This monograph offers an original and timely reading of the disruptive phenomenon of “hacking death”, characterised as the contemporary drive to solve ageing and death as “problems” through emerging technologies. It argues that this technological struggle represents Western culture’s desperate attempt to nullify human temporality and, consequently, individual failure in an era of unprecedented demandingness, competitiveness and acceleration.

Offering a unique interdisciplinary analysis combining philosophy, history, literature, sociology and technology studies, it traces the historical roots of our technological relationship with mortality from ancient Greece through Romanticism to today’s biotechnology companies and prolongevity movements. Using philosophical arguments, thought experiments and literary analysis, it offers insight into how a growing correlation between death and individual failure exponentially typifies the contemporary Western culture in a way that significantly diverges from our past. On the one hand, it posits the question of understanding our technological struggle against mortality as a desperate attempt to definitively solve the “problem” of individual failure itself. On the other hand, it culminates in an exploration of Socratic wisdom as an alternative to our current trajectory, emphasising mortality’s evolutionary value.

This timely work is essential reading for scholars and graduate students in philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, technology studies, anthropology, history and literature. It will also be of interest to biotechnology professionals, policymakers and those concerned with the ethical and cultural implications of emerging life-extension technologies.

Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Simona Chiodo is a Full Professor of Philosophy at the Politecnico di Milano, where she is a member of the Technology Foresight. Among her recent publications, the monographs Predicted Humans. Emerging Technologies and the Burden of Sensemaking (Routledge, 2024), Technology and the Overturning of Human Autonomy (2023) and Technology and Anarchy. A Reading of Our Era (2020).