About 15 years ago, I read Drew Magary’s sci-fi novel The Postmortal. The book imagines a society that has created a pill of immortality. Your aging stops at the moment in time when you take the pill although it’s still possible to get hit by a car and die.
Civilization reorganizes around this new technology. Marriage contracts have a shelf life of 20 years. This reminded me of Larry David and Cheryl’s tiff, where Larry gets yet another self-induced cold shoulder from his wife, pressing his case that “til death do us part” means he’s free to see other people in the afterlife.
I went to the internet for a reminder of other outputs from the Postmortal world:
- The Rise of “End Specialists”: Due to severe overpopulation and the lack of natural deaths, the government creates specialized roles to handle population control, with characters like the protagonist, John Farrell, working as “End Specialists”.
- Widespread Violence and Dystopia: Society breaks down as “Greenie” environmental terrorists and pro-death protesters target those who have taken the cure.
- The “Cycle” Trend: People adopt hedonistic lifestyles, traveling excessively or changing careers, as they anticipate centuries of life ahead.
- International Reaction: Countries like China ban the cure and tattoo citizens with their birthdates, while others, such as Russia, militarize their “postmortal” population.
- The “Correction”: The novel, told through diary entries, news reports, and blog posts, follows the decline of civilization into a “pre-apocalyptic” state, culminating in the “Correction”.
I’m not a regular sci-fi reader, but I should be since I find this recipe of change one major assumption about how the world works and then see how it propagates quite fun. (I am about to re-read Brave New World!)
In the vein of that recipe, there’s a short story I’ve had swirling in the back of my head for a decade. It’s never gonna see the light of day because
a) it’s not a priority and
b) its premise is probably going to happen, spoiling the story
It’s the story of everyone’s private info being leaked on the web. Tax returns, bloodwork, nude photos, Nest footage, emails, DMs, location history. The real Y2K event.
The Postmortal model strongly influenced how I thought about it. There would be a minority of people, like the pro-death protesters who opted out of taking the pill, who were viewed as some anti-progress hippie. It would be the group of people who opted out of looking at other’s private data.
Think of it as a voluntary non-proliferation of grievance. I value whatever privacy remained as of 2026, I assume you do too. We are all adults. We agree to just not look. And society cleaves between the lookers and the ostriches. There’s a whole sci-fi book to be written about every aspect of this.
One of my favorite movies did a skit that would resemble dating in such a world. I love the moment when it “hits” Steve Guttenberg, “It says all that?”
The idea of a non-looker might have been remotely possible when there was friction to sorting and searching through petabytes of files.
But when it’s all leaked, that friction will be gone.
“Hey Claude, have any good friends talked shit about me?”
About a year ago, my family went on a CA gold rush tour at Marshall Gold Discovery Park in Coloma. Strong recommend by the way. The guide is an absolute treasure of historical knowledge. Anyway, you see how the indigenous lived in those lands before the settlers arrived. Touring the site, I was viscerally struck by the lack of privacy that their way of life entailed. Large families coexist in tight tent-like structures. I had to be the one who asked, not quite in these words but with a mix of diplomacy and subtle gestures, “Where did they screw?” As you might guess, tribes didn’t need to do a birds and bees talk. It’s more of a show without the tell.
As tech zooms forward, do social norms loop back to prehistory?