Recent advances in biotechnology have motivated a16z, one of the flagship venture capital firms of Silicon Valley, to declare this the Century of Biology. Like the tech boom before it, the current biotech boom promises to change the world in ways we could have never imagined––and as with the tech boom, many such changes may not be for the better. Perhaps no promise is as ambitious as conquering death itself, which both tech giants like Google’s Calico and new super startups like Altos Labs are working to achieve. This goal is of particular interest to an eclectic group of ultra-wealthy Silicon Valley nouveau riche, known as the transhumanists, who have long believed that the limitations of mortality can be overcome through technology. In this interview, Tamara Kneese, the author of Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond, joins physician-scientist-in-training Santiago Sanchez to discuss the troubling connections between the transhumanists, their particular philosophy as she encountered it in researching her book, eugenics, and the biotechno-solutionism taking hold in Silicon Valley today.
Santiago Sanchez: How do you think the transhumanists you encountered when you were writing Death Glitch, or their ideas, have influenced the anti-aging biotech space?
Tamara Kneese: Many of the people I encountered through my visits to transhumanist conferences and meetups are afraid of aging. They are interested in curing death, treating it as a disease, and thus, are very much invested in staying close to scientific cultures that are attempting to radically extend the lifespan.
People did specifically talk about the pain of death, even losing one’s grandparents, people who are expected to die during your lifetime, as being an event that led to a desire to end death altogether. There’s a spectrum of perfecting human health, and then it bleeds over into a form of self-optimization that allows for immortality. Even if people don’t necessarily always talk about it in base terms, they are somewhat hopeful about the possibility of radical life extension turning into not dying.
Santiago: There has been a shift in science towards thinking about healthspan––instead of lifespan—extension. Healthspan extension is the idea of prolonging the number of years in which you’re not disabled, dependent, or seriously ill. I’d argue that’s an admirable goal to pursue, but there’s also something deeply unsettling about the transhumanists’ eliminationist attitude towards disability. I’m reminded of what Susan Sontag wrote about “illness as the night side of life”: disability is a destiny we are all bound for, albeit to varying extents.
Tamara: Yes, critical disability studies scholars and disability rights groups have critiqued certain corners of transhumanism for essentially saying, “We’re going to perfect your body. We’re going to ensure that the moments of breakdown, the signs of aging and decay, are no longer part of your bodymind.”
A greater healthspan is another form of extending one’s productivity as well. Many people are unable to retire at an age that they would like to. Extending your life even further and having to somehow pay for that, if you are not one of the lucky few with real investments beyond a 401(k), depends on increased productivity. And you see that, too, with insurance industry programs like Vitality that are intended to enhance wellness by incentivizing self-tracking through an Apple Watch to encourage healthier behaviors.1 You’re doing things for the greater good by maintaining your optimal health through healthy living, to not be one of the idle retirees who is depending on younger generations to shoulder that.
Santiago: There seems to be less discussion or interest in funding technologies that are supposed to make life easier if you are experiencing disability. Say, new ways or spaces to build community if you’re isolated or elderly, or somehow make the world and your life more accessible than it otherwise would be if you’re disabled.
Tamara: It gets back to that idea of personal responsibility. Rather than making healthcare more accessible or providing infrastructures for actual care, the focus is on individual responsibility for personal wellness. We all know people who drink kale smoothies and go to yoga every day and still end up with a terminal cancer diagnosis.
There is a problem with conceiving of death as something you can protect against through behavioral changes. There are certain things that do correlate, but if you’re living in a place where you’re exposed to various toxic chemicals, if you’re a worker at a plant where you’re exposed to carcinogens, you lack control. Transhumanists’vision of life extension views the individual subject as this enclosed body that is not dependent upon other living things and other environments.
Santiago: Transhumanists have operationalized an extreme version of what many people facing a new life-altering or life-threatening diagnosis do to process an earth-shattering change completely out of their control––namely attempting to radically reinforce the parts of their lives they can control. What makes the transhumanist version of this psychology so extreme is that the most influential transhumanists are extraordinarily wealthy and well-resourced people who seem to feel that there’s no obstacle they cannot surmount by either developing a new startup or funding some new kind of technology. At the same time, like all forms of techno-optimism, the pursuit of perfection through technology at all costs betrays a certain nihilism about doing anything through politics. We collectively know a great deal about what interventions and public health measures really do substantially impact our health and lifespans, but transhumanists are not at all interested in stewarding their largesse towards public projects backed by longstanding knowledge.
Let’s imagine that a radical life-extension startup succeeds at developing a product for our deeply flawed, often inaccessible healthcare market, and presumably protects the intellectual property for that product from diffusing into the wider world. What would that breakthrough mean for the rest of us?
Tamara: As wealth inequality becomes more extreme and obscene, there’s a desire for the people who are at the top, who are living a good life, to keep it that way. If you have no awareness of what it’s like to feel precarious, you have no recognition of what it would be like to worry about staying housed or staying fed, particularly after retirement, because you’re probably not working, you’re just living on your investments. That is a very different kind of society that you’re attached to and imagining. And it is intentionally exclusionary. There isn’t a desire to keep people from the majority world, to keep poor people, to keep people of color, to keep people who are not already part of that elite in the picture. Because when people are that wealthy, their day-to-day lives may not touch those who are on the margins very often, if at all.
Look at the ways that the threat of climate change, a planetary crisis, leads to the Silicon Valley version of prepping that is also quite popular within transhumanist circles. The wealthiest on this planet will retreat to their bunkers. They will ensure that they’ve stored enough resources for themselves at the expense of everyone else. It is playing out survival of the fittest in a grotesque, over-the-top way. They’re actively building and attempting to materialize these fantasies and that’s why tech billionaires are investing in land. They also want to go to Mars to escape from the masses, the people who are already on the front lines of climate change. It’s their way out. The entire fantasy of living for much longer only makes sense if you have that kind of extreme wealth or if you believe that you have the capacity to achieve it.
Santiago: You could imagine a transhumanist endgame where a subservient majority lives short, mean lives ruled by centenarian aristocrats. It is already true today that the poorest people in this country have a life expectancy nearly two decades shorter than the ultra-wealthy. Even though the marketing from organizations like the Long Now Foundation [Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand’s nonprofit organization dedicated to imagining the next 10,000 years of human civilization] are superficially optimistic, you don’t have to dig very deep to see the vision they propose is a horrific one, a vision meant to be brought about in part by longevity biotechs like Altos Labs, a new super startup, you called it, which I think is appropriate because it’s raised more initial capital than any biotech startup, ever. It’s dedicated to both basic aging research and developing interventions to prevent aging and extend the human healthspan. Altos has already said that they do not expect material results for a decade at least. Super startups like Altos seem to be playing by a different rule book than every other company in Silicon Valley. Why do you think this is?
Tamara: I think it does come down to the rules being different. Some people are afforded the luxury of time and funding to tinker and experiment. We all know the stats indicating that women-run startups, startups run by Black and Latinx folks are just not funded. Whereas if you’re already a tech billionaire, it’s much easier to get the capital to pursue these moonshot projects.
Why is the Long Now enchanted by reviving extinct species like the woolly mammoth? Is that a practical step in terms of conservation, or is that something you only get to do if you’re an eccentric billionaire?
There’s no rational reason why Altos, similarly, doesn’t have to worry about immediate results. They don’t have the OKRs [objectives and key results] and the KPIs [key performance indicators], and all the bullshit that people in a normal tech environment would have. They’re not subject to those rules or mechanisms of control and evaluation. But it is interesting, too, that Jeff Bezos is a quiet investor in Altos.
Santiago: A loud investor.
Tamara: Well, that’s perfect because another fascinating thing is watching tech billionaires age. With Mark Zuckerberg, there is the story of the dorm room and the hoodie, and of Facebook beginning as this Hot or Not clone for rating the attractiveness of women at Harvard. So years go by, decades go by, and then you’re middle aged, and as you get to be middle aged you begin to realize that your body is changing. Maybe you’re thinking about your legacy, how to pass on the wealth that you’ve accumulated, perhaps you are also interested in sticking around for a longer period of time to enjoy your wealth. And so it is no surprise that people like Jeff Bezos would be really personally invested in anti-aging technology and figuring out a way to reap the benefits of being a huge tech billionaire for even longer.
Even if they don’t want to say, “I’m going to be immortal,” there is a desire to escape the reality that does come for us all, which is aging and death. Going back to this idea that you raised before, that it’s another mountain that they’re climbing, it’s another triathlon that they’re completing. But I think it is also this specter of imagining the ability to maintain power in perpetuity. The ten-thousand-year clock, a prototype that Bezos funded on his own land that is meant to last for ten thousand years, is certainly a monument to mythic time—as I say in the book, it is the most phallic smart object that one can imagine.
What’s so annoying about these cultures is that they blatantly position the individual at the center of everything without being able to understand the need for care and various networks that would have to go into maintaining something over thousands of years. What infrastructures do you need in place, what kinds of labor, what kinds of storytelling would you need in order to pass on information? They focus on the technology, on the object itself, and nothing around it, which is a common problem that people within these particular subcultures seem to have.
Santiago: It seems really obvious when you say it, but I hadn’t thought how deeply the life stages of the billionaire class impacts all of our lives. We will have to be vigilant the next time Jeff Bezos has a quarter-life crisis.
Tamara: Yes, we’ve already had to experience the midlife crisis, so who knows what’ll come next?
Santiago: Their influence extends to basic, non-commercial science as well. There is always pressure to work on problems that interest funding sources. In biomedicine, the National Institutes of Health has traditionally been the largest funding source for research, but in the past decade or so, private sources have funded an increasing share of biomedical research in the US. I don’t think scientists yet fully appreciate how this shift is slowly changing the kinds of research questions being increasingly prioritized or neglected. I’d be interested to know what your perspective is on the impacts of this dynamic between the public and private sector and how the solutions that are put forward by the anti-aging biotechnology space are part of this dynamic.
Tamara: What frightens me is how common these transhumanist-leaning fantasies are. Not only in Silicon Valley technoculture, but in major research institutions that are also governing decisions around where to invest in medical technologies and medical research. The idea that someone’s personal proclivities attached to a particular stage in life can shape an entire ecology of investments, philanthropy, and research funding is alarming.
This is not new, if we look at longer histories of theories about self-optimization and public health in relation to institutions. Insurance companies, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the National Institutes of Health—all of these organizations have also, at one point or another, adhered to ideologies that we would today consider to be less than palatable. In the first half of the twentieth century, eugenics was a central part of mainstream public health rhetoric, and medical pamphlets were rife with language about social hygiene and the protection of superior “germ plasm.” So how do you find ways to invest in and create the kinds of technologies or medical care that would be useful to more people?
Tech leaders today talk about their fears over AGI [artificial general intelligence], and x-risk enclaves haunt a lot of the tech world right now. Despite the fact that climate change is a pressing concern with material and immediate negative health effects, to put it mildly, it is not of interest to many of the people who are in control of where money and research attention are flowing. There is this idea that climate change can be easily solved, and we already know how to do it. So once technologists are able to remove the carbon at scale, everything will be fine. Or, they’ll go through with their other plans about fleeing to distant galaxies as fully digital human beings. And thus, they won’t have to experience the worst effects of climate catastrophe.
A handful of powerful institutions that are also incredibly well networked with each other are determining which projects are funded, even when it comes to influencing government agencies. Nonprofits are also funded by philanthropic organizations, many of which are dependent on tech wealth. And so it can be hard to get distance from those ways of thinking.
Santiago: I think many scientists struggle with thinking critically about the relationship between their work and its social consequences. Many, if not most, prefer to pursue their careers unburdened by those considerations. There’s a price to be paid if you’re not willing to entertain ideas about helping people live forever or working on an idea that you think is implausible but also happens to be the hot topic of the moment.
The first eugenics records office is now one of the most prestigious biomedical research institutes in the country, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. I joke that a geneticist accidentally reinvents eugenics every 2.5 minutes. Some years ago, I learned a prominent geneticist was developing a dating app meant to match couples using genetic testing––a particularly absurd example of this axiom. Incidentally, this is the same geneticist attempting to revive the woolly mammoth.
Tamara: Going back to this idea of the woolly mammoth intersecting with a eugenicist view of dating compatibility, there’s always this eugenicist element lurking, as you said. When you’re amassing data to categorize people and thinking about compatibility and affinity through those lines—there’s this reproductive-focused eugenicist turn.
Transhumanist cultures use the deep genetic past in order to unlock secrets that will lead to better health outcomes, that is, some form of immortality. Looking at Ray Kurzweil, he’s always the person who’s held up as the guy who really believes in the singularity.2 He does have a backup plan, maybe, but he is still fervently waiting for the singularity to happen.
But even if others in his tech billionaire circles don’t necessarily believe in the singularity, they are invested in similar projects at organizations like the Long Now Foundation.. Elements that appear to be at the fringes of this world end up being foundational to the entire milieu.
Santiago: How do you think that we, whether we’re scientists or workers in the tech sector or just in the community in general, can change the trajectory of biotechnology so that it works for everyone and not just, you know, the wealthiest people on the planet?
Tamara: I feel optimism when I look at the labor movement and the resurgence of groups like #NoTechForApartheid, drawing a clear connection between the tech industry and genocide. The fact that there are many tech workers, including people in biotech, who are concerned about the direction that they see their employers going in, and are at least attempting to push back against the actions of their employers. Unless there are massive changes in terms of who is controlling the technology, deciding where resources should be funneled, and what kinds of products should be built and for whom, I don’t think there is really any way to get out of the cycle that we’re currently in.
It might be helpful to look back to some early twentieth-century history that I researched before I wrote the bulk of Death Glitch. The Life Extension Institute, founded in 1913, was supposed to improve public health by encouraging behavioral changes. The pamphlets that were meant for wealthy white men, like the ones who founded the organization and the insurance companies who were backing them, focused on healthy eating and breathing exercises, the same kind of New Agey practices that are such a fundamental part of what we think of when we think of the tech industry today.3
The other side of this was mass surveillance of workers in factories and partnerships between the Life Extension Institute and Ford Motor Company—maybe no surprise there given Henry Ford’s general politics. A lot of it was about looking at different races and ethnicities of workers, and women workers versus men, and factors like disability and age. And trying to predict when workers would wear out while also trying to understand the conditions under which workers would be the most productive and most effective without killing them.
What we do have right now is a twenty-first-century version of that system, with fantasies around self-optimization and perhaps immortality for a very select few. Most people are being surveilled more and more and have less and less control over their own health. People have little control over when they’re able to sleep or what they’re able to eat; a lot of people can’t even afford their rent and are working multiple jobs to stay vaguely afloat. And this kind of disparity will continue to accelerate unless there is a shift in the labor landscape of how tech and biotech are operated.
1. Tamara Kneese, “A Responsible Death: Valuing Life from Mortality Tables to Wearables,” in The New Death: Mortality and Death Care in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Shannon Lee Dawdy and Tamara Kneese (Santa Fe: University of New Mexico Press / School for Advanced Research Seminar Series, 2022).
2. Singularity is the notion that technology will advance beyond humanity’s ability to control it, which will enable humanity to transcend biology.
3. Kneese, “A Responsible Death.”