Sex Robots and Vegan Meat

by Jenny Kleeman

  The first time anyone climbs into Sarco and presses the button it will be an event. Philip is already drumming up press interest for it. But Maia isn’t thinking of her own death as a performance; she isn’t an audience member at Philip’s Edinburgh Fringe gig having a go on his new death machine for a laugh. She needs to know whatever is being used will definitely end her life. ‘I’d have to be absolutely totally sure.’

  There are no certainties in Maia’s life. She is in limbo, neither unwell enough to die nor well enough to live. But it’s the way the world around her responds to her inability to fit into neat categories, her inbetweeness, that makes her existence so unbearable.

  ‘For the degenerative, incurable illnesses, you don’t have that kind of compassion that the terminal hospice people have, and you’re obviously not healthy and out in the world competing. You are cut off. America is not a society that favours the physically imperfect at all. It’s very cut-throat. And certainly the media world, where I came from. When you are scared, imperfect and impaired, it’s not a society that embraces you.’

  ‘But isn’t the answer to change those attitudes in society, rather than develop a technology to kill you?’

  ‘Yeah. Right! I think we have to work on all fronts.’

  Philip said the same kind of thing to me in Venice. But just like the effect IVF had on research into the causes of infertility, the easy answer Sarco provides might make it less likely that we investigate what makes a person want to end their life. And while death remains taboo and assisted dying continues to be an option only open to a select few, there will always be a market for DIY death. Like backstreet abortions, the drive will still be there, regardless of whether there is the technology or legal framework to ensure it can be done in a safe and dignified way.

  ‘To die in my bed, with my Cheshire cat who I love so much, and have a last meal – that’s ideally how I’d go,’ Maia says. ‘But my family dynamic is not healthy. Like so many American families, we are terrified of illness and death. Given my domestic situation it’s probably better to be in the peaceful dying apartment by the lake in Zurich or Basel, because it’s a space that is very safe and guaranteed, where it is culturally accepted and there is no shame.’

  Of all the people I’ve met who want to be in control of the end of their lives, Maia is the closest to the end. She expects to end her life at the Lifecircle clinic sometime within the next few months. Death is not some insurance policy waiting in her cupboard, a vague concept she is yet to confront – she is staring it in the face.

  ‘Is there such a thing as a perfect death?’ I ask her. ‘Can it ever exist?’

  Maia pauses for a moment.

  ‘Aesthetically it is the Sarco. You have an elegant device that actually makes you high and elated before you take off, right? It’s in some beautiful setting, because you can take it to your favourite place. That, aesthetically, is the perfect death,’ she replies eventually. ‘But what is really, profoundly, the perfect death is that you have made amends with everybody, and you are at peace with what occurred in your own life and your own mortality. You have cut ties with those attachments to your personal belongings, your resentments, your addictions, your anger. That is the perfect death for me – understanding and having gone through those steps of acceptance. The Sarco is beautiful, but if you don’t have those things in place then you can still be a tormented soul inside it.’

  ‘The perfect death is a state of mind, and not a means of dying?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says wistfully. ‘Yes, yes, yes.’

  Epilogue

  As I write this, Harmony isn’t on the market yet. Sidore and the rest of Davecat’s dolls remain the centre of his world, undisturbed by the artificially intelligent mistress that might one day steal his heart. The JUST chicken nugget still hasn’t been released in a high-end restaurant in a country with a relaxed attitude to food regulation. CHOP are expecting the FDA to rule on whether they can begin putting human babies into their biobag sometime in 2020, and they are hopeful that it will be in widespread use by the end of the decade. Wes and Michael have had a baby boy called Duke. smithe8 has deleted his Reddit account and disappeared from the manosphere. Sarco 2.0 is being spewed out in layers of semi-biodegradable plastic by the printer in Haarlem. Maia Calloway won’t be the first to use it, but Philip says at least a hundred people are in line behind her to die within its lacquered shell.

  In other words, none of the innovations I’ve encountered really exists yet. Harmony, JUST meat, the biobag and Sarco may all be suffused with hype, but the solutions they promise to provide are too alluring for them not ever to exist, the commercial imperative too great. They will go on the market one day, even if it’s not as soon as Matt, Josh, the CHOP team and Philip might promise.

  While their products remain in their workshops, their competitors are making strides. DS are taking £300 deposits on their first-generation heads. Cloud Climax have started stocking Emma, a £3,000 robotic head from another Chinese company, AI-Tech; she’s billed as ‘a secretary without temper’, who always calls her owner ‘Master’. Emma is little more than a winking, blinking mannequin who can read out your calendar alerts, but AI-Tech promises that ‘the more you talk, the more she learns’.

  A new artificial womb prototype was unveiled at Dutch Design Week 2019 that does away with lambs altogether. Eindhoven University of Technology’s take on ectogenesis hangs from the ceiling, like an enormous crimson beach ball, and comes complete with a reassuring artificial maternal heartbeat. The Dutch team will test it using 3D-printed fake babies fitted out with a vast array of sensors, and plan to move on to live human foetuses as soon as possible. In October 2019, the project won €2.9 million in EU funding. Professor Guid Oei, who is leading it, has hailed his invention as a ‘gamechanger’.

  Clean meat start-ups are springing up across the globe, growing exponentially like starter cells in FBS. The FDA in the US and the British government still can’t decide whether clean meat can be called meat, and the clean meat industry is quietly dropping the ‘clean’ label; it isn’t catching on, and it’s making the meat industry antsy at a time when everyone wants to keep it on side and investing heavily. (Even Bruce is changing his mind: in September 2019 he announced that the GFI was going to ‘embrace new language’ and start calling it ‘cultivated meat’ instead.) But plant-based burgers are taking the world by storm. When Beyond Meat shares hit the stock market it was the best-performing initial public offering of 2019, up 600 per cent in its first month. The Impossible Whopper is now on the menu of Burger King branches across the US, and Impossible is trying to work out how to meet the demand. Animal-free meat is taking off, even if disembodied flesh hasn’t quite worked out what it is yet.

  Before birth, food, sex and death are changed forever, significant hurdles will need to be crossed. First there is the yuck factor, the ick factor, the uncanny valley, the disgust human beings feel when something as intimate as how they have sex, what they eat, how they are born and how they die is challenged by a radically new means of production. The entrepreneurs are finding ways around it, with clever language, emotive arguments and sleek design. The shock of the new is nothing new. And if babies conceived in test tubes can become unremarkable, so can robot wives and babies in bags.

  Then there’s the question of who will get to use these technologies. They will be elite products, at least at first. For all Philip’s bluster about the universal human right to rational suicide, the death Sarco offers is a luxury for the privileged, and as much as Josh is working towards a just world ‘guided by reason, justice and fairness’, I can’t imagine the people he met in Liberia tucking into one of his Wagyu beef patties any time soon. Ectogenesis will only bring equality in reproduction for women rich enough currently to afford a social surrogate, and foetal rescue will only be possible in countries wealthy enough to have it in their arsenal of social care options. Even cut-price Chinese sex robots will cost a significant chunk of disposable income. The men determined to
go their own way will need a lot of cash to be truly free of women.

  Men dominate the tech industry, and their inventions reflect their egos and desires. But women will be disproportionately affected by the technologies I’ve encountered, and not just sex robots and artificial wombs. Most of those who died using Kervorkian’s machines were female, and wherever assisted dying is legal women choose it more often than men, even though suicide is generally much more of a male phenomenon. Women are more likely to outlive their partners, and are more used to doing the caring than being cared for. It’s possible that the fear of being a burden is felt even more acutely by women. And as Mark Post told me, ‘Meat has always been associated with power.’ Meat is about ‘eating like a man’. In every part of the world, men eat more meat than women. Meat is masculine, and so is the rampant overconsumption that’s causing so much harm. If the solution is lab grown meat, all of us will become dependent on ever more specialized technology where we were once self-sufficient, but women disproportionately so, compared to their desire for meat in the first place. These innovations tell us a lot about male appetites for food and sex, and the male desire to control birth and death.

  But both women and men fear disorder and powerlessness. Human beings want control over our environment, over our food, our bodies and each other. Sex robots are substitute partners, without the autonomy that makes human relationships so precarious. Clean meat is a substitute for animals, without the shit, disease and pollution that could lead to our extinction. Artificial wombs are substitute pregnant women, without their fallible bodies and potential for unmotherly behaviour. Death machines are a substitute for an unpredictable, undignified death. They are proxies that distance us from our nature, from the world around us and from each other.

  If we agree to outsource food, sex, birth and death to machines in order to have the illusion of control, we risk losing hold of our empathy, our imperfections, our agency, the contingency of our existence. Technology dehumanizes us. Even if it really is being developed with the noblest intentions – Saving the planet! Saving tiny babies! Giving companionship to the lonely! Setting the sick free! – we have no idea whose hands these inventions will fall into, what they will use it for and where it will ultimately take us.

  The ‘problems’ the innovations in this book are supposed to solve were caused by technology in the first place. Industrial agriculture has made animal meat unsustainable; the pill has given women the independence that is so inconvenient for men who want a partner who exists purely for their pleasure; medical interventions have made gestation inside the female body seem ever more risky; better medicines have made ageing, disease and death seem terrifying. Every time we rely on technological solutions, we risk becoming dependent on different orders of magnitude of complexity to carry out what has always come to us naturally. We disempower ourselves, and lose part of ourselves.

  None of these inventions are actually solutions: they are circumventions. Instead of looking at why some of us have the desire to have partners with no autonomy, to have babies without being pregnant, to eat large amounts of meat even though it damages the planet and our bodies, or to be in total control of our own deaths, the people I’ve met are selling us a way to ignore natural human anxieties. Instead of setting us free, they help us live with the conditions that are trapping us in the first place. They depoliticize them, obscure and bypass them. They’re giving us reasons not to know ourselves better.

  What does this mean for all of us? It can mean whatever we want it to. At its most dystopian, it means that women could become obsolete, that empathy will become hard work, that multinational companies could have total control of the meat industry, that vulnerable people will be able to download their own death with no oversight whatsoever. But that would be to take a fatalistic view of human nature, one I don’t buy.

  We can use the time we still have, before these inventions go on the market, to examine why we think we need them in the first place. Then we can make the changes and sacrifices necessary to solve fundamental human problems, instead of turning to technology to paper over them. We will have to make sacrifices – we can’t have our steak and eat it, we can’t have everything we want without any consequences, no matter what scientists and entrepreneurs may say. These inventions are going to change us, if we are not prepared to change our behaviour.

  Progress is the courage to choose a different mindset. That has to come before technological innovation, not because of it. And in some parts of the world we are already making the changes we need to move forward without these inventions. Every year, in wealthy countries at least, more citizens are being given the right to die in a safe and dignified way. Mothers are getting better maternity care and protection for their jobs. More people are becoming vegan or actively choosing to eat less meat, and fewer parents are bringing their kids up as meat eaters. The incels and MGTOWs of the men’s rights movement are an eye-catching but tiny minority; most men want their partners, sisters and daughters to be respected, protected and equal.

  The people I’ve met in these pages know this, but they also know that social change is hard work, and there is money to be made in offering an easier fix. It’s up to us whether we choose to buy it.

  If only everyone had bothered to read until the closing thoughts of that totemic ‘Fifty Years Hence’ essay Churchill wrote in 1931: ‘Projects undreamed of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants; forces terrific and devastating will be in their hands; comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache, their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things.’

  I’ve been trying to find out what these projects undreamed of will mean for our immediate descendants. One person’s dystopia is another’s bright future. But the words that have lingered most for me didn’t come from Matt McMullen, or Mark Post, or Anna Smajdor, or Philip Nitschke. They were said by perhaps the most unassuming person I met.

  As I was packing up my notebook on that cold day at the Open University in Milton Keynes, Matthew Cole, the vegan sociologist, drained the last of his coffee.

  ‘Coming up with technical fixes rather than ethical reform, revolution, rebellion… Every time that technology tries to stand in for ethics, we do ourselves a disservice,’ he said. ‘We deny ourselves the opportunity for growth.’

  It’s not possible to live a selfish life with a completely clear conscience, but living alongside imperfection, compromise, sacrifice and doubt is as fundamental a part of the human experience as birth, food, sex and death. We can choose whether to accept the messiness of our existence, or we can continue to try to use technology to cancel it out, like the earplugs in my Las Vegas hotel room. We don’t need sex robots and vegan meat. The freedom and power they promise us are already in our hands. We already have the answers. Putting them into action will take so much more than just opening a bag, closing a door, or flicking a switch.

  Acknowledgements

  I am incredibly grateful for the generosity of the people who let me interview them for this book. Many had no idea that talking to me would take up so much of their time. Thank you, and sorry I was in your hair for so long.

  I’d also like to thank:

  My agents, Sophieclaire Armitage and Zoe Ross, for their support and ideas, and for immediately getting what I wanted to do.

  My editor, Kris Doyle, for the enthusiasm, for the clarity of vision and for the title. James Annal, for the wonderful cover design. My publicist, Anna Pallai, for her determination in such extraordinary times.

  The people I rang up and disturbed far too often from their much more important work: Julie Kleeman, Rick Adams, Sarah Eisen and Saul Margo. Thank you for your expertise.

  My colleagues at the Guardian  : much of this book was made possible because of research I did for pieces that first appeared there. Enormous thanks must go to Tom Silverstone, who did so much to make my work into sex robots come alive, and to Mike Tait and Mustafa Khalali, who com
missioned the film Tom and I made together. Thanks also to Clare Longrigg, Jonathan Shanin, David Wolf, Charlotte Northedge, Ruth Lewy and Melissa Denes, whose razor-sharp editing of those pieces taught me how to write.

  The people who looked at very early drafts: Rick Adams, Ed Reed and Elizabeth Day. Stig Abell, who told me I should be writing a book in the first place.

  Laura Solon and Dan Pursey in Los Angeles, and Olivia Solon and Stu Wood in San Francisco, who fed me, gave me coffee and let me sleep in their spare rooms.

  My parents, David and Manou, and my sisters, Susanna, Nicole and Julie. Where do I begin? I am so lucky to have you all.

  Anna Kehayova, who held my life together while I was writing this. I can’t thank you enough.

  My children, who by and large stayed out of my bedroom when I was in there writing this.

  Scot, my partner in everything, and the smartest person I know.

  But the greatest thanks must go to Corrie Bramley, to whom I owe so much. Without her, every page of this book would be blank.

  About the Author

  JENNY KLEEMAN is a journalist and documentary filmmaker who travels the world finding eye-catching, thought-provoking stories. Her articles appear regularly in the Guardian and also in the Sunday Times (London), The Times of London, The New Statesman, and VICE. She has reported for BBC One’s Panorama and HBO’s VICE News Tonight. She won the One World Media Television Award for her work on Unreported World and was nominated for the Amnesty International Gaby Rado Award. She lives in England.

  Notes

  Chapter One

  worth over $30 billion This is according to the entrepreneur and investor Tristan Pollock, when he was at 500 Startups. See Andrew Yaroshenko, ‘What is #SEXTECH and how is the industry worth $30.6 billion developing?’, 4 June 2016, https://sexevangelist.me/what-is-sextech-and-how-is-the-industry-worth-30-6-billion-developing-d5f0a61e31d6