Is it too early to hand out the award for Most Disconcerting Overheard Conversation of 2025? No? OK, then I’m going to bestow it upon Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Xi Jinping. Come on down, gentlemen!
At their recent clubhouse meeting, the two supreme leaders were caught chit chatting on a hot mic. Mused the 72-year-old Putin: “Biotechnology is continuously developing. Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and even achieve immortality.”
To which fellow 72-year-old Xi remarked, “Some predict that in this century humans may live to 150 years old.”
First of all, one can only imagine that the technician who allowed the world to hear this translated conversation now resides in one of Asia’s more remote gulags. And second, those autocrats are just getting warmed up!
“The autocrat of Russia possesses more power than any other man in the earth, but he cannot stop a sneeze.”
— Mark Twain
We can safely say that transhumanism — the movement to transcend boring mortal limitations like death with technology — is a subject that 99% of the world doesn’t think about. But if you’re in the orbit of oligarchs and/or Silicon Valley, you think about it all the time. For instance, here’s Steve Bannon going on about it: “When you get to know them and see where they’re spending the money, it’s because they want eternal life.”
“Preoccupation with immortality is for the upper classes, particularly ladies with nothing to do. An able man, who has a regular job and must toil and produce day by day, leaves the future world to itself, and is active and useful in this one.”
— Goethe
The best caricature of this person in recent memory is Randall Garrett, the tech titan in the Jesse Armstrong HBO movie Mountainhead played by Steve Carell as a cross between Michael Scott and Peter Thiel. When we first meet him, he’s berating his latest medical team for their inability to solution his incurable cancer:“All the things we can do and we can’t fix one tiny little piece of gristle inside of me?” The patch for mortality, he believes, is a digital consciousness upload. As one of his tech bros assures him: “We just gotta do, like, a mouse, a pig, like, ten morons, and then once we’re clean, you’re going digital, Randall. First brain on the grid!”
“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.”
— Woody Allen
Let’s be clear: No one is seriously suggesting we’re all going to live forever. What they’re seriously suggesting is that they’re going to live forever. The rest of us might scoop up the occasional 3D printed organ should it slip off the operating table. And that’s why they’re talking about it all the time and we’re not.
“The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.”
— Willem de Kooning
“The trouble with being rich is that it takes up everyone else’s.”
— Terence Davies
You know who saw this coming? Chet Fleming, that’s who! Yes, that name is a pseudonym, but in 1987 the mysterious legal scholar was issued a patent for “A device for maintaining metabolic activity in a mammalian head which has been severed from its body at its neck.” I know about this via the work of Joel Achenbach, a Dave-Barry-adjacent syndicated newspaper columnist in the 1990s who was low-key obsessed with Fleming’s irresistibly titled book If We Can Keep A Severed Head Alive…. What comes after that ellipsis? This: “The people whose lives might be prolonged by discorporation might be the Stalins and Hitlers of the next century. If used by bloodthirsty dictators or ruthlessly greedy people with enormous wealth and power, the ability to keep a severed head alive might lead to incredible suffering for millions of people.”
“Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”
— Susan Ertz
A welcome detour from this disconcerting line of thought is provided by Mary Roach, the always delightful science writer whose latest book is Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy. “Stem cells and gene editing have landed us on the brink of a medical revolution,” she writes. “When it comes to regenerating entire complex body parts, however, it is a wide brink, with plenty of open terrain for hype.” Any reasonable bookie would put actuarial odds for the oligarchs about even with yours or mine. Or as Roach concludes, “It’s tough for a few hundred years of medicine and engineering to compete with the evolutionary accomplishments of millions of years of natural selection.”
“If Death were truly conquered, there would be
Too many great-great-great-great aunts to see.”
— L.E. Jones
“He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt.”
— Joseph Heller
That took us in some unexpected and interesting directions, so thank you! One subject I really enjoyed last year was The Wit’s Guide to Puttering, and I’m considering going deeper on that. Also thinking about staying loose as a general operating principle, after a great newsletter from
earlier this week. Whatever moves you!
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The first Aphoristick:
Issue No. 336 of Get Wit Quick didn’t mention the severed head of Richard Nixon that causes so many problems in Futurama. Oh wait, it just did. If we graft your head onto a new body, is that a head transplant or a body transplant? If I figure out a way to glue a human head to the Ship of Theseus, I’ll certainly offer my paying subscribers first dibs! This newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Tap the ❤️ below to achieve digital immortality of a sort.
Well that was a humdinger of a post. I had to go and check to see if the conversation you started with had actually happened. Oh my! In contrast, as I am mid-way through eighth decade, I find myself thinking fondly of the fact that I'm not immortal and rather looking forward to there being an end in sight.
Until a severed head can keep itself alive on its own, it's gonna have to convince or compel a lab tech to sprinkle in some fish flakes every few days. I don't care if you're Putin or Xi Jinping: the balance of power resides with the unpaid intern.