Over the past decade or so, democracy has been retreating against a rising tide of illiberalism and plutocracy. Power, in much of the world, is becoming more and more concentrated in the hands of a few authoritarian leaders and a small number of expansively ambitious tech billionaires. As average life expectancy has increased, inequality — in income and in access to health care — has widened. And amid all of this, the world’s wealthiest and most powerful have developed a persistent hope, and perhaps even generated some small possibility, that death might be eradicated entirely, or pushed back so far that its existential force is diminished.
The fact of death is, famously, a source of terror and melancholy, but also one of consolation. Say what you like about historical dynasties, but even the worst of hereditary sovereigns couldn’t rule from the grave. Henry VIII died in his mid-50s; Cesare Borgia barely made it into his 30s. Blunt instruments though they may have been, morbid obesity and syphilis played their roles as agents of change. If even the greatest tyrants must eventually die, there is always some hope for a better world, or at least a different one.
But what if the tyrant succeeds in making himself immortal, or in expanding his allotted life span so radically that he might as well be? What if autocrats like Xi or Putin were to extend their rule by decades, or even to rule indefinitely, never relinquishing their grip on their respective states, on the lives of their citizens? Such a prospect is, to say the least, still scientifically remote. But that these two leaders seem to want it in the first place, and seem to believe that science might facilitate it, suggests something important about our political era — and hints at the shape of the era to come.
We live under the sign of the vampire. Among the most potent archetypes of our time is the elite who seeks eternal youth, whose power is drawn from the blood of lower mortals. And the most prominent of our current elites is the small upper echelon of capitalists whose technologies — social media, online retail, artificial intelligence, data surveillance — determine our present and mold our future, and who wield an increasingly disproportionate political power. And these men are, we know, obsessed with pushing out the horizons of human mortality.
