Paper Short Abstract:

The author presents surprising findings from his recent research into the cryonics and radical anti-aging scenes and their efforts to become "amortal" (a proposed avoidance of inevitable death by aging) -- including reasons for their mainstreaming and their counterintuitive approach to kinship.

Paper Abstract:

Cryonics and anti-aging medicine represent two different paths to becoming “amortal” (where the inevitability of death by aging is eliminated, making deathlessness theoretically possible). Both the anti-aging and cryonics scenes have gained recent popularity and coverage in mass media, partly from interest from Silicon Valley figures and more broadly (I argue) from online cultures characterized by techno-optimism and techno-solutionism. As part of the Human Futures: Technoscientific Immortality project at the University of Bergen and Harvard University, this paper draws on ethnographic and survey data to reveal some counterintuitive findings about cryonics and anti-aging as roads to “amortality” that are biological, addressing questions such as: What is their relationship to developments in AI and other technological advances tending towards “transhumanism” or the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (descriptions of increased merging of the digital and the biological)? What do they have to do with “mind-upload” scenarios? Why is growth in the anti-aging and cryonics scenes correlated with growth in movements like Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism? And how are kinship and the family being imagined and reimagined by those involved in cryonics and anti-aging, as projects that seek to remake how human systems are reproduced?