Healthy Body, Sick Soul

How to max out your digital twin

Health nuts are extremists by nature. They obsess over the image staring back from the mirror, whether it’s reflected in silver or silicon. The most diligent will count every rep and calorie, aligning their bodies to the sacred numbers. They’re metabolic alchemists attempting to turn mortal lead into durable gold.

In more innocent times, these were zealots who adhered to fad diets and agonizing exercise regimens. The late Jack LaLanne was a messianic figure for this crowd and confessed, “It is a religion with me.” He quantified his life in ways most of us would never tolerate, but for his followers, the point wasn’t full emulation. As with the saints, LaLanne was canonized as a secular icon to inspire humanity to better health and maybe sell a Power Juicer or two.

“Living is tough, it’s hard,” he explained to EnlightenNext magazine in 1999, “and most people, especially religious people, spend too much time on their spirituality, hoping the spiritual thing is going to do something for them. It doesn’t work that way! … I work out seven days a week and that’s my penance.”

To prove his point, LaLanne would perform various miracles of physical endurance on camera. At sixty years-old, he swam handcuffed from Alcatraz Island to the San Francisco mainland—with a half-ton boat shackled behind him. LaLanne believed himself to be an active agent of a higher plan. “I’m using the power that this Supreme Being has given me to help me control Jack LaLanne; otherwise I’d be an animal.”

This is a spiritual discipline bordering on self-flagellation. Contrary to the extreme transcendence one finds in Hindu renunciates or contemplative Gnostics, one’s higher will is turned away from the heavens and down toward the body, which the 2nd century Gnostic teacher Marcion derided as a “sack stuffed with excrement.”

The Digital Twin as Higher Self

As the 21st century unfolds, next-generation health nuts gaze at their digital twins in the black mirror, trying their damnedest to measure up. They attach wearable sensors to every inch of available real estate on their flesh. These “Internet of Bodies” devices monitor breath, heart rate, body temperature, reps, steps, muscle tension, ovulation, and tumescence. Quality of life is to be quantified and manipulated at will.

With advanced algorithms coming online, all this biometric data is fed into AI systems to create a virtual model of the subject—a lifelike, real-time digital twin. With readily available genetic sequencing, innate predispositions will be incorporated. As bio-implants become normalized for enhancement, a typical digital twin will be fleshed out with blood sugar and hormone levels, pathogen prevalence, immune response, gut biome composition, and ultimately, neurological activity.

Practically speaking, a virtual twin is an immortal guinea pig that can be built up or abused in every way possible, just to see what happens. Even a partial twin can be used to calibrate your ideal diet, supplement protocol, medicine dosage, exercise, sleep, and sexual activity. It can also gauge the upper limit of your vices. As you feed your actual physiological stats into a computer, the resulting “intelligent twin” allows you to monitor your mortal husk in real time.

I imagine each digital twin drawn in Macintosh green lines on a black background, with cross contours tracing out a grid of skin and bone. The figure’s arms are outstretched as it rotates, while numeric readouts indicate health status. It’s a personalized symbol of commodified neurosis. Alongside this simulated self is an idealized twin—a body and brain haloed by perfect numbers—like those muscle-man posters young boys used to pin to their walls, except with a cybotron feel.

What began as space shuttle models in the 1960s has grown into a metaverse of various three-dimensional objects and self-surveillance superstars morphing themselves into data streams. For the most part, a true digital twin manifests as a string of statistics and interactive graphs onscreen. Beyond that are dense layers of invisible computer code. Any cartoonish rendering is just for display.

Transhuman Vampires

As this virtual technodrome expands, Bryan Johnson has become a poster boy for merging one’s body and brain with an ideal digital twin. The multi-millionaire’s alchemical formula is called “Project Blueprint.” Its objective is to “measure all 70+ organs” of his body and “maximally reverse the quantified biological age of each.” This is an “exploration into the future of being human.” Never one to conceal hubris, Johnson’s quasi-religious motto is “Don’t Die.”

In practice, Project Blueprint an ascetic lifestyle of rigidly controlled meals and meticulously planned workouts. Johnson subjects himself to invasive bio-surveillance, regular blood work and genetic testing, and all sorts of inhuman protocols. He lives under the prying eyes of doctors and machines, and relinquishes his free will to their decisions. Using his patented Kernel brain-computer interface—which looks like a seizure helmet covered in cheap carpet—he optimizes his neural activity to endure existence as a corporeal hungry ghost.

Not to pick on his eccentricities, but it should be noted that he’s a big fan of interfamilial parabiosis. That means that he injects his own son’s blood plasma into his veins, and performs the same familial duty for his elderly father. It gives the term “bloodline” a whole new meaning.

All this agony is not for nothing. Johnson’s biomarkers are in “the top 1%” of 46 year-old men, from “speed of aging” to “nighttime erections.” His vampirish physical form is a near-perfect mirror of his optimized digital twin. All this costs over a million and a half dollars per year, which he offsets by selling fifty dollar pouches of “Longevity Mix,” barrels of “Snake Oil” brand olive oil at thirty-five bucks a bottle, and for true believers, the full “Blueprint Stack” for $343/month.

On one level, Project Blueprint is a gross exercise in self-focus. Yet Johnson also serves as a living icon for the wider public, sacrificing part of his own humanity so that others can stumble in his footsteps. He won’t stop at the Fountain of Youth, though. Similar to the not-so-health-conscious mage, Aleister Crowley, his method is Science—his aim is Religion. “I’m trying to build a company,” Johnson told Eric Siu last summer, “and a country, and a religion, and defy death—and all of us become God. That’s the goal.”

Transhuman Fever Dreams

As traditional religion withers—along with its promise of eternal life after abs—the higher worlds are being replaced by materialist dreams of mastering death. “I think it’s a good probability,” Jared Kushner said in 2022, “that my generation is—hopefully, with the advances in science—either the first generation to live forever, or the last generation that’s gonna die.” And Kushner is hardly alone.

“One of the great projects of early modernity was radical life extension,” Peter Thiel recently told Piers Morgan. “There’s a personal immortality version of it [and] I still believe that project as something we should be working on very hard as a society”—even if Thiel is skeptical of imminent success.

Ray Kurzweil—who’s deteriorating before our eyes despite uploading his every vital sign and choking down some eighty pills a day—remains hopeful. Haters may dog on Kurzweil’s clownish appearance, but his prophecies are still a sort of gospel to the tech elite, from Elon Musk to Marc Andreessen.

“Basically, we can get rid of death through aging,” Kurzweil assured Wired last summer. Should your body fall apart, your mind’s pattern can persist in silico. “There is no upper bound. Once we get past the Singularity, we’ll be able to put some AI connections inside our own brain...it’s going to connect to the cloud...it’s completely backed up.” Even if the medical nanobots falter in your bloodstream, a fully formed digital twin is your ticket to virtual youth and personal immortality.

The thing is, most of us can’t afford to live inside a body scanner or rent server space for our uploaded souls—nor would we want to. Yeah, we’ll max out a few lifts and take some multivitamins. We’ll eat well and let doctors zap us with machines when necessary. Maybe a smartphone app is involved now and again. But it amounts to a casual glance in the black mirror.

The future splits off into countless diverging paths. Some will merge their monkey meat with circuitry to optimize this mortal coil. Others will wander off in pursuit of the Tao. For the aesthetically or spiritually inclined, the only “virtual twins” worth emulating are the poets and prophets. You don’t need apps or implants for that.

The promise of transcendence lies ahead of us all, even if our paths through eternity are as various as plants in a forest. One way or another, our bodies will have to be discarded—transhuman dreams be damned. Some will leave carcasses pocked with biosensors and saturated with vitamins. Those lives will provide interesting data for scientists to ponder, yet most won’t be worthy of poetry or prophecy. No great story is written in numbers.

---

---

SIGNED COPIES OF DARK ÆON AVAILABLE

Purchase yours at → DarkAeon.xyz ←

CLICK HERE