Hacking Death: Life-Extension Technologies and the Fate of Western Culture

This monograph offers an original and timely reading of the disruptive phenomenon of ‘hacking death’, characterised as the contemporary drive to solve ageing and death as ‘problems’ through emerging technologies. It argues that this technological struggle represents Western culture's desperate attempt to nullify human temporality and, consequently, individual failure in an era of unprecedented demandingness, competitiveness, and acceleration. Offering a unique interdisciplinary analysis combining philosophy, history, literature, sociology, and technology studies, it traces the historical roots of our technological relationship with mortality from ancient Greece through Romanticism to today's biotechnology companies and prolongevity movements. Using philosophical arguments, thought experiments, and literary analysis, it offers insight into how a growing correlation between death and individual failure exponentially typifies the contemporary Western culture in a way that significantly diverges from our past. On the other hand, it posits the question of understanding our technological struggle against mortality as a desperate attempt to definitively solve the ‘problem’ of individual failure itself. It culminates in an exploration of Socratic wisdom as an alternative to our current trajectory, emphasizing mortality's evolutionary value. This timely work is essential reading for scholars and graduate students in philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, technology studies, anthropology, history, and literature. It will also be of interest to biotechnology professionals, policymakers, and those concerned with the ethical and cultural implications of emerging life-extension technologies.