Immortality Populism

Bryan Johnson, Otto Rank and the Homonculus

“In the end, and in a way typical of the era of the son, Faust achieved immortality in his own acts and works, and so rededicated himself to humanity.” - Otto Rank

“In the end we’re dependent on

The creatures we’ve created.” - Mephistopheles, Faust II 

You can tell a lot about a culture by how it approaches death. You can figure out even more from how it approaches its rejection of it.

So what does immortality or longevity mean for a contemporary person living in the United States? And what did it mean for a diverse set of New York underground culturati that gathered last week to watch an in-person livestream interview with one of the avatars of post-modern deathlessness?

The particular avatar was venture capitalist Bryan Johnson, who was interviewed over video call at a baroque-modern lounge in a social club/coworking space in SoHo. Hundreds of people milled about and a few dozen sat as Johnson appeared – a pale apparition of fitness – on two large projectors. He was being interviewed live by a few moderators including Matthew Donovan, who is adept at crossing cultural wires within this convoluted social machine by casting mixes of people and subjects together, creating ideological and social cocktails in a way that almost resembles performance art.

Here the most interesting thing wasn’t Johnson, though, whose views and methods aren’t particularly absurd or even troublesome in the spectrum of the tech oligarchy, but the why at the core of the fascination of those gathered, even if ironically, What drew them towards this spector of immortality and life-extension in a contemporary iteration?

Donovan and company pressed Johnson on several issues including the classist nature of his project. He mostly avoided them, preferring instead to go on spiels about his belief system. He said, essentially, that we are on the eve of the advent of superintelligence, and that we should use the data analysis and biological tools we have now to shore our species up while we can. He also said that contemporary American culture feels rudderless and that the belief in and scientific pursuit of longevity could be the unifying point that brings it all back together.

Whose longevity remained unsaid, even after Donovan pressured him about other more democratic methods of sharing research around anti-aging, which on further inspection resembles a doctor giving researched health advice for free. A closer look at Johnson’s program includes ground-breaking procedures such as fasting, clean eating, and supplements, all optimized through the unprecedented computation and biological feedback made possible by contemporary AI, of course. All bundled in tiddy subscriptions.

The most outlandish of his pursuits include the (now abandoned) attempts to reinvigorate himself with blood transfusions from his son and experimental gene therapies, detailed in this New York Times piece that fashions him the “meme king of longevity”. It also presents numerous skeptical takes on his method. 

In the article, Johnson says, “I’m more interested in what people of the 25th century think of me. The majority of opinions now represent the past.” 

The blood stuff and gene editing are surely what drives the ongoing fascination with Johnson—it’s certainly what drove me to the event (he joked about people disparaging him as a vampire and made it clear, to the haters, that it is empiricism that drives him), but his comment about the “past” is interesting, as his pursuit is one that has occupied the ruling class for thousands of years and puts him more in line with pagan emperors and popes than any sort of modern technocrat, the smartest of which in the 20th century were more concerned with the survival of their name and advancements than with literal biological continuation. 

In the talk, Johnson was asked if he believed in God and replied that he needed to see more evidence. But he is happy drawing on belief to gain traction for his own personal brand of longevity. 

“Every religion has been trying to offer a solution to ‘Don’t die’ — that’s the product they’ve generated,” he told the Times. 

Throughout history, extensions of human life past a natural span have been divided roughly along class lines, with the ruling class chasing extended life and immortality, and the lower classes holding onto hope for more time in afterlives of various flavors. 

It seems that Johnson’s Don’t Die project, and many like his, aim to collapse the two poles, which on its face doesn’t seem like such a bad thing – after all, heaven is less popular, and more people have the time and means to devote themselves to the kind of program that Johnson is selling (and the hundreds of supplements it entails).

 

Immortality populism 

In an article for the Washington Post, Theo Zenou writes about the burgeoning anti-aging industry and how it's projected to be worth upwards of 600 billion by next year. 

He then cites a long list of powerful antecedents from Gilgamesh to the modern day, including but not limited to the first Chinese emperor whose relentless search for eternal life led him to slaughter entire villages for even mentioning death and led to his relatively early death at 46; a pope who bathed in blood to prolong his power; testicle grafting among 19th-century proto-physicians; and of course Himmler’s infamous search for the holy grail.

He even goes as far as to call the alchemy of the Middle Ages and the legend of the Philosopher’s Stone as “Medieval biotech”.

This is elite immortality, always utilizing vast powers and resources to uncover new leads is usually at the margins of some burgeoning or even slightly heretic field. Some of these elite exploits may have even provided seed money for research into other scientific or academic pursuits. 

Somewhere between this elite immortality and popular immortality are the ascetics such as yogis, who have long been known for their old age as a result of extreme self-discipline and knowledge of plant medicines, diets, and mental practices. The contemporary anti-agers know this. Buddhist and Hindu practices have for generations been easily worked into the individualist body cult of the post-Esalen West. 

VC anti-ageism has managed to combine the technological grandeur of marshaling vast resources and the spectacle it entails with the unique American mixture of capitalist self-optimization, packaging it into a consumer-friendly evangelism of health, and, as Johnson explicitly says, using the mechanics of religion to sell it. It is am immortality populism on par with our degraded politics and belief systems and runs a very similar course. It latches onto some of the unhealthy (and very real) habits of contemporary life and promises a solution through membership in a club that anyone can join, for a price. It’s clear that anti-aging is also linked, in many ways, to the sort of nostalgic body cult; those were the good days, and winding back my biological clock may keep the scary future at bay. This mixing of elite and popular immortality makes it like so much of our products and beliefs, without conviction or history, smooth, user-friendly – and extremely profitable. It’s a massive expenditure akin to the ancient quests for immortality, all while cutting a profit, used by some to build bunkers or to invest in their own scores of offspring—sad inverted pyramids and hasty dynasties.

Soul searching 

Psychoanalytic thinker Otto Rank agreed with his mentor Sigmund Freud that there were forces within human desire that called for self destruction, but also that to imagine one’s death is impossible. Rank believed the desire to live beyond the bounds of one’s own life led to the creation of the concept of the soul, which took on a variety of manifestations. Rank saw the approach to immortality as fluctuating between personal immortality and procreative immortality. The first held the soul's intractable existence and persistence within a cosmology, while the second held that the soul’s immortality would pass on to offspring. 

Rank eventually divested himself from Freud’s theory, concluding that the adherence to natural sciences to investigate the inner workings of the soul – whether viewed as an existing intractable “shadow self” or as a concept to negate mortality – had led to a hallowing out of humanity’s inner life. 

“From their inception, the natural sciences had been humanistic. Babylonian astrology, the metaphysics of the Ionian philosophers, and the alchemy of the black arts of the Middle Ages were all manifestations of spiritual belief: alchemy tried to create the soul artificially (homunculus ); and astrology, to read its fate in the stars with which it was identified. The one tried to insure personal immortality by virtue of the soul's connection with the external world soul; the other, by consciously fathoming its secrets.” (Psychology and the Soul)

Rank believed that the elite/popular immortality has transited relatively unbroken into the modern sphere, but that a breakdown of the “soul” in the face of doubting generated by misplaced self study of the “soul” (as guarantor against mortality) has itself led to individualist neuroses. While he’s talking about psychology specifically, it seems that this hyper-intense diagnostic of the self or self-measurement could be applied more broadly, and that the same analytic gestures of psychology have spread to our self-focused cultural dynamics.

“The real threat to the soul lay not with the atheistic natural scientists, but with the individualistic soulseekers who felt that they had to win their immortality independently of collectivistic spiritual ideology and beyond procreative sexual ideology, and whose need for personal immortality could be satisfied neither by the family or religion nor by the state or people, which stood for both.”

It’s unclear what the role of the soul plays for Rank. He’s not necessarily calling for a return to religious conceptions of immortality but showcasing the limits of the natural sciences for turning back on the individual. Such self-analysis has created conditions for highly neurotic individuals, and while it’s not appropriate to diagnose someone like Johnson from afar, the popularity of his consumerist Don’t Die does exactly what he says above, uses a religious parlance coated with empiricism to cover up individualist neuroses towards death usually routed through some religious principle. 

Johnson’s project isn’t a response to the lack of a national project, as he mentioned in the talk, but a symptom of it. Taken in total, the desire for more life isn’t bad or necessarily wrong in the scheme of desire. Using empirical data to promote this puts it well within the scope of the trajectory of natural sciences that Rank laid out above. Johnson’s tactic even appropriates aspects of lineage-based immortality by offering his own blood to his father through his (failed) transfusion methods. So maybe it’s all good! A unification of all the different strains of immortality in an attempt to maintain the staying power of the soul in a time when AI and mass depersonalization threaten to hollow out social systems and aesthetic ideals.

Or does the insistence of the whole system on AI’s importance just further the hollowing?

The Homunculus 

At one point in his talk in SoHo, Johnson asked the crowd, “Would you give up decisions about your body and routine to AI if it meant you could live longer?” He didn’t give specifics and was met with, from where I stood, a pretty square “no”.

Johnson spoke about how “unaligned” AI could lead to human destruction and that rallying behind the goal of anti-aging utilizing the predictive and analytic models of AI could be a rallying point in our shared future with superintelligences. 

Here, multiple of the immortality strands converge. Attempts to transcend death by creating artificial life have created a threat to our own existence, driving more worry into fear of mortality that, according to Johnson, can only be solved by pumping resources into the venture capitalist’s dual goal of research into longevity and better AI. 

In the second book of Goethe’s Faust, the scientist/alchemist Wagner gives body to a being of pure spirit that is born knowledgeable and lives in a vile. Wagner is convinced he has “crystallized” the organic processes of nature’s randomness. Homunculus ultimately wants to become a being, but in his search dives into the sea and reunites with nature, losing individuality and allowing the highly symbolic narrative to continue. The artificial being dies, essentially, putting everything right and allowing Faust to continue towards his redemption.

In this essay on anti-aging mentioned above, Theo Zenou brings up the work of physicist Thomas Fink, who says that some of the first life on earth may not have died at all, but that the introduction of death allowed for more successful species. 

“That’s a shocking insight: It means that the first forms of life, which started billions of years ago, likely didn’t die,” writes Zenous. 

“Death emerged during the course of evolution because it conferred an advantage. In short, species that died fared better than those that didn’t.”

So is AI the Homonculus or Mephistopheles? Or both? Does AI need to be given lifespans rather than be complicit in expanding our own? The metaphors don’t track, but the anti-ager’s quest summons some of the same hesitations people have always felt toward the undying.

However, just as Faust’s deals with the devil and interactions with these sciences and beings drove him back towards enduring work of the spirit, maybe those who see past the Don’t Die marketing and into the whorl of desire and fear of death that has animated us for centuries will see some of these statements and scenes not as future-oriented, as Johnson believes, but part of ancient moralities and constructions that we must always contend with in order to overcome.

Maybe it is the hopeless lot of the contemporary to be so far from any sort of transcendental project that the belief in immortality appears as a vestige of the past and a freak show, an alluring one, that hints at another mode of viewing the world. Sickness is guaranteed in our lifetimes, but we can use our lives to benefit the health of society and the planet. To Johnson’s point, we do lack a goal. He’s suggested before the extension the anti-aging philosophy to the health of the planet, but without a proper view of death there is no real health, only nostalgia and inversion.

It’s like Donovan and company cast a ghostly figure from the past in front of our eyes, a taste of a vintage spectacle cast in cybertechnic hues. Johnson claims he isn’t a vampire, he may as well be mythical and while that means that things are the same as they ever were, there still is some hope for our souls.