Gennady Stolyarov You Are Going To Die

Robot Cultist Gennady Stolyarov has written a children's book entitled "Death Is Wrong" and is now soliciting funds to distribute copies of this techno-immortalist twaddle to kids and libraries for free.

Of course, the fear of death is sadly quite commonplace, and frankly foolish behavior indulged in the denial of it is no less commonplace: losing oneself in the delusive promises of red sports car salesmen, for instance, or late-nite boner pill hucksters, or plastic surgery butchers, or priestly con-artists peddling their various heavens.

Like so many transhumanists, Stolyarov wants to pretend that facing the fact of mortality somehow makes mortality the fact that it is, and so that indulging in death-denialism renders that mortality less inevitable in some way. Of course, this is flagrantly irrational. And especially in those who become fixated on their fear of death and fervent over its denial this irrationality can all too readily yield the grim paradox of a death in life prior to the still inevitable arrival of death itself. Robot Cultists of the techno-immortalist sect, to the contrary, like to decry any such common sense reconciliation with the inevitable as a matter of what they call deathism. It is as if they believe human beings have been mortal all these millions of years mostly because we lack the can-do attitude of Robot Cultists. I cannot say that the superlative futurists' curious amplification of consumer fandoms into faith-based initiatives presumably promising techno-transcendence of all error, mortality, and scarcity is really even still recognizably a form of "optimism" given the zany fever of its pitch.

Needless to say, there are very good reasons to insist that greater public investment in medical research to cure disease and ameliorate suffering, to enable the treatment of neglected but treatable conditions in overexploited regions of the globe, and to build and maintain infrastructural affordances to basic health and nutrition and support to everyone on earth (it pays to remember, as Mike Davis said well over a decade ago, access to clean water is the closest thing to a real miracle drug of the kind the techno-utopians are always idiotically blissing out about) are all worthy efforts for the common good. But it is crucial to grasp that the preoccupations of the techno-immortalists veer into the margins of pseudo-science (Stolyarov is a booster for Aubrey de Grey, for example, a software guy whose biology sounds like a textbook from the seventies the Robot Cultists have declared a sooper-longevity guru) and outright incoherent wish-fulfillment fantasy (Stolyarov seems a bit ambivalent about those of his fellow faithful who think a picture of you can be the same you and even the same as an eternal you somehow if the picture is a "scan" that can then be "uploaded" as a cyberangel avatar in Holodeck Heaven, since he seems to count on sooper-medical longevity and eventual "upgrading" into a nano-magickal shiny robot body because that is ever so much more reasonable).

I mention this, because while techno-immortalists like to commandeer the progressive commonsense intuitions of the majority who think healthcare and social support are good things, Robot Cultists seek in fact to distract public attention away from real science into pseudo-science, away from real research and organizing into marginal concerns, away from shared problems into wish-fulfillment fantasies, and in so doing actually make it more likely that more people will suffer and die needlessly in the name of "ending death."

Gennady Stolyarov's efforts to indoctrinate young people into fearful pseudo-scientific death-denialism is a stupid and vile. His robo-cultic child indoctrination screed "Death Is Wrong" should be titled "How To Die in Life through Death-Denialism" or "Killing People With Death Denialism."