What do Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping all have in common? Well, quite a few things, actually - and here’s another one to add to the list: they are all preoccupied with thoughts of their own immortality. This became apparent with Putin and Xi in September of 2025, when a hot mic caught the autocratic duo having a Black Mirroresque conversation about using organ harvesting and brainless clone farms to extend their own lives indefinitely. One of the ideas that has captured their undeniably fertile imaginations is a scheme where “human organs can be continuously transplanted”, suggesting a kind of modular biology in support of a literally permanent dictatorship.
Altman, Zuckerberg, and Bezos are perhaps the most famous, or at least public, examples of techno-capitalists gripped by a similar obsession with living forever, with all three men providing substantial funding for anti-ageing research. Altman has been a long-time longevity enthusiast, matching various investments in life-extending technology with a lifestyle designed to specifically extend his own life. And along with Altman, Bezos has a track record of getting involved in the preventative side of geroscience, especially around interventions on a cellular level. Meanwhile Zuckerberg has, as of February 2026, systematically shifted his “philanthropic” efforts away from activities that would have traditionally been considered actually philanthropic, like funding for more fair access to housing and education, and towards a more narrow focus on “science”, with the even narrower definition of science as the mission to “cure all disease”, an objective which in turn seems to focus on the idea of “engineering biology”, a core concept in the domain of longevity research. (A notable outlier here has been Elon Musk, who has opined, in a fleeting moment of consensus with expert opinion, that super-extended human lifespans “would cause asphyxiation of society because the truth is, most people don’t change their mind”.)
There is something completely obvious about the idea that a group of men with such evidently overblown notions of their own worth - what kind of megalomaniacal narcissist doesn’t ease up a bit after their first several billion dollars, or their first several terms in office? - would also be fixated on the idea that, whatever the future holds, they should be a living part of it. But there might be something even more grotesque happening here, a menacing shift towards the deterioration of the very order of the world as we know it. If the price of a long life for a few powerful men is the certain death of our species, will they be willing to take the offer?
The allegory of life as a cycle of seasons runs right through human cultures across time and space. It’s there in the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes, where we are told “to everything there is a season”, and it is likewise an ongoing theme in classical Sanskrit scripture, beginning with the Vedas where the term ritu is associated with both the concept of the proper time for each activity in life and for the seasons themselves (a term from which, some linguists have argued, we have inherited the English word ritual). The enduring crux of the conceit is that a single life is one and only one cycle of seasons; the plain fact that there will be many other cycles starting over and over again indexes the many generations of lives that have come before and will come after each of our own few seasons under the sun. The point of extending the metaphorical mapping between a life and a calendar here is to see that the sequence and balance of the seasons of a lifetime is essential to the process of living a full life, and that the process of each life going through this sequence, and so having a beginning and an accordingly delimited end, is in turn vital to the continued progress of our species on our planet. The mapping from seasons to generations is more literal than it might at first seem. As the seasonal and epochal shifts in nature drive the evolution of life, so the rise and decline of generations, each reacting to and against the one before it as each repeats the process of inheriting a changeable world, propels the evolution of society, for better and for worse.
And yet… here we are, at what looks like the edge of an epoch in which the seasons themselves are rebelling against the ongoing presence of our entire species on this planet. Leading the way into this impending era of darkness and death are the ultra-wealthy and super-powerful men striving to live forever, who ironically would like to break out of the rhythm of decline and renewal: it is not so much that they want to live through the seasons of life again and again, as that they would extend their own lives into one neverending summer, even if it is spent on a barren world. And there is a brutal completeness to the way in which a technologically enabled elite are seeking technological solutions to the problem of their own mortality by means of a technology which portends to accelerate the end of the world and so bring about the death of us all.
And so in an era where power is defined by the admixture of techno-barrons and autocrats, technology itself, and specifically artificial intelligence, is acting in the triune role of harbinger, enabler, and enactor of eternal life-amidst-death. AI has long been an enabler of a particular variety of the fantasy of unending near-life, specifically through the philosophically void fetish of the “uploaded brain”, a scenario in which fine-grained mappings of humans’ brains are somehow transposed into an AI-facilitated digital reality where the uploaded humans can continue to experience a veridical simulation of existence (Sam Altman in particular has been noted as enthusiastic about a digital afterlife). More recently, AI has been involved in enacting the decline of the only world we currently have through its direct material impact on the environment by way of the tremendous resources involved in an arms race towards a perpetually receding goal of “general intelligence”. It is easy to see the irony of AI as the antidote to the brevity and precariousness of physical existence, when it is the operational burden of AI itself which is making this existence all the more uncertain.
But above all, AI is a harbinger of what life might become like if some of us never die, in an era when the ultimate purchase for the man who can literally afford the world is his own eternal existence at the cost of everyone else. This is because AI has an embalming effect on the state of ideas and communication in a society up to the moment at which the AI is trained. In a technical sense, a data-driven model like an LLM is a massive compressor, finding a way to efficiently encode all the information it is shown, so a representation of all the ways people have already expressed themselves through text and other media. To the extent that data-driven AI can be used to extrapolate something new from this data, it is inducting a continuation of what has already been established.
Taken from this perspective, the current mode of AI is an excellent preview of what the world would be like if the people who have power now were able to remain the very same undying people who have power in the future. Shannon Vallor summarises the situation elegantly in the introduction to her book The AI Mirror:
“AI tools reflect the values of the wealthy postindustrial societies that build them… AI is a mirror of ourselves, not as we ought to be or could be, but as we already are and have long been. This is why we can’t let today’s AI tools decide who we will become, why we can’t let them project our futures for us.”
AI, being merely of the world but not alive in it, can only reflect and project permutations of what has already happened. In this respect, AI is acting as a forecast of the reality the men who currently own AI and so much else want to give us: a world in which their current power and the circumstances that have enabled it are made permanent, a realisation of their fantasy for things, and especially their lives, to be just as they are, forever. Like pharaohs who would entomb their servants with them, they are intent on keeping us in their sway, except their move is to switch up the process and drag the total and permanent stasis of death into all of our lives rather than pulling us along with them to their private deaths.
In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault writes about the impermanence of the cultures humans build, and of the ineluctable churn of upheaval after upheaval in the ways we understand our knowledge of the world:
“It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.”
By the relatively new idea of man Foucault, writing in the mid 1960s, means the modern notion of the human as an individual with a subjective perspective and experience, as a fundamentally introspective and self-occupied unit. By his estimation, it is a concept that came about around the beginning of the 19th Century and precipitated an epochal shift in the way that people thought about themselves - or arguably, even more fundamentally, the shift towards the modern preoccupation with thoughts of self in the first place. (And the application of the gendered term man here should not be interpreted as a politically incorrect anachronism; it has been an era in which the impulses of male humans especially have progressed from the emergence of individualism to the consuming obsession with the self that underwrites the quest for eternal life. The aptness of the term is evident in the makeup of the cast of characters involved in bankrolling the technologically facilitated quest for the fountain of youth, to which, in addition to those already mentioned, we can add the likes of Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Bryan Johnson - notice a pattern here?)
Foucault reflected, with the benefit of hindsight, on some of the same concerns that emerged around the beginning of this age of man, as for instance evident in the trepidations about the rupture between the natural world and the human world expressed by the Romantic poets of the early 19th Century. To return to a literally recurring theme, it was something like this that John Keats had in mind when he opens his poem “The Human Seasons” with the lines “Four seasons fill the measure of the year; There are four seasons in the mind of man” and then goes on to conclude, several lines later, “He has his Winter too of pale misfeature, Or else he would forego his mortal nature”. Here Keats - a poet who wrote prolifically, almost compulsively about the seasons, and also about death - deftly ties the anxieties of an era in which humanity was beginning to click into a mode of auto-systematisation with a warning about the perils of disrupting the natural cycles of the world.
Foucault’s critique, though, with the bulwark of modernism passing to its rear, hinges on the assertion that it is comforting that this era of self-significance and perpetually relativistic reframing has been brief and will end soon. The inevitable death of individuals presages the end of the individual itself as an institution and as an organising principle, as a de facto frame of reference. And this inevitable phase change is precisely what the men who want to use technology to preserve themselves fear: the impending irrelevance of their own lives and of the values that they held during those lives. As such, it is precisely their effort to use technological means to, as Keats puts it, forgo their mortal nature that guarantees they will be remembered as cautionary tales, exemplary, in their attempt not to die, of the death of an era that had already lived on too long.
← Back to Writing · Originally published at masteradamo.substack.com.