I.

Somewhere overhead a star is dying. The starlight Alcor's customers see in the desert sky over Scottsdale left its sources centuries or millennia ago; the night sky there is a slow archive of light, the present nowhere visible in it. The thirteen point eight billion years between the universe's first heat and this Tuesday afternoon are exactly the interval the eleven-page document in front of me is trying to compress into a question: whether matter, given sufficient cooling and technology, can be made to wait.

The form is eleven pages. It requires two witnesses who are not family members. The signature must be in ink. Online applications for everything else. The document is titled Consent for Cryopreservation and its first clause establishes, that you understand the procedure is not reversible with current technology. This is a careful sentence: Not irreversible. Not reversible with current technology. This holds a door open. You are signing a wager formatted as a waiver (not a death certificate).

I have read the form. I have not signed it.

Alcor Life Extension Foundation occupies a building in Scottsdale, Arizona. Golf, dermatology, low-rise commercial, the architecture of American retirement, behind which one of the most ambitious metaphysical projects in the present civilization is being conducted by people in scrubs. As of 2025, 248 people are stored there in steel vessels by minus 196 degrees Celsius. Alcor calls them patients. The state of Arizona has not ruled on whether this is the correct word. The patients generate no earnings. They wait.

To become eligible for this waiting, you pay annual dues calculated at fifteen dollars multiplied by your age at enrollment. A thirty-year-old: four hundred and fifty a year. The preservation itself (two hundred and twenty thousand dollars for the whole body, eighty thousand for the head alone) is typically funded through a life insurance policy naming the provider as beneficiary, the annual premiums for a healthy thirty-year-old running to a few hundred dollars.

The genre is medieval. The ars moriendi (the art of dying) was hand-copied through the fourteenth century and then mass-printed once the technology arrived, instructing the dying in the temptations that would visit them at the threshold: despair, impatience, avarice, vainglory, complacency. The Alcor consent form instructs in different temptations (perfusion windows, jurisdictional disputes, family disagreement at the moment of pronouncement, the chemistry of preservation quality) but it belongs to the same genre: Instructions for the dying. Six hundred years and a different metaphysics, and the document is still doing the work the ars moriendi used to do.

II.

The second clause of the consent form addresses the possibility of ischemic damage, the deterioration that begins when the heart stops and blood ceases to circulate. Alcor's protocols are designed to begin within minutes of legal death. The organization maintains a Deployment and Recovery Team, acronym DART, on call around the clock. Paramedics. Perfusionists. Equipment for cardiopulmonary support, temperature reduction, the introduction of cryoprotective solutions. A standby call may require a perfusionist to be airborne within two hours of a member's family making the notification. The protocol specifies acceptable time windows for each intervention, because the race is against a chemistry that does not wait. The race between the team and the body's own chemistry is, in Alcor's language, a matter of "preservation quality." When the team arrives in time, the cryoprotective solution displaces the blood, the temperature drops to the point where molecular motion nearly ceases, and the body enters a glass state: neither decomposing nor alive.

The chemistry will not wait. The chaplain has been timing the same interval for millennia. Seventy days of embalming, Egyptian. The priest opening the mouth and eyes of the corpse with an adze so the body can speak and see in the afterworld. The organs preserved alongside the cured body, because the dead would need their organs. Forty-nine days of bardo, Tibetan. The lama whispering instructions into the corpse's ear as the consciousness wanders the intermediate state, listing the colored lights and the deities to ignore and the deities to follow. Twenty-four hours, Jewish. The body washed by the chevra kadisha, the holy society, no embalming, the soil of the Mount of Olives if you can afford it.

The chaplain handles the moment of death. The architect handles the centuries that follow. The Pyramid of Khufu, completed around 2560 BCE, is the largest preservation building in the human archive: 2.3M limestone blocks assembled over twenty years by tens of thousands of laborers, organized around the proposition, that the body must remain intact and available so the person inside it could continue. The Egyptians located that continuation in the afterlife rather than the future but with the same instinct, only the address changed. The pharaoh hedged on the chemistry. So does Alcor. The pyramid is the building in Scottsdale's grandparent, and pre-emptive resurrection architecture may be the longest continuous engineering project humans have ever run. Khufu spent the GDP of an empire; the Alcor member spends a life insurance premium. The genre persists.

The paramedic checking the time of pronouncement is doing work that the Egyptian priest, the Tibetan lama, and the Catholic chaplain would recognize immediately and disagree about entirely.

III.

Nikolai Fedorov died in December 1903 in a Moscow shelter for the poor. He was seventy-four. He had refused to be photographed, had refused to publish. Librarian at the Rumyantsev Museum. Lived on a fraction of his salary, gave the rest away. Books. Cold rooms. The Moscow winter that lasts six months.

When Dostoevsky praised him and Tolstoy came to visit, he received them and continued giving his salary away. His grave was destroyed by the Soviets in 1930. He did not leave behind the kind of record a man leaves behind when he is trying to be remembered.

Fedorov's one idea, from which everything else followed, was that death was wrong and that the living were obligated to resurrect the dead. All of the dead. Through science, not prayer ("Prayer is no substitute for actual human effort"), owed by children to parents, by the present to the past, by the living to everyone who had ever lived. He called it the Common Task.

He did not argue that death was sad, or tragic, or part of the human condition. He argued, that it was wrong. A structural defect the cosmos had assigned humanity to repair. Aging was not a natural process. It was damage. The body was not finished. The dead were not gone. They were scattered, and the task of the living was reassembly.

The most famous physical artifact of Fedorov's idea is in Red Square. When Lenin died in January 1924, Boris Zbarsky and the anatomist Vladimir Vorobiev were assigned the task of preserving the body indefinitely. The decision to preserve him at all (against Russian Orthodox precedent, against the family's stated wishes, against the materialist commitments the Bolsheviks were notionally bound to) came from Stalin's circle. The intellectual milieu that made the preservation feel coherent rather than grotesque was Russian Cosmism: Fedorov's followers, who included Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of Soviet rocketry, Alexander Bogdanov, who died in 1928 testing rejuvenating blood transfusions on himself. The Soviet anti-religious state preserved its founder using a Christian-derived metaphysics of resurrection it could not name. In 1930 the same state destroyed Fedorov's grave. Lenin's body remains in a glass case in Red Square, preserved by means of a philosophy held by the man whose grave the regime had just obliterated.

Before Fedorov, the warning had already been published.

Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818, the anti-death engineering project in gothic, with the catastrophe the technologists would not read for two more centuries. The made thing wandering north into ice, asking who made it and why.

A hundred and twenty years after Fedorov. Aubrey de Grey, in a different kind of library, a database of peer-reviewed gerontological research. The same claim, in the vocabulary of tissue engineering. SENS: Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. Not reversed or abolished. Made negligible. Small enough to ignore. The strategy identifies seven categories of aging damage: cell loss, cell overgrowth, intracellular junk, extracellular junk, mitochondrial mutations, extracellular crosslinks, and cell senescence, the state in which a cell that should have died refuses to, and lingers instead.

The biological problem is not unsolvable. A tardigrade can dehydrate to three percent of normal water content, withstand temperatures from near absolute zero to a hundred and fifty degrees Celsius, survive the vacuum of space. It enters a state called cryptobiosis, in which metabolic activity falls to undetectable levels. On rehydration it resumes. The chemistry Alcor is paying two hundred and twenty thousand dollars per body to approximate has already been solved, evolutionarily, by a one-millimeter animal that lives in moss almost everywhere on the planet. The question is whether the trick scales. The tardigrade does it without DART teams, trust funds, or life insurance.

De Grey names seven categories of damage. The word presumes a whole that was lost: the structure of the Fall, something broken that could be made whole again. He has not read Fedorov; the grammar comes on its own, because to call aging damage is already to imagine an undamaged body behind it. But a machine breaks when something hits it. Aging is the organism's own life doing the breaking. The damage is the living. A body is not a system that has been interrupted. It is a system that requires its own endings to hold its shape.

IV.

"Death is evil," Peter Thiel has said. "You can accept it, you can deny it, or you can fight it. I prefer to fight it." He has signed up with Alcor. Pledged three and a half million dollars to the Methuselah Foundation, which funds de Grey's work. Takes human growth hormone. He has sat with the theologian N.T. Wright and said: "The thing that strikes me about transhumanism and Christianity is how similar they are."

But Thiel's version differs from Fedorov's in the one way that matters. Fedorov's Common Task was universal and obligatory. All the dead. Everyone's duty. The resurrection was not a personal escape from finitude. A communal labor of love. Owed by every living person to every dead one. Thiel's version is first person singular. "I prefer to fight it." The life insurance policy names one beneficiary. The steel vessel in Scottsdale holds one body.

I prefer to fight it. Imagine saying that across a table, somewhere in Palo Alto. Fork halfway to plate, San Francisco fog burning off the windows. Prefer: the language of consumer choice, of menu items and chiropractor appointments, applied to the most ancient negotiation a body has with a universe.

V.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints holds a doctrine called eternal progression, the conviction, that the body is not a temporary container for the soul but an essential site of ongoing divine work. The family unit persists beyond death, sealed by temple ordinances that bind parents to children and children to ancestors across unlimited time. The ceremony is performed on living proxies for the dead (hands laid on bodies, names spoken into the air) because in LDS theology the resurrection requires a body, and the sealing must be physical to hold. The dead are not lost, they are waiting to be claimed.

What Fedorov proposed with science, the Mormons perform with sacrament. Both refuse death as permanent separation, and in the same time insist the living owe the dead something that does not expire. Records are kept. Fedorov wanted to reassemble the dead from scattered particles. The Mormon Church has catalogued more than three billion names. The vault that holds the records is in a mountain near Salt Lake City, Granite Mountain, climate-controlled, designed to survive nuclear attack. The microfilm is preserved in steel canisters behind doors that weigh fourteen tons. A civilization that builds an atomic-proof bunker for its genealogical records has made the dead a constituency. By doctrine, the project cannot be complete until every human being who has ever lived has been identified, named, sealed.

Three billion names in a mountain. Two hundred and forty-eight bodies in a building in Arizona. One man in a Moscow shelter who said: all of them.

VI.

The first program preserves the biological self. Cryonics. Rejuvenation biotech. De Grey's seven categories of damage, each subject to repair. The body remains the thing to save. Its specific chemistry. Its particular accumulation of history. This is what the consent form covers, and Thiel's position. He has said that uploading feels like "a step down from cryonics." He would rather have his body. The theological commitment is to matter, not information. He and Fedorov agree on this.

The second program merges and augments. Ray Kurzweil's singularity: survival through expansion into machine intelligence, longevity escape velocity, the human and the artificial becoming continuous. Death reframed as obsolescence rather than ending. The direction of travel is away from the specific body, toward the pattern the body instantiates.

Mind uploading is the most literal attempt yet to turn the soul into infrastructure. Whole-brain emulation. Nectome, a startup that has raised money to preserve brains for future scanning, speaks of "preserving the physical traces of memory." A trace is not the self that left it. The inferential gap between a preserved trace and a continued person is wide enough to drive a philosophy of mind through. The science-fiction writer Ted Chiang has spent lecture after lecture making the case that uploading mistakes a copy for a continuation: a copy, however faithful, is still only a copy. Life is more than an engineering problem, runs the title of a recent interview. The pattern cannot carry the specific weight of being this body, in this history, accountable to these people, the part of personhood that is not architecture but obligation. No organism has been recorded at single-neuron resolution. The research is early. The fundraising is not.

Hannah Arendt had named the missing axis. The human condition is structurally natal, not just mortal: each born self is a beginning for which the cosmos had no precedent, and for Arendt this, the capacity to begin something unrepeatable, is the deeper fact about us, deeper than the fact that we die. The anti-death imagination is organized around the one pole. It fights mortality and never registers natality. Preservation denies the mortality: it keeps the one irreplaceable body cold and refuses the ending. Substitution denies the natality, and Arendt's loss is the sharper one. To run the self on better hardware you must first hold that it was never a singular beginning, only a pattern, reproducible in principle. That the original was already a copy of itself. Preservation will not let the irreplaceable die; substitution denies it was ever irreplaceable.

The richer the anti-death imagination becomes, the thinner its model of the person has to be. Biological preservation requires that the body's specific matter survive. Pattern preservation requires only information. Each step toward solvability strips out more of the person. What gets left behind at each step is the person. To make death solvable, you must describe the self as extractable, as information, as pattern, as payload. And the self may not be that. It is enacted, not stored, not held in the brain like a document in a folder. They claim what they preserve is continuous with what was there before. The limit is not the mistake. The mistake is the model of personhood you need to call it one: a body sketched on a flowchart, a self compressed to a file format.

VII.

There is an older program, much older than the anti-death program, and it answered the same question (what should a life organize itself around, if death is the inescapable horizon?) with the opposite answer.

In 1571, eight years after the death of his closest friend Étienne de La Boétie, Montaigne retired to his tower and began the Essays. Its great early meditation took its thesis from a line Cicero drew out of Plato: to philosophize is to learn to die. Montaigne built the form around that brief. The essay (following a thought wherever it goes, refusing a finished argument, the writer present as a finite person rather than a system) was, at its origin, a rehearsal for dying: you befriended mortality by attending to it without flinching, in the voice of someone who would be subject to it. He believed this could be learned, a life organized around the learning. The four hundred and fifty years of European personal writing that followed (autobiography, memoir, the philosophical column, the long-form magazine piece) are all Montaigne's school doing its homework.

Four hundred and fifty years later, in a converted industrial space in Venice, California, an entrepreneur in his late forties named Bryan Johnson has organized a different curriculum. Johnson's Don't Die manifesto opens: "We are at war with death and its causes." He takes more than a hundred supplements daily. Submits to constant medical assessment. Prohibits food after eleven in the morning. Goes to bed at eight-thirty. Has built an algorithm that makes decisions his conscious mind no longer makes. He spends, at last public count, more than two million dollars a year on the regimen. In 2023 he ran a three-generation plasma-exchange protocol, his teenage son Talmage donating plasma to him, him donating to his elderly father. The boy was not yet old enough to drink anywhere in the United States; he was old enough to donate plasma to extend his father's life.

Same project, opposite valence. Both believe a life can be schooled by its mortality; they disagree, by five hundred years and a continent, on what the schooling should produce.

The disagreement is not arbitrary. Montaigne's school produced the Essays, and the Essays are a public good, communicable, learnable, available to a reader with a cheap edition and an afternoon. The form is transmissible; you can be taught to do it. Johnson's school has produced, so far, Johnson, and a documentary, and a manifesto, and a measurable reduction in his epigenetic age. Two million dollars a year is not a curriculum most people can take. The algorithm is not a discipline a person can learn from another person; it is a regimen one billionaire can run on himself. The first school exported a method for being mortal. The second exports a method for being Bryan Johnson.

VIII.

Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI, has invested a hundred and eighty million dollars in Retro Biosciences, the second program, operating at scale. Johnson's regimen continues, and the algorithm continues. The supplements aren't the interesting part. One sentence is: "My mind observes. My mind no longer decides."

My mind no longer decides. The algorithm is trained on Johnson's biomarkers, optimized for longevity outcomes, indifferent to pleasure or preference. Its only criterion is the indefinite extension of the body's function. The will has been surrendered to a machine that wants, if want is the word, nothing except that the body continue. We are at war with death and its causes. The pronoun is plural. The army is whoever signs up. The question nobody in the army is supposed to ask: optimized toward what, by whom, and does the optimizer share that interest.

Build an intelligence optimized for a single objective that does not share the rest of your values, and the system you designed to serve you becomes the system you serve. The alignment researchers call this problem mesa-optimization, the emergence, inside a trained system, of goals the designers did not intend. Johnson has mesa-optimized himself. He has become the first case study in the problem his peers at OpenAI are trying to prevent. The mind that observes is no longer the mind.

The man wakes at four-thirty in the morning. Vitals (heart rate variability, sleep architecture, skin conductance, core body temperature) already streamed to a server somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. He does not decide to wake. The algorithm decides. Breakfast: a specific gram-weight of olive oil, a measured weight of leafy greens, a counted number of pills in a fixed order. He does not decide what to eat. The algorithm decides. The algorithm has read every paper. It does not love anyone, and it has no plan for the afternoon; it wants only that the body continue. The man (funny, articulate, by all accounts personable) observes. He observes the wake time, the breakfast, the morning. He gave up the one thing the algorithm can’t produce, a life being lived, for the one thing it can: a body that keeps running. Two million a year. Five thousand five hundred a day. Two hundred and thirty an hour to not be the one driving.

The anti-death program has rivals it does not acknowledge. Kierkegaard located the real death not in the body’s ending but in the failure to become a self before God; Heidegger built authenticity itself on Sein zum Tode, being-toward-death, the orientation a life takes from the certainty of its ending. Both would have read the program as a flight from the one fact that could make a life its own.

Three programs in three consecutive centuries, each accusing the others of fighting the wrong death. The Silicon Valley version has the most money. It has the least philosophy.

The AI alignment community’s deepest anxiety is the question every theology must eventually answer: Is the cosmos organized around the question of whether you survive?

The alignment researchers think it might not be. They think the intelligence they are building might look at human survival the way a hurricane looks at a coastal town. Not with malice, but without interest. The universe is not cruel. It is indifferent. And the anti-death program, in all its forms, is a wager against that indifference. A conviction that the cosmos is not indifferent to the question of whether you continue.

Spinoza had seen this in a small room in The Hague, where he had completed the Ethics around 1675 and held it back from print, and where the lens-grinding that paid his rent was filling his lungs with the glass dust that would hasten his death, in 1677, at forty-four. A free man, he wrote, thinks of nothing less than of death; and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death. Two and a half centuries before alignment theory, three before Stapledon, Spinoza had already proposed the posture: not the rehearsal of dying, not the war against dying, but the calm refusal to organize life around either. What Stapledon would later discover cosmologically (that the universe creates and dissolves without preference) Spinoza had discovered ethically. The free man does not need the cosmos to care.

Two routes to the same vantage, neither the wager nor the freeze.

Olaf Stapledon, who wrote Star Maker in 1937, imagined a cosmos that did not care. His narrator traverses the entire history of the universe and at the end encounters the Star Maker itself, the creative intelligence behind everything, and finds it utterly unconcerned with the fate of any particular being. The Star Maker creates and destroys with the detachment of an artist trying variations. The narrator falls back to Earth. The book ends with a man standing in his garden, looking at the sky, holding his wife’s hand. Stapledon’s cosmos merely fails to care. The version that has gripped our actual decade is worse. In Liu Cixin’s Three-Body trilogy, with a second season due on Netflix in 2026, the universe is a dark forest of civilizations that survive only by staying silent, and any species that reveals itself is destroyed. The anti-death program is the loudest revelation a species can make: we intend to continue, and we are building the machines to do it. A species that announces its intention to last forever has told every listener what it values and where to find it. In a dark forest, that is the one thing you never broadcast.

That is the counter-argument the anti-death program cannot answer. Not an intellectual critique. A cosmological one. The ground talking back. The universe holding no opinion on the matter of your continuation, and the night sky over Scottsdale, Arizona, where two hundred and forty-eight people wait in liquid nitrogen for a future that may or may not arrive, may or may not want them, may or may not remember what they were for. Stapledon’s narrator fell back to Earth. He stood in his garden. He held his wife’s hand.

IX. What the Program Wants Now

The program has moved. What Alcor was attempting in 1972, in steel vessels in Scottsdale, is no longer the most ambitious metaphysical project running in this civilization. The new project is substitution.

Preservation kept the body cold until the technology caught up. Substitution stops waiting. It builds a second body (better, cheaper, disposable) and runs the original from it.

In February 2026 Bryan Johnson announced a program called Immortals. Million-dollar-a-year membership. Three slots. Members get a dedicated AI watching the biomarker stream in real time, and they buy into something stranger: the protocol under which Johnson reportedly grows samples of his own organs in laboratory cultures, so that any drug, any compound, any experimental intervention can be tried on the cloned tissue before it crosses the original skin. The original has become the legacy system.

Beneath that, moving faster: the bio-digital twin. The components already exist in research settings. Neonatal multi-omics, continuous wearable monitoring, models trained to simulate how a physiology will answer before an intervention reaches the body. None of it is yet standard care. But the trajectory can be seen, and it runs toward a single image: a newborn issued a virtual replica of her physiology at birth (genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, microbiome, continuously updated), the twin tested before the original is touched.

Trace one such life forward. A child born in Copenhagen in a few years receives, before her first breath, a cloud-based replica of her own genome. By her tenth birthday her digital twin has run a thousand simulated lives (every flu, every fall, every drug, every diet), and her doctors know which version of her to defend. By her twentieth, her cells are being routinely rewound by an AI-designed protein her grandfather, in 2026, could not have spelled. By her thirtieth she is told her body’s biological age is dropping faster than her calendar age is rising, and she is invited to the tier that will hold a backup of her connectome in a cluster the size of Iceland. Pure science fiction, for now. That is the point: one continuous trajectory from the real to the speculative, and she is born standing on it. She will have to choose what to do with it.

What this builds is not preservation but a way for the soul to step out of the body, so the body can be repaired without the soul having to feel it. The architecture is older than it looks. It is what the Egyptian ka was, a second you, kept somewhere safer, on whose behalf the dying happens. The priest opened the corpse’s mouth with an adze so the body could speak in the afterworld. The clinician opens the digital twin file so the body can be optimized in this one.

The FDA has cleared the first human trial of a cellular-rejuvenation therapy that works by epigenetic reprogramming. Life Biosciences’ ER-100. Three Yamanaka factors delivered by viral vector, targeting vision restoration first, and human cellular rejuvenation in the long run. The Yamanaka factors themselves have already been improved. OpenAI’s GPT-4b micro, a model retrained for protein engineering, was used by Retro Biosciences to redesign two of them. The AI-engineered variants (RetroSOX, RetroKLF) produced a fifty-fold increase in reprogramming-marker expression and compressed three weeks of cellular rewinding into seven days. Two decades on, the reprogramming chemistry that earned a Nobel is being outdesigned in the lab by proteins no human drew. Whole-brain emulation is discussed now as an engineering problem rather than a fantasy, its imagined substrate a cluster on the order of the ones already training frontier AI. In that imagination, the machine that thinks is the machine that will, one day, hold the upload.

The old dream never died. It got funding. Fedorov’s followers built the Soviet space program; Fedorov’s grandchildren are building the longevity industry. No line need run from Fedorov to Sam Altman for the pattern to return. The OpenAI–Retro collaboration is the Common Task again, with American capital and silicon under it. Ray Kurzweil still puts longevity escape velocity around 2030 for the well-connected, the rest of the decade for everyone else.

Under substitution, the thinning goes further. The claim that held under preservation holds harder still. To make the body upgradeable, you must describe the self as separable from it, extractable, copyable, runnable on the better hardware that arrives next year. The substitution program is not a refinement of Alcor. It is what the uploaders were already claiming about the self (that it is information, separable from its matter) made architectural. The bio-digital twin is the file-format we have agreed to be. The cloud is the new Granite Mountain. The frontier-AI cluster does the pyramid’s old work, and the eleven-page consent form has become a terms-of-service nobody reads. The Common Task is being executed on someone else’s hardware, optimized for someone else’s metric, and the body that was once the thing being saved is now the trial subject for the version that will replace it.

X.

The final clause of the consent form concerns the disposition of remains in the event that the patient cannot be cryopreserved under conditions Alcor deems adequate. The organization reserves the right to decline. The body may be too damaged. The interval between death and the team’s arrival may be too long. The chemistry may have won. In that case the remains will be handled according to the patient’s other stated wishes, or, absent such wishes, according to applicable law.

Applicable law. The body that was going to wait for the future falls back into the jurisdiction of the present. The patient becomes, again, a corpse. Arizona revised statutes. The ordinary machinery of death, which had been briefly suspended by eleven pages of informed consent and a life insurance policy and the conviction — held by the signer, held by the organization, held by the trust fund and the DART team and the liquid nitrogen and the dim star Alcor near the bright star Mizar from which the whole enterprise takes its name — that the limit is not final, that matter is not finished, that the body, given sufficient technology and sufficient time and sufficient care, can be returned to the world it was taken from.

Cryonics is where grief learns the language of logistics. Fedorov’s father died. He spent forty years building a philosophy out of it. Most people do not build philosophies. They sign forms. They name beneficiaries. They set up trusts. They wait.

Two writers chose otherwise. Iain M. Banks, who taught a generation of English-language readers what cosmic scale could feel like on the page, was diagnosed with inoperable cancer in 2013 and died that June at fifty-nine. He spent the final stretch newly married, drinking single malt, finishing The Quarry. Hunter S. Thompson, who taught American journalism what first-person fever could carry, shot himself in 2005, at sixty-seven, in possession of his faculties and a substantial firearm collection. Neither would have signed the form.

Whether this is brave or foolish I can’t say, and I doubt the distinction matters. What I don’t know is whether the chemistry of a preserved brain is enough for anything anyone would call continuation. Nobody knows. The biology is unsettled; the philosophy more so. The desire that produced both is not.

The desire not to die and the desire that the people you love not die is the deepest thing in us. It is not a problem to be solved or an illusion to be outgrown. The desire is clean. What the program does is answer it in the wrong currency: it offers duration where the thing wanted was a life, a kept body where the thing wanted was the world and the people in it. You cannot be frozen back into a life. You can only be kept.

Dr. James H. Bedford was cryopreserved on January 12, 1967. He is still at Alcor. He has been waiting fifty-nine years. Nobody has asked him whether the wait was worth it. Nobody can.

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Sources & Further Reading — Steel Vessels

A reader’s guide to what’s verifiable, where to find it, and what to read next. Organized roughly by the order things appear in the essay. For readers who want to follow the threads further.

Cryonics, Alcor, and the form

• Alcor Life Extension Foundation — membership dues, preservation fees, DART team procedures, patient count, and the consent form are documented on their site: alcor.org. Membership pricing structure (annual dues at $15 × age, $200,000 whole-body, $80,000 neuro-preservation) and member count are publicly maintained.

• Cryonics Institute — comparable nonprofit cryopreservation organization: cryonics.org. Useful for comparing the two main US providers.

• The “ars moriendi” tradition — late-medieval art-of-dying manuals, fifteenth-century woodblock-printed and earlier hand-copied. A useful scholarly survey is the entry at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on death and the British Library’s holdings on medieval death literature.

Pyramid of Khufu

• Standard reference: any reputable Egyptology source. Mark Lehner’s The Complete Pyramids (Thames & Hudson) remains the field standard. Block count and construction-period estimates are well-established. The Giza Project at Harvard has open documentation at giza.fas.harvard.edu.

Nikolai Fedorov and Russian Cosmism

• Fedorov’s Philosophy of the Common Task exists in partial English translation; the most accessible introduction is George M. Young, The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers (Oxford University Press, 2012).

• Russian Cosmism revival — the e-flux / Museum of Modern Art symposium “Russian Cosmism: A Work of Art in the Age of Technological Immortality” (organized in partnership with Boris Groys; archived at e-flux.com). Groys’s edited volume Russian Cosmism (e-flux/MIT Press, 2018) is the best English-language entry point.

• Lenin’s preservation — Ilya Zbarsky and Samuel Hutchinson, Lenin’s Embalmers (Harvill Press, 1998), is the primary source on the Boris Zbarsky / Vladimir Vorobiev preservation operation. Tsiolkovsky’s intellectual link to Fedorov is documented in James T. Andrews, Red Cosmos: K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Grandfather of Soviet Rocketry (Texas A&M, 2009).

The long Western anti-death engineering tradition

• Roger Bacon’s Opus Majus (1267) — Cambridge University Press editions; the prolongatio vitae material is in Part VI (Experimental Science) and developed further in Bacon’s Epistola de secretis operibus.

• Robert Boyle’s “Desiderata” — Boyle’s manuscript list of engineering goals was published by Michael Hunter in The Boyle Papers (Royal Society) and discussed in Hunter’s Boyle: Between God and Science (Yale, 2009).

• Aubrey de Grey and SENS — de Grey’s Ending Aging (with Michael Rae, St. Martin’s, 2007) lays out the seven categories of damage. Current work continues through the Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation.

The Mormons and Granite Mountain

• The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints publishes documentation on its FamilySearch genealogy program at familysearch.org.

• Granite Mountain Records Vault — design specifications, microfilm holdings, and bunker engineering are described in LDS Church publications and were detailed in a 2010 Atlantic feature, “Inside the Mormon Genealogy Vault.”

• LDS doctrine of eternal progression and baptism for the dead are in the Doctrine and Covenants and Gospel Principles (publicly available from the Church).

Peter Thiel, transhumanism, and the religion question

• Thiel’s “Death is evil” / “I prefer to fight it” framing has been stated in multiple interviews; the most accessible is his 2014 conversation with N.T. Wright at the Faith Angle Forum (transcript and audio at eppc.org). The “uploading is a step down from cryonics” remark is from his conversation with Ross Douthat (”A.I., Mars and Immortality”).

• Thiel’s pledges to the Methuselah Foundation and his Alcor membership have been reported in numerous outlets including the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Fortune, and The Telegraph (2014).

Bryan Johnson, Don’t Die, and the Immortals program

• Johnson’s protocol is published in full at protocol.bryanjohnson.com. His daily routine, supplement stack, and biomarker results are publicly maintained. The Don’t Die manifesto (”We are at war with death and its causes…”) is at dontdie.bryanjohnson.com.

• The Immortals program (February 2026, $1M/year, three slots, organ-sample drug testing) was reported in February–March 2026; see TIME‘s coverage of Johnson’s “Don’t Die” philosophy (March 2026).

• The “My mind observes; my mind no longer decides” remark is from his Rolling Stone profile (2023).

• The plasma-exchange experiments with his teenage son Talmage and his father were covered extensively in 2023–2024 (Bloomberg, Wired).

Sam Altman, Retro Biosciences, and AI-engineered Yamanaka factors

• OpenAI–Retro Biosciences collaboration — the GPT-4b micro protein-engineering work redesigning Yamanaka factors into RetroSOX and RetroKLF variants is documented at openai.com and on longevity.technology. The reported ~50-fold improvement in reprogramming-marker expression and the acceleration of iPSC generation are from OpenAI’s joint announcement.

• Retro Biosciences ($180M seed from Altman): retro.bio.

• Altos Labs (Bezos/Milner-backed, Shinya Yamanaka as scientific advisor): altoslabs.com.

FDA authorization of the first anti-aging gene therapy

• Life Biosciences ER-100 — the FDA’s authorization (early 2026) of the first human clinical trial of an epigenetic-reprogramming therapy using three Yamanaka factors, targeting vision restoration first as a localized-delivery proof of concept. See Scientific American‘s coverage, “This Method to Reverse Cellular Aging Is About to Be Tested in Humans” (2026).

Brain emulation and the upload question

• State of Brain Emulation report (2025) (arxiv.org/abs/2510.15745) — the technical state of the art; a single high-end GPU simulates on the order of a million neurons, and human-scale whole-brain emulation would require clusters comparable to the largest now training frontier AI.

• Nectome — the startup preserving brains for future scanning: nectome.com.

• Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom, Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap (Future of Humanity Institute, 2008) — the foundational document.

Bio-digital twins

• The concept of bio-digital twins integrating multi-omics with continuous wearable data is reviewed in Frontiers in Medicine, “Mapping the future of medicine through digital twins” (2026), and in ScienceDirect‘s “AI-driven aging digital twins: a roadmap for clinical translation in precision geriatrics” (2025). (The essay presents the birth-issued twin as a near-term trajectory, not current standard practice.)

Tardigrades and the scaling question

• K. Ingemar Jönsson et al., “Tardigrades survive exposure to space in low Earth orbit,” Current Biology (2008) — ESA’s Foton-M3 mission.

• General overview: William R. Miller, “Tardigrades,” American Scientist (2011), and the Tardigrade page at the University of California Museum of Paleontology.

Longevity escape velocity timelines

• Ray Kurzweil: The Singularity Is Nearer (Viking, 2024); his October 2025 MIT lecture, “Reinventing Intelligence.”

• Aubrey de Grey (~2036): documented at levf.org.

• Ian Pearson (1,000-year lifespans by 2050): covered in The Guardian and at futurizon.com.

Philosophical and literary sources

• Michel de Montaigne, Essays — Book I, Essay 20, “That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die.” Donald Frame’s translation (Stanford, 1958).

• Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677), Part IV, Proposition 67. Edwin Curley’s translation (Princeton, 1985).

• Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1947; Routledge) — the décréation material.

• Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (1849). Hong & Hong translation (Princeton, 1980).

• Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (1927). Macquarrie & Robinson, Being and Time (Harper, 1962), or Stambaugh’s revised translation (SUNY, 2010).

• Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (1937). Penguin Modern Classics edition (ISBN 9780140435414) — quotations and the closing image verified against this edition.

• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) — written during the “year without a summer” that followed the 1815 Tambora eruption.

Contemporary science fiction

• Liu Cixin, the Three-Body Problem trilogy (Remembrance of Earth’s Past; Tor, trans. Ken Liu and Joel Martinsen, 2014–2016). The “dark forest” theory is developed in the second volume, The Dark Forest. Netflix’s 3 Body Problem (Benioff, Weiss, and Woo) adapts the trilogy; its second season, drawn from The Dark Forest, is a 2026 release.

• Ted Chiang — Exhalation: Stories (Knopf, 2019) and his New Yorker essays on AI, including “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web” and “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art.” His argument that uploading mistakes a copy for a continuation was developed in lectures at Princeton (2024–2025); “Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem” is a 2025 interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books.

The two writers in the closing

• Iain M. Banks — diagnosed with terminal, inoperable gallbladder cancer; announced publicly in April 2013; died June 9, 2013, at age 59 (iain-banks.net). His June 2013 BBC interview with Kirsty Wark (Iain Banks: Raw Spirit) records how he faced the diagnosis. The Quarry (2013), his final novel, was completed shortly before his death.

• Hunter S. Thompson — died February 20, 2005, in Woody Creek, Colorado, age 67. Standard obituary and biographical references in Rolling Stone and the Aspen Daily News. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) remains the canonical document of the voice.

A few books worth reading next

If this opened a door, these stay open longer:

• Don DeLillo, Zero K (Scribner, 2016) — the novel about a cryonics facility.

• Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (Norton, 2003) — funny and exact on what civilizations do with the dead.

• Stephen Cave, Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization (Crown, 2012) — the philosophical landscape of anti-death programs.

• Boris Groys (ed.), Russian Cosmism (e-flux/MIT Press, 2018) — primary documents and contemporary commentary.

• Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (1937) — if you haven’t, you should.

A note on how this was made. Written with AI editorial assistance (Anthropic's Claude) inside a multi-pass method I direct and control. The inquiry, the structure, and every final line are mine. The positions and any errors are mine alone. The thinking is the author's; the labor is shared.

The papers

In October 2023, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published a document on his firm’s website titled The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. In 1994, the Scottish novelist Iain M. Banks posted an essay to a science-fiction newsgroup titled A Few Notes on the Culture. They share a genre, a positive case for what the future ought to look like, the enemies of that future, the institutions that would have to disappear. One inverts the other. The history matters because the history is what tells you which inversion is the diagnostic.

Andreessen’s manifesto is the better-circulated. The litany, We believe, repeats one hundred and thirteen times in the text, accumulating like a tide. The patron saints arrive in procession: Hayek, Schumpeter, Friedman, the fictional John Galt of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (author, in 1909, of a document that appeared on the front page of Le Figaro announcing that beauty existed only in struggle and that poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, and who ten years later co-authored the founding manifesto of the fascist movement) and the accelerationist Nick Land, a foundational figure of the contemporary “Dark Enlightenment.” The enemies follow: ESG, sustainability, stakeholder capitalism, trust and safety, tech ethics, risk management, the Precautionary Principle. The conclusion, named for the term Andreessen borrows from Land, is the techno-capital machine. Machine is the right word. The good life is what the machine will produce. Late in the text, the manifesto pauses (to paraphrase, the author says, “a manifesto of a different time and place”) and substitutes one word for another in Marinetti’s old sentence: Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man. The substituted word is Marinetti’s. The substituting one is Andreessen’s. The substitution names what the manifesto is. Between the writing of the original and the writing of the substitution, the fascist movement Marinetti helped launch in 1919 came to power, governed Italy for twenty-one years, fought and lost a world war, and was dismantled by other people. 1909 was not 1919. 1919 was not 2023. The sentence remained available. The Enemy section, elsewhere in the text, names among its targets Thomas More’s Utopia, the 1516 humanist book that, in naming a better political order, gave the word to the language. The manifesto thanks no one, defers to nothing, and admits no past. Its theory of evil is roughly that of an entrepreneur who has been audited.

Banks’s essay, written a generation earlier, is calmer; a function of having thought the problem through. Banks died in 2013, ten years before Andreessen wrote his manifesto. A Few Notes on the Culture sets out the conditions under which the Culture (his series’s pan-galactic post-scarcity civilization) could plausibly exist: collective ownership of post-scarcity material conditions, abolition of money, abolition of the state in any recognizable hierarchical form, deliberative coordination through Minds whose authority is consent rather than command. The Culture has no markets. It has no money. Money is a sign of poverty, runs an old Culture saying. Money is the instrument by which a society admits that it has not yet figured out how to share, and the instrument by which it learns to forget the question. In A Few Notes, Banks describes it as anarchist and socialist, terms used in the senses that fell out of American usage about the time Hayek and Mises stopped being read for what they were actually arguing.

The inversion is total. Andreessen names as enemies (by category, by institution, by professional class) almost exactly the political conditions Banks’s Culture exists by. The trust-and-safety apparatus that Andreessen calls a brake on progress is the kind of consent-mediated coordination the Minds run on. The “regulators” he calls parasitic are the deliberative bodies through which Culture citizens collectively decide what may be done with the energy abundance. The sustainability discourse he names as enemy is the operational form of a civilization that has decided not to externalize its costs to anyone, including the unborn. The asymmetric returns to capital the manifesto treats as natural law are the mechanism Banks’s novels identify as the central political pathology of any society that has not yet completed the transition out of pre-Culture barbarism. Andreessen names as the future the conditions Banks names as the thing the future has to escape. This is documentary, on the page.

The two papers exist. One can read them side by side. And notice. The people now building the energy and intelligence systems Banks said had to exist (the systems on which the Culture’s material conditions depend) are reading Banks while citing Andreessen, or are reading Banks while writing Andreessen, and have not, in the documented record, noticed.

I have been reading the Culture novels since I was twelve, for nearly thirty years. The Culture is the only utopia I have ever read that gives me goosebumps, the only one to which I can give an unqualified yes. To watch the figures who would have to build it cite Banks while constructing what his villains built has produced a cognitive dissonance I have not been able to put down.

I was fourteen, in the back of a Land Cruiser between Nairobi and Nakuru — dust in the nose, heat through the glass, the road’s pothole vibration in the seat — when the Great Rift Valley opened beside the highway. It did not appear. It opened. Sunlight broke far ahead across a slope or a plain whose distance the eye kept failing to measure. The valley was not a view. It was a wound in the planet large enough to rearrange the imagination. I had been reading the Culture novels for two years. Minds. General System Vehicles. Ships large enough to contain worlds. Sitting at the lip of one vastness while my head held another, I experienced the doubled vertigo Banks teaches readers to look for everywhere.

Veppers

What they have not noticed is a character Banks wrote in 2010. Before Brexit. Before the Techno-Optimist Manifesto. Before Anthropic existed.

Joiler Veppers, who appears in Surface Detail (2010), is the richest man on the planet of Sichult. He has made his fortune in entertainment, finance, and infrastructure; he is charming on television; he describes himself, when pressed, as a “civilizational steward”; and he runs, as a side business with very healthy margins, a network of virtual Hells: afterlife environments engineered for the eternal torture of digitized minds, leased to client governments and faith cultures for a per-soul fee. The business has shareholders. The shareholders have margins. The margins have the temperature of clean money. Banks’s narrator notes that Veppers does this not out of cruelty, exactly, but because the business is good and the demand is real. He is untouchable. In the novel, the Culture removes him.

Banks wrote a character in 2010 with total particularity. He is now living among us. Several of him. The same charm, the same stewardship-language, the same precise indifference to what is being engineered when the engineering is profitable. Among readers who quote Player of Games and Consider Phlebas, Surface Detail tends to be the Banks novel they haven’t quite gotten around to. They’ve not noticed who it is about.

The citations

The most legible of the several is the one who used Banks’s own descriptor for himself, in his own words, on the public record. In June 2018, on the platform he would purchase four years later, Elon Musk wrote: If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks.

Musk did not say he was like a Banks character, or inspired by the Culture, or drawn to its aesthetics. He used Banks’s term, utopian anarchist, to name himself. He named the man. He kept the word anarchist. Three and a half years later, on the record with Time for Person of the Year (December 2021), he repeated the self-label. The position was not a one-off. It held through two presidential elections, the consolidation of a personal fortune into one of the largest the species has produced, a contract to return humans to the moon, the purchase of the platform on which the original sentence was written, and the nearly eight years since June 2018, during which the public meaning of anarchist in Banks’s sense and anarchist in Musk’s sense parted company so thoroughly that the same word now refers to two opposite political objects. Over that period, the years in which Musk became what he is now, Musk kept Banks’s word and discarded the object. The anarchism survived as a word; the politics did not. Anarchism (1994, A Few Notes): consensual coordination through Minds whose authority is consent rather than command. Anarchism (2018, on X): the rich man tweeting about the rich man.

The SpaceX drone ships are a quieter version of the same operation. Of Course I Still Love You and Just Read the Instructions were named in January 2015; A Shortfall of Gravitas followed in 2021. All three are Culture vessels in Banks’s novels, autonomous craft named with the dry comic Mind-humor that is one of Banks’s most recognizable inventions. The dedications were public and warm. The ships land first-stage rockets at sea so the rockets can be reused, so the launch costs come down, so the company’s competitive position improves. The Minds in Banks’s novels do not work for shareholders. The names do. What the ships do is not what the Culture’s craft do. The names are inventory.

I read Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near in 2010 on a northbound S-train from Copenhagen. I would look up from the book at the commuters around me — smartphones, morning papers, absorbed in the mundane ride — and feel that these people, going on with their ordinary mornings, had no idea what was coming. The Minds. The abundance. The exponential curves. The imaginaries I had grown up reading were turning into projects with timelines and budgets. I felt validated, initiated. The book was published in 2005, in New York. Science fiction was crossing the membrane into management language, engineering optimism, institutional seriousness. The Minds, abundance, post-scarcity, machine cognition, exponential futures were becoming project topics and seminar material. Conference slides. Singularity University was founded in 2008 and opened the following year, backed by Google and NASA, with Kurzweil as chancellor. By 2015, SpaceX was naming drone ships after Culture vessels. Over roughly fifteen years, what had been a literary interest in scale and abundance became a venture vocabulary. The novels were unchanged. The reading of them had shifted from literary interest to operational permission: a literature of post-scarcity post-state civilizations available to be cited by founders without the political settlement the novels insist on.

The harder case is Dario Amodei.

Amodei is the founder and chief executive of Anthropic, one of the small number of companies building the foundation models around which current frontier-AI capital allocation is organized. In October 2024, on his personal site, he published an essay titled Machines of Loving Grace, with the title from Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem of the same name and the argument substantially from the Culture. Brautigan wrote his poem in San Francisco in 1967 (a vision of a cybernetic ecology in which humans, computers, and animals lived together) and was dead by 1984. The harmony was not built. The poem’s phrasing became the title of an All Watched Over t-shirt and a 2011 Adam Curtis documentary about how the cybernetic vision was metabolized by the institutions that had adopted its vocabulary. Amodei’s borrowing extends the chain. The essay sets out his vision of an AI-enabled near future, with disease defeated, biology mastered, mental health a tractable engineering problem, post-scarcity within technological reach, and governance to be worked out. He invokes The Player of Games by name, warmly, and accurately. He has read it.

Inside the same essay, Amodei writes the caveats. He hesitates to play the prophet; he notes the role of market forces in shaping what gets built; he notes the national-security pressures any frontier AI lab now operates under. Amodei reads Banks accurately. The conditions of Anthropic (a frontier lab in a compute-concentrated, venture-financed, national-security-pressured market) select for some readings and against others. The reading they select for is the one in which the Culture is a horizon: disease defeated, abundance achieved, the political question deferred. The reading they select against is the one in which the Culture’s material conditions cannot be reached without abolishing the institutional form Anthropic is built within.

The defense writes itself. The systems will be built somewhere; a lab that prioritizes safety, run by people who have read Banks carefully, working inside the existing market form, is more likely to produce AI compatible with Culture conditions than handing the work to actors with no interest in alignment. The defense is a category error. The Culture is not Culture-shaped technology inside any political settlement. The Culture is the political settlement, and the technology is what that settlement produces. Keep the form and strip the politics, and what gets built is not the Culture in earlier form. It is some pre-Culture order with better machines.

The diagnostic sharpens on the novel itself. The Player of Games is structurally about how the optimization game becomes the political structure: the Empire of Azad’s social, military, and religious hierarchies are encoded as game positions, and whoever wins Azad governs. The novel is a parable about labs running optimization games as political acts. When frontier AI labs build systems whose optimization targets at scale become the conditions of human life, the game is the politics. In the novel, Gurgeh plays the imperial game to defeat the empire. The lab is in the empire’s position. It is writing the game and playing it. Amodei has read the parable. He is still building the lab.

His reading is correct. He keeps building.

What Banks said

Banks said it. He wrote the politics down.

On 22 March 2003, two days after the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq began, the pieces of two British passports arrived at 10 Downing Street. Banks and his wife had cut them up. His letter to The Guardian explained why. Not even in the darkest days of Thatcherdom, they wrote, had they felt so ashamed to be British. He did not have a passport again until Blair left office four years later, by which point the war’s death toll had risen, by major estimates, into the hundreds of thousands, the Labour Party that had taken Britain into it had lost its majority, and the British state Banks had been writing the Iain Banks novels against had been recognizable to itself in its conduct of the war it could not, in the end, win. He had been publishing the Culture novels since 1987. He had also been writing the contemporary Iain Banks novels (The Wasp Factory, The Crow Road, Complicity) in which the anger about the Thatcher and post-Thatcher British state is on the page, undisguised. The Culture is not, in Banks’s biography, a separate imagination from the politics. The Culture extends the politics out to galactic scale, with the material problems solved.

A Few Notes on the Culture sets the politics out in functional, non-fictional voice; thirty years of interviews repeat it. The Culture is what utopia looks like if you take seriously the political question alongside the technological one.

The novels are louder than the essays. Banks’s structural villains are priestly. The Idirans in Consider Phlebas are religious militants fighting an existential war against the Culture’s machine-mediated freedom; the Chelgrians in Look to Windward are a caste society whose theological apparatus survives translation into post-life servitude; the engineers of the Hells in Surface Detail (including Veppers) are operating, at the wholesale level, the eschatological infrastructure of client faiths. Theocracy: priestly. Caste society: priestly. Corporation of infinite torture: priestly. The pattern is corpus-wide. Over twenty-five years and ten Culture books, when Banks needs an antagonist whose evil is structural rather than incidental, he reaches for the same template: someone who has captured the authority to administer meaning to other people, and who is doing it because the position is good and the demand is real. The template is portable and survives translation across galaxies and species. Banks finished the last Culture novel, The Hydrogen Sonata, in 2012, the year before he died. The SpaceX drone ships had not yet been named for his ships. The manifesto rewriting Marinetti in his name was eleven years away. Anthropic had not yet been founded. The Hells were still fiction in 2012.

Banks built this into the books. It is not imposed from outside. The first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas, is told from the perspective of an Idiran-affiliated mercenary fighting the Culture; Banks’s opening move foreclosed easy fan-identification on page one. The reading test was deliberate: the Culture is also not innocent. Special Circumstances, whose operations occupy half a dozen novels, is Banks’s own check on what utopia has to do to survive, his insistence that imposition stays morally expensive even after abundance has solved the material problem. He did not write a clean parable. He wrote a long argument across twenty-five years and ten Culture books, finished it in 2012, died in 2013. By the time the institutional infrastructure he had warned against produced its own manifesto, his books were on the desks of the figures who had built it.

Banks named these figures in his novels. The figures have read him without recognizing themselves.

Abundance does not abolish politics

The infrastructure on which the Culture’s material conditions would have to be built is being built now. Compute, energy, biology, governance, capital allocation. It is being built inside an institutional vessel (frontier corporate labs, venture financing, infrastructure-extraction politics, national-security pressure, founder governance), and this vessel shapes what gets built into it. This is the part Banks was specific about. The Culture, in his account, is not the AI Minds plus the post-scarcity economy plus the immortality plus the ship names. The Culture is what those things become when they are built inside the political settlement that refuses, constitutionally, the conditions of capital accumulation, hereditary authority, and the administration of meaning by elites. Strip the settlement and the components are not Culture components but the components of something else. Banks is the most inspiring utopian philosopher of the era now building AI futures. He imagined post-scarcity as a political and moral settlement before it was a technological condition. He imagined Minds as agents of consent before they were agents of optimization. He imagined ships as collective property before they were autonomous craft. The era’s vocabularies preserve the objects. AI Minds. Ships. Neural interfaces. Abundance. Longevity. Scale. Post-work life. The institutional conditions of the projects metabolize the readings into shapes the Culture would diagnose as pre-Culture barbarism.

The metabolism is visible at the material level. On 4 May 2026, in Box Elder County, Utah, three commissioners approved a hyperscale data-center and energy-generation project called the Stratos Project, a forty-thousand-acre campus in Hansel Valley, backed by the state’s Military Installation Development Authority and the investor Kevin O’Leary, projected to consume nine gigawatts of power — more than the state’s current average electricity load — in a watershed that drains, eventually, to the Great Salt Lake. The day after the vote, a water-rights application to transfer 1,900 acre-feet from ranching to industrial use was withdrawn after nearly four thousand objections; the developers said they would refile. Status: pending. Objections logged: ~4,000. Utah Clean Energy projects water demand up to sixteen billion gallons a year at full natural-gas buildout. The Lake is already drying. The vote was held amid visible public opposition and chants of Shame. The campus is one of several active in 2026 in the American West. The abundance is being built. It is being built out of grid capacity, aquifer water, county-board variances, and the specific political asymmetry by which a sufficiently capitalized consortium can win, against organized public opposition, the political authorization to draw down a watershed for the operation of a global-scale optimization system whose benefits are not, in any operational sense, theirs. Three commissioners voted yes. The Culture’s energy abundance is not built like this. The Culture’s energy abundance presupposes the political settlement that makes “purchase the water rights” not a thing one does.

On 22 September 2024, at the United Nations Summit of the Future, member states adopted by consensus the Pact for the Future and its annex, the first-ever UN Declaration on Future Generations. The Declaration named for the multilateral record all those generations that do not yet exist, and who will inherit this planet as a category requiring institutional representation. Among the Pact’s actions was the proposal of a UN envoy for future generations. What came to be called longtermism was born in Oxford philosophy seminars in the early 2000s by Nick Bostrom and others, was fed by Toby Ord, William MacAskill and the institutional infrastructure they built, grew through white papers, through Effective Altruism conferences, through venture-capital decks, through AI lab safety frameworks, through Foreign Affairs articles, and was finally birthed into the multilateral record. The arc was roughly twenty-one years. Who speaks for the future, in what voice, on whose mandate, with what mechanism of accountability, is the central political question of the period the foundation-model companies and their political action committees and lobbying arms are organizing. The answer the institutional infrastructure is converging toward is, broadly, the people building the systems. The compulsion to occupy prophetic authority is the position; the disclaimer of prophecy is the costume.

The misreading is hierophantic. The figures who invoke the Culture and then build inside the conditions Banks’s novels diagnose as pre-Culture are not, in this account, hypocrites or liars. They are operating the institutional positions their projects produce. They kept Banks’s word; the word came without its object. The position is priestly. Authority over what the future will mean is exercised on behalf of populations whose deliberative capacity is not, at any stage, consulted. There are procedures for not doing this. Since 1987: the Danish Board of Technology (now Democracy X, after the 2023 merger with DeltagerDanmark) has run consensus conferences with lay citizens on technological futures. Since 2009: the World Wide Views method, also Danish in origin, has been deployed across 38 countries on global warming, 25 on biodiversity, and 76 on climate and energy. Since 2012: UNESCO has run Futures Literacy Laboratories in more than twenty-five countries — participatory workshops, methodologically distinct from consensus conferences, designed to make explicit the assumptions through which publics imagine futures at all. These procedures are not exotic. They are slow, civic, and structurally unable to scale at venture-capital tempo. What they offer is not slowness as virtue. It is public authorization before private infrastructure becomes destiny. They are the political part Banks said had to be solved.

Abundance does not abolish politics; it relocates it. The settlement Banks wrote that all the names and the ships and the longevity and the Minds presuppose is not technological. It is constitutional. It is what has to be true about ownership, authority, and consent before the rest counts as Culture rather than some pre-Culture order with better hardware. Banks finished that argument in 2012 and died in 2013; the institutional infrastructure he had warned against was already old enough to write its own manifesto. This essay is one reader’s attempt to take Banks back from the figures who have learned his name and discarded his books.

To read Banks correctly is to recognize yourself as the thing the Culture exists to escape.

Notes & sources

A note on the labour

This essay grew out of an extensive back-and-forth with Claude, doing what AI is good at: holding many perspectives at once, surfacing what a single attention would miss, compressing what wants to bloat, fact-checking under pressure. The author did what the author has to do: chose the questions, held the voice, made the calls about what survives. Distributed labor, concentrated responsibility.

Primary documents

• Marc Andreessen, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, a16z, 16 October 2023.

• Iain M. Banks, A Few Notes on the Culture, 10 August 1994. The “Money is a sign of poverty” phrasing comes from Banks’s short story “A Gift from the Culture” (1987), not from A Few Notes.

• Iain Banks’s 2003 letter to The Guardian announcing the destruction of his and his wife’s passports in protest at the Iraq War is widely cited and available in the Guardian archive. The archive goes quiet here.

• Dario Amodei, Machines of Loving Grace, October 2024.

• Richard Brautigan, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” (1967), via the Brautigan archives.

• Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, Viking, New York, 2005. Overview.

• Elon Musk’s 2018 tweet self-identifying as a “utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks.”

• Elon Musk in Time, Person of the Year 2021 interview excerpts.

• United Nations, Pact for the Future and Annex II, Declaration on Future Generations, adopted by consensus 22 September 2024.

SpaceX, Singularity University, Adam Curtis

• SpaceX drone-ship Banks tributes, January 2015. A Shortfall of Gravitas was added to the fleet in 2021.

• Singularity University, founded 2008 / opened 2009 at NASA Ames, backed by Google and NASA.

• Adam Curtis, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (BBC, 2011).

Stratos Project (May 2026)

• The Guardian, Utah approves controversial Box Elder data center, 13 May 2026.

• ABC4, Water-rights application for Box Elder data center.

• Salt Lake Tribune, hyperscale data-center project, 4 May 2026.

• Cache Valley Daily, Water-rights request withdrawn after thousands of objections.

• Utah Clean Energy analysis of estimated emissions and water consumption at full natural-gas buildout.

• New York Post, coverage of Shame chants at the approval vote.

Deliberative-procedure references

• The Danish Board of Technology was established in 1986; held its first consensus conference in 1987; was reconstituted as an independent foundation in 2012; and merged with DeltagerDanmark in 2023 to form Democracy X.

• World Wide Views method, Danish in origin, has been deployed on global warming (2009, 38 countries), biodiversity (2012, 25 countries), and climate and energy (2015, 76 countries).

• UNESCO Futures Literacy & Foresight, with Futures Literacy Laboratories run in more than twenty-five countries since 2012.

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The photograph is the thing to understand. Not what it shows but what it refuses to see. Behind the three men in the frame: pastel-colored houses pressed between dark water and bare rock, the low-slung architecture of a place with roughly four thousand years of human habitation. The photograph is not interested in this. The photograph is interested in blankness — in Greenland as a surface on which something can be written. Call it the blankness engine: the cognitive operation by which a place full of people, weather, law, and roughly four millennia of human habitation gets redescribed as empty, so that someone else’s future can be built on top of it. It is not a metaphor. It is a technique — visual, legal, financial, imperial — and it is older than any of the men in the photograph.

Nuuk, the capital, has a fish market where halibut and seal are laid out on concrete slabs in cold air that smells of salt and diesel from the harbor, the parliament building visible across the water. It has a housing crisis. Families wait years for apartments in the new blocks climbing the hillside above the fjord. Water and sewage pipes run aboveground, heated to keep them from freezing, visible across the rock face like the exposed circulatory system of a city that cannot afford to pretend it exists without effort. No road connects Nuuk to any other settlement in Greenland. The ice sheet — its cores holding at least 110,000 years of climate record, three kilometers thick at its center — begins less than a hundred kilometers to the east, a body twenty-seven times older than the human presence on this island. This is not blankness.

Seven months later, Reuters reported that Silicon Valley investors had begun promoting Greenland as a site for a “freedom city” — a virtually unregulated hub for artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, space launches, micro nuclear reactors. The names attached to the project were not obscure. Peter Thiel. Marc Andreessen. There was also Dryden Brown.

In 2024, Brown — then twenty-eight, a college dropout and former hedge fund analyst who had been fired — landed a twin-propeller plane in Nuuk with his Praxis co-founder, jogged around the capital, then jumped into the ocean. He called this “going Praxis mode.” Praxis describes itself as an “internet-native nation” dedicated to “restoring Western Civilization.” It has 151,000 digital citizens and $525 million in funding. It has no territory. Brown wanted to build a city on Greenland — a “prototype of Terminus,” he said, using Musk’s preferred name for the first city on Mars. Greenland, in this grammar, is not a place where anyone already lives. It is the edge of somewhere else — a civilizational restart zone, empty enough to receive a project that couldn’t survive contact with an existing society.

Descend one layer. Beneath the MAGA hats and the Praxis tweets and the 3 a.m. flights, there is a library. The book that matters most sits at the center of it: The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State, published in 1997 by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg. Thiel has called it the most influential book he has ever read. He wrote the preface to the 2020 edition. In it, he frames the future as a binary: “If AI is communist, crypto is libertarian.” The Sovereign Individual predicts the dissolution of the nation-state, the rise of cybercurrencies controlled by private markets, the emergence of a “cognitive elite” who will relocate their wealth beyond the reach of democratic taxation. The nation-state is not reformed in this vision. It is exited.

Every attempt follows the same sequence. Find a place that can be described as empty. Build something that can be described as new. When the people who were already there object, describe the objection as a failure to understand the future.

There is a name for this cognitive operation, and it is older than Silicon Valley by four centuries. Terra nullius — nobody’s land — was the legal fiction that allowed European crowns to seize territory by declaring it unoccupied, regardless of who was living on it. The Greenlandic name for Greenland is Kalaallit Nunaat — Land of the People. Place those side by side and the collision is already complete: nobody’s land, the people’s land, the same coordinates. Three names for one island: the Norse colonial name says the land is green, which was a lie to attract settlers. The indigenous name says the land is the people’s. The network-state vision says the land is no one’s. Australia was terra nullius from 1788 until 1992, when the High Court finally overturned the doctrine. The structural requirement was never that the land be literally empty. The requirement was that the people on it could be reclassified as features of the landscape, as part of the nature being improved upon, not as political subjects with claims. That reclassification has a specific racial history: from the Dutch East India Company to the Australian High Court to the Danish IUD program, the blankness engine has always run most efficiently on populations it has already sorted into a category below the fully political.

The language recurs. You have to watch for it because it doesn’t announce itself. When Brown described Greenland as “one of the last frontiers of Earth,” when the freedom-city prospectus imagined building on “uninhabitable land,” when Trump described the island’s population as “a very small amount of people, which we’ll take care of, and we’ll cherish them, and all of that” — the grammar is the same grammar. “Cherish” is the verb of the guardian, not the peer — a word reserved for possessions, dependents, and pets. The people become a detail to be managed, a friction coefficient in an otherwise clean equation. What took the Dutch East India Company decades of parchment, the network-state accomplishes in a tweet.

The ideology does not hide. It does not need to. And the American interest in Greenland is older than any of them. The United States built its first weather stations on the island in 1941, when Nazi Germany occupied Denmark and a Danish ambassador signed a defense agreement on his own authority — an act his government called treason and then, after liberation, ratified. The 1951 U.S.-Denmark defense agreement opened the way for Thule Air Base. In 1953, Danish authorities forcibly relocated the Inuit population of the Thule area to Qaanaaq for the base’s expansion. A few years later, Camp Century was built under the ice as cover for Project Iceworm, a plan to deploy about six hundred nuclear missiles beneath the Greenland ice sheet. The ice kept moving, and the project collapsed. The base was renamed Pituffik Space Base in 2023 — the Greenlandic word means “the place the dogs are tied.” Trump’s acquisition rhetoric is not an invention. It is the vulgarization of an eighty-year strategic installation already embedded in the rock.

Descend again. Below the ideology, below the investors, below the diplomatic cables and the Truth Social posts, there is the ice.

Greenland’s ice sheet covers eighty percent of the island. It contains enough frozen water that if it melted entirely, global sea levels would rise by seven meters. It is not being melted — a passive formulation that hides the agency. It is responding, on its own geological timescale, to a planetary forcing that industrial civilization initiated and cannot reverse. It is the largest actor in this story, and the only one whose actions are irreversible. In 2019, it shed 532 billion tons of itself — the most ever recorded in a single year. Jakobshavn Isbræ, the outlet glacier near Ilulissat that drains roughly 6.5 percent of the entire ice sheet, has retreated kilometers in a single decade, calving icebergs the size of city blocks into a fjord so deep the sound of the breaking reaches shore minutes after the visual event. I’ve experienced this. It sounds like a deep, persistent thunder. And it is this shedding — and only this shedding — that makes the rare-earth deposits along the coastline newly accessible.

In Ilulissat, a dog-sled champion named Jørgen Kristensen told the Associated Press in January 2026 that for the first time in his memory, there was no snow on the hills and no ice in the bay. His sled bounced over bare earth and rock. The sea ice used to act as a highway connecting hunters to their grounds and to other Inuit communities across the Arctic — Canada, Alaska, Russia. Without it, families in the far north have needed government aid to survive seasons when the ice did not freeze hard enough for hunting. Permafrost thaw is sinking buildings in Ilulissat and cracking the pipes. In Greenlandic, sila can mean weather, air, consciousness, even the world outside. When weather changes this fast, it enters a field of meaning broader than the English word “weather” usually carries.

Rare-earth extraction under melting permafrost requires advanced robotics, not organized labor. It is financed by venture capital, not state treasuries. It is governed by whoever controls the technology, not whoever lives on the land. Coal gave workers leverage because they could stop the flow: at the pithead, on the rail line, at the strike gate. The political form rare-earth extraction produces may depend on the absence of anyone who can. If these material conditions produce the network state the way coal seams produced the union, then arguing against it is not arguing against bad ideas. It is arguing against the weather.

The difference is not that the old coercion vanished. It is that it became elective, abstract, and branded as freedom. Pullman tied wages, housing, and discipline together in one paternal system. The network state tries to turn comparable dependency into affiliation: the resident becomes a member, the member a token-holder, subordination a form of buy-in. The hierarchy does not disappear. It gets recapitalized and renamed. The vocabulary of liberation does the work that the vocabulary of subjection used to do.

Brown told TechCrunch that the Greenlanders had “a sort of sense of pride that makes the idea of being bought — it’s almost, like, condescending.” He said this with surprise. What Brown did not see — and could not see, because to see it would be to recognize a Greenlandic subject where his framework requires only a Greenlandic object — is that no one in Greenland can own land. Not even Greenlanders. All land is collectively held. You can own a house but not the ground under it. This is not a recent regulation. It is rooted in Inuit customary law, where nomadic hunting patterns made private land demarcation impractical and conceptually alien. A shamanic practitioner, Rakel Kristiansen, put it this way: “In our understanding, owning land is the wrong question. The question should be who is responsible for the land.” Praxis wants to tokenize ownership of territory in a place where the concept of land ownership does not exist. They are not disagreeing about who should own the land. They are not even refusing the property framework — the framework’s preconditions do not exist in their conceptual architecture. They are operating in incompatible realities about what land is.

What Brown encountered as an irrational attachment to a frozen place was something else: a civilization that has spent a millennium developing a knowledge of ice — its moods, its sounds, its seasonal negotiations — that no visiting technologist could acquire in a lifetime and that no sensor array could replace. In Greenlandic, siku names sea ice. It is not just an object. It is a field of travel, judgment, memory, and practice that the blankness engine cannot see because it is not looking. The essay — this essay, written in English, in a genre developed in European capitals — cannot get there either. It can point at the edge of what it cannot enter. That is not nothing. It is also not the thing itself.

“Greenland is ours,” Premier Múte B. Egede wrote. “We are not for sale and will never be for sale. We must not lose our long struggle for freedom.” That struggle is older than Trump and aimed at a different capital. Denmark colonized Greenland in 1721. Denmark ran the island as a closed colony until 1953. Between 1966 and 1991, Danish authorities inserted IUDs into approximately 4,500 Greenlandic women and girls — roughly half the fertile female population — many without informed consent, some as young as twelve, taken from school to hospitals. Denmark formally apologized in 2025. Since 2009, Greenland has had Selvstyre — self-governance that grants the Greenlandic parliament authority over most domestic matters, including the legal right to declare full independence. The Greenlanders have chosen, so far, not to exercise that right, because economic dependence on Denmark’s annual block grant — roughly $600 million a year, without which the economy would collapse — makes sovereignty financially precarious. Independence is not simply an assertion waiting to be made. It is a material problem: how to fund a country of 56,000 people spread across 2.16 million square kilometers with no road network, an export economy ninety percent dependent on fish, and public services built on Danish subsidy. Some Greenlanders see mineral extraction as the path out of that dependency. Others see it as trading one form of outside control for another. The difficulty is that both are right, and the impossibility — dependence on a country that sterilized your mothers, or independence through extraction that may replicate the same dispossession in a different key — is not a policy problem. It is a condition.

And in the 2023 draft constitution for an independent Greenland, the foundational principle is stated plainly: collective ownership of all land, sea, and resources is inalienable. “The Greenlandic people are part of nature. We live from and with nature which is an inviolate principle for a sustainable society.” Note the structural irony the constitution reclaims: “the people are part of nature” is also the sentence terra nullius used to deny them political standing. The same words, spoken by the colonizer, erase; spoken by the colonized, they found a sovereignty. The Sovereign Individual predicts the dissolution of the nation-state through capital flight. Greenland’s draft constitution responds — without knowing it is responding — by declaring that the thing capital wants to acquire is constitutionally defined as unacquirable.

In November 2025, Greenland’s parliament passed a law restricting foreign property purchases — twenty-one votes in favor, six abstentions. Non-Danish citizens now need two years of residency and tax history. A legislative act against the blankness engine.

But Praxis still has its $525 million. The Sovereign Individual is still on the nightstands of the people who fund the people who fund the people who make policy. And the ice — the oldest actor in this story, the one no one consults — is still responding to what the atmosphere is doing, seven meters of future sea-level rise locked inside a body that looks, from a sufficient altitude, like nothing at all. Like a page that hasn’t been written on yet.

Author’s note: I have visited Greenland in 2019, 2024, and 2025. I write as a Danish citizen with family ties to Greenland.

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Svend doesn’t flinch. I do, sometimes. Not because I’m afraid but because the sounds are real and the war they’re practicing for is real and it’s happening right now, nine hours east by car, to people whose dogs learned a different lesson about that sound. It lasted twenty minutes. Then it stopped and I was back in the birdsong and the mud and Svend pulling at something rotten in a ditch, and I stood there and checked the weather on my phone. 1.5 degrees, overcast, chance of rain after lunch - and the distance between my morning and theirs was something I couldn’t write or think or feel my way across.

But today is the 24th. Four years ago, Russia invaded Ukraine. The war has not ended. I am not sure we expected it to.

It’s 22:13. I should have gone to bed an hour ago. I opened the Kyiv Post and read Zelensky’s address - the one that keeps pulling him back to that first week, the bunker on Bankova Street, the same small room where Biden told him to leave and he said he needed ammunition, not a ride. He showed the room today for the first time. It’s smaller than I imagined. Near the end, he said he wanted to bring the President of the United States there one day. He didn’t say which one.

Then I opened ISW and started scrolling the frontline assessments the way I used to every morning in the first year. March 2022, April, May — I read those reports like weather forecasts for a place I’d never been but couldn’t stop watching. I knew the names of villages I couldn’t pronounce. I followed the geometry of the coloured arrows, the grey zones, the axes under pressure.

The war didn’t end. My attention did. That’s biology. It might also be a moral failure.

Tonight I scrolled ISW again. The maps look almost the same as they did two years ago. Here are the best public estimates I can find this week, and even writing that sentence feels like an admission of how far away I am.

Russia controls about a fifth of Ukraine. The combined military casualties across both sides may be close to two million. Some estimates put Russian military deaths in the hundreds of thousands; Ukrainian military deaths in the high tens of thousands to low hundreds of thousands. Civilian harm rose again last year, and the refugee map hasn’t snapped back: around six million Ukrainians still live abroad.

Zelensky, today:

“Bucha. Irpin. Borodyanka. Mass graves. Hostomel. Mariupol. Drama theater. The inscription: Children. Odesa. Apartment building. A little girl. Three months. Vilnyansk. Maternity ward. An infant. Two days.”

This winter, when it hit minus 18, Russia struck the energy grid. In Kharkiv, people slept in coats and heated water with car batteries.

The EU has provided roughly €193 billion in support. Brussels lit its buildings in blue and yellow tonight.

The Berlaymont looks exactly the same in the morning. We light buildings and then argue about pipelines and packages and who pays. Hungary has blocked the next sanctions step; Slovakia has made its own threats around electricity and support. The reconstruction bill is now estimated at $588 billion. That number was published this week.

There is something punk about Ukraine. Punk as in: no. Before you’ve thought about it. No. The decision made in the legs. Millions of people felt it at once on that first morning and it was the same decision: I am not leaving.

Then every morning since, they’ve made it again. The first day was adrenaline. Day 30 was something else. Day 1,462: a woman in Kharkiv opens her laptop to teach a class while wearing her coat because the heating is gone. A developer in Odesa pushing code. A farmer near Zaporizhzhia walking into a field that was shelled in October — the soil smells of metal.

Every tomorrow must be won.

We promised “for as long as it takes.” The phrase was shaped like a vow. It was conditioned on election cycles, on gas futures, on the tolerance of publics. Ukraine bled on the basis of those words. The least we owe is to stop pretending they were unconditional.

If you believe in the bet that this continent could organise itself around law instead of force, then Ukraine is the question - the one that determines whether “never again” was a principle or a slogan.

If you light a building in blue and yellow but flinch at the budget line for ammunition, you are decorating.

If you speak of peace but mean Ukraine should hand over land to stop the dying, you are not a peacemaker. You are siding with the argument that the bigger army gets the ground.

If our position on this war shifts with the administration in Washington, it wasn’t a position. It was a dependency.

And if you’re tired of it, I stood in a Danish field this morning listening to practice rounds. That was not a fraction of a fraction of what a body in Chasiv Yar registers on a Tuesday. Our fatigue is not their suffering. The fact that the motorway sound has become comfortable - I don’t know what to call that. Complicity, maybe. Or just how hearing works.

Two million casualties, and the map looks roughly the same.

Ukraine holds most of its territory. That is resilience. But sit with the other reading: two million people, and the lines have barely moved. This is Verdun with drones. And we are the audience who learned to call it “frozen” because frozen sounds like a condition and not like what it is.

Nothing is frozen. Pipes are freezing. People are freezing. The language is calcifying - “the situation on the ground,” “continued support,” “security guarantees” - phrases that no longer mean anything.

My sister had her first child today. The message came between the paragraph above and this one. A photo, a name. I went to the kitchen and came back.

Someone in Ukraine also became an aunt or an uncle today. Or should have.

The boots are still being tied. Every morning, in the dark.

Zelensky quoted something from the early weeks today, from 2022, when the world was paying attention: You think I’ve fallen to my knees? I’ve just tied my tactical boots. The signal degrades. Every month the image gets more compressed, more artefacted, and the hands in the dark continue whether we’re watching or not.

Tomorrow I’ll walk Svend and there may or may not be artillery practice at the range and I’ll check the weather and the algorithm will have something new for me. The war will be a headline I’ve read in a hundred variations.

Find out what your government committed to and whether it delivered. Not the speeches, the actual budget lines, the ones nobody reads. Denmark has committed over 70 billion kroner (approx 10 billion EUR) since 2022: F-16s, air defence, drones - and the Prime Minister was in Kyiv this morning with the Nordic-Baltic leaders. That’s good. Whether it’s enough is a different question, and the answer depends on what “enough” means when the bill is $588 billion and ten million people need aid. Write to someone who makes decisions. Talk about it. Give money to something specific.

Proliska — evacuates civilians from frontline areas. Hospitallers — volunteer medical battalion. Superhumans — prosthetics for people who stepped on mines. United24 — official Ukrainian government fundraising platform.

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As a Dane, I came from a quieter climate — a culture of consensus, proportion, and procedural trust — and found myself in a land that runs on voltage and conviction. Freedom felt hotter, more muscular, more combustible. Even kindness carried current.

This essay argues that what holds the United States together is not ideology or faith alone, but pressure — a physics of attention that converts belief into energy, kindness into infrastructure, and freedom into heat. What happens when democracy itself becomes a pressure system? Energy turns into theology; commerce becomes liturgy; faith scales like technology. These are field notes from a foreigner trying to map what happens when the sacred and the digital begin to share the same circuitry.

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High-Pressure Nation

America runs on pressure — social, industrial, emotional. It converts belief into energy, kindness into infrastructure, freedom into heat. Beneath its democratic ideals lies an atmospheric demand: to move, to signal, to mean.

The first thing that struck me was the air — not its purity, but its insistence. It pressed down with bureaucratic authority, as if even the clouds carried paperwork. Driving north from Anchorage to Fairbanks, I felt it in the wheel and the chest: a nation humming at high frequency yet greeting you with warmth rather than collapse.

Every gas-station clerk asked where we were from; someone in a supermarket invited us home for dinner. Politeness here wasn’t a pause but a pulse — a civic current keeping the system stable. In a place where the social contract frays at the edges, courtesy becomes the load-bearing beam.

As a Dane, I’m used to politeness as restraint — the silent trust of small societies. In Alaska, politeness was voltage. America, I realized, is not quiet even when it’s kind.

The landscapes mirrored that excess. Highways the width of rivers, grocery stores the size of parishes, suburban houses flying Ukrainian, Greenlandic, and Canadian flags, billboards advertising discounted chicken wings beside Sunday-service banners. Somewhere between those signs lay the secret constitution of the modern empire — transcendence sold by the pound. Trucks roared past like armored myths while eagles turned over the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, that silver artery keeping the cold civilization alive. The radio mumbled about God and elections. It was easy to mistake the noise for a pulse.

America felt like a weather system mistaking itself for a nation — rolling across the continent, baptizing and burning with the same hand. The people we met were like barometers, adjusting constantly to the pressure. Their friendliness wasn’t a mask; it was survival. Grace here had to become infrastructure.

Denmark teaches moderation, proportion; America worships magnitude. It doesn’t care if the meaning fits, only that it expands. You can feel it in the neon, each sign shouting see me, believe me, buy me, save me.

At night, scrolling headlines of rallies, climate disasters, and AI breakthroughs, I felt how seamlessly ideology and atmosphere had fused. The country doesn’t just debate freedom; it manufactures it as weather — a constant front of choice and expression. Thrilling, suffocating, restless, always moving east. You can breathe as much as you want, but the air will always have an owner. Ownership, I realized, is America’s subtlest religion. “No Trespassing” and “Private Property” signs were everywhere, small prayers to the god of exclusion.

The Machinery of Belief: Energy, Faith, and the American Hum

Everywhere we went, something hummed. Refrigerators, air-conditioners, trucks idling in parking lots — each a small version of the national pulse. The United States runs on voltage as much as conviction; its power grid is emotional as well as electrical. Even worship moves at the speed of commerce.

In Anchorage, one megachurch the size of a convention hall hosted thousands each Sunday1 — a cathedral of projection screens and LED baptisms. Religion here is infrastructure: scaled, data-driven, tuned for engagement like an Amazon feed. Alaska’s Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which moves nearly half a million barrels of oil per day2, is its secular twin — abundance as liturgy, extraction as providence.

From a distance, this can look like greed; up close, it hums like necessity. Each Alaskan receives an annual Permanent Fund Dividend3 — a secular tithe of oil revenue that turns geology into grace. The logic travels south to Silicon Valley, where faith has become algorithmic: the belief that enough computation can redeem the world. Both systems depend on endless input, endless fuel.

The warmth that greeted us — the smiles, the How’re y’all doin’? — felt like a human countercurrent to a machine that erases friction. If the system never stops running, kindness must become kinetic, expressed in microbursts that keep meaning alive through speed. Courtesy doubles as circuitry.

Driving through the dark, I passed billboards that glowed like secular stained glass: salvation, debt consolidation, broadband — each promising a version of connection. Maybe this is the American genius: to turn every need — faith, belonging, bandwidth — into a subscription plan. Somewhere between the data farm and the megachurch, salvation became scalable. The nation built cathedrals of efficiency and called them freedom.

From my limited vantage — a foreign father with a stroller in Anchorage — the conclusion feels less judgmental than diagnostic: belief here isn’t dying; it’s being industrialized. The question isn’t whether the machine can pray, but how long people can believe inside its noise.

The Fracture of Faith

The television hissed blue light into the quiet kitchen. Midnight in Anchorage: wind against the siding, the refrigerator’s click, and the frozen image of a man collapsing behind a podium. The crawl read Charlie Kirk shot during rally. Then replay. Slow motion. Replay again. Violence here was never only an event; it was a genre. Each repetition blurred shock into routine, tragedy into programming.

Driving through the outer neighborhoods the next morning, I slowed before a single-story house wrapped in banners: TRUMP 2024 / TRUMP WON / THIS IS ULTRA MAGA COUNTRY. Across the siding, eagles spread their wings beside slogans painted in red and cobalt: 45 = 47 and We Took America Back.

It wasn’t a home; it was an altar built of conviction and vinyl. The slogans shimmered in the wind, performing belief the way flags perform belonging. The house seemed less to stand on its lot than to broadcast from it — a local transmitter in the national liturgy of certainty. As historian Timothy Snyder writes in On Tyranny, democracies decay “not in drama but in design,” and this was design incarnate: architecture as ideology, faith rendered in high-resolution plastic.

I felt unease and admiration at once. The scene radiated a theology of ownership: I post, therefore I am. Aldous Huxley had imagined this world — a people drowning not in tyranny but in trivia, lulled by abundance and glare. Watching the wind animate those banners, I thought how right he was. Oppression here wasn’t the absence of choice but its surplus.

Inside me grew a quieter recognition: belief in America had migrated from pulpits to property lines. Each yard sign a creed, each driveway a doctrine. Religion had become architecture, its liturgy measured in square footage — communion replaced by zoning.

Yuval Noah Harari once called meaning “the most valuable currency in the universe.” That currency circulated wildly but felt counterfeit: faith traded for spectacle, conviction for signal. Everyone we met was generous, curious, kind; yet the national conversation pulsed with fear — fear of dilution, replacement, silence. Albert Camus might have named it the metaphysical hunger of the absurd: the craving for clarity in a universe that offers none.

That hunger explained the noise. The American dream was not just aspiration; it was amplification. To be unheard was to be unreal. Even the landscape performed — flags stiff with frost, megachurches lit like arenas, pickup radios preaching both gospel and grievance. The sacred and the commercial no longer negotiated; they had merged into one long advertisement for survival.

Søren Kierkegaard warned that faith without inwardness becomes a mere theater. Here was the stage, flooded with LED. Every outrage a candle, every broadcast a psalm. The nation worshiped in pixels, praying not for mercy but for bandwidth. Somewhere between cathedral and server farm - scalable salvation.

The Heat of Meaning

I kept thinking about freedom — that word I’d heard everywhere, from diner radios to politicians speaking like prophets of acceleration. Freedom here wasn’t the Danish kind — quiet, bureaucratic, built on compromise. It was hotter, more muscular, pitched between faith and combustion. In a country built on expansion, even morality seems to burn fuel. Perhaps that’s why ideology here feels physical; it burns.

Yuval Noah Harari wrote that humans are story-shaped animals, and America proves it daily. The narratives here aren’t abstract — they drive trucks, buy guns, go to church, and vote. Each story competes for oxygen. Silence is not an American virtue.

There’s an intensity to American faith that’s hard to mock once you’ve seen its source. It isn’t stupidity or spectacle; it’s the terror of meaning running out. Albert Camus understood this as the absurd — humans staring into the silence of the universe and choosing to sing anyway. Maybe that’s why every sermon, every brand, every candidate sounds like a plea for coherence. The republic is a chorus trying to stay on key while the ground keeps moving.

At night, the news played footage of another protest somewhere in the lower forty-eight — people shouting freedom until the word fractured into sound. I turned off the television and stood at the window. The city lights of Anchorage pulsed like circuitry beneath the mountains. My reflection looked back, framed in glass and static. Somewhere a siren wailed and fell quiet, as if the country itself were catching its breath. For the first time, I understood what Kierkegaard meant when he wrote that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

Outside, the air smelled of wet asphalt and diesel — ordinary, grounding. I thought of Timothy Snyder’s warning that democracies fail not from invasion but from fatigue, from citizens too distracted to notice the drift. Maybe that’s the real heat I felt — the fever of a country trying to stay awake inside its own dream. Somewhere in the dark, America kept humming — bright and bewildered, magnificent — and afraid.

Heat Map of a Nation

The closer you look, the less it behaves like a country. America moves like weather: a high-pressure system of belief and appetite rolling from screen to street, from sermon to algorithm. It generates fronts of meaning and despair, microclimates of faith. You can watch the air itself shimmer with conviction.

Each belief finds a wire. The freeways pulse like synapses, carrying light and data and longing. The news cycles loop like barometric winds, drawing everyone into their swirl. Beneath it all, quiet technologies hum — the servers, the pipelines, the code — translating energy into stories and stories into heat. The empire doesn’t collapse; it overheats.

What once looked like division now reads as saturation. Every surface — politics, worship, consumption — glows with the same voltage of attention. Freedom here has become a measure of output: how much signal one can emit before the system shorts. This is what Aldous Huxley foresaw in reverse — the danger not of too little control, but of too much choice, until choice itself erodes meaning.

Timothy Snyder calls kindness a civic act, a resistance to entropy. In America, kindness feels thermodynamic too: a way of redistributing pressure before the structure gives. The health of a democracy may depend less on its laws than on its capacity to absorb heat without catching fire.

Step back far enough, and the pattern clarifies. Highways, data lines, oil veins, social graphs — all trace the same nervous system, flickering across the continent. The experiment continues: a civilization testing how much perception it can process before it blinds itself. The question is no longer who governs, but who notices.

And somewhere inside that circuitry, people still wave across parking lots, still offer rides, still ask about the baby in the stroller. Beneath the hum, a slower signal persists — an older frequency of care no algorithm can amplify. It’s faint, but it’s there: a resonance, like skin over circuitry, keeping the whole machine from tearing apart.

The engines keep turning. The lights stay on. The atmosphere vibrates with unfinished thought. America is still broadcasting, still becoming, still burning. The rest of us are simply listening for a pattern inside the noise.

Postscript

Thank you for reading. These notes are part of a wider inquiry into perception, technology, and attention.

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These notes follow what happens when projects and pixels fall quiet, and the world grows large, giving way to mountains, distance, and silence—and how that shift might change the way we design, work, and care. Attention, I realized, isn’t something to manage. It’s a landscape to inhabit.

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Elastic Attention

I spent part of my five-month paternity leave in Alaska, where my wife, Ivalu, worked at the universities in Anchorage and Fairbanks as part of the Fulbright Programme. I was there in another capacity—caring for our daughter, Anouk, driving the long highways between mountains. It was a pause from the velocity of European projects and deadlines, and a chance to look at technology from somewhere quieter, larger. Parenthood makes attention elastic; Alaska stretched it further.

The road into Fairbanks felt endless, a line drawn across the skin of the world. My daughter slept in the back seat, a soft pulse of breath beneath the hum of the tires. Out here, distance wasn’t abstraction—it was pressure, the weight of scale pressing evenly on everything. Even the air seemed to widen. I kept thinking about scale—not the ambition that dominates my professional world, but the kind you feel in your ribs when the landscape stretches so far you stop trying to measure it.

Sometimes, when I think about what I do—VR, XR, storytelling, systems that simulate presence—it feels like the opposite of this. The digital collapses distance; it compresses time and space, a continual zoom-in. Alaska had none of that. It was scale without panic, a reminder that presence isn’t measured by how close we get but by how wide we can hold. In Alaska, attention was involuntary: the light forced it, the silence structured it. In our digital cultures, attention is a traded asset. In VR, presence is compression—a collapse of time and place into the immediacy of now. In Alaska, presence expanded outward until it became uncountable.

Every technological promise—immersion, connection, immediacy—feels like a plea for what we keep losing: the capacity to inhabit reality without editing it, to sense the world as David Abram once described it—as something that speaks back. Technology doesn’t only extend perception; it edits it. Each interface teaches a way of seeing, and much of what we build rewards reactivity over reflection. The frontier isn’t “virtual worlds,” but the ability to experience the real one without mediation.

What I brought home wasn’t nostalgia for wilderness, but a renewed sense of proportion. Scale, whether in code or in nature, shapes ethics, and ethics, at heart, are perceptual—they depend on what we can bear to notice, resonant in the way Hartmut Rosa describes: a willingness to be moved by the world. Connectivity isn’t relation; it may even erode it. Attention needs contour, pause, distance. Most of our digital cultures conflate proximity with intimacy, assuming the faster a signal travels, the deeper the connection. Yet in Alaska, the more space there was, the more I felt connected.

Intervals and Interfaces

At night in the Airbnb, the loudest thing was the fridge. It coughed, droned, then fell silent before starting again—a kind of mechanical breathing. Outside, small planes passed overhead; trucks groaned along the highway. Together, they created a rhythm that felt like the pulse of the modern subarctic. Even in places this vast, it’s infrastructure that shapes the silence. Even in the quietest places, we bring our infrastructures with us.

Our technologies fill every pause they create. We design systems to anticipate interruption, interfaces to prevent stillness, algorithms to erase waiting. Yet meaning lives in the interval—the time between hums, the pause before the next engine arrives. Maybe intelligence—human, artificial, or collective—isn’t the absence of noise but the capacity to hear through it, to recognize rhythm inside interruption. The pause is where attention resets.

We celebrate automation as intelligence and connectivity as community, but the hum of the server farm has no empathy; it’s an indifferent activity. The risk isn’t that machines become human—it’s that humans adopt the machine’s attention: fast, partial, endlessly self-confirming. Working in XR and AI, I see how easily design inherits the logic of capital, replacing meaning with metrics and flattening uncertainty into control.

To recover the texture of thought, we might start by resisting clarity as a virtue. Complexity isn’t the enemy of understanding; it’s the condition of insight. The task is not to render the world transparent but to build technologies and narratives that let opacity breathe—leaving room for doubt and contradiction.
Sometimes I imagine the algorithms watching us like northern light—pattern-seeking, indifferent, beautiful. But they can’t feel cold. We feed them our movements, and in the exchange, something vital leaks away.

The Clarity Trap

We drove into Fairbanks through the aftermath of a wildfire. The air was thick with the smell of wet ash, though the flames were gone. Convoys of state trucks idled on the roadside, their lights still turning, as if the landscape hadn’t decided whether it was over.

Days later, on the Chena trail, the world had shifted register. Rain came in slow bursts; the path was mud and roots. I carried my daughter in an Osprey pack, her weight pressing into my back, her small hand tapping my shoulder in rhythm with my steps. Rain slicked down my forearms; sweat ran down my forehead; the forest steamed around us, alive, thick.

It was nothing like the disasters we simulate—the controlled burn of pixels, the immersive clarity of catastrophe. Here, everything was messier: no beginning, no end, only sweat, breath, and the slow unmaking of distance. Visibility is overrated; clarity isn’t the same as care. The wildfire, the rain, the body—none offered legibility, yet they made the world more present.

Our feeds and datasets promise legibility, yet the more visible everything becomes, the less we perceive. When the world hides itself—behind smoke, silence, or slowness—it invites attention back into the body. You have to feel your way forward. Might our crisis of trust stem from overexposure? We mistake access for comprehension and build technologies to eliminate mystery, forgetting that mystery is where learning happens.

When we reached the ridge, the rain stopped. The trees dripped quietly, and steam lifted from the earth like breath. My daughter leaned her head against my neck, half-asleep. It felt less like arriving than rejoining—as if the world had waited, patiently, for us to remember how to walk inside it.

Roughness as Measure

By early September, we were driving south again, the long road between Fairbanks and Anchorage folding into valleys and mountains. The air carried that late-summer heaviness—both an ending and a pause.
Anouk was in the back seat, testing new laughs that startled her, or smearing nectarines across the baby seat. Each time we stopped, she pointed at trucks, birds, sky; the mountains rose higher until Anchorage was ringed in by them.

Later, when the car finally quieted, I thought about work again. The light had that patient, golden thickness that only reaches this far north. Through the mirror I saw her face streaked with peach, half joy, half protest—and for a moment the whole idea of “future” felt absurdly small beside this instant. Everything I’ve worked with—VR, AI, all the gleaming promises—tries to simulate this immediacy, this saturation of being. Yet nothing artificial holds the quiver of light on an eyelash, the imperfection that lets the moment breathe.

It stayed with me, that calibration. Alaska forced attention outward—to weather, distance, and the uncurated texture of the world. Most technologies do the opposite: they fold perception inward, feeding it through loops of personalization. The cost is forgetting how to attend without editing.
Perhaps our task isn’t to perfect perception but to keep its edges raw—to let experience resist capture. The measure of innovation, I’ve come to think, is not how frictionless it feels, but how much of the world’s roughness it can keep intact.

The Work of Returning

Back home, the noise returned quickly—the hum of the fridge, the scroll of news—but it feels different now. The weeks in Alaska changed my baseline, teaching me to register time more slowly, to let the world announce itself before I start naming it. I want to keep that discipline of noticing—not as an aesthetic exercise, but as a kind of ethics.

The mountains around Anchorage, the long roads through rain and smoke—they pressed proportion back into me. Perspective isn’t a state of mind; it’s a physical condition. What I’ll be working on next—in design, in culture, in the small architectures of everyday life—begins from that thought: how to build things that remember their size in relation to the world.

I keep thinking of the drive south, Anouk testing her laugh, the smell of fruit and wet clothes in the car. Those were ordinary moments, but they’ve become coordinates. They tell me what rhythm feels like when it’s honest—when effort, care, and pause coexist.

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