With their plan, the Extropians built a historical trap they could only escape by being cryonically frozen for future revival, a practice intimately connected with their currencies—and one that plays into the creation of Bitcoin. We follow their ideas into the financial arrangements demanded by the extreme investment of immortality, further connections with the theories of Friedrich Hayek, and the economic implications of both the fantasies and reality of frozen human bodies, from the Bolshevik Revolution to the turn of the millennium.
With this paradox of futurism, the Extropians had created a singularly poignant and—despite all their relentless cheerfulness and dynamic optimism—very melancholy model of history, a cosmogram of singular cruelty for those who lived in it. They knew a future of glory awaited them, one that so exceeded modern expectations that it would torch through the structure of the “future present” like a beam of coherent light. With reputation currencies, virtual finance schemes, and, more seriously, idea futures and digital cash experiments, they could bank on this future and underwrite its production at the same time. But they could neither predict its precise advent nor control how, much less when, it would take shape. For a group of can-do hyperrationalists, this was a very painful state of affairs. What if you, yourself, laid all the economic and financial groundwork for generating an emergent posthuman paradise and then did not live to see it?
What if you, in your untimeliness, are one of the last generation to perish prior to posthuman existence? If you can make it a few more years—with the “Walford high-low life extension diet,” the bottles and pillboxes of supplements, the cold showers for thermogenesis, the calibrated fitness regimen (Hal Finney’s spouse, Fran Finney, wrote about this for Extropy1)—you could live forever.
Hence biostasis and cryonics—a stopgap, an emergency better-than-nothing strategy to cross that historical border that is somewhere near us, sometime soon, but not quite yet. You arranged a payout from your life insurance—and, in some cases, set up far more complex and strange financial vehicles. You put on a bracelet with medical instructions, or even got a tattoo on your chest for the paramedics: the emergency phone number, the offered reward, and “PUSH 50,000 U HEPARIN BY IV AND DO CPR WHILE COOLING WITH ICE TO 10C … NO EMBALMING NO AUTOPSY.”2 In case of misadventure, you won’t miss out on the billion-year spree to come—with the unfortunate hurdle of still having to die.
Cryonics was the ultimate idea future. It expressed the spirit of Extropian money in a form purer, and more successful, than the money itself: no one transacts in thornes, hayeks, or Ghostmarks, or waits to redeem a stack of idea future coupons, but more than a hundred people are currently frozen, and more than a thousand are signed up with their affairs in order. Alongside the development of digital cash in the 1990s and into the millennium, we find debates on how to move your consciousness into the future that these speculative, utopian currencies will help create: “a biomedically mediated form of investing in the self,” as the anthropologist Tiffany Romain put it in her study of cryonicists.3 Cryonics made it possible to develop new forms of digital money in what Romain calls the “long, long term,” transforming the nearly inconceivable Extropian future into a present-day form of extreme investment.
The “long, long-term” time frame of investment and financial speculation is no longer a matter of planning your retirement and senescence but of arranging assets to transcend your life and, ultimately, money entirely. Aschwin de Wolf, editor of Cryonics, an industry magazine for the life extension and preservation nonprofit Alcor (whose current CEO is Max More) speaks to the challenge of reintegrating the “patient” from their storage at metabolic zero into some unknown future condition: “If proper thought is given to this issue, the person should at least have access to a modern home and money in the prevailing currency of the time (if ‘money’ as we know it has something like the same significance then).”4 In the meantime, rather than scattering your assets to heirs, you can construct a dynasty trust, which will hold your capital and earn interest until you reclaim it post-posthumously.
In this context, digital cash had to walk a knife’s edge between money as a store of value—an inherently conservative position, particularly for those followers of Austrianism demanding money with “inherent value” and the preservation of social and technical structure that would sustain it—and money as a solvent and agent of chaos, with speculative profit melting every obstacle in the path of transcendence. It would wipe out established industries, create and destroy markets, render laws irrelevant, make existing social practices and commitments meaningless, and ultimately vaporize humanity itself into something else entirely. Until then it would be as stable as a Treasury bond and solid as real estate.
This put digital cash work into a paradoxical bind. It needed to be robust, suitable for denominating and holding in the ultra-long-term financial architecture of the deep future, which put an emphasis on the reliability of natural and mathematical constants like the key systems and hashing schemes of cryptography. But it could also ultimately be disposable, as rickety as the “geodesic scheme,” if the goal was to get to a society of radical abundance, cosmic proliferation, and immortality. Like many imagined machines of the Singularity, all digital cash had to do was run well enough to make itself obsolete, and then vanish from the scene.
Cryonics made it possible to imagine a nearly inconceivable future and build instances of it now as an extreme investment vehicle. The specialized “dewers”—the massive stainless steel flasks holding liquid nitrogen and the bodies or heads of cryonics patients—are effectively broken time machines, assembled with crude components in the hope that future engineers will be able to activate their cargo successfully and bring the passenger out of the past. Lined up in the Alcor facility, they are the biomedical versions of the runways and bamboo radios of millenarian religions in post–World War II Melanesia—what outsiders dubbed “cargo cults”—which, among other more immediate social goals, meant to summon the requisite technologies: clearing and grading landing strips for the planes to come, trying to use an effect to act on a cause.
Charles Platt, a science fiction author, technical writer, and cryonics technician (with patents on “liquid ventilation” systems for rapid cooling of the body, as well as other medical applications) described the attitude necessary for advancing the goals of cryonics: “In science and medicine, first you prove that a technique works, and then you apply it. If you invert this sequence, you’re not involved in orthodox science anymore; you’re working speculatively, gambling on the future.”5 And while a certain gambling spirit is necessary, even vital, you have to be able to deliver “a product that works.” The challenge inherent in that working product is that it’s not only a body successfully returned to functional order, a mind piecing itself together (remembering the last moments on the hospital bed or the hospice porch), but also a corresponding future required to bring it back in full: a brilliant, healthy, gloriously posthuman age. Banking the body for revival means having a future that can be banked on. And that is the future that digital cash, the disruption machine, the motor of innovation, had to be able to deliver.
In 1996, two announcements were made on facing pages of the same issue of Extropy. The first was the launch of Chaum’s dollar-denominated e-cash through a St. Louis–based bank—“perhaps of particular interest to Extropians is the pending acceptance of ecash by Laissez Faire Books.” The second was a public vow, an example to encourage others: to donate a thousand dollars a year, for ten years, to an initiative called the Prometheus Project. This would start a business to do the research that could “convincingly demonstrate and publish” a successful “fully reversible brain cryopreservation.”6
To live at the intersection of these technologies meant “living largely in the framework of possibility,” in Romain’s phrase, rather than current conditions. Extropian life was conducted by combining empirical, rational, biomedical, and computational research with the “dream work” of science fiction, imaginative extrapolation, and fantasies of innovation. (Dream work: In 1990, aerospace engineer Rand Simberg proposed to make cryonics and space tourism cost-effective by putting the remains in space, lowering the price of launching and cold storage at a stroke; one of the interested parties was the then-president of Phillip Salin’s American Rocket Company.7) Idea coupons and digital cash, and dewers in the Arizona desert (holding the heads of a few people discussed in this book) are the preeminent artifacts where this particular framework of possibility, and the model of history on which it relied, was manifested. Two alternate accounts of economics and cold sleep put the Extropian project into proper perspective.
“You don’t have to know what the future may bring,” wrote the physicist Leo Szilard. “All you have to do is understand what the future may bring one day before most of the others do.” He left Berlin soon after the Reichstag fire, the day before the order to halt and interrogate those departing went into effect; he had kept two suitcases always packed by the door as the Nazis took power, and he walked out with his life savings hidden in his shoes. He seemed in general to have lived always a day or a few years ahead, like a traveler at relativistic speeds (he and Einstein were friends), in a string of unimaginable futures.
Before the first nuclear chain reaction test at Stagg Field in Chicago—the validation of a theory he had developed walking around London years before—he had a second dinner, “just in case” the experiment worked too well and some portion of the University of Chicago’s campus and many of its best physicists, himself included, were annihilated.8 As they pushed the chain reaction toward criticality, repeatedly changing the scale on the recording equipment to accommodate the new levels of neutron intensity, Szilard could feel past and future split apart. (That afternoon, at the shores of a new age, the physicists drank Chianti from paper cups in subdued celebration.) He envisioned societies collapsing under the effects of scientific and technical progress, the nuclear extinction of humans on Earth, societies of machines, world governments to contain the threat. He spent most of the rest of his life in hotels, living out of two suitcases—“to be able to move at a moment’s notice came to be important to me”—thinking about potential futures and how to reach them, and writing patents, petitions, and science fiction.9
In July 1948, he opened a story with a scene of a rabbit brought back to life. It returned from days at 1°C without “appreciable metabolic activity.” With injections of “dorminol” and “metaboline,” the bunny could be cooled safely to just above freezing: “we could keep the rabbit ‘asleep’ for a week, a year, or one hundred years, just as well as for one day.… If this worked for the rabbit it would work for the dog … if it worked for the dog, it would work for man.” In the 1920s, Szilard and Einstein had collaborated on the design of an experimental refrigerator without moving parts (in lean years, Szilard would live, if meagerly, off income from his refrigeration patents), and he made the refrigerator into a time machine for his narrator.
Szilard’s story shared this narrative device of long sleep with R. C. W. Ettinger’s fantasy of cold storage from the same year, “The Penultimate Trump.” Ettinger, a physics teacher, devoted the rest of his life and career to popularizing the idea of practical cryonics, directly inspiring the Extropians with speculative nonfiction books like The Prospect of Immortality and Man into Superman.10 (Ironically, Ettinger’s Extropian-influencing story ends with a twist for his rapacious, Randian arch-capitalist protagonist: he is revived into a future society that evaluates his past crimes and dumps him on a penal colony on Mars.) Ettinger argued for the arbitrage of money now into unlimited time to come, a thousandfold return on the investment of your days: the “open-ended future,” he wrote.11
Szilard’s narrator explained his plan. “I intended to ‘withdraw from life’ (as we proposed to call the process) as soon as we had perfected the method, and to arrange for being returned to life in 2260.” In cold sleep, the narrator can skip through centuries into the future that fascinates him (but: “I would not have dared, though, to go much beyond three hundred years,” fearing a world too alien, leaving him literally “too much behind the times”). After a legal battle about his status is resolved, the narrator throws a temporally fractured party at the chamber for his hibernation, celebrating “my last evening in the twentieth century.” The historiographic dislocation between the narrator and his guests is severe: “Most of them seemed to have had the feeling that they were sort of attending my funeral, since they would not see me again alive; whereas, to me, it seemed that it was I who was attending their funeral since none of them would be alive when I woke up.”12
Pulled out of his refrigerated limbo after only ninety years, rather than the three centuries originally planned, he finds himself in a society stricken with the possibility of hibernation: tens of millions of people had “withdrawn from life.” When the next Great Depression hit, millions went into federally subsidized hibernation until things picked up again, authorized to be revived when the labor market had likewise come back to life. (“Operating the refrigerator plants of the public dormitories for twenty-five million sleepers is part of our Public Works Program,” a politician mentions in passing.) Szilard fills his tale with satirical economic strategies—like plates that chew food into slurry for diners, who must chronically overeat to consume the food surplus generated by so much of the population time-shifting decades or centuries into the future.
The heart of this story about accelerated history is a project to decelerate it: the narrator, dreading the more extreme dislocations of the future to come, becomes part of a cabal to slow science down—to orchestrate centuries of little real scientific and technological progress, giving “the Art of Living a chance to catch up.” With techno-scientific progress artificially throttled under the pretense of support, the narrator considers whether to leave with his packed suitcases for another few centuries hence and cross the border into the future. If change is stalled, he says, then “Two hundred years hence, the world should be a liveable place.” In other words, he bought himself some time.
At the end of the nineteenth century in Sofia, Bulgaria, the physicist-biologist Porfirii Bakhmet’ev became curious: How is it that insects do not freeze to death during the winter?13 How are they able to revive in spring? He discovered and painstakingly documented a state of hibernation into which his moths and butterflies could go, a temperature range where they were seemingly frozen—and capable of remaining so indefinitely—and yet not actually dead, and able to be returned to life. He called this state anabiosis, not dead nor alive. Naturally, he became curious if mammals such as humans could go into an anabiotic state. We can successfully freeze sperm and eggs for future use, and many animals can go into a kind of cold metabolic standstill and come back out of it again. If humans could do so, for how long? A season? A decade? A thousand years?
Bakhmet’ev’s applications for this state between life and death were straightforward and practical, as though he planned to install wind power turbines on the stormy bluffs of Purgatory. You could transport cattle and horses by rail in an anabiotic state, reviving them at their destination, to save on feed, cleaning, and misery. You could ship sturgeon and caviar “live.” If tuberculosis bacteria die at −6°C, and a human can be revived from −8°C, you could freeze TB victims for a week and bring them back to life cured. Perhaps creatures from other ages—relics of the historiography of cold—were still anabiotically preserved in Siberia; expeditions should be made to find and revive them. (As I write this now, the human species has, with admirable initiative, taken up that last notion of Bakhmet’ev’s by collectively warming the Earth’s atmosphere a few degrees and melting the permafrost, to see if we could find unknown ancient viruses and bacteria we can foster in the growth medium of human biomass.)
During the Russian Revolution, the temporality of anabiosis changed: no longer a way to access the past or aid in short-term economic and medical projects in the present, it became a way to interact indirectly with the future. It was a time for experiments: “We will remake life anew,” promised the futurist-Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, “right down to the last button of your vest.” As with the economic reinvention of the world, the goal was never mere health but superhumanity and immortality, the anatomical equivalents to the unlocking of as yet unknown sluices of abundance, efficiency, and organization—as on Alexander Bogdanov’s science fiction of Soviet Mars, with fully automated factories managed by proto-computers and data transmission tools in a “moving equilibrium” of labor, supply, and production demand. Bogdanov celebrated and engaged in blood transfusions, the prelude to a future society where human vitality itself was the ultimate store of value and medium of exchange—a “physiological collectivism,” where the storage and circulation of comradely life was an act of almost telepathic intimacy in an economy that was a self-regulating organism, a homeostatic machine. (Bogdanov himself died of renal and liver failure following a botched exchange with a visiting student in 1928.)
Others, in the midst of developing the modern command economy, turned to fountain-of-youth endocrine therapies, injections of “glandular secretions” and goat hormones, and “Steinach” vasectomies to restore energy: posthuman potency, on demand, as a corrective to the “revolutionary exhaustion” and “nervous disorders” claiming the lives of the vanguard of the future. Ettinger’s capitalist captain-of-industry protagonist, prior to his cryonic interment, underwent a similar battery of technologies—part of the popular biomedical imagination of the first half of the twentieth century: “They gave him gland extracts, they gave him vitamins, they gave him blood transfusions.”
In this spirit, what if you could enter anabiosis during the wretched years of multifront civil war and terror, trauma, paranoia, the relentless grind of “revolution from above,” malnutrition, and “war communism,” and wake up in some summer hence, when the promised future has arrived at last? The idea of turning the crank on Marxist historical inevitability was everywhere. Popular Russian sci-fi stories concerned exactly the notion played with decades later by Leo Szilard: evil capitalists putting their workforce on ice during downturns, to prevent labor unrest and keep “full employment,” and thawing them out when the boom part of the capitalist economic cycle kicked in again. In the Kremlin, immediately after Lenin’s death, the faction arguing that he should be frozen almost carried the debate with the promise that perhaps he could be recovered, one day, in what Mayakovsky called “the workshop of human resurrection.” The poet was addressing scientists of the future, pleading with them to bring him back in an age of abundance and peace, when no one needed money anymore. He and his muse Lili Brik would return in the “thirtieth century,” into “future nights” of “countless stars,” with their bodies restored to the fullest life: “Put a heart in me,” he requests, “transfuse blood / to the uttermost vein.”
Other stories, though, concerned the violent temporal dislocation experienced by the cryonically saved, with “comrades-in-anabiosis” thawed into a future in which they had become alien—as alien as Bogdanov felt, who called himself “a Martian stranded on Earth.” They were marooned in history, the world around them rendered incomprehensible, sick with “the disjunction of time.” The revived comrades-in-anabiosis expressed the experience of untimeliness—being too early or too late. They had launched out of history into new kinds of time from which they could not return, rendered “alien to everything and everybody.”
The Extropians couldn’t wait for this shock, though—indeed, they eagerly anticipated it—not least because they saw themselves in the role of the prefiguration, the prototype, of the order to come. They had faith in the particular dynamics of the technologies, the attitudes, and the optimal outcomes for which they were the social prototypes. If they could create the right social, monetary, and technical framework, they would be brought back to life, prepared to be astonished and transformed—but not surprised. They knew it would happen, and they knew they could not know how to get there, only how to create the initial conditions from which would come the transfiguration of the world. They would not be left behind.
The Extropians drew strength as a utopian movement by combining the predictable and the unpredictable. They fused the starry-eyed certainty of dynamic optimism in great things to come—the dawn already visible on the horizon of expectation, the exponential curve of growth and improvement going vertical against the y-axis on the graph—with a contemptuous skepticism about the capacity of human planning and existing social structures to reach those goals. We would get there, certainly, but not all of us: only the daring, the brave, the angel investors, and the early adopters. This is perfectly captured by their iconic image of Hayek in biostasis: launched like a pharaoh in his sarcophagus into the unknown and unknowable future that was his abiding obsession, and theirs.
Hayek meant something very specific—and surprising, given the way many of his acolytes took up his banner—by his idea of “liberty”: it has not to do with us but with some future person who is as yet unknown. “What is important is not what freedom I personally would like to exercise but what freedom some person may need in order to do things beneficial to society. This freedom we can assure to the unknown person only by giving it to all.”14 This is the historical model at work in the Extropian cosmogram and in the Extropians’ version of digital cash: a propitious arrangement of society whereby the “unknown person” may come to transform the world. Hayek’s conclusion to the third volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty—the abstract summary of his philosophical model and ideas, in 1979—is a single sentence, entirely italicized in the original: “Man is not and never will be the master of his fate: his very reason always progresses by leading him into the unknown and unforeseen where he learns new things.”15
That sentence concludes his indictment of the empiricism, scientific socialism, and psychological insight that characterized the Viennese milieu of his youth. Individually, we are mysteries to ourselves; collectively, we are at the mercy of forces and circumstances that are complex beyond our ken. Hayek was the most broadly influential of the Austrian economists; he was also the most tragic in the classical sense. This does not excuse his choices or his arguments—most notably his admiration of dictatorships that privatize public institutions and maintain “free” markets, like Pinochet’s—but it explains his framing sensibility. We operate in a universe in which humans are mostly ignorant, when not actively misguided; the gods are capricious; death awaits us all; and the best things available to us come from spontaneous emergence out of clashing needs, impulses, and desires, rather than foresightful planning.
The heart of his argument in Law, Legislation, and Liberty is to distinguish (in his terms) taxis from kosmos: order that is “made,” constructed by organizations, and order that spontaneously “grows,” emerging from conditions. “Its degree of complexity,” he wrote of kosmos, “is not limited to what a human mind can master.”16 He compared it to crystal lattices and organic compounds; kosmos comes of itself out of the operation of a set of rules that describe the behavior of the elements—with the question then becoming how to properly organize the rules for the spontaneous generation of the world for which we hope. Inevitably, Hayek returned to his ideal model: “The market order in particular will regularly secure only a certain probability that the expected relations will prevail, but it is, nevertheless, the only way in which so many activities depending on dispersed knowledge can be effectively integrated into a single order.”17 This is the kosmos mechanism at the center of Hayek’s cosmogram, and, strangely transplanted, that of the Extropians.
As Corey Robin has argued in detail, this is all very Nietzschean—aside from the obsession with markets, economics, and money, which Nietzsche generally despised. Likewise Nietzschean is Hayek’s impulse to look to mysterious successors, the “Philosopher of the Future,” Hayek’s “unknown person,” revealed as an Übermensch who will come next and justify what has been before—making something of it that we cannot.18 So is Hayek’s elitism, the desire for a superior aristocracy of taste, refinement, and wealth who can exploit and create “the next range of desires and possibilities” when the time comes, as well as the “uncompromising rejection of the political structure of every modern democratic society” (as Robert Drinan put it).19
In Hayek’s version of a future without oligarchic industrial dynasties and permanent, capital-holding elites, the world will continue to toil along with people merely satisfying existing needs, settling for less, and asking—to take the famous phrase of Henry Ford’s—for better horses rather than developing automobiles. Piketty’s income inequality gap, with return on capital outpacing wages except for the occasional redistributive initiative, is for Hayek not a bug but a feature. The ultrarich can feed appetites and afford luxuries that will spur new technologies, drive prices down, and keep avant-garde culture alive. This last detail is perhaps the most Viennese of all: Hayek writes of magnates and heirs in ways that recall the great Ringstrasse families of his own youth, like the Wittgensteins, who supported poets, painters, composers, and architects.
Holding all that money, he argued, sensitizes the very rich to the price signals of the future to come, the impulses and desires on which they can act. “What today may seem extravagance or even waste, because it is enjoyed by the few and even undreamed of by the masses, is payment for the experimentation with a style of living that will eventually be available to many.”20 Hayek’s aristocrats are not investing in these systems, necessarily, but merely indulging in them: it’s a trickle-down theory of vanguard technologies as luxury goods, which Hayek credits with everything from inexpensive refrigerators and radios to airplane flights. None of this is historically true for technologies, in particular or in general. It’s a fairy tale of the superior shopping habits of the very rich. But that should not distract us from the larger significance of these mythic characters for those who came in the Austrian wake, like the Extropians: money gives access to the future as an experimental zone where those whom Hayek called “scouts” could find “new goals.”21
Hayek even outlines how a socialist country should take advantage of this concept, in one of the most peculiar recommendations in the history of economics: “It would be necessary in a planned economy … to designate individuals whose duty it would be to try out the latest advances long before they were made available to the rest.… In order to know which of the various new possibilities should be developed at each stage, how and when particular improvements ought to be fitted into the general advance, a planned society would have to provide for a whole class … which would always move some steps ahead of the rest.” This was precisely the role the Extropians sought to seize for themselves: to be, returning to Max More’s words, “the vanguard of the future.” This was the project woven into their digital cash and the free market for which it was built: speculative currency would be the fuel of unrestrained, spontaneous order, and its makers would be the experimental pack who got to live in the future already, “some steps ahead of the rest,” in the country of new desires and new possibilities. This was currency and utopia at once, Austria and California, the 1920s and the 1990s: Hayek in biostasis.
Another thing unites the late 1920s and 1990s: they were boom years that preceded global financial calamity. Projects, ideas, technologies, and people in the Extropian community were adapted into the new context of the crash—first in the early 2000s and then, with Bitcoin, the global financial crisis in 2008. Instead of idea coupons and geodesic schemes, the new money would be identified with precious metals and coinage, forms of currency closely connected with the libertarian politics of catastrophe, and a theory of the near future where things fall apart. Digital cash was yet again being repurposed: not to bring about the demise of governments for a wild utopia of ciphers, nor to protect privacy against a future of ubiquitous surveillance, nor to power relentless innovation toward an emergent utopia of abundance and immortality, but as a dystopian currency established to speculate on imminent collapse—a bet on an emergency.
The technologies of digital cash spliced easily into a dystopian speculative monetary tradition belonging to groups, schools, and subcultures the next chapters explain: agorists, goldbugs and silverbugs, Objectivist followers of Ayn Rand (who took her name from her typewriter but coincidentally shared it with the compound name of the South African gold coins), seasteaders and builders of libertarian enclaves and micronations, “sovereign individuals,” proprietors of digital gold currencies (DGCs), and moneyers who struck their own coins. Their money, like all money, was built on the promise of a future. Their anticipated future was one in which the collapse of existing systems into some combination of tyranny, decadence, and anarchy would force a return to sources of “objective value” and the validation of their philosophy—a collapse that could be accelerated if things were moving too slowly.
It is only fitting, for a story of how Extropian ideas became unrecognizably transformed, to close this chapter on a note of Hayekian melancholy rather than “dynamic optimism.” After that final sentence of his epilogue to the final volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty—his last significant book and summation of his thought—Hayek skipped a line and added a short paragraph: “In concluding this epilogue I am becoming increasingly aware that it ought not to be that but rather a new beginning. But I hardly dare hope that for me it can be so.” His work was only tangentially for his contemporaries; the hope—and his model of history—was to create something that would provide new circumstances for those about whom he could predict nothing. It would be a new beginning, he believed, but not for him.