Halloween and the Gift of Death

We risk our humanity when we indulge transhumanist mythologies of digital immortality

We have all heard a great deal in recent years about how thoroughly digital networks have integrated themselves into our lives. There remains one day a year that has remained largely app-free, however: Halloween, the day of the dead.

Across America, Halloween traditions continue without much influence from the online world. People still dress up in physical costumes, not in augmented reality skins. Celebrants of the holiday go out trick-or-treating into the night to see their neighbors face-to-face, or at least face-to-mask, not through the digital interfaces of social media. They seek bits of candy, not Bitcoin.

There’s a reason for this: Death is the ultimate offline experience. In a world saturated with online fantasies and false promises, death offers us an authentic and trustworthy, if spooky, anchor in reality.

We are terrified with death, but we celebrate it too, and spend quite a bit of money doing so. Halloween is a huge business in the United States, and is mirrored with similar celebrations of death in other nations because, although its cultural interpretation differs from place to place,

Businesses that ignore death miss remarkable opportunities for relevance. In spite of this, Silicon Valley business culture is, for the most part, doing every thing it can to rebel against the reality of death. Its insistence upon doing so reveals quite a bit about the other blind spots of digital business culture.

Selling Fantasies Of Digital Immortality

In the Journal of Beautiful Business, transhumanist libertarian Zoltan Istvan speaks enthusiastically about an end to death enabled by digital technology. “As humans and rational creatures capable of creating sophisticated tools, there’s no limit to what we can do. Death is the first major challenge for the species to overcome to truly transcend our biology. There’s nothing in the way out there saying we must continue to die.”

Istvan’s heart is in the right place, I’m sure, but I’m concerned that his transhumanist mythology is detached from our reality. There are limits to what human beings can do. Human beings have always died, and we must continue to die.

There are plenty of stories about tech gurus pursuing immortality, but there have always been people pursuing immortality. The plain fact is that no one in Silicon Valley is actually anywhere close to delivering immortality. Heck, the digital life sold us by big tech hasn’t even nudged our country in that direction.

We’ve had an entire generation under the economic and social domination of big tech. Nonetheless, in the United States, life expectancy isn’t rising. The reasons for this can’t be solved by improvements in information technology, because they’re human problems, social problems. Prime among them is the refusal of big businesses, those in Silicon Valley included, to pay their fair share in taxes, to create a system of universal access to health services.

The Lesson Of Tithonus: Give Us Basic Health First

I doubt that anyone who seeks to rush headlong toward a promise of immortality has heard of the ancient Greek myth of Tithonus.

Tithonus was a prince of Troy, a musician who charmed the Eos, the rosy-fingered goddess of the dawn, with his playing. The two became lovers, and Eos declared that she never wanted to be parted from him. Eos asked of Zeus that Tithonus be given immortality, and her wish was granted.

The two did not live happily ever after.

Eos, who lived in perpetual dawn, never thought to ask Zeus to give Tithonus protection from aging. So, though Tithonus could never die, his body kept on growing older and older and older. Tithonus eventually lost his mind, and the use of his body. Eos could not bear his presence any longer, and so placed him alone, paralyzed, on a slab in a dark room, where he lies, babbling nonsense into the shadows to this day.

Immortality sounds lovely, until you start to think about what it really means.

The myth of Tithonus emphasizes the essential distinction between quantity of life, and quality of life — a point that was missed by Eos and transhumanists alike. The structure of digital business has been so focused on creating economic efficiency that it’s created qualitative misery for huge numbers of people. Families whose ancestors enjoyed access to health insurance are now living without because of the gig economy, pioneered by tech executives who feel no obligation to ensure that the people who work for them have medical care when they get sick.

If they want us to listen to their rambling fantasies about digital immortality, transhumanist executives should take care of fundamentals first. They should ensure that our lives are livable before they try to make it make it everlasting. There’s no way I’ll believe that I’m going to be granted digital immortality if I don’t even have dental care.

Immortality = Permanent Inequality

Let’s be honest about this: Transhumanism is envisioning immortality as a perk for digital elites, not as an experience for everyone. You won’t find many transhumanists among the rank and file of digital workers. It isn’t the Uber drivers or the people laboring in Asian tech factories who are dreaming of a perpetual life made possible through consciousness on a microchip.

The MIT Technology Review provides a frightening example of the dystopia of digital immortality that Silicon Valley executives have in mind. They describe the work of a consultant, Hossein Rahnama, who works with CEOs to establish algorithmic copies of their identities that will continue to exercise executive authority on their behalf even after their physical bodies have died.

In this particular scheme, executives wouldn’t actually become immortal themselves. Only their digitized voices would remain as algorithmic shadows, haunting the corridors across the corporate campus, lingering, waiting for opportunities to exert control. They would be like Ringwraiths, ancient kings determined never ever to let go of power.

If executives actually remained immortal themselves, the haunting curse would become even worse. There would be no new fresh voices at the top. There would be no advancement within the company. Those in power would stay in power forever, and their ideological interests would remain immortal too. Innovation would stumble along like zombie. The corporation itself would become undead.

Developing digital avatars enabling executives to continue to boss everyone around from the grave may be a dream come true for the executives, but it’s a nightmare for everyone else. It’s telling that Rahnama is working only with executives to provide this kind of service. Rank and file employees won’t their expertise and opinions represented in the afterlife. There certainly won’t be any digitally immortal union chiefs defending the rights of workers after death. Of course, to be fair, there are barely any unions left among the living — tech bosses like Jeff Bezos have made sure of that.

Silicon Valley pledged that if we went along with the digital revolution, there would be short term disruptions, but we would benefit economically in the long term. It’s been over three decades now since digital devices began to be introduced into everyday life, though, and during that time, wages have gone down, benefits have become more thin, and Americans are working longer hours for less income. Why would anyone believe transhumanist assurances that digital immortality would be available for everyone, and not just for the same lucky few who have been hogging the benefits of digital productivity for themselves?

It’s the financial elites of the tech industry who are driving talk of digital immortality, because they’re the only ones with the luxury sufficient to bring everlasting life to the top of their to-do lists. The massive inequalities of the new digital economy have got everyone else scrambling working side gigs just to scrape by in the here and now.

Immortality, An Environmental Disaster

Even if it ever becomes technologically possible, immortality will come at an expense that will be unbearable for all but the most callous and corrupt. Digital immortality will require enormous sacrifices from those living a natural span of life — both human and non-human. Human beings are already using up Earth’s resources at an unsustainable pace. Immortal humans used to living in the comfort of great wealth would use resources at an even higher rate in order to prop up their increasingly tenuous lives, making climate change and habitat destruction even worse than it is now.

Transhumanists rarely talk about what their plans for digital immortality would mean for the environment. It’s as if they regard their place in the digital ecosystem as more relevant. The math isn’t hard to figure out, though: Transhumanist immortality would either result in larger population (much higher, if immortality ever spreads beyond Silicon Valley elites) or a reduction in the number of children that are born.

A world populated by ancient business executives without any babies would certainly be an aesthetic nightmare, and a cultural disaster. On a more practical level, it would endanger the survival of humanity. Biological adaptation of our species would grind to a halt.

Innovation: The Upside of Death

Anyone who has studied evolutionary biology knows that death and reproduction drive adaptation. The creation of new people means the creation of new combinations of genetic traits, as well as the development of brand new genetic traits. If people are forced to stop having children, so that there will be enough room for transhumanist immortals, genetic adaptation will grind to a halt.

Cultural evolution would be thwarted, too. People go through predictable developmental stages, with adults typically disposed to defend old ideas and practices, while younger people challenge them. If transhumanists have their way, old ideas and old practices, especially those favored by the most-likely-to-be-immortal economic elites, will become firmly entrenched. Humanity will get stuck in its ways.

Both biologically and culturally, digital immortality will thwart innovation. Innovation means the creation of something new. A society that’s centered around immortality will be inherently opposed to new things, adopting an anti-innovation approach.

Humanity Out Of Time

Transhumanists want to stay around forever — but what for? I’ve never heard a transhumanist talk specifically about their plans for what to do with the eternity of immortality. What do they need the extra time for? We can all come up for a plan for an extra week, an extra month, an extra year… but an extra eternity?

We actually have plenty of time in life to achieve something meaningful, as it stands. I’m saying this not as a young man with his all of his life ahead of him, but as someone who has passed the middle of his life expectancy.

Not all of us make good use of our time, but we all know the way that procrastination really works. Whenever procrastinators get a deadline extended, they don’t get more done. They just extend their procrastination. A world full of transhumanist immortals would largely be a world of people struggling to avoid getting things done — forever.

Immortality would make time meaningless. Living in artificial environments that reflect neither the passing of the day nor the passing of the seasons, ultra-powerful immortal digital barons would soon cease to reckon the passage of time in meaningful ways. As a result, the narrative arc of our lives would lack direction. An abolition of death would make our lives as incoherent as a soap opera, a story that goes on and on and on without any resolution or clarifying frame.

Confronting The Crisis Underneath the Push For Digital Immortality

Instead of seeking an infinite amount of time in which to determine meaning, it would be more fruitful for Silicon Valley tycoons to confront the deeper crisis that’s driving their dissatisfaction with their mortal lives: The realization that what they’ve achieved is not enough.

Maybe, when these people wake up in the middle of the night, with more wealth and social influence than most people could imagine, and meet the unshakable feeling that they still need something more, it isn’t more time that they need. Perhaps, up in their towers of artificial intelligence, what they really need is more of a human connection.

When the bosses of Silicon Valley seek immortality, they seek to widen the economic divide. They reveal their disconnection from the common human experience that goes on beneath the mask of their data analytics. They neglect to attend the basic needs of life.

This Halloween, let’s turn off our smartphones, our tablets, our laptops, our desktops. Let’s disconnect tonight from the digital unreality that spawns delusional aspirations of immortality among those who spend too much time with their head in a screen. Let’s get back to our old haunt, the physical world, and confront the spirits of our own mortality.

We need death to keep us human. Unlike the transhumanists, I don’t view humanity as a flaw, as a tragic error we must seek to escape. For me, being human is what makes being alive worthwhile in the first place.

When our leaders begin to believe otherwise, that’s when the true horror begins.