Perhaps you saw this video last September, when it went viral: The two most powerful autocrats in the world — Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, both of whom have been heads of state for well over a decade, and neither of whom shows any signs of intending to relinquish that power — caught by an interpreter’s hot mic discussing their own apparent shared desire for immortality. The moment, though brief, felt lavishly overdetermined, rich in a kind of mythic political symbolism.

Over the past decade or so, democracy has been retreating against a rising tide of illiberalism and plutocracy. Power, in much of the world, is becoming more and more concentrated in the hands of a few authoritarian leaders and a small number of expansively ambitious tech billionaires. As average life expectancy has increased, inequality — in income and in access to health care — has widened. And amid all of this, the world’s wealthiest and most powerful have developed a persistent hope, and perhaps even generated some small possibility, that death might be eradicated entirely, or pushed back so far that its existential force is diminished.

The fact of death is, famously, a source of terror and melancholy, but also one of consolation. Say what you like about historical dynasties, but even the worst of hereditary sovereigns couldn’t rule from the grave.

But what if the tyrant succeeds in making himself immortal, or in expanding his allotted life span so radically that he might as well be? What if autocrats like Xi or Putin were to extend their rule by decades, or even to rule indefinitely, never relinquishing their grip on their respective states, on the lives of their citizens? Such a prospect is, to say the least, still scientifically remote. But that these two leaders seem to want it in the first place, and seem to believe that science might facilitate it, suggests something important about our political era — and hints at the shape of the era to come.

We live under the sign of the vampire. Among the most potent archetypes of our time is the elite who seeks eternal youth, whose power is drawn from the blood of lower mortals. And the most prominent of our current elites is the small upper echelon of capitalists whose technologies — social media, online retail, artificial intelligence, data surveillance — determine our present and mold our future, and who wield an increasingly disproportionate political power. And these men are, we know, obsessed with pushing out the horizons of human mortality.

The man perhaps most associated with this desire is Peter Thiel, who once outlined his interest in blood plasma transfusions from the young as a means of extending life. But more practically, and less vampirically, he has also invested many millions of venture capital dollars in various biotech concerns, seed-funding a flourishing Silicon Valley longevity ecosystem. The OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has invested $180 million of his own fortune in Retro Biosciences, a Bay Area biotech concern aimed at stalling and potentially reversing human aging. Jeff Bezos is reportedly among the major funders of Altos Labs, a company that hopes to find stem cell therapies to extend human life spans.

What do these men, these autocratic heads of state and staggeringly wealthy technologists, have in common, other than the desire to don’t die? They have, for one thing, arrived — through ruthlessness and ingenuity, through the obsessive pursuit of power and personal enrichment — at an Olympian distance from the mortals from whom their profit and power derive.

Consider the tech billionaire: This is a man who has amassed unimaginable wealth through the disruption of economic and social relations. He has completely reshaped how we buy things, how we pay for them. He has changed how we interact with our fellow humans. He has restructured our brains and reordered the global economy, and is now creating the ultimate technology, the one that promises to do away, once and for all, with the need for human intellectual labor. Is it not right that such a man should buy his way out of death, that he should break this last tie that binds him to the fate of his fellow humans?

Indeed, just as it represents the final victory of capital over labor, A.I. is also being pointed toward a greater and more decisive victory, the victory of technology over the human condition itself. The futurist and entrepreneur Peter Diamandis is convinced that A.I. can facilitate huge increases in human life span.

Power is its own kind of immortality project: The power to leave your mark on the world — to mint coins bearing your image, to redraw maps — is the power, on a symbolic level, to deny death. Over the past four years, Putin has said that his decision to invade Ukraine was rooted primarily in geopolitical considerations. But the deeper motivation seems imperial.

The symbolic connection between gold and immortality transcends cultures and historical periods. These lines of magical thinking have now been rewoven in a more technologically sophisticated form. In his 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” the billionaire venture-capitalist Marc Andreessen made the following assertion: “We believe artificial intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosophers’ Stone — we are literally making sand think.” This is the promise of technology, that it will intercede between us and our deaths. This is the promise of money itself.

For now, though, no matter how greatly a person is enlarged by his wealth, his own power and prestige, there is no escaping the determinism of death. Bryan Johnson will die. Peter Thiel will die. Sam Altman will die. Xi Jinping will die. Donald Trump will die. Vladimir Putin will die. And so will you, and so will I, and so will all those now living and yet unborn. Not a one of us will be saved: not by 3-D-printed organs, not by artificial superintelligence, not by transfusions of plasma from our beloved and indulgent teenage sons. None of these things will intervene between even the richest and most powerful of us and our common animal end. The great and terrible democracy of death abides.

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