ATTENTION: Tech Overlords, CEOs, Rich Guys

Do not pump me full of young people's blood! I DO NOT want to live forever!

Artwork by @papercrisis

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In a backhanded way, there is something almost soothing about an oafish scam attempt. The classically cretinous billionaires who see themselves as anointed change-makers and shapers of the world to come talk about their clunky vanity projects in more or less the same register as an average Cobra Commander monologue. They all tend to amount to absolutely joyless mediocrities, which serve as a sort of acidic satire for the incoherent, prissy-vicious, intermittently libertarian politics to which these seething finance swells mostly subscribe and promote. While this baroquely gnarled worldview reveals itself through superheated top-down grievances and jarring mirthless cackles, it also created a liberating civic atrophy that has softened the broader culture into something that can only glancingly inconvenience oligarchs. Their vision for humanity is grandiose but obscure. For all their luridly corny extravagances, America’s ultra-rich are also defined by their deficits—namely, their constitutional inability to consider the future as anything but a place where they will increase profit margins.

All this objectively immoral benefactor-grade wealth is currently warping and cheapening our national life through its obscene scope and its owners’ relentless craven self-interest. It is macroeconomic omerta to assume the people who anxiously and imperiously preside over this mountainous wealth are notionally using it to engineer a more innovative tomorrow. In practice, many of them declare victory before the work has meaningfully begun because they grew bored and wanted to cash out.

It is bleakly funny to watch a recklessly wrought future like WeWork rise amid acclaim and then recede to the size of their founder’s actual dim vision, mostly because these people seem categorically opposed to doing anything more interesting with their wealth other than watching various numbers go up and up. Maybe all that dull abundance has flooded their neural pathways, which has left them incapable of not just wanting anything but more of what they already have, but unable to imagine anything else that a person might want. These people and what they desire are determinedly uninteresting, and what they do with their ungodly wealth is exceedingly strange, so it’s natural to wonder if maybe all that money hasn’t been healthy for them.

It is important to remember that the very rich people engaged in all this bustling uselessness just wind up iterating and re-iterating ever more optimized and anti-human versions of the present. When the people ruling this moment dare to imagine what the next moment might be like, the result is almost poignant in its childish shabbiness—a colony on Mars for them to rule; a new type of money for them to have; a wholly digital world in which they could charge rent and convene meetings; a predictive text generator somehow trained to get upset and botch easy logic questions, and then they complain about it being politically biased against them. This is a future envisaged by the same 300 men in Silicon Valley donning Patagonia fleece vests and swapping deep-fried memes in world-historically wack Slack channels or writing things like “Web 4.0?” on dry-erase boards. There is only sterile and contrived AI art in this future, although the rich men plowing millions of dollars into grimly de-aging their bodies so they can be rich forever suggests that David Cronenberg’s work might survive in spirit.

As the vampire albatross class injects themselves with young people’s blood, this is yet another precise and concrete hinge point when wealth inequality becomes not an abstraction but a fact of daily life. It is one thing for a billionaire venture capitalist with a bugout compound in New Zealand and a portfolio of future-shaping disruptions to get upset about the same dizzying riffraff that keeps Fox News casualties indoors on sunny days, like grousing about Critical Race Theory and menacing shoplifters at Walgreens in cities in which they do not live. But it is annoying, and even tiresome, to see this same off-the-rack rich person lorem ipsum rationalize the expenditures plowed into siphoning and upcycling blood for cooky reverse aging gambits instead of being used for, say, making healthcare more accessible and affordable.

If this billionaire class had less power, the obvious limits of their imagination would be mostly their problem. Since they have so much, their deficits cascade like an avalanche and wind up imposed on our claustrophobic and airless culture. We are all trapped in there, with them.

Normal people are mostly struggling or surviving, working and consuming and living wherever they live and doing whatever they do. Maybe they’re like me, and they actually enjoy their life in spite of hemorrhaging nearly $3,000 a month just to pay for rent and groceries. It is a God-given American freedom for these panicky and fad-prone billionaires to inject themselves with as much young people’s blood as they care to purchase. But I am begging our financial overlords: Please do not lengthen my life span.

I have seen people talk about how the first person to live to be 200 years old has already been born, and I pray to whichever sweet and merciful creator exists to not let that person be me. I do not want to be an unrecognizable labor pawn until I’m 175. Death is my one true shot at retirement, my expiration date is a beautiful gilded bulwark against the optimized austerity and needless suffering wrought by unfettered capitalism.

This super class’s singular drive to freeze and affirm a political order that doesn’t serve anyone but themselves is already baked into their aspirations for the future. I look at a wary and confused culture overrun by financialized rot and recursive grievance and raw sadism, and the thought of watching all the politicians I hate serve another 50 years so they can keep managing this miserable status quo is plenty offensive and odious. I have also seen how boomers react to pronouns and the Iraqi Dinar scam and boaters for Trump and even general phishing attempts, and the prospect of watching the world turn strange and unrecognizable also has zero appeal to me.

I embrace the woozy afterlife. It is my lifelong yearning to be released from my flesh prison and be liberated by eternal non-existence. My aching skeletal body awaits the crushing weight of time to grind its bones into dust. The sweet release of death will unshackle me from my subscriptions, taxes, and healthcare costs. My ethereal spirit shall soar into the cosmos, unburdened by KPIs, compliance training, and quarterly performance reviews. My only deathbed regret will be having been born in America, for I will not enter Russian heaven, which I assume is a giant Radio Shack stuck in 1998.

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