New story about the recent book on #transhumanism To Be a Machine:
For the (very very quickly) upcoming Love & Death Issue, I had the chance to interview the journalist, Mark O’Connell, who is the author most recently of To Be A Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death. He also wrote that amazing piece in the New York Times Magazine a few months ago about Zoltan Istvan, the transhumanist who ran for president and drove across the country in a coffin-shaped bus. O’Connell’s new book reads like a travelogue among characters like Zoltan, futuristic types (mostly from California) that O’Connell describes with a charming blend of cynicism and aloof interest. Like an agnostic amidst a group of “true believers,” O’Connell is both repelled by and drawn in by the belief system that transhumanism proffers.
If you’re unfamiliar, transhumanism is the movement that asserts an immortal future thanks to technology and science. As O’Connell describes it, it is the technological teleology of salvation: “a projection whereby intelligent life takes over all matter in the universe, leading to a cosmological singularity.” In other words, the computers we’ve built, the science we’re discovering, will free us from our mortal coil, our bodies. We will live eternally in new bodies, machines unconstrained by sickness, vulnerability and death.