Strategies for Colonizing Death: The Online Dead, Griefbots, and Transhumanist Dragons

Abstract

Digital immortality and transhumanist longevity proposals are currently researched and debated independently. This essay claims that both ideas represent two sides of the same cultural denial of death, reconceptualizing them as interconnected forms of thanato-colonialism. The first form includes the digital immortality industry, in both its passive and active versions. Interpreted from the framework of data colonialism, digital immortality represents a masterful maneuver, guaranteeing that the dead can continue to contribute to the extractive logic of this new economy by endlessly generating data and serving as bait for the appropriation of human lives. In this way, data colonialism is no longer constrained by physical disappearance—transforming death itself into a profitable colonization strategy. The second kind of thanato-colonialism surfaces within the transhumanist imaginaries, which inherit the violence of historical colonialism and resort to the argument of progress to justify their ends. Nick Bostrom’s fable of the Dragon Tyrant allegorizes old age as a mythological beast, an archetype of the “other”—fundamentally different, threatening, and impossible to negotiate with—who must be subdued without contemplation. A team of engineers—humanity’s saviors—is tasked with slaying it.

1. Deprived of Death

In his historical studies on death, Philippe Ariès (1977) reflected on the denial or “prohibition” of death as the natural ethos of Western society since the end of the 19th century. The medicalization of death meant better technical assistance for the dying, even as it gradually reduced them to clinical objects. The power once held by the family was transferred to the hospital doctor. The affective component that had characterized the beds of a domestic death—which was also much more precarious in terms of medical science—was gradually lost.1 Ariès concluded one of his lectures by relating the last words spoken by the Jesuit priest François de Dainville (1909–1971). Affected by leukemia and aware that his death was near, he decided to face it as calmly as possible, agreeing with the doctors to avoid aggressive treatments to keep him alive. However, when his condition worsened, an internist transferred him to the intensive care unit of another hospital. Isolated in a sanitized room where his loved ones could only talk to him through an intercom, with inhaler tubes in his nose and another in his mouth, one arm punctured and the other on a drip, one of his companions heard him utter his last words. Ripping off his breathing mask and untying his arms, Dainville exclaimed, “They are depriving me of my own dead!”. Afterwards—the witness recounted—he fell into a definitive coma (Ariès 1977, p. 808).

The denial of death that Ariès documented from the 19th century onwards has worsened in Western culture. Death continues to be a visceral taboo for society and the individual. Far from inviting us to reconsider our relationship with death, current technologies are being designed to perpetuate this denial or prohibition. This social ethos also affects philosophy, since, even today, philosophy is still largely a reflection on death. The taboo has reached such a peak of tension that we philosophers also deprive ourselves of reflecting on death in directions other than those popularly accepted at the present time. The safe avenues of reflection all point to a search to delay the hour of death at all costs, to even eradicate it or, when it happens, to make the dead person remain involved in the digital social ecosystem by converting them into a conversable bot or avatar. How to reflect on the “art of dying” in an age where death itself has become an -ism? On the website of the World Transhumanist Association—Humanity+—it is argued that individuals should be free to choose their own death. Yet, at the same time, the site brands—or, rather, insults—as “deathists” those people and philosophies that refuse to consider old age as one of the most urgent biological “problems” afflicting humanity, resorting to their “engineering paradises” to remedy it.

The comedy series Upload (2022) uses as its main plot the celebrated transhumanist proposal to upload the software pattern of the brain to a computer. The protagonist of the series was about to die in a hospital due to a traffic accident, when his girlfriend made the decision to upload him to a “virtual paradise”, resorting to the mindscan technology. The series continues naively showing the life of this person now living in a first-class virtual paradise, like a country club where he depends on his girlfriend’s money to access any basic service. It does not seem to matter that this man, like the priest Dainville, has also been deprived of his own death. Furthermore, with all the artistic license that fiction allows, the series implies that the mindscan consists precisely of that: It allows you to become independent of your body and continue living by uploading yourself to a supercomputer or a hard drive. But as Susan Schneider (2019) and Louis Rosenberg (2022) have already pointed out, the mindscan is far from representing an opportunity to extend our lives. In fact, it could not even be considered an “enhancement”, since the person would still die when their turn came, leaving behind them in the world a copy—or a clone—that would share their memories and biography, yet would already be independent of their original.2

This essay reflects on the situation of being dispossessed of our own death—it is no longer a question of dying how we would like to, but simply of being able to die. Dying is an unknown experience for the living, but there is something we can be somewhat sure of: The person who dies ceases to participate in the world of the living, with its business, worries, and hurries. The dead person is absent, silent, and disconnected from the affairs of the world. In other words, they rest in peace. There is no single correct funeral ritual—as Christian colonists used to believe3—but as many rituals as there are traditions and societies. Additionally, there is no single form of mourning—as Freud’s successors believed when they medicalized mourning—but as many ways of grieving as there are living beings and affective relations. However, I believe that all grief assumes a common challenge, which is the irreplaceable character of what has been lost. It was precisely this key part of grief, the irreplaceable character of the dead, that was underestimated by Freud’s successors, as Jean Allouch pointed out in his magnificent work Erotics of Grief in Times of Dry Death.4

We are entering the era of the so-called “restless dead” (Nansen et al. 2014), a fortunate expression that, in my opinion, points to another face of the denial of death, now mediated by technology, where the dead continue to actively participate in social life and even become narrators or animated presences of their own absence. To address this complex issue, I will use two fundamental questions to serve as the guiding thread of this essay. In the first part, I take the following question as my guiding question: (1) Is death being used as a colonial weapon by the Big Tech corporations? Meanwhile, the second part of this essay seeks to answer this other question: (2) Is it death itself the “monster” that we, human beings, must subdue and dispossess for the sake of progress? These two questions are intimately linked as both examine two sides of the same denial or prohibition of death that Philippe Ariès addressed.

The first question is related to what Couldry and Mejías (2019, 2024) call “data colonialism”. These authors have demonstrated the strategic and ideological continuity that exists between historical colonialism, based on the appropriation of land, natural resources and human labor, and surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019), which is the business model beyond Big Tech corporations. They define data colonialism as the “prolongation of a global process of extraction that began under colonialism, continued through industrial capitalism, and culminated in the current new form: Instead of natural resources and labor, what is now appropriated is human life through its conversion into data” (Couldry and Mejías 2019, p. 21). Thanks to the industry of digital immortality, not even physical death frees us from this new colonialism. The digital immortality provided by current technologies proves that their extractive practices are not limited to human life—nor do they end with it. Whether the dead remain passively on the Internet—for example, through commemorative profiles on social media platforms—or actively—in the form of chatbots or postmortem avatars—they continue to be a source of data, occupying their place in the extractive colonial economy. Dying is no longer synonymous with resting or disconnecting. The online dead, griefbots, and postmortem avatars continue to generate data, serving as bait for the further datafication of human lives. The first part of this essay reflects on this particular form of thanato-colonialism, which makes “immortality” an efficient weapon to continue datafying human lives for its own profit.

The second question, related to the colonization of death itself, brings us even closer to historical colonialism. Transhumanist narratives for increasing longevity or postponing senescence are an extension of the colonial violence that has legitimized the ideology of unlimited growth that has brought us to the current planetary crisis—wrongly called “Anthropocene” and better reformulated as “Westernocene” (San Román and Molinero-Gerbeau 2023). What we now seek to control, subdue, and forcibly assault are no longer just other human beings, non-human animals, or the land, but our own mortal condition. To show the continuity of this colonial attitude—based on violence, dispossession, and the inability to engage in dialogue with an “other” who has been reduced to the condition of a beast—I am going to analyze “The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant” proposed by Nick Bostrom (2005). Thus, in the second part, I explore a second kind of thanato-colonialism that makes the transitory nature of human biology the fundamental enemy of progress and evolution.

I am aware that both digital immortality and transhumanist proposals for longevity are being researched and debated independently. But from the perspective of the cultural prohibition of death, they are not truly separate issues. On the contrary, I argue that they represent two contemporary faces of the same underlying denial of death.

2. Artemisia’s Griefbot

In his Attic Nights, Aulus Gellius (2nd century CE) tells the story of the mourning of Artemisia, wife of Mausolus, king of Caria. Upon the death of her husband, “Artemisia, inflamed with grief and with longing for her spouse, mingled his bones and ashes with spices, ground them into the form of a powder, put them in water, and drank them” (AN, X.18,3; Gellius 1927 [1961]) translated by Rolfe, p. 263). The extravagance of this “cannibal mourning” is explained by Gellius in terms of a “violent passion”. Later, this anecdote would be, for Marsilio Ficino, proof of the kind of aberrations caused by “vulgar love”, as if the passion of human Eros could even lead to necrophagia.

That lovers also wish to take the whole loved one into themselves is illustrated by Artemisia, the wife of King Mausolus of Caria. She is said to have loved her husband beyond the belief of human affection, and to have ground his dead body into dust and to have drunk it, dissolved in water.

(DA, VII.6; Ficino 1944 [1985] translated by Jayne, p. 226)

Artemisia’s “cannibal” mourning, the commemorative tomb or “mausoleum” she created for Mausolus, and the treatment this story has received offer creative possibilities for thinking about death in the 21st century. At the risk of falling into an anachronism, I will use this story as a heuristic exercise to reflect on how digital technologies have altered our conventional way of approaching the mourning and death of a loved one.

Let’s take Ficino’s idea of Artemisia’s grief as a starting point. Let us concede that the gesture of drinking her husband’s ashes shows the extent to which the lover longs to merge with her beloved. The hybridization of humans with technology is one of the central themes of contemporary philosophy, not only through technologies that are not yet fully developed, such as brain-computer interfaces—e.g., Elon Musk’s famous NeuraLink—but also through devices such as VR helmets. Even our relationship with more rudimentary and much less coupled devices such as the smartphone is being thought of as a hybrid relationship. Based on his Extended Mind Hypothesis, David Chalmers argues that the smartphone has become an active part of our mind. Consequently—he further argues—the theft of a smartphone is not only the theft of an object we own—such as a wallet or handbag—but an assault on our very person. (Chalmers 2023, p. 362). According to this framework, the boundaries between our body-mind and our smartphone become dangerously blurred. But if the smartphone functions as an extension of ourselves, should it also be considered part of our corpse? Taking Chalmers’ idea to its logical conclusion, in order to truly merge with her husband, Artemisia would have to drink not only the ashes of her husband’s physical body, but also his smartphone—along with other similar technological devices, such as his laptop or tablet. These devices would not simply be objects that belonged to her husband, but dispersed parts of Mausolus’s mind whose bodies Artemisia could no longer ignore if she wished to ingest the “complete” corpse.

There is no doubt that Artemisia, in managing her husband’s legacy, would not be able to ignore his digital legacy or even the so-called “informational body”, which could give rise to the so-called “immortality by proxy” (Harbinja 2019, p. 81). Simply put, we would say that an individual’s digital legacy is made up of four types of assets: (1) digital remains, including data from their social networks and web pages, such as photographs and memes; (2) digital assets, as in goods stored in the cloud or on a personal computer, such as photographs, books, or music; (3) digital traces resulting from the deceased’s interaction in digital media, including their various search histories, the record of their movements on the internet, their blog posts, emails, etc.; and (4) digital endurance, which includes the creation of a post-mortem digital legacy, such as the creation of online memorial sites or a digital avatar of the deceased, whether created by the deceased in life or recreated by their loved ones (Savin-Baden 2022, p. 73ff).

It is precisely the digital endurance of the deceased that constitutes the kind of symbolic immortality that has come to be called “digital immortality”. Some authors have defined this immortality as “the continuation of an active or passive digital presence after death” (Savin-Baden et al. 2017, p. 11). They distinguish between “passive social media death”, which would constitute a “one-way immortality”, and “an active artificial intelligence-driven presence after death”, which would constitute a “two-way immortality”. But both kinds of digital immortality, active and passive, imply the permanence of the dead in a digital ecosystem built on the extractive commodification of human experiences, including the experience of mourning and commemoration of the deceased. In both cases, the dead are a living source of income for the corporations that administer the data colonialism mapped out by Couldry and Mejías (2019, 2024). Apps like HereAfter allow a person to store their memories through audio recordings and images to construct a kind of animated panegyric space. Family and friends can go to this space and have the virtual self of the deceased tell them relevant stories from their lives and even explain the context and stories behind the photographs they uploaded to the app before they died. “Preserve memories with an app that interviews you about your life. Then, let loved ones hear meaningful stories by chatting with the virtual you” the app description explains. In addition, the app is presented as a “heartfelt, customized gift you can give for the holidays, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, birthdays, retirements, and more”.5

Nanser Bjorn and other researchers claim that the “hybrid digital cemetery” offers “forms of commemoration that are increasingly individualized, temporal, and animated” (Nansen et al. 2014, p. 122). Apps like the one I just mentioned fit this description nicely. Furthermore, I think it is a wise idea for these researchers to conceptualize the transition between physical cemeteries to hybrid digital cemeteries as a transition from rest to restlessness on the part of the deceased. In fact, the “restless dead” might participate in the same “preoccupied ecstasy” that, according to Peter Sloterdijk, currently characterizes the living: “Work, struggle, love, dialogue; these are the main forms of preoccupied ecstasy. From this point of view, occupation is synonymous with existence, and the opposite of preoccupation would not be boredom, but death” (Sloterdijk 2003, p. 91).

“Digital immortality”, with all its variations and complexities, should not be interpreted solely in sociological terms—such as the new online forms of mourning or commemoration—or in phenomenological or psychological terms, like the emotional burden of deleting a loved one’s online profiles or encountering ”death glitches”, ranging from the loss of a web domain to automatic messages provoked by “algorithms [that] make it feel as if the dead are trying to make contact from beyond the grave” (Kneese 2023, p. 96). The social presence of the dead on the Internet should also be interpreted in terms of the data colonialism that sustains the current digital ecosystem. Like the living, the “restless dead” continue to be agents and subjects of this colonialism, active and productive members of the neo-extractivist economy. Couldry and Mejías explain this new form of colonialism as follows:

Big Tech has achieved a similar feat of exploitation [than historical colonialism] by setting up business models that convert ‘our’ data—that is, data resulting from tracking our lives and those of others—into wealth and power for them (but not for us). At the micro level, this means that our data is used to target us individually through advertising or profiling. At the macro level, this means that our data is aggregated and used to make decisions or predictions impacting large groups of people, such as the training of an algorithm to discriminate based on race, gender, economic status or medical condition. This is possible thanks to a rearrangement of many aspects of our daily life in such a way that ensures we are continuously generating data.

(Couldry and Mejías 2024, p. 6; italics are mine)

Unlike historical colonialism, the new social order of data colonialism is built on the basis of an already developed and globalized capitalism. This explains why it does not rely on the physical violence that constituted historical colonialism, which was rooted in the appropriation of land and labor. On the contrary, this new form of colonialism has evolved partly thanks to our consent—although the expansion of technology in our lives is anything but democratic. Nowadays, techno-capitalism has reorganized itself so that its extractive practices are never interrupted and human beings are “continuously generating data”. Digital commemoration applications and services cannot be interpreted outside of this incessant data capture dynamic. The physical death of an individual no longer represents a loss for this new form of colonialism. In other words, dying does not have to be synonymous with ceasing to generate data. Of course, this is not what a mourner pursues or perceives when seeking to preserve the online presence of a loved one whom they miss. I have already indicated that data colonialism places us into many ambiguous situations, where individuals often use the services that the internet offers with certain intentions but, through their participation in a colonial, monopolistic, and extractive network, end up achieving exactly the opposite of what they intended. Additionally, there is no doubt that the digital immortality industry does not advertise the commercial benefit it gains from these new forms of digital commemoration. Instead, it appeals to sensationalist marketing that plays on our deepest emotions: “[...] mass mourning on social media platforms are still tied to the platform’s commercial interest; it attracts living users and keeps them emotionally invested in platforms. Mourning itself is hard to disentangle from the attention economy. Dead people Facebook’s memorial pages often accrue ‘likes’ and emojis”, explains Kneese (2023, p. 46).

It should come as no surprise that the permanence of the dead in the digital ecosystem often stems from the wishes of the deceased or their loved ones. In fact, popular demand to keep the social profiles of the dead active forced platforms like Facebook to reform their policies. Data colonialism leads to all kinds of paradoxical situations, where multiple factors come into play. Mejías and Couldry mention Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s reflection when she acknowledged that using social media to promote the cause of Canada’s indigenous peoples “made the largest corporations in the world [...] earn more money to reinforce the system of settler colonialism” (Couldry and Mejías 2019, p. ix). Preserving the presence of the dead on the web throws us into situations that are equally ambiguous and difficult to resolve. There is one indisputable reality: As long as the living are willing to remain connected even after death, we will continue contributing to data colonialism—even from the afterlife.

“Death was not baked into social media platforms like Facebook”, explains Tamara Kneese, “but memorialization has become a source of value to Facebook all the same: it helps keep users invested in an imperfect, aging platform. Through the preservation of profiles, the dead are able to remain productive members of a network” (Kneese 2023, p. 45). As it was usually the case with historical colonialism, now it is no longer the State or the colonists’ religion but the technological platforms that dictate how the dead should be memorialized, whether on social media or in applications designed to remember the deceased or chatting with their virtual self. The so-called “restless dead” not only depend on the development of technology or artificial intelligence, but also on the decisions of tech executives who determine the correct way of commemorating them. These heads of technology corporation ultimately have the power to alter or even delete these commemorative accounts, as well as to create them for no reason, when the person they commemorate is still alive.6

The indiscriminate capture of data is veiled by various advertising claims, yet it permeates every aspect of data colonialism. Mejías and Couldry explained that just as the colonists believed they had more of a right to own the land than the natives—arguing that they knew how to make it profitable and exploit its resources—Big Tech believes it has the right to appropriate the population’s data, since it understands how to capitalize on properties that would otherwise go to wasted. In their words, “Businesspeople often say that the data they extract from our time online is ‘just there’. [...] Wouldn’t it be too bad if all that knowledge were lost, the data that might help solve most of humanity’s problems? So why not let control of this vast ‘data exhaust’ pass to business for free?” (Couldry and Mejías 2024, p. 37).

In our century, Artemisia could have chosen to maintain Mausolus’ social presence on the Internet or even continued to converse with him via an AI chat—the so-called griefbot. Mausolus himself might have trained this bot before he died or even subscribed to a more sophisticated avatar, such as the one once proposed by Eternime (Ursache 2015) and fed it an indecent amount of private information—private information that, moreover, would not only affect the individual themselves. We often tend to forget that privacy is a public value; our privacy also compromises the privacy of the people around us. It is not a strictly individual “possession” that one can dispose of as one pleases.7

While forms of passive immortality—commemorative websites or commemorative profiles on social media—can provide social support to mourners and allow distant people to participate in the commemoration of a person for whom they feel sorrow, active immortality—based on griefbots or postmortem avatars—comes dangerously close to suppressing grief, reinforcing a denial of death that Western society has been cultivating for at least two centuries. Active immortality should be studied from the perspective of the taboo that death represents in our society—where we no longer would be denying death itself, but also the dead person as dead. We should not dismiss the consequences of using AI to continue talking to our dead—generating new memories from these interactions engineered to facilitate their presence—nor the possibility that behind this techno-solutionism lurks the horror of both our own and others’ disappearance. If, as Jean Baudrillard claimed, the hypothesis of an “ironic stage of technology” could be accepted, it is difficult to deny that we are invoking it strongly. I fully agree that the ironic stage of technology leads us “towards something like ‘pataphysics, as the science of all that exceeds its own limits, of all that exceeds the laws of physics and metaphysics” (Baudrillard 2005, p. 85). As the science of the particular, ‘pataphysics, originally founded by Alfred Jarry, would have embraced the idea of a dead person who continues to be “active” enough to help you overcome the grief caused by their own death. It is akin to continuing to sleep with an ex-partner to ease the pain caused by a break-up or continuing to go to work to process one’s retirement. To soften the blow of loss, we manipulate the loss itself: By clipping the wings of absence, we seek to prevent the void from manifesting itself. In this case, we resort to digital strategies. But it is a form of mourning that undermines itself at the very moment it involves the presence and participation of the very loss it seeks to resolve.

Reflecting on the work of B. G. Glaser and A. L. Strauss, Awareness of Dying, Ariès mentioned that in industrial societies, “the dying person no longer felt death coming: they were no longer the first to decipher the signs and from then on they were hidden from them; doctors and nurses, the only ones who knew, did not warn them, except in exceptional cases subject to discussion” (Ariès 2007, p. 256). The dizzying pace of industrial and hyper-technological societies has only exacerbated the distance from our own physical bodies. At the beginning of their book The Costs of Connection, Couldry and Mejías mention the case of novelist Sally Rooney. When doctors warned her that she was not hydrating herself enough, she turned to an app called WaterMinder to remind her to drink water throughout the day. The app’s slogan claims, “Make water fun again”.

The simple, daily act that every individual body does of monitoring whether it has drunk enough water has suddenly become something that happens in a competitive social space. The human body has been reworked into something that requires a distant infrastructure, from which, incidentally, profit can be made. In Rooney’s own words, ‘I have contracted out one of the essential functions of my body to a piece of software’.

(Couldry and Mejías 2019, p. x)

How are we going to feel the coming of our own death if we now even delegate the basic needs of our body to an app? Contrary to what the Christian colonists believed—and contrary to what Freudian psychoanalysis argued—there is no single way to grieve for the loss of a loved one, nor is there a “correct” way to do so. But there is a fundamental feature that characterizes every experience of grief, and that is the irreplaceable nature of what we have lost. In his Erotics of Mourning in The Time of Dry Death, Jean Allouch harshly criticized the way in which Freud’s successors approached mourning, treating it as if it consisted of a “labor” in which a mourner was expected to substitute the lost object as if it were something “replaceable”. “If I lose a father, a mother, a wife, a husband, a child, a friend, will I be able to replace that object? Isn’t my grief precisely related to it as irreplaceable?”, Allouch (2011, p. 49) asked. He claimed that Freud’s successors subjected grief to such rigid medicalization that they even went so far as to defend the need to make children cry for their own good to ensure the grieving process unfolded properly. Allouch called this “the sadistic fantasy”, which consists of a “‘charity’ that presents itself, determined not to back down in the face of its own cruelty”, and which justifies itself in the name of a correct medicalization of grief.

What are we going to show the child as what has been lost? A corpse? But that’s not what they’ve lost! A photo of the deceased? But the photo is still there! Love? Hate? Contempt? And whose words would express the love, hate or contempt? Furthermore, has the child lost a lover or a loved one, an hater or a hated one, a despiser or a despised one? And above all: what is known about it? Because that is the point: people think they know what the child has lost, or at least they pretend to know, and that pretense, apart from cutting off whatever they might happen to say, is still abusive from start to finish.

(Allouch 2011, p. 47; Italics are mine)

Today, the child could be shown certain pieces of the deceased’s “informational body”—an interactive app where the deceased would have recorded their memories in the form of words, audio, and images. But if, as Allouch pointed out, what the child has lost is not a mere physical body, I suspect that it is not a mere digital body either. The industry of digital immortality, particularly in its “active” or “two-way” version, does not seek to make death reversible, but to replace the irreplaceable. In doing so, it does not invite us to review our relation to death or loss; rather, it promises to spare us the experience of this loss altogether, to suppress the experience of grief—in all its diversity and singularity, both individual and social. In a similar way, transhumanism—which I will discuss in the following pages—by seeking to remove the experience of suffering from our brains, reduces human life to a biological problem that engineering must solve.

What I aimed to argue in the first part of this essay is that both forms of digital immortality, both passive and active, keep us tethered to a digital ecosystem where our deceased continue to serve as business opportunities and bait for data extraction, fueling this new colonialism. As long as we are willing to remain connected even after we die, we will be participating in this extractive economy in ways that are more or less profitable for the technological oligopoly. Data colonialism is no longer held back by our physical disappearance, as it has found a way to make death a profitable colonization strategy.

3. Tyrant Dragons and Savior Engineers

In one of his writings on death, Ariès reflected on how we have come to distance ourselves so much from this final part of life that its very mention makes us shudder:

[Death] is now so removed from our customs that we find it difficult to imagine and understand it. The old attitude, in which death is at once close, familiar and diminished, desensitized, is too different from our own, in which it is so frightening that we no longer dare to speak its name. That is why, when we call this familiar death the tamed death, we do not mean that it was once wild and was then domesticated. On the contrary, we mean that it has now become wild, whereas it was not wild before. The most ancient death was tamed.

(Ariès 1977, p. 52)

Death has become so wild for us that transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom (2005) turns it into a tyrannical dragon who must be slain by a team of engineers—the beast is supposed to represent senescence, although it behaves like death, and anyone who opposes its killing is accused of being a “deathist”. Techno-capitalist progress dictates that the next step of the “forbidden dead” (Ariès 1977) is willful submission to technology in order to avoid it, even splitting the mind from the body if necessary and transferring it indefinitely to other non-biological supports, as if we could discard the body and still preserve our identity. The imaginaries of this kind of progress are direct heirs to all the colonial progress that preceded it. Old age has become the new “other”, assuming the role of the indigenous person who must be educated and civilized, of the woman who must be subdued or the non-human animal who must be hunted or exploited. Our transient biology has become “the barbarian to be Christianized”—or, in this case, “the defect to be enhanced”.

There is not much of the world left to colonize, so it is understandable that at this point in history, it is our own finite condition that has come under scrutiny. Anselm Jappe (2017) pointed out that capitalism, which has its genesis and development in colonial imperialism, functions in an “autophagic” way. There is no reason why this self-digestion should not also devour its own defenders, who are eager to be transformed by utopian futures and paradisiacal eschatologies in which they now place their civilizational hopes—such as Kurzweil’s fantasy of uploading his mind into a supercomputer. The main obstacle to current techno-capitalist progress is our own temporality, inscribed in a defective biology. The tale by the transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom, “The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant” (Bostrom 2005), perfectly illustrates the longstanding imaginary now applied to the new colonial adventure.

Bostrom caricatures senescence as an insatiable, tyrannical dragon that it is both right and urgent to annihilate. In truth, the dragon seems to play the role of death in Bostrom’s fable. While human senescence is a gradual process that unfolds over time, the dragon behaves as predatory “vermin” that devour people when the time comes, making them vanish. This shows that the boundaries between old age and death are rather blurred, and that the target of the fable is indeed both of them. In fact, those who oppose the slaying of the dragon are branded “deathists” by Bostrom. This pejorative category, which functions as an insult, is also found on the Humanity+ website—the website of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA), originally founded by Nick Bostrom and David Pearce. With this little word, the transhumanists execute a masterfully demagogic move: While they are the ones who subject life to the imperialism of technology, reducing it to a mere engineering problem, it is you who are left defending death. “The illusions of deathist philosophies”, it is claimed in Humanity+ website, are “dangerous, indeed fatal, since they teach helplessness and encourage passivity”.8 However, the “illusions of transhumanist philosophies” are far more dangerous, and it still remains to be shown how they could be applied without reinforcing the already worrying social inequalities and discrimination of our world today.9

The dragon has no voice—Bostrom presents it as a stupid and instinctively predatory animal. Therefore, no negotiation or dialogue is possible: It must be slain without contemplation. To guarantee the progress of our species, we must resort to violence and subdue and kill the wild animal—an allegory of our own biological temporality. And who are the true heroes of the fable? Who are our saviors? A team of engineers! The kings and princes of traditional fairy tales are no longer enough. Politicians are useless without the advice of technocrats. Only a techno-oligarch government can save us all—natives of our own self-digestion. It is reasonable to assume that these engineer saviors will be graduates of Stanford or MIT. It is also reasonable to assume that they will be white, given the background of the author of the fable: “In 1996, Bostrom argued that ‘Blacks are more stupid than whites,’ lamenting that he couldn’t say this in public without being vilified as a racist, and then mentioned the N-word” (Gebru and Torres 2024, p. 9).

The motif of an animal monster guarding a treasure that a group of intrepid warriors must steal from it, heroically risking their lives in the attempt, is as old as the Histories of Herodotus. As James Romm explained, “at a deeper level, these stories [by Herodotus] are also myths of progress, of man’s conquest of primeval and terrifying forces in order to make possible a stable and organized life for himself in a political setting” (Romm 1987, p. 49). In Bostrom’s fable, the treasure itself is the murder of the monster, and the “intrepid warriors” are engineers. There would be much to say about engineering and the circumstances in which this profession emerged and evolved. Noble has pointed out “the millenarian significance of the advent of the engineer” which “was first announced by Henri Saint-Simon, the early socialist”. He continues,

Saint-Simon was closely associated with, and drew his disciples from, the Ecole Polytechnique, and had himself studied mathematics with Monge at the Ecole du Corps Royal du Genie. As social reformers, he and his followers became “evangelists for the engineer” and “apostles of the religion of industry”, and ultimately forged a new religion, the New Christianity, on the basis of the Baconian vision of redemption from labor through science. But the true herald of the engineer was Saint-Simon’s disenchanted disciple Auguste Comte.

(Noble 1997, p. 83)

The engineer was the ideal archetype of the positivist philosophy of Comte, for whom progress was always subordinate to order: “Whether that order was to be achieved on behalf of a state or a capitalistic enterprise, or both, the engineers, in just the manner Comte envisioned, remained devoted to that end” (Noble 1997, p. 205). Engineers are expected to be efficient, generators of capital and, above all, obedient to the established order, focused solely on making it work properly and ensuring its evolution as expected. In the transhumanist imaginary, which subscribes to the “thousand-year convergence of technology and transcendence” pointed out by David Noble, these engineers continue to assume the role of saviors, priests of the only rational form of liberation. The engineer who designs “psychochemical nirvanas” in the engineering paradise described in Pearce’s The Hedonistic Imperative (1995) could be considered a bodhisattva. In fact, there are authors who extend this comparison to all transhumanists, given their persistent desire to do good: “[Transhumanists] are already fulfilling at least one of the religious vows of the Mahayana branch of Buddhism, a vow to ‘save’—or bring about abundant good for-all beings” (LaTorra 2005, p. 40). However, these engineers are also responsible for the slaughter of the wild animal—the beast that lives within us. Additionally, it’s not as if Bostrom has prepared an action plan in case this happens and our life expectancy is massively extended. At the end of the fable, one of Bostrom’s proposals to compensate for possible overpopulation is to colonize other planets. Bostrom has always fantasized about colonizing the universe. However, colonizing Mars promises to be easier than colonizing Mors—death itself.

Nowhere in his fable does he no mention the global crisis of suicide, despite the fact that its high rates around the world flatly contradict his assumption that humanity’s fundamental priority is to turn all the scientific strength to postponing old age or avoiding death. But a 2019 report by the World Health Organization (WHO) places suicide “among the top twenty leading causes of death worldwide, with more deaths due to suicide than to malaria, breast cancer, or war and homicide. Close to 800,000 people die by suicide every year” (World Health Organization 2021, p. 7). Suicide rates gesture toward social and political problems that cannot be solved through engineering and that will remain unresolved as long as we continue to divert our attention from the real problems that plague the world—inequality, poverty, and discrimination, among many others. This is a common feature of technological fundamentalisms: pretending that their escapist daydreams and fantasies of transcendence are the most pressing concerns of our daily existence.

The expectation of ultimate salvation through technology, whatever the immediate human and social costs, has become the unspoken orthodoxy, reinforced by a market-induced enthusiasm for novelty and sanctioned by a millenarian yearning for new beginnings. This popular faith, subliminally indulged and intensified by corporate, government, and media pitchmen, inspires an awed deference to the practitioners and their promises of deliverance while diverting attention from more urgent concerns.

(Noble 1997, p. 207)

Twenty years after these words by Noble, works such as The Survival of the Richest (2022) by Douglas Rushkoff confirm that the escapist tendencies of the billionaires and technocrats have only increased alongside the ecological crisis and the deepening global inequality driven by their own corporations and business decisions. Rushkoff is right to connect the fantasies of the billionaires who summoned him to ask for advice on possible ways of escaping the “catastrophe” of an imminent apocalypse to Musk’s colonizing fantasies, Peter Thiel’s anti-aging fantasies, and Ray Kurzweil’s fantasies of uploading his mind into a supercomputer. All these ideas form part of the same science fiction escapist scenario—whether it be escaping the extinction that threatens humanity or escaping aging and death—upon which both the idea of human “evolution” and the supposed future “regeneration” of the species are being constructed. The group that Rushkoff encompasses under the term Mindset, with ideologies rooted in Silicon Valley, is closely related to the group that Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres call TESCREAL (an acronym for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism). This group includes the author of our fable and his colleague Kurzweil, as well as entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen. Andreessen’s (2023) Techno-Optimist Manifesto is completely supportive of the colonial violence present in Bostrom’s fable. While Bostrom casts death as a wild beast to be slain, Andreessen likens societies to sharks, destined “to grow or die”. Paris Marx (2023) has dismantled the fallacies of this fundamentalist manifesto in his analysis “The Religion of Techno-optimism”. The ideologues of the “TESCREAL bundle” are both the heirs of the first wave of modern eugenics and the representatives of the second. They share the same historical roots, contemporary communities, discriminatory attitudes, and fanatical eschatologies, as well as having a vested interest in financing and developing artificial general intelligence (AGI), which would no longer be limited to specific tasks, but capable of surpassing human capabilities across all domains.

The TESCREAL bundle of ideologies has become enormously influential, especially within certain powerful corners of the tech industry. Current and former billionaires who subscribe to, or are associated with, one or more TESCREAL ideologies and its techno-utopian vision of the future include: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jaan Tallinn, Sam Altman, Dustin Moskovitz, Vitalik Buterin, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Marc Andreessen, the last of whom included “TESCREAList” in his Twitter profile for several weeks in 2023. These billionaires have co-founded TESCREAList institutes, promoted TESCREAL researchers and philosophers like Bostrom, MacAskill, and Kurzweil, and TESCREAL Internet personalities like Yudkowsky who have endorsed military strikes against data centers, if necessary, to stop a hypothetical AGI apocalypse.

(Gebru and Torres 2024, pp. 9–10)

The TESCREALists have their hopes set on the development of AGI, which they finance and publicize as if it were the great panacea that humanity has been waiting for since its dawn. Although they themselves fear the consequences of this AGI, recognizing that if it is “misaligned”, the consequences could be catastrophic, they continue to trust that it will develop “without deviations” and lead us to a paradisiacal utopia rather than a zombie apocalypse. They themselves oscillate between the desire for a posthuman paradise and the fear of the most horrific disaster, and this gives rise to two kinds of eschatologies. The first manifests itself in a paradisiacal utopia, while the second gives rise to an apocalyptic eschatology. This is how Gebru and Torres explain it:

The apocalyptic aspect of the TESCREAL bundle arises from two considerations unique to the methodology of second-wave eugenics: first, transhumanists in the late 1990s realized that the very same technologies needed to create a posthuman utopia would also introduce unprecedented threats to humanity. Kurzweil (1999) referred to some of these hypothetical risks as “a clear and future danger”. The reason for concern is that emerging technologies are expected to be (a) extremely powerful; (b) increasingly accessible to both state and nonstate actors; and (c) dual-use, as exemplified by CRISPR-Cas9, which could enable us to cure diseases but also synthesize designer pathogens unleashing an “engineered pandemic”. Hence, developing these technologies was deemed necessary, but they potentially could destroy humanity.

(Gebru and Torres 2024, p. 8)

The faith and eschatology of the anti-dragonist squad are quite confusing. On the one hand, they defend the urgency and moral duty to kill the wild animal of our finitude, the enemy of progress and world order. On the other hand, if we follow their path too far, humanity could face extinction. Between ultra-longevity and extinction, anything is possible. Some may even argue that it is better to destroy humanity in the name of “progress” and “evolution” than to live and let live with the passivity of a deathist.

4. Conclusions

Like it is for all individuals in this age of attention, the greatest challenge for philosophy today is to avoid being distracted. I cannot resist concluding this essay without addressing the responsibility of scholars in sustaining the fantasies of transcendence promoted by TESCREALists—whether by legitimizing their underlying colonial violence, or by turning philosophy into entertainment at the service of these techno-imaginaries. Instead of speculating about whether AGI will be conscious or should have rights, we should pay attention to the exploitation of millions of workers or the environmental racism that its development perpetuates, as well as the groups of billionaires who finance and publicize it. Douglas Rushkoff lamented the philosophical distractions to which the Silicon Valley mindset has given rise. Certainly, many fields of philosophy often resemble playgrounds for thought experiments dissociated from reality:

Should children get implants for foreign languages? Do we want autonomous vehicles to prioritize the lives of pedestrians over those of its passengers? Should the first Mars colonies be run as democracies? Does changing my DNA undermine my identity? Should robots have rights? Asking these sorts of questions, which we still do today, may be philosophically entertaining. But it is a poor substitute for wrestling with the real moral quandaries associated with unbridled technological development in the name of corporate capitalism.

(Rushkoff 2022, p. 15)

Unfortunately, this kind of philosophical entertainment is common in areas such as the philosophy of mind, epistemology, or the cognitive sciences, where debates about the relationship between our mind and digital technologies fail to mention their real modes of functioning, the capitalist interests of the Big Tech industry, the colonialism of data, the surveillance capitalism, or the historical origins of AI and the Internet in the military industrial complex. Far from being an apolitical issue, reflecting on digital technologies without considering the real and practical contexts of their application betrays a metaphysical, ethical, and political alignment with the dominant values of the Big Tech industry.