Some rich and powerful tech bros want to recast the US government in the image of Silicon Valley
Steve Proehl/Getty Images
In all my years covering ageing research, I have paid little attention to the fringes, at which people (mostly rich white men) strive to cheat death, or at least add decades to life. Thankfully, journalist and social scientist Aleks Krotoski has, and her portrayal of “the immortalists”, as she calls them, is eye-opening, entertaining and disturbing.
The quest for eternal life is as old as humans, of course, but recently it has taken on a new, sinister twist. In the driving seat are Silicon Valley “tech bros”, who see ageing and death as just another problem to solve. They have what Krotoski calls “engineer’s syndrome” – a hubristic belief that any complex problem can be cracked using engineering thinking, even in fields (usually biological) about which they know nothing.
