The Last Word On Nothing

“Conquering death would be humanity’s greatest achievement…This will become the primary objective for the human race. I think it’s inevitable.”

-Bryan Johnson, speaking to The Information in 2024 about his “Don’t Die” philosophy.

“I’m a huge fan of death. I’m a groupie for death. I think it’s the metronome of our existence. And without rhythm, there is no melody.”

-Guillermo del Toro, speaking to Terry Gross on “Fresh Air” about “the torment of eternal life” and his adaptation of Mary Shelley’s gothic classic, Frankenstein.

Not long into Guillermo del Toro’s excellent new adaption of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the titular character (played by Oscar Issac) finds himself in front of a disciplinary tribunal at the Royal College of Medicine. Addressing an audience full of be-wigged academics with elaborate facial hair, Victor Frankenstein rails against what he sees as a staid and ossified approach to teaching (and thinking about) science and medicine:

“Birth! Birth is not in our hands, is it? Conception, that spark, the animation of thought and soul—that is in God’s hands. God. But death. Ah, now there lies the challenge that should be our concern. Who are we to do so? We are not gods, are we? But if we are to behave as immodestly as gods, we must, at the very least, deliver miracles … ignite a divine spark in these young students’ minds. Teach them defiance rather than obedience. Show that man may pursue nature to her hiding places and stop death. Not slow it down, but stop it entirely.”

This Victorian-era TED Talk—delivered in a medical theater instead of an amphitheater—does not go well for Victor, especially after a gruesome anatomical demonstration freaks out the already skeptical panel of judges. But while the medical establishment wants nothing to do with Frankenstein’s hubris, fate has delivered a venture capitalist (of sorts) in the audience—a wealthy arms dealer who, for a highly personal and comical reason I will not ruin, is willing to take him both literally and seriously.

“This is the future,” declares Victor as he’s escorted out of the building. “This is possible. Why not study it? Why not quantify it?”

Since it began streaming on Netflix earlier this month, much has been made of the tech bro-y subtext in del Toro’s new adaptation of Frankenstein. To be fair, there’s plenty already baked into the source material, to which, save for a few significant departures, detours, and a strategic 50-year time-shift forward, del Toro mostly stays true. Mary Shelley’s Dr. Victor Frankenstein is, if nothing else, a kind of ur-tech bro, a man who doesn’t just want to make a dent in the universe, but smash the entire clockwork and rebuild it himself. In the new movie, as in Shelley’s 1818 novel, he’s rash, ambitious, arrogant, naive, and animated by a profound sense of victimhood.

In other words, he’s a perfect stand-in for a more modern creature: the tech billionaire. Like any would-be disrupter, Victor knows how to pitch his product (immortality): Identify a problem (death); frame it, reductively as self-evident and universal; pursue a scientific/technological solution with monomaniacal zeal (and, crucially, without ever considering the repercussions of success); and dismiss anyone who criticizes you along the way as lacking the sufficient vision or higher-level thinking needed to understand your goals.

Watching “Frankenstein” I couldn’t help but think, in my lower-level way, of one of our more contemporary (albeit far less charismatic) Promethean figures: Bryan Johnson. If you’ve managed to remain blissfully unaware of this man, I apologize. I am about to burden you with the curse of knowledge. Johnson, rather famously, is trying to live forever. Indeed, he believes he will live forever. Whether this immortality will be accomplished in his own body, a borrowed one, or a different, more robust substrate altogether, the details are still a bit fuzzy. What he’s sure about is that AI will play a big role in achieving his goal.

It must be said that Johnson adheres to some perfectly reasonable, science-backed practices in his quest to extend his life. He follows a strict vegan diet, he doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t drink alcohol, he exercises, and he’s militant about getting enough sleep. He also does some certifiably insane things, like inject other people’s fat into his face, compulsively measure his nighttime erections, gulp down between 40 and 50 supplements per day, shock his genitals to improve blood flow, inject his son’s blood plasma, and stimulate his vagus nerve (again with electrical pulses) to reduce inflammation and promote a “more chill” state. Reportedly, he spends upwards of $2 million per year on this personal, ever-evolving, “don’t die” protocol.

Johnson is only the latest high-profile figure in a long line of Silicon Valley immortalists and “life-maxxers.” The billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Antichrist lecturer Peter Thiel plans to live to the ripe old age of 120 (that is, if Greta Thunberg doesn’t destroy Earth first). Google co-founder Sergey Brin has said he hopes to “cure death.” Oracle’s Larry Ellison has spent hundreds of millions to fund anti-aging research because, he says, “death makes me very angry.” And then, of course, there’s the futurist, inventor, and biohacker extraordinaire Ray Kurzweil.

Kurzweil is most famous for his books on the coming “singularity,” a point, he says, when artificial intelligence will become self-improving and overtake the human mind. While he eagerly awaits this day, Kurzweil, like Johnson, prodigiously pops pills and attempts to quantify himself into oblivion. “I have a personal program to combat each of the degenerative diseases and aging processes,” he said during a talk at Google back in 2005. “My view is that I am re-programming my biochemistry in the same way I reprogram the computers in my life.”

Indeed, what all of these men tend to share—beyond an apparent inability to come to terms with their own mortality—is an obsession with data and a view that the human body is fundamentally a machine. For them, the body isn’t just reducible to numbers, the body is numbers. Optimize those digits and you’re well on your way to living forever, perhaps with a little help from some future nanobots who will repair any stubborn cell that doesn’t get your anti-aging memo.

All of this, I hope you will agree, is patently ridiculous. It’s also not new or cutting edge or radical or any of the other adjectives these men use to characterize their quests. While data gives their approaches to longevity a sheen of scientific veracity, the fact is that people have been trying to measure their way to immortality for a long, long time, convinced, as these men are now, that their era was the one where, finally, the secrets to eternal life could be unlocked.

If Silicon Valley had any sense of humility (or interest in reading history), this might become apparent. Alas, it does not. What we’re left with instead is basically “wellness” elevated to the status of transcendental principle, a perversion of the Socratic imperative to “know thyself,” where the knowing is less about preparing for death and more about being able to rattle off your telomere length.

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One of the books I find myself returning to again and again for wisdom, wit, empathy, and to make sure I’m not going completely insane is the late Barbara Ehrenreich’s Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer. I adore everything Ehrenreich has written. But this book in particular had a profound impact on me when I read it back in 2018, and it has only become more important in helping to explain our modern Silicon Valley Frankensteins and contextualize the disorienting and depressing times we are all living through now.  

“Wellness,” she writes, “is the means to remake oneself into an ever more perfect self-correcting machine capable of setting goals and moving toward them in smooth determination.” One of Ehrenreich’s fundamental critiques of this approach to health and longevity, beyond its propensity for scientific quackery, is its solipsism. Wellness not only shifts the focus away from all the external things that are simply out of our control when it comes to living a long life, it conditions its practitioners to become so hyper-focused on themselves that they stop asking age-old questions like, What does it mean to live a good life? In the absence of such concerns, she says, we now find ourselves dealing with a bunch of rich men selling self-absorption as the key to immortality.

Here’s what we do know with certainty about life expectancy in the U.S. and elsewhere: The more money you have, the longer you will generally live. If Johnson and his tech billionaire cohort wanted to truly help the human race live longer, they’d probably be doing something other than tracking their boner data. But of course that’s not what they care about at all. These are men who view the world through the lens of power and control, winners and losers, status and wealth. The danger isn’t that they somehow succeed in their quest for immortality, it’s that they convince the rest of us to start seeing the world that way too.

Like the rest of us, Bryan Johnson will die someday. So will Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel, and all the other Silicon Valley scions for whom death is an affront. In the meantime, let’s not confuse their childish fantasies for technological determinism. Better yet, let’s make sure that their own reductive, impoverished ideas of what it is to be human don’t outlive them.

Bryan Gardiner is a writer based in Oakland, California.