Description
This paper theorises the ways in which superrich techno-capitalists pursue engineered transcendence from both the polis and the flesh, treating the end of the world and the end of the body as mutually reinforcing political projects. Contemporary Silicon Valley technocapitalist imaginaries are increasingly positioning apocalypse as opportunity: a programmable horizon to be optimized through technological infrastructures. Against narratives that frame emerging products such as luxury bunkers, cryogenic longevity ventures, oceanic seasteads, and outer-space colonization as eccentric billionaire hobbies, this analysis instead reads them as co-constitutive expressions of an evolved settler-colonial imperative to exit rather than to repair shared worlds. Drawing on critical security studies, feminist new materialism, and genealogies of neoliberal governance (Brown; Cooper; Slobodian), I argue that these projects enact a political theology of engineered survival in which the body is reconfigured as a technology to optimize, and apocalypse becomes a speculative commodity project.
Foregrounding Thiel’s techno-reactionary body futurism and AI-mediated fantasies of sovereign self-enclosure, the paper traces how transhumanist logics that promise “escape velocity” from biological limits, mortality, and democratic interdependence. In this schema, not all bodies are imagined as deserving of futurity. Instead, technology arbitrates who must inhabit a dying planet and who may transcend it, either through literal escape or new forms of embodiment. Situating these infrastructures of survival within colonial histories of extraction and futurity, I contend that the technocratic management of both apocalypse and the body is central to the technocapitalist reimagining of the ways that “the human” could/should survive doomsday.
