Anna Savina: Erik Davis on Longevity as a Spiritual Pursuit
A few weeks ago, I wrote about tech millionaire Bryan Johnson, who claims that an AI algorithm is helping to significantly extend his life. I wanted to delve further into this topic and explore the link between AI and longevity, so I decided to interview Erik Davis. He is a scholar, journalist, and author of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies and numerous other pieces on tech, spirituality, and mysticism. We discussed the connection between religion and longevity, the aesthetics of transhumanism (and blood transfusions!), and our bleak gerontocratic future.
AS: Do you think there is any connection between longevity as a trend and Californian ideology? Why do we keep seeing this come up when we read about Silicon Valley elites in particular?
ED: I think it has to do with the peculiar cultural and psychospiritual history of libertarianism in America. You can’t understand Peter Thiel or Elon Musk’s less conventional sides without really understanding how, at least in one major formulation, libertarianism is not simply a desire to have minimal government and no regulations over capital — it’s also a psychospiritual claim for freedom.
For example, Robert Anton Wilson, who is a very fringe countercultural figure, never made a lot of money, didn't care about capitalism, was a libertarian. He was a right-wing anarchist, meaning an anarchist that's not as interested in social formations, but more like a Max Stirner-style egoist. He was also interested in longevity — if you believe in people’s right to determine their fate, then inevitably death becomes an enemy.
There's an aspect of libertarianism that is very radical because it wants to pull the rug out from under ideas of any kind of limit.
If you go back and you look at the history of longevity movements, you're going to find that there's this libertarian approach. And you’re also going to see an interest in technology because it helps overcome these limits in our natural, political, institutional, economic world.
So tech millionaires’ interest in longevity is not just about being raging egoists — it’s also about politics and control. There's a great Bruce Sterling novel, Holy Fire, that elaborates on what happens when you have this installed gerontocracy. With recent advancements in AI, it’s also much easier to imagine that the concentration of capital will create tech overlords that will be able to actually populate the universe. And the personal version of that cosmic story is achieving immortality and get off the planet.
AS: What's interesting to me about Bryan Johnson is that he was a member of the Mormon Church. What is the relationship between religion and the scientific pursuit of longevity?
ED: Secularism offers a substitute and resistance to traditional religious viewpoints. But religious longing and imagination inevitably seep in. The most obvious example is singularity. It seems like a rational idea, but what you've actually produced is a secular analog for some kind of transcendental culmination of history. This is obviously a religious narrative or at least originates as one.
Once again, we're living in the shadow of an apocalyptic moment that's just around the corner, not unlike the early Christians in Rome who were waiting for Jesus' second coming. That creates a whole subjectivity in relation to this upcoming moment. Those people don't see it as religious, but I do because it ends up serving a similar function, even if the details are different.
It's really interesting that Johnson has this background because Mormonism definitely has a science fictional flavor. From his point of view, he abandoned religion and went in this other direction. But in Mormonism, God has a body in the future and Mormons aren’t ghostly and in some kind of heaven, outside of the material world. For them, it's a material cosmos. And if you're a good Mormon and you do it right, you're like the patriarch of a planet in a body with your family. It's not that hard for me to imagine how someone would leave the church but then continue with a certain kind of imagination and a certain kind of relationship to the body as a vehicle of the immortal spirit.
AS: Conversations about blood transfusion and other practices related to longevity make many people very uncomfortable. Why do you think the aesthetics of the movement fall into this uncanny valley where many things that prolong one's life also feel almost repulsive?
ED: "Uncanny" is a good word for it. One of the things I admire about the libertarian attitude towards the human experience is its willingness to question and actively resist many of our conventional ideas about what it means to be human. If you are on the transhumanist train, you are explicitly embracing aspects of our potential that are not human or are uncomfortable from a human point of view. Therefore, there is a freakish quality to it.
Many of us are convinced that it's natural to die or to get lines on your face. Plugging a computer chip into your brain is not natural. That's disgusting for many people, right? And so, the transhumanists are wondering where's that edge and does it actually exist. There's something about that that I really admire, but it leads to this weird kind of nerdy aesthetic that seems to lack all poetry. It's a quantitative way of thinking about human value.
There's a way in which the whole technological mindset, the efficient self, the self-hacking, the biohacking, all of it is a way of just literalizing human experience and then taking it beyond the limits that most of us impose on it. There's also an aspect of an astronaut aesthetic where you're eating from little foil packs and everything's around you is made of plastic and metal, and there are no plants, and you love that. Transhumanists often embrace this very cheap and easy aesthetic, and they lack a certain kind of poetry that you might find in other anti-humanist or post-humanist models.
AS: What's the relationship between singularity and AI, and how does that link to longevity?
ED: The language of the future needs to change to make it feel new; otherwise, it loses its power. The language of singularity emerged in science fiction and then became popularized, even becoming a mainstream signifier that can be mocked in popular media. It had a long life. I think it has been replaced by AI for several reasons. AI is a more tangible thing that we can already see in our lives, making it easier to think about. It also shares many features with singularity because, of course, the AI is what will wake up and become smarter than us.
Singularity used to be a large, abstract model, but with AI, we are on the runway to the future, and we don't need that big picture anymore.
There is a feeling that all existing models and technologies are insufficient to address the historical significance of the current moment. It feels closer which to some degree is more terrifying — it's like a singularity with teeth. And what does that do? It affects longevity, as you mentioned. There is a cultural connection among people drawn to these different concepts.
I have no idea what Bryan Johnson means by claiming that AI assists him in his longevity journey. That's part of the flavor of the aesthetics we were talking about before. The body becomes kind of a meat robot, and we're going to make sure the meat robot lives as long as possible to go out into space. It's a radical reimagining of the physical body that paradoxically affirms the physical body. Rather than just saying, "Oh, who cares about it, we're just going to upload ourselves to the cloud." Most people don't really want to do that.
The body becomes this privileged point between the Earth that we're leaving and the post-human future that doesn't really require a body anymore. It's our little spaceship that we need to have because even people who want to live forever aren't ready to live forever inside of code, but who knows?
AS: If we ever achieve this future where privileged people can live longer, what are some of the implications that you see?
ED: I don't know when it will become obvious, but the human race is composed of different lines that have fundamentally different capacities based on their access to technologies, genetic engineering, education, etc. We already have these layers that we all know about — it’s uncomfortable because it's not written in stone, but it's also true. That variety is largely based on class — and over a long period of time, this separation is going to reach a point where it becomes more obvious.
What's happening now is that to varying degrees, we recognize this, and some people are thinking about it in terms of politics. If you're an overlord, why would you want to share power with people who aren't even getting the same opportunities that you and your children are getting? It naturally leads to an anti-democratic position, which has been more and more obvious in Silicon Valley, the New Right, and the Dark Enlightenment. The political implications of it are significant, but there's also a psychological question of who we really are, and the new developments in tech will make us confront this question very soon.
We used to think, "Oh, AI is going to be making our political decisions for us, or it's going to be like the smartest scientists on the block." Nobody expected AI to directly impact our humanity in this way — art, poetry, image-making, music, writing — all this softer stuff. Now these fundamental features of human psychology and human identity are simulated in a way that nobody expected. It's going to create reactionary formations, and it's going to create anti-reactionary movements. That’s why we’re seeing movements like QAnon and the fears of vaccines and of a transhumanist agenda.
The conflict is already visible, and that isn't going away. Within a few generations, the sense that there is a human race that we all belong to is going to be more obscure. And so in a way, longevity is a feature of that because that's one of the most obvious ways that this differentiation will announce itself. And the ugliness of this aesthetic is a way of saying, “I am no longer in the human world with your cute little poetics — I don't care about that anymore because I'm on this other train.” We also don't see a lot of it because a lot of it is hidden. Peter Thiel is okay with being famous, and Bryan Johnson wants to be famous, but there are a lot of rich people who aren’t. We're already in the future, and that will become more visible and more anxiety-producing.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Subscribe to Erik Davis’ Substack, Burning Shore, to read his recent essays and research.