On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience

by Abou Farman

An ethnographic exploration of technoscientific immortality

Immortality has long been considered the domain of religion. But immortality projects have gained increasing legitimacy and power in the world of science and technology. With recent rapid advances in biology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, secular immortalists hope for and work toward a future without death.

On Not Dying is an anthropological, historical, and philosophical exploration of immortality as a secular and scientific category. Based on an ethnography of immortalist communities—those who believe humans can extend their personal existence indefinitely through technological means—and an examination of other institutions involved at the end of life, Abou Farman argues that secular immortalism is an important site to explore the tensions inherent in secularism: how to accept death but extend life; knowing the future is open but your future is finite; that life has meaning but the universe is meaningless. As secularism denies a soul, an afterlife, and a cosmic purpose, conflicts arise around the relationship of mind and body, individual finitude and the infinity of time and the cosmos, and the purpose of life. Immortalism today, Farman argues, is shaped by these historical and culturally situated tensions. Immortalist projects go beyond extending life, confronting dualism and cosmic alienation by imagining (and producing) informatic selves separate from the biological body but connected to a cosmic unfolding.

On Not Dying interrogates the social implications of technoscientific immortalism and raises important political questions. Whose life will be extended? Will these technologies be available to all, or will they reproduce racial and geopolitical hierarchies? As human life on earth is threatened in the Anthropocene, why should life be extended, and what will that prolonged existence look like?

Genres: Technology, Academic

336 pages, Paperback

Published April 21, 2020

Reviews

[D · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un libro original, con un análisis inteligente y sostenido por una metodología precisa. Farman estudia los grupos transhumanistas que buscan lograr tecnológicamente la inmortalidad humana. Lo hace con un enfoque etnográfico, que sustenta empíricamente sus hallazgos, pero con una inmensa claridad teórica: su objeto de estudio es precisamente la "secularidad" de esta noción de inmortalidad, es decir, el modo que se configura en un período moderno donde la religión no ocupa el lugar que tenía, si bien persiste de otras maneras. Realmente imprescindible, un trabajo único que logra dos objetivos simultáneos: esclarecer el funcionamiento de las prácticas transhumanistas, criogenistas e inmortalistas en el siglo XXI; y aportar desde este lugar al pensamiento materialista contemporáneo, al giro ontológico y la especulación actual sobre la vida, la conciencia y la extinción.

[Justin Norman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Provides a fascinating, in-depth look at transhumanists, cryonics, and the variety of people in those movements, along with a great examination of the ways secular life and death contrasts with religious life and death. All of that interesting material is unfortunately offset by the author's insistence on ultimately viewing everything he's researched through the lenses of power and race. This flattens the complexity of the subject matter into a viewpoint best summed up by his repeated notes throughout the book that "most of the people at this conference/company are white and male". The question of whether or not humans can and should use medical progress as a way of extending life is eventually reduced to a question of whether or not this will impact all races and cultures in an equally positive way at an equal rate of availability. It can't and won't, of course, because nothing can, but the responsibility for this impossible task is ultimately laid at the feet of white men as the author closes his mostly wonderful book on a tired, boring trope.

[Frances Currie · Rating 5 out of 5]

What does it mean to not let die? While biopolitics, famously, is organized around making live but letting die, cryopolitics explores how “death appears perpetually deferred,” specifically via the manipulation of matter through temperature (123). Because, as Abou Farman points out, human temporality (living and death) is imbued with social and ideological implications, the manipulation of matter through temperature is therefore “also entangled with structures, meanings, and experiences of time, and especially of endings.” The potential to push back death through cryotechnologies is framed as salvation: life suspended in cold, ready to be brought back when the technology is right. This techno-utopian process blurs the distinction between life and death (123). As Farman writes, immortalism and transhumanism have fully embraced the libertarian ideologies that focus on the individual and ignore the structural reproductions of patterns and pasts throughout history, ultimately ignoring race, gender, class, and ethnicity (mind you, all central themes to the discipline of anthropology and the study of culture) when addressing the culture of immortalism and its future-making goals. This, I feel, is one of the prominent horrors described by Farman. The immortalists discussed by Farman effectively ignore the historical pasts of subjugation, colonialism, and control that shape and sustain Western nations, while simultaneously building a future that strongly reflects them, leaving ample room for these problems to reproduce and even worsen within this “techno-utopian” future they wish to reach through cryogenics. Another “horror” (Farman himself describes it as such) is “the haunting of secular modernity” that is now taking place through “the horror of imagining modern humans as nothing but emptied shells, code-filled bodies, algorthmically generated beings, zombies who have fooled themselves into thinking they have selves at all, that something special like a mind animates them into unique conscious beings” (33-34). Does uploading one’s mind to some sort of chip, to be transported to another hub of flesh or machine, count as living? Can one live without a soul? This, of course, is more of a philosophical question, and I suppose it depends entirely on whether or not you believe in the soul in the first place. I, for one, do, and I’m not sure that it resides entirely in our brains. I’m not religious by any means, but I do not think it is possible that our entire being resides in one spot in the body. We are made up of all the parts of ourselves. To be just our brains (not even our full brains, mind you, maybe just scans of them) could not possibly reflect our entire person. In this way, I think Farman is right: we would become algorithmically generated zombies, but instead of lacking brains, we would lack authenticity and soul. Alternatively, if we’re discussing scanned brains rather than preserving the originals, the digitized versions of “us” have to reckon with the fact that they are not the originals and that their memories stem from someone else. This part, in particular, reminded me of Black Mirror and the technological horror that stems from the manipulation of the mind and the body for the purposes of living forever. At what point in the pursuit of transhumanism do we lose the human aspect? This reminds me of another related horror that occurred to me while reading this book: the type of people who would sign up for such an endeavour. Who would want to live forever? As Stephen Greenblatt states, “humanity is in part defined by biology and especially ‘biological flaws,’ without which ‘we lose an essential part of who we are’” (5). Those who subscribe the the transhumanist touted and financially supported by the likes of Elon Musk are already so far removed from me (economically, socially, politically, and, if they get their wish, mechanically) that I cannot imagine living forever with them. Immortality surrounded by people who are so willing to live forever, even as their loved ones die, in the hopes of reaching a techno-utopian future that they wish to shape after Western civilizations, without any acknowledgment that those futures would only be utopian for some, is my own personal horror. Clearly, I am not the intended audience for immortality.

[Daniel Percival · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine breathing fresh air into an already fresh anthropological focus- step up Abou Farman the unapologetic scrutiniser of a cryonicist movement poised for expansion. Secularism hasn't ever occupied a must have in my research; admittedly its not been much of a have in my research full stop! However, a fool I would be if I didn't acknowledge how excitedly I read on in this ethnographical delimiter; Talal Asad's great foundational work has been well and truly extended to the realm of the indeterminate, or rather the speculative! The conclusion arrives passionate and damning though I would be so bold to suggest I would have enjoyed a further explanation of alternative uses for technologies of the future as is so enticingly alluded to.
Get reading if tech and anthropology are your thing(s).