Since class, I’ve been thinking more about the contemporary examples of biopower we raised. I’d like to further explore some of the many ways individuals have internalized biopolitical incentives – and question what it means for the population to manage itself:

While reading “Society Must Be Defended,” I thought a lot about the venture capitalist Bryan Johnson and other self-proclaimed biohackers. An early profile of Johnson in VICE from 2023 called him “The Most Measured Man in Human History”… which feels very Foucauldian already. He’s famous for his obsession with reversing the aging process and – although he’s 47 – claims his biological age is much younger. (He says his heart functions at the level of a 37-year-old and his lungs like an 18-year-old, so I guess he’s somewhere between.) Here’s an excerpt from VICE that gets at what Johnson’s up to:

“Johnson says that he spends more money on his body than LeBron James. With this sizable budget (more than $2 million a year), he pays for the food he eats (a precise 1,977 calories a day, made up of the world’s most nutritious elements), as well as the 112 to 130 supplemental pills he takes on a daily basis, and the ultrasound machine and other medical-grade machinery he keeps on the second floor of his discrete compound in Venice, Los Angeles, where he and his team of more than 30 doctors, clinicians, and researchers analyze how the 78 organs that make up his body have responded to the latest tweaks to his diet, sleep, and movement.”

Johnson has taken the example Professor Allred mentioned in class (a teenage boy’s casual interest in protein intake, macros, fitness, etc.) to the furthest possible extreme, self-policing his own body down to the level of his organs. But is this behavior representative of biopower? On the one hand, Johnson chooses to dedicate his own time and resources to this obsessive self-optimization, which feels different from the state interest in population-level metrics that Foucault describes. For Foucault, “the mechanisms introduced by biopolitics include forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures. And their purpose is not to modify any given phenomenon as such, or to modify a given individual insofar as he is an individual, but, essentially, to intervene at the level at which these general phenomena are determined, to intervene at the level of their generality” (1444). Johnson’s interest in himself, by contrast, seems very individually-motivated: he doesn’t want to die.

On the other hand, we could argue that Johnson – and the population at large – has internalized the interests of biopower so thoroughly that state intervention or management is no longer necessary. If individual members of a population are already interested in lowering the mortality rate or extending the general life expectancy, then does the power in biopower lose its oomph? In other words, does the alignment of individual motives with technologies of the state dull biopower’s teeth? Foucault argues the post-classical state has gained the power to make live and let die … but Johnson himself is desperate to live optimally. What’s left for the state to do?

That said, I think Johnson would be a much stronger example of the internalization of biopower if he were interested in the longevity of the entire population. His extreme self-interest in his personal biometrics seems more like a privilege of the ultra-wealthy than anything else. It would feel different if he were advocating for the health of the entire population. (Unfortunately, I’m assuming here that Johnson might be more interested in the health of people like him than the well-being of people in general – but I don’t know for sure.) But I think he’s still a good example of how comfortable we’ve become with the collection and analysis of our personal data. Tracking everything about our health might benefit us, but it also benefits the companies and governmental bodies who access and wield that data against us. It’s unsurprising, then, that a lot of biohackers are folks who aligned with the interests of the state and the market. Maybe it’s most useful to think of biohackers as sneaky spokespeople for the continued proliferation of biopower, or whatever kind of biopolitical-disciplinary matrix we’re living under now.