Future Human
The Misguided Idiot’s Quest for Immortality
A diatribe on the folly and privilege of the Transhumanist movement
The Transhumanist movement is made up of people of various political leanings. There are those who skew left-of-center, those with a more libertarian mindset, and there are even some who are archly conservative. But they all share a belief that science and technology can be wielded to cheat death. And they’re all completely tone deaf.
I first came to Transhumanism in my work as a journalist. In my career, which has spanned a decade of reporting and editorial writing on the intersection of human rights, policy, and science, nothing has raised my hackles as much as this movement’s quest for immortality and the ignorance of the inherent inequality of the discussion around that idea.
It was actually this ignorance, or perhaps willful callousness, that made me pivot my career to focus on bioethics, in which my main areas of research are biohacking, DIY science, and fringe technologies. I overlap with Transhumanist interests more often than not in my career. And it’s not all negative. In fact, I very much agree with the other maxims of the movement, including self-experimentation and morphological freedom, and I enjoy investigating the ethical challenges associated…
