The future of body and mind is already here.
It costs a minimum of a few million dollars. It looks like a pale man drinking his son’s blood on TikTok.
Bryan Johnson isn’t evil. He might not even be wrong. But he’s become a stand-in, a visual example, of the modern myth of transhumanism. He’s on a very visible quest to extend his life through medical tracking, cellular rejuvenation, using algorithms to optimize everything in his life.
So he gets ridiculed a lot. But underneath that ridicule it also feels like there’s something strangely defensive. Underneath all the jokes about blood and hundred-pill breakfasts, there are some quieter and more unnerving questions.
What if he’s right…but what he’s doing is only available to the super-rich?
Is the next phase of human evolution here, but being gatekept by cost and power?
Transhumanism isn’t sci-fi anymore. It’s about health and strength. It’s also about gender identity. About whether people can make more choices to live longer and feel better, or if the system decides who gets access.
Transhumanism’s PR problems
When people hear transhumanism, maybe they’re thinking of neural nets, robotic bodies, cloned bodies and drug glands. We talk about the term as any easy shorthand for a libertarian billionaire-run dystopia. Immortality and escape pods for their egos, and damn the rest of us.
We see it all the time in fiction.
Altered Carbon sees the rich download their consciousness into new bodies, the rest of us are left to rot.
Elysium gave us a world where healing is literally “out-of-this-world” - orbital and off-limits to all but the most privileged.
And Orphan Black (a favorite of mine) portrayed a situation where identity itself could be patented, monitored, and used as a weapon.
These stories aren’t necessarily exaggerations, but they are warnings. In the real world, the technology is starting to catch up to the fictional portrayals. But the power structures of those portrayals are already here.
So you don’t need a cortical implant to be able to see the future. You just need that access to an exclusive clinical trial. Or a concierge private health service. Or a prescription that isn’t covered by insurance.
The risk isn’t about some people becoming “more than human”, it’s about the rest of us being left behind.
Maybe we laugh so we don’t need to ask
Bryan Johnson isn’t really the problem. He might even be a case study of the visible discomfort society seems to feel about this topic.
He’s open-source. He self-tracks, maintains clear protocols. He doesn’t hide his body-as-a-dashboard approach behind NDAs, patents, or exclusive access. In some ways he’s the opposite, a compulsive sharer. He’s said that he’s experimenting, going above and beyond the sensible, in order to find scalable, affordable interventions.
But we’ve reduced him to memes. A vampire. A narcissist. A weird man-machine.
Visible transformation - especially when it’s extreme - makes us uneasy.
Johnson’s body doesn’t really signal health. It’s really about his trying to gain control. He wants to control his time, by making himself younger. To manage all his biometric data, personal and lineage-based. Create an intensely quantified version of himself. People flinch at that.
Buy why do we think of Johnson like that? Why is he weird, when there’s a near-trillion dollar wellness industry telling us how to optimize ourselves?
It’s easier to mock things than to worry about our own lack of access. And to cast scorn upon something that we’re worried we might one day be asked to do.
So self-modification is treated as vanity, at best, or madness. And we only approach some level of comfort when it’s invisible, or gradual.
That mockery is exactly what the entrenched powers want. It creates a wall around that transformation, it’s elite, absurb, off-limits.
We’re already practising soft-transhumanism
Not all of those transformations look like sci-fi.
It might be as simple as a patch on your skin. Or an injection into your stomach. Or maybe just an app on a device on your wrist that lets you check how you’re sleeping.
Soft-transhumanism is about slow evolutions, rather than radical changes. But it’s still achieved through intervention or augmentation. Less about replacing some or all of the human, but fine-tuning it.
GLP-1 weight loss drugs like Ozempic. They’re not just supporting weight loss. They’re actively rewiring hunger, pleasure, self regulation. They directly change how a brain reacts to food.
Wearables like Fitbit are more than just step-trackers. They’re creating a performance report for your physical exertion, your heartbeat, your REM sleep. They give you a body dashboard.
Hormone therapy reshapes bodies and identities in ways that can be genuinely life-saving, and so often misunderstood.
AI co-pilots sit alongside us as a digital augmentation. They might help cognitive range, translation, creativity. They’re the very early edge of outsourcing tasks for the mind.
None of these things are speculation - they exist now. They happen in bedrooms, pharmacies, on our bodies, on our browsers. It’s very real, and also very uneven.
You don’t strictly need to be wealthy to participate, but it helps. It helps a lot.
Which makes even the soft version of transhumanism become a fault line.
Some people are changing their lives. Other people are being told it’s cheating. And others are being told it’s not for them at all.
Who gets to choose?
When we get new technology, it often promises liberation, and then ends up mirroring the social hierarchies that already exist.
GLP-1 drugs are miracle solutions. Or you might be “a fat person” who’s using them “wrong”. The cultural frame around drugs has always shifted depending on who’s using them.
Gender-affirming care is life-saving, but transgender people are criminalized, pathologized, their lived experience denied.
Biohacking is chic tech-bro edginess in Silicon Valley, and weirdly suspect when it’s being practiced outside that wealthy, white, bubble.
We have two problems. Inequality of access. But also inequality of permission.
Who’s going to be allowed to change? Whose body is a “worthy” project? Is it desirable to evolve these people, but dangerous for these ones?
Who gets to make those kind of decisions?
These aren’t abstract questions. They’re political. They’re structural - weighed down by society’s preconceptions. And they are having a distinct impact in how we deploy and subsidize transhumanist tools. Or whether we withhold and stigmatize them instead.
We could mock the tools, or claim them for ourselves
Don’t reject transhumanism. That doesn’t protect or serve us. It just entrenches the divide that already exists.
If we start treating augmentation as an unnatural thing, call it weird, call it unethical, then we’re abandoning the playing field entirely. But by not playing, we’re just letting the rich and powerful take control of the boundaries of this evolution. And then they’ll sell some version of it back to us at a big markup.
But maybe there’s another way.
Demand access. Metabolic care, hormone treatment, prosthetics, neuro-enhancement. These are essential, not luxury.
Push for transparency. Support open-source research, experimentation efforts led by patients not corporations. Community driven initiatives.
Make consent sacred. Choice stays with the individual. Not politicians, employers, or insurers.
Normalize it. Don’t hide bodily transformation as a failure, or vanity, or loss, or something “wrong”.
By and large, we’re not trying to become gods (however much some billionaires might want to be). We just want to become the best version of ourselves, and on our own terms. Nobody should be forced into that evolution alone, or challenged, or blocked.
Can we make a common future?
Transhumanism will develop and advance…but it’s also already here. It's unfolding, quietly, and inequitably.
We need to push back against that inequity. If not, then transhumanism becomes just another method of control. Of cementing the division. From haves and have-nots, to optimized and obsolete.
It doesn’t, and can’t, be that way.
We should be demanding a version of transhumanism that’s built based on care. Something where there’s shared agency rather than corporate gatekeeping. Make it not selfish, but based on a desire for collective evolution.
Our bodies don’t have to be somebody’s battleground. They could be a workshop, our sanctuary, our true selves.
The future can be brighter by being wider. Wide enough for all of us to fit inside.
Further reading:
Drummond, Katie. Bryan Johnson Is Going To Die. Wired, July 2025.
Ribeiro, Celina. Beyond our ‘ape-brained meat sacks’: can transhumanism save our species? The Guardian, June 2022.
Pazzanese, Christina. How ‘Ozempic shaming’ illuminates complexities of treating weight problems. The Harvard Gazette, February 2024.