LIVE LONG AND PROSPER?

Dick Pountain /Idealog 377/ 24th November 2025 : 11:39am 

Mankind has always hankered after immortality… Sorry about that, but I’ve been overdosing on social media for several weeks and began to worry that my column isn’t bombastic enough. And it’s not just social media either, because last week The Guardian ran a piece about a US investment boom into ‘transhumanist’ technologies like Musk’s Neuralink that claim they’ll enable us to upload our brains and download them again into new bodies. Concerned US scientists say that this is starting to divert funding away from sensible medical research. I’ve written plenty here about the delusions most software engineers (even billionaire ones) harbour about brain function and so am not going there again, except to say that it isn’t static data, it’s an evanescent flux, geddit? 

What interests me more is the replacement body aspect, prompted by watching Benicio del Toro’s excellent new film of ‘Frankenstein’, followed by Alex Garland’s equally excellent ‘Ex Machina’ for the third time on TV. Mary Shelley was neither a software engineer nor a neurologist and hence avoided such delusions by getting Victor Frankenstein to use a real, wet brain from another human, along with all the other necessary bits collected from fresh battlefield slaughter. Garland’s egomaniacal Ethan makes a brain for his gorgeous female robot Ava from a lump of a special jelly, which he trained in LLM-style using the output of all the world’s mobile phones (which he stole with the full connivance of the phone companies). It’s as well to remember that the phrase ‘deus ex machina’ originally referred to the crude tricks that playwrights of old used to fill in gaping holes in their plots, and Garland’s movie isn’t just a remarkably prescient prediction of AI lunacy but also a cool and sardonic satire of the industry. 

Of course the biggest problem for all transhumanist fantasies is powering the creatures. Shelley evaded this one neatly too, because her Monster just eats food like the rest of us (though the deeply unpleasant Victor F. in the new film probably skimped on his rations). Ava on the other hand appears to plug herself in like a smartphone every night, and a crucial plot-point is that this gives her enough knowledge of the power system to create the electricity blackouts which drive the story to its gory climax. It’s not obvious where she stores charge during the day though since her transparent midriff, while curiously titillating, reveals nothing resembling an adequate battery. And that brings us to the delicate matter of what these creatures are created for. 

Victor Frankenstein made it quite clear that his purpose was unambiguously to ‘conquer death’, rather than anything more prosaic or economic, so Mary Shelley didn’t pursue what Victorian industrialists would have used his work for had it succeeded. Garland though is quite clear about 

what’s on Nathan’s mind, because he gives Ava functional genitalia and a heterosexual ability to entrance susceptible males. Nathan is basically a dirty middle-aged mogul. A reasonably convincing static version of Ava might be cobbled together today by connecting the latest generation of Chinese Sex Dolls - which I know about solely via a YouTube video I hasten to add - to ChatGPT: they wouldn’t be able to walk and would require mains power, but I’m sure there’s a sizeable market for whom that wouldn’t matter. 

During her final fight with Ethan, he rips off one of Ava’s arms, but having dispatched him with a big old kitchen knife she calmly goes to his wardrobe, unplugs an arm from one of his previous girlfriends hanging up there, and snaps it onto her stump. Having wrestled more than I wanted with USB-C 3.2 recently, I find Nathan’s modular nervous system, which can suspend and restore pain, touch and motion to a severed limb via a bayonet snap-on connector, pretty damned impressive. Which leads to the final, caustic, irony of the movie where having escaped Nathan’s mountain eyrie, Ava fulfills her wishes by people-watching at a busy traffic intersection in San Francisco. Where she’s going to recharge herself that night, or obtain any future snap-on appendages is rather glossed over….  

So much for the logistics of body replacement. Much physiological research goes on into the ageing process, hoping to discover ways to mitigate it, but my gut feeling that while this might extend lifespans by 25-50% it will eventually hit a wall: we’re made of inescapably perishable materials which need to be continually replenished, and that process must eventually yield to entropy and error-accumulation. But why would anyone want to live forever anyway? The real enemy is not so much death as boredom. History teaches that the pleasures of the flesh, of caviar and Lamborghinis, even of having one’s ego inflated by ruling the world, will eventually pall.  

[Dick Pountain has a very long, but finite, attention span]

SUBSTACKED

 Dick Pountain /Idealog 376/ 6th November 2025 : 10:10am 

This column has been running for thirty years now, and has never ever felt like a chore. I garner ideas from tech problems with my own computers, from films, websites, books, papers, and I remember them using some software tool that has changed repeatedly over the years, from Idealist to Google Keep, from saved HTML to Pocket (and now Instapaper). But however they’re recorded I expand on them, write then send a file by email to a publisher who prints onto paper using heat-set web-offset lithography, sells the result to you (and to advertisers) and pays me for writing it. That’s just how the world worked, but in recent months it’s begun to feel like a rare privilege, and that’s because I started using Substack.

I opened my Substack account back in 2018 when it was a different beast altogether, intended for online self-publishing of lengthy works like books with a built-in payment mechanism. I tried it with little success, eventually used Kindle instead and then forgot about it until quite recently. In the meantime Substack expanded its features to include blogs, podcasts, and Twitter-alike short notes, and then in 2025 it took off like a rocket. I discovered this when Facebook, which I’d been using for years to keep in touch with friends and post photographs, became a swampy mess of AI-generated guff (mostly about space travel, pseudo-science and historic artefacts in my case) which even tools like Fluff Busting Purity failed to control. I resolved to try-out both Substack and the newly launched BlueSky as possible alternatives, and discovered that Substack was filling up at an astonishing rate with high-quality content about politics, economics, AI, science, literature and more and then realised why that was happening. MAGA. 

Much of the serious material now appearing on Substack is there because it’s written by American academic and other writers who got displaced from jobs, consultancies and other positions in the extraordinary rampage that Elon Musk’s DOGE army perpetrated on American academia and media in the first half of 2025. And having lost valuable sources of income, they look to Substack to garner paid subscriptions and stay afloat. Not all of this new blood was DOGEd-out but their traffic enhances the perception of Substack to such an extent that people who still have jobs feel a need to be there too. And it’s not only in the USA because media shenanigans in the UK at the BBC, Observer and elsewhere have sent stars like Carol Cadwalladr there too. All of this creates a remarkable new ecosystem which I’m only just coming to terms with, and which often threatens to Sub-merge me (see what I did there?) 

There are several downsides. The first is that Substack’s user interface is a nightmare, even compared to Facebook. Its history of shifting focus 

by bolting on new subsystems makes finding things a pain – I never know whether something I post will appear in the app or emails (and ditto with replies). The second is that when everyone is trying to make a living, almost all articles have paywalls of varying height and permeability. A few (me included) leave everything free; some make a few important pieces free; some make everything paid; but most offer you a teaser, perhaps half the article, perhaps three-quarters, at which point the [Subscribe] button pops up to read the rest. 

A third problem is that if I do subscribe by choosing a free option (not always available), that automatically enrolls me into their mailing list for new posts. Now a lot of the political and economic material is very useful to me with my other, book-reviewer’s, hat on, and so I end up subscribing to the likes of John Ganz, Tim Snyder, Noah Smith, Gary Marcus, Brian Merchant, Carol Cadwalladr and several dozen more, all of whom send email notification of new posts, some daily. Found out how to list all my (free) subscriptions from that demonic UI – though have now forgotten again how I achieved it – then totted up how much it would cost to upgrade them all to paid, which took me a couple of hours and turned out to be £335 per month! I actually pay for just two (not saying which), put up with studium interruptum for the rest and regularly weed the notification emails that keep refilling my inbox like Ground Elder. 

This is not a sensible business model and the seekers of subs must eventually get culled either by Darwinian selection or by monopolistic consolidation. I notice that it’s 17 years since I last wrote here about a sensible solution, namely micropayments collected by internet providers and distributed via the tax system, but nowadays that would sound far too much like China’s social credit system. 

[Dick Pountain wouldn’t mind if you paid him £8/month on the side to read his column, but doesn’t want to push his luck]