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@Magusoflight you said that the main thread right now is "wildly boring"; please let me know where this post ranks on the boring/exciting spectrum, and if it's not up to snuff, I'll try to incorporate your feedback into future posts.
The Tyranny of Transhumanism (paywall'd, but it's short, and I'll quote the relevant bits):
It should be clarified that, as a matter of empirical fact, there is no such thing as true "immortality" or "stasis". Entropy comes for us all in the end, and the expansion of the sun in approximately eight billion years will, at minimum, force a change of environs for whomever remains on Earth at that time.
Nonetheless, in contradistinction to the majority of transhumanist aspirations which are of a fundamentally childish nature, there is in fact something to be said for the image thus outlined: the immortal Xi, who stands as the silent and watchful observer, a grim reminder of eternity. (I have specifically chosen Xi's name here as the metonymic signifier of dictatorial immortality rather than Putin's as a token of good faith, and to demonstrate that I'm concerned with structure here rather than content; I have publicly expressed my own harshly critical views of China in the past.)
Of course, in order for the narrative to work, in order to establish the appropriate mise en scène, it can only be Xi who is immortal, and not any of his subjects. He precedes you, and he will outlast you. You will not live to see your great-grandchildren grow to maturity; but Xi will. He measures the seasons of his life by the empires he has seen rise and fall; for you, the turning of the leaves and the thaw of Spring are all that is needed. He stands as the lone pillar that structures a great many ever-changing forces and events, an isolated outpost of stability, made all the more enigmatic by his remoteness from ordinary affairs such as "birth" and "death". You'll never get to find out how the story ends. But he will.
This would, at least, be the portent of a new drama; this would at least give the poets "something to sing about". If nothing else, it represents a vision, instead of the horror of and the recoil from vision. To have a vision is to make a choice, to accept the structural role of sacrifice, to say "yes, that is mine" but also "no, that is foreclosed"; it cannot be otherwise. I am not in any way opposed to the pursuit of immortality. But I am opposed to stasis, to the leveling of difference, and to the "end of history".
The formula of an authentic anti-egalitarian politics is: "if not me, then somebody". We might go one step further and say that, just as the communists have their "heroes of the revolution", so too the anti-egalitarian hero is the one who brings about the state of inequality. The Übermensch, far from being a victorious conqueror, may indeed be the man who, upon noticing that everyone has finally become equal, takes it upon himself to make the sacrifice, to abase himself, to accept a lower station, in order to restore the distinction of rank between man and man.
This is just narrative. What things? Changing how?
It is worth noting that during Xi's reign China has changed a lot. Not in all ways for the better, but that's covered enough. They've become a high-trust society, in many respects higher-trust than the modern West. (So now we have pathetic protestations of things like safety in the streets or general politeness not counting, because it's compelled or whatever). They've doubled energy production per capita (the US has fallen a bit, while say the non-dictatorial UK has fallen off a cliff by 30% and is now far below China). They've transitioned from makers of slippers and "plastic crap" with a pathetically corrupt and infiltrated military and government to a technological superpower half a step behind the US and spooking the US into an increasingly undignified retreat from the Eastern Hemisphere. The list can go endlessly, it's arguably the most staggering timeline of national ascendance since the Industrial Revolution (if mostly by virtue of absolute scale), and of course it can be said that none of that is Xi's achievement, but he sure was well equipped to arrest those and other changes. He, however ineptly, struggled to accelerate them. Wouldn't it be easier to rule over impoverished peasants? Well, probably not. Chinese peasants sometimes used to decide they've had enough, successfully kill their emperors and usurp their thrones. "Lost the Mandate" and all that. Stupid slavish bugmen.
Taking it charitably, we know Xi was interested in Eastern mysticism and would likely love to be an Immortal Emperor. He also would opt to keep stagnant things he genuinely believes are good enough already: the "Democratic Centralism" and other buzzwords for the mechanics of the One-Party State he is lording over. That would necessitate stagnation and repression in significant aspects of culture and society, which we observe. But I'm not convinced a single immortal guy would achieve that better than an ever-regenerating hydra of government and quasi-government actors. Is there some cabal of ancient vampires maintaining American Civil Rights regime? No, they seem to keep recruiting. The Party, as O'Brien taught us, can be immortal even if the individual cell is frail. I think that's the core tragedy of our species – we have functional immortality for crude structures of power, often obfuscated in discourse by handwaving about "memes", but not for humans who, if they don't grow senile, can actually learn and acquire wisdom. Yeah, I think that even immortal dictators can be better than dictatorless dystopias, and it's too easy to build those.
Moreover, Xi said "in this century humans might be able to live to 150 years old". It sounds like he describes the opinion of scientists about the probable outlook for life extension technology, not some secret project he could realistically monopolize. Technology of this nature is, in general, hard to monopolize, and its very realization depends on scale.
I don't think we will see an immortal Ubermensch King in the East. Or at least, there will be a sizable class of lower-tier Immortals cultivating towards ascension – like in those Xianxia novels young Chinese read so much.
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