The Anthropological Aura

And Death Shall Have No Dominion

Welcome to Ever Not Quite—essays about technology and humanism. This one is about the tech-entrepreneur Bryan Johnson’s much-publicized designs on biological immortality and the Don’t Die movement of which he is the founder and leader. With the help of the American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, whose 1973 book The Denial of Death has influenced a generation of readers from diverse disciplines, I interpret this new form of death-denial as a manifestation of modern mainstream cultural assumptions. If you are interested in learning more about Becker’s ideas, I highly recommend a recent documentary called All Illusions Must Be Broken [https://twobirdsfilm.com/films/allillusionsmustbebroken], which is a contemporization of Becker’s work for our technologically-mediated world of today. As always, thank you for reading. If you’d like to support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber and/or sharing this essay around within your circles.

The Anthropological Aura

Welcome to Ever Not Quite—essays about technology and humanism. This essay attempts to name something for which—or so it seems to me—we have lacked a satisfactory term. I have argued before against the reasoning which attempts to defend human preeminence by insisting that “no technology could ever do ‘X’”, however sophisticated or impressive the ‘X’ in question might be. This, it seems to me, is a weak position from which to secure humanistic values, for reasons which I’ll explain below. Here, I offer an alternative basis on which to think about what distinguishes us from even the most powerful simulations of human competencies. I am calling this the “anthropological aura”. These reflections, of course, don’t exhaust all we might wish to say about what is at stake in the present unfolding of artificial intelligence, but I hope they provide a helpful category which may perhaps be of some use in your own thinking about these issues.

Without Regard For Persons

How industry is talking about the AI rollout

Building in the Ruins

Building in the Ruins On what comes after techno-optimism

Crisis and Revelation

Crisis and Revelation “Things Aren’t Getting Worse. The Truth is Just Being Revealed.”