If I had to choose a favourite tech guy, it would probably be Bryan Johnson. Johnson was, until fairly recently, best known as a venture capitalist and CEO of the online payment platform Braintree. In 2012, the company acquired the payment app Venmo for $26 million, and sold the following year to PayPal for $800 million. It’s not so much his ability to make vast sums of money by flipping companies that makes him my favourite tech guy, though (I’m at best ambivalent about such things); it’s more his monomaniacal commitment, in recent years, to the project of his own immortality.
Johnson is, by standard chronological measures, 46 years old. But, through various medical interventions and high-end supplements, he claims to be reversing the ageing process, so that he is in fact “biologically” much younger. His aim is to keep this going until he is functionally – in terms of his fitness, his cardiovascular capacity, his appearance, and every other conceivable metric – an 18-year-old.
He claims to spend somewhere in the region of $2 million a year on this stuff. According to a recent interview in The Atlantic, he makes every decision about his health in consultation with highly specialised software and a team of 30 medical professionals, who take extensive tests every day. He goes to bed at 8.30pm every evening and wakes at 4.30am; he maintains a strict workout regime and takes dozens of supplements. He wears, when he is sleeping, a sort of penile Fitbit device which tracks his nocturnal erections – a reliable biomarker of ageing.
He has had bone marrow transplants. He takes periodic trips to an island off Honduras, to receive unregulated gene therapy injections intended to reduce inflammation and increase muscle mass and bone density. Perhaps most remarkably of all, in an effort to reduce age-related cognitive decline, he has received transfusions of blood plasma from his own son, who is in his late teens.
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What I find most compelling about Johnson is how he seems to be living his life as a lurid allegory for the worst aspects of our culture. There is something downright Swiftian in this comedy of obsessive delusion, about a strange man and his unshakeable conviction that he can defeat mortality through science.
This is only a slight mutation of a strain of delusion that has infected the techno-utopians of Silicon Valley for many years now. Ray Kurzweil, whose current job title at Google is “principal researcher and AI visionary”, famously believes that by 2045 we will merge our brains with AI and become super-intelligent, immortal beings. Peter Thiel, among the most influential of tech venture capitalists, has invested in countless immortality-focused start-ups, and has himself spoken about the practice of getting transfusions from younger donors as a potential path to radical life extension.
If I were a novelist or a screenwriter, looking for a way to dramatise capitalism in a state of advanced necrosis, a wealthy middle-aged tech entrepreneur chasing immortality by way of blood transfusions from a teenager would be hard to resist. As if the vampire allegory weren’t overdetermined enough, Johnson has spoken publicly about avoiding exposure to sunlight. He has, as a consequence – and as a consequence, perhaps, of any number of other facial interventions – a sort of otherworldly sheen to him. It’s not that he looks younger than 46, so much as that he doesn’t look any age at all, as though he has carved, out of the landscape of human physiognomy, some uncanny valley that is entirely his own.
It seems to me that somewhere, within the absurd spectacle of a wealthy man who refuses to acknowledge the reality of ageing and death, is a kernel of something irreducibly human. I myself am a human, and I don’t feel all that great about ageing. I’m younger than Johnson, but not by much, and certainly not by enough that I can laugh at his terror of ageing without a little shudder of recognition. Getting older and slower, shorter of breath, and worse to look at with every year that passes, until eventually you die? No thanks! It’s a raw deal – and famously so. “Nothing more terrible, nothing more true,” as Philip Larkin put it. Whole libraries of literature have arisen out of this intractable fact, entire religions formed around either outright denying or reaching some troubled accommodation with it.
Johnson’s motto is “Don’t die”, which, in its blunt insistence on a big, dumb idea, has a family resemblance to certain infamous tech world rallying cries – Google’s “don’t be evil”, for instance, and Facebook’s “move fast and break things”. But, as Johnson himself is aware, a great deal of human existence is, in a sense, a “don’t die” enterprise. Johnson is really just shouting out loud what much of our hyper-consumerist culture is constantly whispering in our ear: eat the right foods, do the right things, make the right purchases, and you will have eternal youth.
If I could recommend one book to Johnson, and to his fellow Silicon Valley immortalists, it would be a 1973 masterpiece called The Denial of Death, by the American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker. The book’s thesis is that the fear of death “haunts the human animal”, and is the “mainspring of human activity.” Becker was dying of cancer as he finished the book, and by the time it was published he was dead at 49, just three years older than Johnson is now.
In its final pages, he addressed the utopian scientific projects that aimed to perfect humanity. “The problem with all these scientific manipulators is that somehow they don’t take life seriously enough,” he wrote. Taking life seriously, for Becker, meant “that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false.” Becker would have understood that the real message of Johnson’s “don’t die” was no less clear for its being unconscious: don’t live.