When the Rich Refuse to Die
By: Tommy Boon
Tags: Philosophy, Technology, Art, Life, Death

It was pictures of butter floating in coffee that introduced Dave Asprey to the world. Coined ‘Bulletproof Coffee’; it, Dave Asprey, and Asprey’s company ‘Bulletproof360’ were the subjects of a slew of think pieces. Some of these were admiring, some critical, most were despairing. Asprey evangelises what he terms ‘bio-hacking’: through technology, he intends to live until he is 180. The means by which he intends to achieve these- his ‘hacks’- are eclectic and are detailed in an interview with Men’s Health. They include:

“…get his own stem cells injected into him every six months, take 100 supplements a day, follow a strict diet, bathe in infrared light, hang out in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, and wear goofy yellow-lensed glasses every time he gets on an airplane.”

According to the Men’s health article, Asprey has spent over a million dollars on extending his life.

Transhumanism was first properly formulated by a British scientist called Julian Huxley in 1957 ², but it found its modern incarnation in the Transhumanist Declaration in 1998. The declaration outlines a world where liberal values are applied to gene editing and designer therapies: it will be technology which will guarantee life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

In his quest for ever-lasting life, Asprey, and those like him, share a lot with the ancient hero ‘Gilgamesh’. The authors of the epic, however, tempered it with editorial warnings: Gilgamesh eventually lost the life-giving plant to a serpent and is forced to come to terms with being merely human. In quest to take that which is the Gods, Asprey could also be compared to Icarus. Icarus was the man who, for the Greeks, built wings to fly to the heavens. The authors of this myth too seemed to have something to say about hubris: Icarus’ wings, which were made out of wax and feathers, promptly melted when he got too close to the sun.

That the ‘big swinging brains’ of Silicon Valley can sweep these myths aside is perhaps because they have spent years in an ecosystem where seemingly only the daring, creative and ingenious thrive. The wealthy of Silicon Valley are those have clambered over the weak: the start-ups which didn’t impress enough investors or the businesses which didn’t find enough markets to disrupt. Such a man, it would seem, deserves both his fortune and perhaps the leniency to transgress millennia-old superstitions.

In Silicon Valley, this myth is often closely followed by another. Like their Wall St forebears, the tech entrepreneurs see massive wealth as the necessary engine for progress.

A relic from the 80’s, this thinking sees progress coming from wealth and technology pooling in the top tiers of society where it then trickles down to benefit those beneath. Inequality is an unpalatable fact.

In Silicon Valley, which is awash with well-thumbed copies of ‘Atlas Shrugged’ ³, the philanthropic tendencies of billionaires is preferred to serious structural reform. Billionaires are ‘people who do really good things and kind of help a lot of other people’: structural reform that hurt the Valley’s bottom line is like setting fire to the engine of the economy.

Decades of evidence, however, suggests such thinking erodes democracy, makes people sicker, and strips workers of their rights. It ignores the fact that the line between individual genius and community toil is hard to draw: the fortunes of Silicon Valley are built on the products of years of government-funded research.

The big swinging brains of today, however, are likely to temper these views by conceding billionaires should not exist in a ‘cosmic sense’. This moderation partly comes from an image problem: pictures of private helicopters and gold penthouses are no longer aspirational but moral outrages.

In the labs of the Transhumanists, this conflict takes on a metaphysical pallor. If one of the figures of the Danse Macabre will be able to resist death’s invitation, it is not likely to be the peasant or the hermit.