Punks and profiteers in the war on death

The genre of transhumanism known as biohacking, or the human augmentation movement, is rooted in a history of medical and scientific developments in the service of religious nationalism, where the perfection of the American body is advanced as a patriotic duty and symbol of the superiority of the American nation. Some participants in the biohacking scene advocate for a classic global rehabilitation project in the tradition of UNESCO, a post-war project of global salvation through collective evolution and science literacy. This vision contrasts sharply with separatist and grassroots biohacking projects. I introduce a model of ‘punks and profiteers’ to investigate two broad genres of biohacking: Corporate Medical Futurism and the DIY biohacker movement. Both strands rely on the fruits of the post-WWII boom in prosthetics, plastic surgery, and drug therapies, fruits well watered by religious and nationalist imperatives. Exploring the war on death led me to the grinder punk biohacking movement, which troubles the dominant view on transhumanism with their delight in human existence, taking limited interest in, or even demonstrating hostility toward, immortality, and rejecting ideas of finding salvation in escape from nature, the human body, and the earth.