If effective accelerationism cannot posit what an actual human being would resemble in an accelerated world, that’s because it is a belief system more interested in technology than the humans technology is meant to serve. Partially this is because e/acc is less a serious belief system and more of a hype vehicle for start-up fundraising, such as Jezos’s own company Extropic, or the startups “accelerated” by Andreessen Horowitz (Marc Andreesen’s venture capital firm). But on a deeper level, the libertarian, commercial outlook of most e/acc enjoyers prevents them from stating what human beings are actually for.

That is entirely due to a lack of imagination and a reactive squeamishness to the top-down project that creating a “new man” actually entails. One could create a picture of the man-machine merger as something beautiful; something that would look like the use of cognitive-enhancing technology to strengthen innate human abilities and heighten the irrational character of humanity that demarcates us from machines. Imagine enhancements that could perfect memory to the point we could rattle off the sequences of the human genome or the Old Testament at will, and the implications it would hold for the learning and production of art and technical skills. Would there be any fear of AI in a world where the human personality could reach its maximum depth and capabilities? 

But ultimately, it’s not surprising that effective accelerationists have no vision for humans beyond building something that will obsolete them. The creation of a new man veers into politics, and that is something entrepreneurial boosters are not equipped to do. Where, then, are we to look for the actually-living harbingers of a technologically-maximized way of life? Or at the very least, what would effective accelerationism look like as a way of life? The answer is embodied in the form of a man who spends a great deal of his will trying to deny himself.

The Autonomous Self

The story of Bryan Johnson begins with his loss of faith in Mormonism in the mid-2000s as a young man. That, and the struggle to bring a startup to profitability, threw him into depression and excessive weight gain throughout his twenties. But as he entered his mid-thirties and achieved financial success, an increasingly stringent exercise and diet regime restored his mental balance. The protocols coalesced into “Project Blueprint,” an anti-aging experiment wherein meticulous optimization for certain biomarkers accompanied by scientifically-determined health routines dominates his everyday life. Among his claims are 99th percentile sleep recovery, perfect liver fat, and “nighttime erections 179 min, better than avg 18-year-old.” He calls Blueprint “STEM for health.”

Johnson’s routine costs around two million dollars a year and completely dominates his physical and digital life. By design, we will not be able to ascertain its effects on human longevity for years to come, but this is not to discredit his research. Physical health in a world with an unhealthy baseline counts for something, and the public self-experimental aspect of Bryan Johnson’s work is a rare example of citizen science that can break through the often superstitious-therapeutic world of health-influencing. Describing it as a vanity project is only partially correct, for even though vanity is a great part of his image — something he is self-conscious of — Johnson is intoxicated by a vision of the future that heralds an upending of the human body itself.

Back when he was depressed, Johnson noticed that the human body actively rebels against good habits. He knew that overeating went against what was good for him, but something in him made him do it anyway. He claims that a form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which tries to develop the conscious mind’s ability to abstractly model and then arrest undesirable thought loops, is what helped cure him. Using this mental technique to implement his health routine, he went on to refine the idea into a life philosophy called “Autonomous Selves,” an attempt to disrupt negative cycles and implement good ones as a route to self-sovereignty. But this also meant that his mind, as a “story-telling creature,” is “unauthorized to grocery shop, peruse the pantry, spontaneously order pizza, eat a dessert — to basically make any food-related decision. This is my Autonomous Self.”

This is not something all that new. Using the rational mind to suppress the irrational one is as old as philosophy, and stoicism is still popular among those interested in self-improvement. But Johnson’s idea is to go a little further. He hopes to develop an artificial intelligence that will integrate with the human brain to inform it when it is making an unhealthy decision. While Johnson wants to limit his idea to a device that can help you maintain your physical health, the “autonomous self” concept means outsourcing one’s decision-making to a body that knows what’s good for your body better than you do.

It does not take a great leap of the imagination to see how the end-state of this optimization for longevity is indistinguishable from a human being whose “biological substrate” has been conquered by machine intelligence, and whose reward is perpetual existence. That is not speculation: when asked what gave Johnson faith that human immortality was even possible, he did not demur with the easy answer that aging in other animals like sea turtles or jellyfish is much slower than it is in humans, and that we could learn their secrets. He replied that the speed of improvements in AI would make such advances possible; that “we are going to create God” and that ideal human activity — in particular and in general — would be determined by this god. Until then, his one ask of his followers is that they “Don’t Die.”

But the coming god of e/acc boosters and Bryan Johnson does not actually promise transcendence to a higher form of life; its task upon arrival will mainly be to boss you around, either for the sake of capitalism or the continuation of mere life. They believe in neither the stability of worldviews born of religion nor the representation of the world created by our animal brains; they believe that the only permanence in the world comes from what is made from math and physics, and so only a decision-making agent that comes closest to the fundamentals of the universe is capable of determining right and wrong — not the fleshy consciousness that conceived of morality to begin with. In Bryan Johnson’s case, he looks forward to the ushering in of an algorithm that can dictate his life precisely because its partiality is detached from any kind of fallible lifeform.

The implication here is that any human who embraces this mode of existence won’t see a reason to remain recognizably human in the first place. As it stands now, not even speaking of the future, a world of Bryan Johnsons who optimize for longevity will heavily structure their lives to be around that and nothing more. Youth, art, and heroics evaporate under these circumstances because the existence of such things is predicated on two deeply uncomfortable concepts: the first is finitude, and the second is that great lives are often lived at the expense of biological health. Our sacrifices and our time-constraints are the dilemmas that determine our humanity; a biologically healthy human being who shies away from them is barely human at all.

Because of this, the most interesting version of Bryan Johnson is not the one where he becomes the first among many to live forever. It is that of the tragic citizen-scientist who fights as long as he can against the corrosion of time, and dies standing his ground. He is fortunate; this more likely outcome is what will redeem his life’s work.

The transhumanism that the lords of Silicon Valley offer on the menu does not offer an enticing vision for a coming man-machine merger. The ultimate implication of their views is that any human who embraces an accelerated, “automated self” won’t see a reason to remain human at all. Humanity in their eyes is an impediment to a rational ordering of biology and the world system, or in other words, a market inefficiency.

The problem with this current crop of transhumanists is not the merger of humans with technology, for that is a process that has been ongoing for thousands of years as we learned to interface through writing and computers — a physical merger would only be a formalization of this process. But what is consistently missing from transhumanist models is a definitive statement on what desirable human and societal characteristics are outside of “freedom of speech,” “innovation,” or the automation of self-discipline rather than self-cultivation.

They can identify something desirable in the process that sustains humanity and the world economy, “capitalism,” but the whole point of such engines is to allow us to marshal our resources into the production of ideal human types. Transhumanism today cannot perform this task as long as it remains committed to libertarian principles that avoid asking what good humans are, and conceptualizing the social organizations necessary for their production. If man is to become like God, we must first realize what a god is, and decide what creation is for.