April 3, 2023. Things fall apart. Not Bryan Johnson though — not today anyway. Today he is with his father and son at a nondescript medical clinic in the Denver suburbs, preparing for what he claims will be the first multi-generational plasma transfer. Infusions of plasma from young healthy people appear to have potential anti-aging benefits, and today these hopeful plasmatic benefits will be siphoned upwards through the family tree from son to father to grandfather. In a fluorescent-lit room with taupe knockdown texture walls, Johnson’s son Talmadge reclines with his arm splayed on a padded rest, plump vein rubbed with iodine by a med tech. The vein is pierced. The blood flows. “One liter out,” says Bryan, pointing at the tube of ruby fluid snaking from Talmadge and towards the centrifuge where the plasma will be spun out. “Then one liter in for me, one liter out from me, and one liter into dad.” The circle of life.

“I won the lottery,” his father Richard says. “There has to be a benefit in getting this much volume of him.”

So much volume. So much of one being supped by another (Each of you drink from it, for this is my blood, Matthew 26:28). The mood in the room is charged with something strange and ecstatic. As soon as the final milliliters of Johnson’s plasma flow into patriarch Richard, Johnson and grandson Talmadge hoist him to his feet and envelop him in a three-way hug. Three men, previously estranged from one another through divorce and religious trauma, are brought close again through this fluid intermingling. The trinity reunited. Later, narrating to camera for his YouTube audience from one of the many echoing chambers of his large empty house, Johnson explains that this transfer of volume obliterated the interpersonal barriers that kept them apart: “we were divided by the mind, and we were unified by our biology.”

This day was a beautiful one-off. On the internet, you’ll still hear Johnson referred to as “the guy who uses his son as a blood boy” which is a good joke that Johnson himself encourages. Plasma exchange is conceptually (and memetically) powerful. However, some months after family day at the Denver clinic, Johnson announced on X that no clear benefits had been detected from the plasma treatment. Consequently, he would cease the protocol. Never again was the blood trinity assembled. Johnson moved on to other experiments.

Bryan Johnson, as you probably know, is a rich man undertaking a series of improbable and experimental treatments in an attempt to slow or reverse the physical markers of aging. After an early adulthood of overwork, depression and bad habits, his goal is now to live forever. Actually, his goal is “Don’t Die” ™. Don’t die now, don’t die tomorrow, don’t die next year, or the year after that. If you string along enough days of not dying, eventually you’re living forever. Certainly something is happening with his corporeal form. At age 47, after three years of Don’t Die experimental treatments and an austere and predictably White-wellness-coded low-calorie diet, he has the appearance of a well-preserved cosmetic surgeon or a Nexus-6 pleasure model replicant.

For the most part, Johnson treats his body like a closely-guarded and obsessively monitored system that can be endlessly tweaked and iterated and formalized into a “Blueprint” ™. Every action is guided by the information extracted from his fluids and reflexes, the data trusted above any subjective sensation or bodily desire emanating from his fallible brain. He and his adherents display an almost erotic, devotional attendance to their own viscera. How are the fluids looking? What can be foretold from the rumblings of the kidneys? In this constant loop of biometric feedback and tweaking of inputs, Johnson and his team seem to have developed from first principles a kind of cybernetics of the self. “That’s what the power of this approach is,” writes Johnson in his self-published book Don’t Die. The ability to optimize the body “through algorithm alone, without letting the pesky mind get in the way — not because it’s necessarily harmful but simply because there should be a way without it.”

In the context of the rest of his bodyhacking, the plasma experiment was counter to Johnson’s usual Don’t Die methodology. Don’t Die is a system of the self, a set of practices and systemic interventions that shore up the individual’s boundaries rather than extending them. Of course, despite its transcendent moment of interpenetration and interpersonal regulation, the family transfer still engaged with many of Johnson’s usual tropes including relentless self-promotion, under-regulated private clinics, and controversial medical techniques.

Still, to me the son-self-father transfer remains the most interesting thing he’s done — incredibly romantic, kinky even. What could be more intense than to take in the fluids of another in the hope it will change your life? A blood purification ritual that is also a contamination. Johnson has experimented with a range of plasma transfer protocols before and since the three-way experiment, but these were always unidirectional. This is the norm for the Silicon Valley young plasma enthusiast, who considers blood a commoditized product, alienated from its source and flowing in one direction only. In that brief moment of the intergenerational transfer, Johnson showed a willingness to expand the boundaries of his tightly-held body. Not by becoming eternal (the individual body extending through time) but by connecting to a collective body (the conjoined body expanding through space) and taking a leap into inter-corporeal circulation.

I’m not the only freak with a dream of collective circulation. In Alexander Bogdanov’s 1908 Russian sci-fi novel Red Star, the human narrator describes visiting a utopian Martian society whose incredible vitality and longevity is due in part to the physiological bond formed through health-giving inter-generational blood transfusions. These transfusions represent a “comradely exchange of life that extends beyond the ideological dimension into the physiological one” — a line echoed almost exactly by Johnson over a century later (“we were divided by the mind, and we were unified by our biology”).

Bogdanov was a physician and a revolutionary before he was a fiction writer. The worlds described in Red Star and its prequel Engineer Menni were more than speculation. They were an expression of his politics and a blueprint for a real-world intravenous communism he later attempted to actualize through his own pioneering transfusion work, including at the Institute of Blood Transfusion he founded in 1926. While transfusions of human blood had been practiced with various degrees of success since the 1810s in order to preserve the lives of people suffering from injury or hemorrhage, Bogdanov believed that the exchange of blood could do more than keep people alive. As he understood it, blood is a complex “living tissue” that has an enormous organizational role in the overall health of the organism, embedded with infection-fighting leukocytes, hormones that regulate the metabolism, and other vital elements that reflect the overall health of the body through which it circulates. Therefore, he hypothesized that young blood, bearing as it does “materials taken from young tissues,” would be able to help an older body and regulate some of the decay and disorder of age, imbuing the recipient with desirable attributes of the donor.

Bogdanov’s belief that young blood could revitalize the old body was part of a broader theory that the process of aging was not inevitable or wholly necessary. In this way, he was a precursor to Bryan Johnson and his obsessively-honed Blueprint for extended life. However, unlike the mainstream crop of Silicon Valley longevity enthusiasts, Bogdanov’s theory of life-extending blood transfusions reached its ideal form in mutual or inter-communal transfers, beyond the individualistic charity (or financial coercion) of the one-to-one transfusion.

In his essay “The Tectology of Struggle Against Old Age,” he posits that not only would the old benefit from the blood of the young, but that the blood of older people would likely also benefit the young, offering “elements for evolution” or age-related immunities to childhood diseases. The mutual transfer, “a simultaneous, interchanging transfusion from individual A to individual B, and from B to A, with neither one nor the other sustaining quantitative losses of blood,” is where the true benefits of blood-sharing come into effect. Bogdanov imagined that an ongoing, community wide network of blood exchange would vivify and enhance the entire population: “the broadening of life here depends generally on going out beyond the limits of individuality.” This is the expansive notion of inter-communal circulation that Johnson’s intergenerational plasma transfer hinted at: a communism of the blood.

This eccentric systems approach to understanding social health was part of Bogdanov’s large-scale theory of “tectology” — his term for the study of the regulation and organization of all systems, with the goal of preserving stability and optimizing systems (through collectivized labor and production, naturally). Essentially, an early version of cybernetics. In Red Star, the Martian society runs using an elaborate process of information control and feedback, computing machines, and regulatory mechanisms — a model for the kinds of lossless systems which would enable the maintenance of social, bodily, and global equilibrium. For Bogdanov, health can only be collective. Ecologies and bodies alike fall apart when the actors fall out of sync or when one element is allowed to run too long in isolation, creating (per Marx) a kind of metabolic rift.

As a communist and a theorist, Bogdanov was deeply concerned with systems and relations, and he was quick to draw analogies between forms of social organization and the function of organisms. In his writings, notes the scholar Douglas Greenfield in his analysis of Bogdanov’s novels, “sociology informs biology.” In the reality of blood and viruses and immunology, this is not always the case. But while Bogdanov’s scientific theories are certainly a product of their time and his social theories closely informed by his political commitments, he was right about many things: the interconnectedness of all beings and systems, the exciting permeability of our bodies, and the need to re-regulate the metabolism of the social body and the planet.

The body-world’s dysregulated metabolism is a problem for today’s life-extension enthusiasts. The industrial production of steel and plastic bags and ASOS blouses adds carbon and pollutants to the atmosphere, diminishing air quality and accelerating the warming of the climate. Romaine lettuce farmed in Santa Barbara County near animal production facilities and irrigated with contaminated water leads to E. coli outbreaks in Ontario and New Brunswick. The fluids grow septic and the blood flows weak, diminished by parasitic human activities as the greediest of our kind suck, tick-like, on the planetary veins. Even if you stack your nootropics correctly and optimize your sleep cycle with all the care in the world, there is no escaping the fact that the materials that compose the body’s fluids and meats originate from somewhere outside ourselves, subject to the pollutants and influences of the wider environment. The systems of the planet and the systems of our bodies necessarily intersect, and the sickness of the world comes home to roost. The body is a world: a planet in microcosm, or in metaphor.

Is blood a metaphor? I’ve come this far mostly without stepping over into the figurative, just teetering on the edge of blood’s describability and its literal existence. But blood is so turgid with history and symbolism that a slip into metaphor feels like a pulsing inevitability. Every vampire sodden with sex, death, the idea of Europe. Every bleeding man a possible Christ. “Drink from this cup for it is my blood” (the gospel of Matthew laying it plain). In every drop a threat of contagion, in every drop a possibility of eternal life. What is blood if not a metaphor?

And yet, the thing I admire most about Bogdanov’s blood-thought is its literality. The Martian blood transfusions described in Red Star are not (or certainly not exclusively) a metaphor for socialized systems of labor and distribution. They are in fact blood transfusions, literal blood piped from vein to Martian vein. The collective body engendered by this society-wide system of transfusion is also a metaphoric one, but the mechanism of its formation is very real. Bogdanov applied this commitment to inter-embodiment to his own life and circulatory system. In the course of his transfusion research, Bogdanov underwent at least eleven successful transfusions himself, which he claimed resulted in an improvement in his eyesight, a reduction in balding, and other positive outcomes. In his blood work, he practiced the belief in the simultaneous mutual transfer, and eventually perished from it: after an inter-communal transfer with a young student suffering from malaria and tuberculosis, Bogdanov had a serious post-transfusion reaction and died. The negative reaction was likely due to an unexpected antigen response unrelated to the student’s malaria and tuberculosis. Still, Bogdanov’s death highlights the inherent risk in experimental inter-corporeality and bio-solidarity, especially in those early and hasty years of transfusion science. The student, on the other hand, eventually made a full recovery from his illnesses. For Bogdanov, true comradeship required both political and biological transformation via a dissolution of individual boundedness, and a dedication to exploring what the social body can do.

Just as a connected body can be forged through communist commitments, it can also be forced through violence. In Tom Six’s 2009 film The Human Centipede, an inter-corporeal body is imposed upon its subjects by a crazed and evil surgeon obsessed with the idea of a multi-body digestive tract. The surgeon, who formerly specialized in the separation of conjoined twins (or so he claims), is now fixated with joining what was previously separate. After capturing three victims, he surgically connects the anus of each person to the mouth of another, creating what he calls “a Siamese triplet connected by the gastric system. Ingestion by A, passing through B, to the excretion of C.” This is the long and the short of it — the plot, the premise, the high concept gag. This human centipede, however, in no way constitutes a multi-person gastric system. Imagine it! Imagine a single mouth in front, an esophagus stretched down to somewhere below the belly of the first person, down again to a second person whose interior is all stomach, to the final person comprised entirely of intestine and rectum. This is not what the mad surgeon presents, nor the film. Instead we are given three digestive systems sutured end to end, with a little ass-to-mouth between each to entertain the teenagers. There is no interest in distributed digestion, the strange capabilities or frailties of the human bowel, or even the psychopathology of the man obsessed with its creation. It doesn’t take its convictions seriously, nor its anatomy.

In this perverse counter to Bogdanov’s horizontally networked organism, the human centipede is entirely linear, each segment connected clumsily to the one ahead. Linearity is central. The human centipede is about the violence of the segment. In her essay “Violence and the Diagram; Or, The Human Centipede,” Eugenie Brinkema describes the crude diagram the doctor draws of the human centipede before he enacts it surgically. What this diagram illustrates, she posits, is “an enchainment in a specific sequence. The diagram formalizes the fact of being riveted, stitched and sewn, to an inescapable finitude, one’s own and that of others who precede and come after the self.” The diagram (which necessarily breaks things apart, describes the pieces) is itself a form of violence, which is later enacted on the flesh. It is a violence of coercive social relations, imposing a maladaptive linear metabolism on every person in the system (the linear economy made literal: take-make-waste). There is no room to provide aid in the human centipede, no room to recombine or reorder the chain, no room to collaborate. No room for horizon or horizontality. Only the violence of one segment forced to digest the shit of another.

The terminal end of the human centipede’s linear logic can be seen in The Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence). The setting is a prison, and the centerpiece is a giant human centipede made up of all the prison’s inmates, an arrangement dreamed up by the psychopathic prison warden as the ultimate deterrent to crime. In the segmented world of the human centipede, pollutants and toxicity are intensified throughout the chain and imposed onto the lowest of the low. That is, shit always runs downhill and forced connection is punishment and death. Where the trans-venous organism of blood communism is premised on free and non-hierarchical exchange, the human centipede demonstrates (per Brinkema) a model of violence “that is constitutive of systems and structures to which one is inescapably riveted.” The horror of our world.

Clearly, fluid exchanges and bodily experiments can be coercive or cruel as easily as they can be liberatory or expansive. The Human Centipede is fiction, but the subjugation of HS3’s prisoners appears only two steps away from the vicious spectacles of “crime deterrence” we’ve seen broadcast from El Salvador’s CECOT prison — deportation and illegal imprisonment being “one of the tools in our toolbox” according to the depraved carceral imagination of US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Nazi doctors experimented on over 15,000 documented concentration camp prisoners — including by transfusing blood and sewing twins together to create conjoined twins — killing many of their victims and permanently injuring most of the survivors. The “father of gynecology” James Marion Sims performed painful experiments without anesthesia on enslaved Black women while other doctors observed. The Human Centipede may be bad science fiction with a constrained digestive imagination, but its experimental bodily punishments can be seen in our real and recent history from slavers to Nazis to maximum security prisons.

The life extensionist biohacking of Silicon Valley’s young plasma crowd exists somewhere between the fluid interchange of the communist Martian horizon and the deranged linear cruelty of the human centipede. The fluid economy of the human centipede and the Nazi surgeon are entirely linear and hierarchical, a unidirectional flow that is pushed downward onto its subjects, enforced by the literal violence of the despot and the symbolic violence of the economic structure. The Silicon Valley longevity enthusiast also participates in a unilateral flow, with fluids and their metaphoric equivalents (money, power, resources) sucked only inwards in a many-to-one arrangement, only extracting and never reciprocating. In general, the flow of fluids and resources must be commoditized before it can be absorbed through this dry and insular process. The cold violence of extraction, the refusal to participate in reciprocal exchange. Bryan Johnson in his hyperbaric chamber, sucking on oxygen. Bryan Johnson injected with 300 million young Swedish bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells.

Bryan Johnson, eyes welling as he watches his father’s body absorb a liter of plasma from his son, his self. I remember! It was, however brief, a moment of intercorporeal possibility. That moment feels far away now (Bryan has since moved on to hawking supplements and collaborating with Balaji Srinivasan) but it represented an alternate path for life extensionists: a kind of biohacking that understands all bodies as interconnected with one another and entwined with the systemic function of the planet. To hack one is to hack all.

There is danger in connection (as Bogdanov experienced when he transfused the blood from the young malarial patient), but there is also danger in the segment, and in imagining yourself removed from the metabolism of the world.

One day, Bryan Johnson will die. This I know for sure. One of his causes of death will be exposure to the world, the same world he lives in with the rest of us. Bryan: even the very rich are subject to the ruin of the planet, even when it was they who conducted the ruination. Why die alone? Why not give yourself permission to be a body that opens up horizontally, to bring all into its system. To understand yourself as part of this system is to take other circulations seriously. Regulate yourself and your comrades (start sharing plasma). Regulate your relationship to the planet (start drawing down carbon). Reopen the vein, so we can all survive for a while longer. ■