Imagine a stereotypical Californian. Now make them even more stereotypical. Now more. Push the limits of absurdity, like a chatbot straining under an adolescent user. The person you end up with is probably fit and tall. They have sunglasses. Maybe a surfboard is involved. The lighting is golden. They look ethereal and calm. In a way, they are a beachier Ray-Banned version of the Isengard elves of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: aloof and superior, never in a hurry.
This Californian elf, now the Golden State’s avatar, is the work of generations, refined over time from early Hollywood to Silicon Valley today. It’s tempting to see this mythologisation as an act of idle self-absorption, a preening in the style of Barbie and Ken. But the truth is far more mercantilist. California is a massive economy, and its most defining exports are not hard goods or clear-cut services but fickle ideas.
The myth began modestly, with health seekers heading west in the late 1800s to find relief from tuberculosis in the dry air. Over time, “Go West!” became almost rote advice for chronic illness, as if the very place itself could heal. But these primordial associations weren’t enough to transform California into a global myth. The state needed a dream machine and it found one in early Hollywood.
By the Twenties, Hollywood was the face of American cinema, resplendent with all the glamour and scandal it would soon embody. Movie stars, not just movies themselves, were some of its most potent domestic exports. Studio executives understood that selling California as a paradise was essential to their business model, and they took to the task with profit-minded aplomb. Every palm-lined street, every sun-drenched beach scene, and every impossibly beautiful actor stepping out of a convertible advertised the way of life that the silver screen offered for the mere change in your pocket.
In our day, Silicon Valley represents the latest iteration of this very same mythmaking engine. By the Eighties, Silicon Valley had surpassed Route 128 outside Boston to become the centre of the technology universe, drawing brilliant founders and scientists to the beach with the very same allure that had given rise to the motion picture industry before. The visionary founder joined the starlet, and the IPO became as important as the premiere, but the underlying promise remained: California is a place that transcends humdrum human life, and if you buy its products you can get a taste.
As we in marketing like to say, it’s “aspirational”. Even New York, the state most capable of rivalling California in cultural power, whispers about the golden elves. In Mad Men, the New York ad man Don Draper dreams of an escape to mythic California, ending the series in a wellness retreat there where meditation inspires him to make the iconic Coca-Cola “Hilltop” ad. The show uses California as an outlet for Don’s recurring fantasy of reinvention, a place where the damaged protagonist could shed his skin and emerge transformed. That’s why Don’s trips to California often involve surreal, dreamlike encounters that feel disconnected from reality. California as an idea is a constructed, aspirational export.
And what’s more aspirational than wanting to live forever? Behold the grandest of Californian extravagances yet: immortalism, a movement of scientists and eccentrics quite literally trying to never die. Like Hollywood’s promise of stardom or Silicon Valley’s promise of money, the immortalists movement offers the ultimate Californian product — the transcendence of the one true human limitation.
Aleks Krotoski, a social scientist based in New York, has written an account of her years-long investigation into the entrepreneurs and inventors currently searching for eternal life. The Immortalists is a survey of transhumanists and their efforts: a loose confederation of scientists, entrepreneurs and true believers united by the conviction that ageing is a disease to be cured. These tech elites see themselves as successors to earlier “seekers”, armed with wealth and engineering confidence, approaching death as another problem yet to be disrupted by the application of capital and expertise. Their goals are straightforward if audacious: extend lifespan by preventing typical causes of death, whilst extending their vital “prime years” so they can remain young forever. The connection between the latest trend and broader Californian mythmaking is clear to behold throughout the book’s pages.
It’s obvious why such an initiative would make its home in California. For one, the state has a high concentration of extant scientific talent, with one third of the nation’s aerospace companies headquartered there. The balmy beachside lifestyle attracts reliably high earners, while Silicon Valley provides both the capital and the risk tolerance necessary for a moonshot venture like overcoming death. But there’s also a mixture of cult experimentation and alternative medicine which led to the boom of the wellness industry from the Seventies onwards. In the last few decades, the wellness craze has taken hold of Los Angeles. Erewhon, the upscale organic grocery chain, is now basically a temple, with $20 smoothies you’re supposed to be seen consuming. The logical next step after trends such as sound baths, micro-dosing and therapeutic IV drips, was always going to be living forever.
In The Immortalists, Krotoski floats from oddball to oddball, listening intently and giving each person their due when it comes to their views on mad science, but there’s one recurring star who sits above the rest: the entrepreneur Bryan Johnson. He has gained significant online fame largely by posting provocative erection-related statistics and cultivating a vampiric look. He has smooth, hairless cheeks, a piercing gaze, and much plastic surgery. He has turned himself into the vampire king of California, obsessed with rare elixirs and draining blood from the young.
Krotoski spends so much of the book quoting Johnson verbatim. It’s easy to see why: “When my body, when my mind is like, let’s go eat pizza or let’s go drink… that’s non-cooperation. I relabel those things to violence.” You can almost hear the California dialect just from the words on the page. It’s a particular blend of tech-speak optimisation language and therapy-influenced self-actualisation rhetoric and rapport, part Silicon Valley efficiency gospel and part Venice Beach spiritual woo. Simultaneously earnest and performative, vulnerable and branded, there’s nothing else like it, and that’s partially the point.
Krotoski’s mocking portrayal of her subjects, as vain, anxious or bored in their pursuit of immortality, is probably fair. But it misses something key in its portrayal of Californian weirdness: it’s all embellished. She doesn’t fully capture, and may not even realise, that her Californian subjects are fully aware of what they are. In reading Johnson’s words, one can find a detectable wink to the audience in everything he says. He has made himself into the character, physically and verbally, to get attention. Take his vampiric appearance. In one telling exchange with Elon Musk on social media, Johnson wrote: “the difference between Elon and me: I’ll nourish you and drink your blood; he’ll fire you and leave you to die” — a tongue-in-cheek reference to his publicised blood transfusion experiments. The darkness of the imagery, perhaps as a shield against criticism, is part of the performance.
Johnson is not the first to do this, and he won’t be the last. The routine is commonplace, especially in the health space. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, after all, knowingly markets products like “This Smells Like My Vagina” candles, a deliberate provocation that generated discourse (and thus notoriety) far in excess of the actual candles sales. The entire “Valley Girl” phenomenon of the Eighties was both authentic dialect and conscious performance, with Frank Zappa’s daughter Moon Unit simultaneously embodying and parodying the accent in her hit single. Even the garage startup myth acknowledges its own absurdity while simultaneously perpetuating itself. The mythology of the billion-dollar garage startup has become an exportable, addictive idea that drives many to apply to places like Y Combinator each year.
California has always needed to find new dreams to sell as the old ones lose their lustre. Film’s cultural dominance has waned with the rise of streaming and global production. New York has been aggressively courting film production back from California with tax incentives, and other cities like Atlanta have successfully challenged Hollywood’s monopoly. As traditional Hollywood loses ground, new innovations in the myth are needed to keep it both economically relevant and socially potent on the world stage. Californians understand this, and this is why there is such an effort to continue the myth creation.
“California has always needed to find new dreams to sell as the old ones lose their lustre.”
The immortalist movement may succeed in refreshing the California myth for another generation, proving that the state can still produce world-changing ideas. On the other hand, if it spectacularly combusts, it may reveal the myth’s exhaustion, showing that we’ve reached peak California, where the only frontier left is literally trying in vain not to die.
The truth is that California has always sold impossibility. From the gold rush’s promise of instant wealth to Hollywood’s promise of stardom to Silicon Valley’s promise of changing the world with an app, the state’s primary export has been dreams that statistically just won’t come true for most people. Yet, occasionally, just often enough to make the news, someone actually does strike gold, become a star, or build a billion-dollar world-changing company. As such, the myth rolls on, renewed.
The immortalists represent the logical endpoint of this tradition of gambling for glory. They’re selling the ultimate prize of all with just enough scientific merit to make it seem faintly possible. Whether Johnson and his cohort achieve immortality matters less than what their quest reveals about California’s enduring power to make fortune seem inevitable, to turn personal neurosis into cultural movement, and to perform transcendence so convincingly that performance itself becomes a kind of truth.
In the end, Krotoski’s book captures California early in the act of creating its next great myth. Like all the best California stories, it’s obviously fake yet somehow real. The author herself, by taking these eccentric immortalists seriously enough to write about them, becomes part of the myth-making machine she observes. She’s another New Yorker drawn into California’s orbit, unable to look away from the golden elves even as she rolls her eyes at their antics.
It’s a very old story. Johnson and his fellow immortalists are the people who went West seeking transformation and in the end decided to put on a show about it. The fact that their particular show involves blood transfusions and supplement regimens rather than surfboards and sunshine doesn’t change the fundamental dynamics. They are performing California, and in performing it, they make it real.
