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[...] Like economic returns from Bay Area tech companies today, human enhancement technologies of the future will not be evenly distributed. If we’re now exercised over how the rich get privileged access to airline seats, imagine the reaction from le menu peuple when they see the callow Jared Kus…

For example, not far away from where some of the Thiel Fellows lived and coded — is there a difference? — are the 27,000-plus undergraduates of San Jose State University. Many are first-generation college students for whom a college education offers a ladder to the middle class and a decent income.…

This near-contempt for our mortal vessels takes us to a second faction — let’s call them the coders — who are selling their own strategy for defeating or deferring death. Instead of augmenting the body with high-tech gadgets or through genetic and medical tweaks, they propose abandoning the Flesh…

[...] Gesturing to his seemingly normal and well-functioning body, one such biohacker tells O’Connell, “I’m trapped here.” Transhumanism, at least in this version, appears less about liberation than self-annihilation. Like the ancient Gnostics, these people believe that our flesh is a prison trappi…