” could not hope to match his impact in this sphere. The media loved him, and he loved that they loved him, and he loved that the former leaders of the transhumanist movement hated that they loved him.
I was impressed by the multidisciplinary sweep of his ambitions, his almost mystical conviction about his own rise to greater heights of influence and power. Frequently, he spoke of the environmentalist movement as a model for how he planned to build transhumanism, and radical life extension particularly, into something the general public, and eventually governments, would be forced to take seriously. It was clear that he thought of himself as the Al Gore figure in this model.
—
My feelings toward Zoltan were complicated, contradictory, and subject to sudden mutations, intensifications, reversals. His grandiosity exerted a paradoxical magnetism, tempered as it was by an easygoing self-deprecation. He would be talking about wanting to change the world, convincing folks that physical immortality was within their grasp, and, in the next moment, he would be taking ironic delight in some scheme he’d come up with to keep the Wanderlodge on the road for another few hours.
“That’s what I’m good at, half-assing stuff,” he told me one afternoon in the parking lot of a Walmart where we’d stopped to fill a cart with containers of engine oil, and some barbecue trays to collect it as it leaked from the bus.
I said I’d begun to think of the Immortality Bus as the Entropy Bus, and of ourselves as trundling across Texas in a great mobile metaphor for the inevitable decline of all things, the disintegration of all systems over time.
The elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.
“Entropy sucks,” said Roen.
“It is what it is,” said Zoltan. “It absolutely is what it is.”
I had begun, I realized, to feel some strange affinity with these two men: not through any deeply felt sympathy for their mystical aims, but rather through being with them, traveling with them, eating in the same truck stops and sleeping in the same motels and listening to the same endless loop of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on the ancient cassette deck of the Wanderlodge. It was a comradeship of sorts; we were confreres in futility, which was perhaps the best that could be said of any association of humans. But then they would never have consented to such a description of our situation, and so it was, in that sense, no kind of comradeship at all.
This question of futility was raised many times on the Wanderlodge. Zoltan and Roen believed that life was rendered meaningless by death. If in the end everything was lost, they asked, what was the point of anything?
I did not feel qualified to answer this question, but I tried to make a case for life as it currently stood, which meant trying to make a case for death. Wasn’t it the fact that life ended, I asked, that gave it what meaning it had? Wasn’t it the very fact that we were here for so brief a time, that we could be gone at any moment, that made life so intensely beautiful and terrifying and strange? (Then again, wasn’t the idea of meaning itself an illusion, a necessary human fiction? If a finite existence was futile, wouldn’t immortality be just a state of endless futility?)
There was no beauty in finitude, they said, no meaning to be extracted from oblivion. My arguments, Roen insisted, were transparently motivated by a “deathist” ideology—a need to protect myself against the terror of death by trying to convince myself that death was actually not so terrible. As crazy as most of what Roen had said sounded to me, he was, I thought, basically right about this. This was an idea that had been suggested to me, in one form or another, by many of the transhumanists I had spoken to over the previous eighteen months—by Natasha Vita-More, for instance, by Aubrey de Grey, by Randal Koene.
We drove through the emptiness. Don’t Mess with Texas. Ruptured armadillos, rotting in the desert heat. Stand with Israel. Zoltan swigged at intervals from a magnum-sized vessel of greenish energy drink he’d picked up on our last Walmart stop. We talked for hours, and then for hours more we said nothing at all. We listened to the Tom Petty cassette straight through, twice, three times. “Running down a dream,” he sang, “that never would come to me.” Forty minutes later, he sang it again.
What was it that was going on here? The whole enterprise suddenly seemed to me like an absurdist parody of social privilege: three white men traveling across a wilderness, protesting against the final injustice they would one day suffer in common with all creatures, the great leveler that must itself be leveled. Was dying of old age not, in this sense, the ultimate First World Problem?
About an hour east of Ozona, we pulled off the Interstate onto a narrow side road so that Zoltan could remove the barbecue tray, which was by now almost overbrimming with leaked oil. We were on the perimeter of a vast ranch, a flat and half-barren landscape of scrub grass and squat cactuses as far as the human eye could see. I went behind the bus to take a piss, and as I did so I looked up and counted five vultures idling overhead, like predator drones in the inverted abyss of the sky. I tried to imagine how we might have appeared to the serenely primordial eyes of these eschatological beasts, three medium-sized mammals lumbering upright, without apparent purpose, around a great coffin-shaped Leviathan. But what could any of this—men, coffins, journeys—possibly mean to these creatures, to whom nothing was required to mean anything? Probably, we were irrelevant to their view of the landscape, being too large to kill, and not yet otherwise dead.
I struggled to remember a line from the eighth of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, where he writes about the freedom in which animals live—“the Open” upon which they look out, and which vista is unavailable to us, oriented as we are always toward the overbearing presence of our own finitude. Back on the bus, I Googled it on my phone, and found it: “We, only, can see death; the free animal/has its decline in back of it, forever, and God in front, and when it moves, it moves/already in eternity, like a fountain.”
Later, as we barreled along the Interstate, Roen cheerfully drew our attention toward a gigantic billboard that read “IF YOU DIE TODAY, WHERE WILL YOU SPEND ETERNITY?”
“In the ground,” he said. “In the ground.”
He told me about an accident he’d had when he was six. He’d fallen from his bike, and punctured his spleen and had very nearly died from internal bleeding. Weeks in the hospital, then a recovery; but a darkness had been revealed to him, a black terror beneath the thin surface of the world. Every night, he awoke gasping from the same nightmare, in which he had died in his sleep, in which he felt himself lying there in his bed feeling nothing, an impossible body. Every night this same experience of a thing that could not be experienced, this same vision of a thing that could never be glimpsed. This was the beginning of his move away from the religion of his parents, he said, this vision of the nothingness that awaited him after death.
—
Farther east, at a roadside rest stop, Roen switched on his video camera and approached two young women seated at a picnic area, beneath a corrugated iron shelter flanked on either side with giant wagon wheels. Pointing the camera in their faces, he asked them if they feared death. They seemed more bemused than intimidated, but I wanted no part of this exchange, and so I wandered off toward the other side of the rest stop. My path was intersected by two young men. They wanted to kn
ow why my friend was filming their girlfriends. I pointed to the Wanderlodge, and told them we were on the campaign trail with a third-party presidential candidate, and that Roen was making a documentary.
“That guy’s running for president?” said the larger of the two, peering skeptically at Roen—Roen, with his Joan Baez hair, his knee-length shorts, his unblinking righteous eyes.
“Not that guy, the other guy,” I said, indicating Zoltan, who was standing beside the Wanderlodge finishing up a phone call. “That’s his campaign bus. I’ll introduce you guys if you want.”
We all—me, Roen, the two young women, their boyfriends—went over to Zoltan, who met these constituents with expansive gestures, warm greetings, statesmanlike handclasps.
“So what’s up with the bus?” said the smaller and tougher-looking guy.
“We fixed it up to look like a giant coffin, to raise awareness about death.”
“It doesn’t look like a giant coffin,” said the guy. “Looks more like a giant turd.”
Zoltan tactfully ignored this remark, and explained, somewhat superciliously, that the goal of the campaign was “to promote investment in longevity science so that you can live a longer life.”
A sturdy, low-slung man who looked to be in his mid-thirties descended from the cab of an adjacent truck, stretched briefly, and narrowed his eyes at the Wanderlodge, the assembled group, before ambling over. He was wearing purple basketball shorts, a voluminous black T-shirt, Oakley shades. His name was Shane, he said, and he was driving cross-country toward Florida.
“You got some kind of political thing going on here?” asked Shane.
“Yes we do,” said Roen. “Do you want to live forever?”
“Sure I would,” said Shane. “I’m scared as hell to die. Who wouldn’t want to live forever?”
To Be a Machine Page 23