Not everyone views the transhumanist project positively. Raquel Ferrández’s 2025 paper offers a sharp critique, reframing the pursuit of digital immortality as an extension of colonial logic. Her arguments deserve serious engagement, even from those who disagree with her conclusions.

The Dragon Tyrant Deconstruction

Ferrández begins by critiquing Nick Bostrom’s famous “Fable of the Dragon Tyrant,” an influential transhumanist parable that depicts death as a monster consuming humans, which society has wrongly accepted rather than fighting.

Her critique is structural. The narrative frames a natural process as an enemy combatant. This “war against death” rhetoric justifies extreme technological intervention while pathologizing acceptance of mortality.

Ferrández argues that this framing is not neutral. It emerges from a specific cultural context: Western, capitalist, and historically oriented toward conquest. The dragon must be slain because the alternative, coexistence with finitude, is culturally unthinkable.

Data Colonialism and the Dead

The paper introduces the concept of “Data Colonialism” applied to the afterlife. Having colonized geographic territories, then bodies through medical intervention, Western capitalism is now colonizing death itself.

The dead become a resource. Their data is extracted, processed, and monetized. Digital ghosts are not memorials. They are products. The grief of survivors becomes a market to be captured.

Ferrández identifies the “Online Dead” as a new category of exploited resource. Memorial pages generate advertising revenue. Grieving families pay subscription fees. The digital afterlife industry profits from loss.

The Westernocene Critique

The broader argument positions transhumanism within what Ferrández calls the “Westernocene,” a pathological cultural condition characterized by:

• Refusal to accept natural limits
• Compulsion toward infinite growth
• Inability to find meaning within finitude
• Externalization of psychological problems onto technological solutions

From this perspective, the fear of death that drives transhumanism is not a universal human condition to be solved. It is a cultural pathology to be diagnosed. Other cultures have made peace with mortality. The West has not. And now it wants to impose its refusal globally.

The Validity of Critique

These arguments are serious and deserve response rather than dismissal. Several of her points identify real risks:

Commercial exploitation: The digital afterlife industry does have incentives that may not align with the interests of the deceased or their families.

Cultural imperialism: Transhumanist frameworks do emerge from specific Western contexts and may not translate appropriately to other traditions.

Technological solutionism: There is a tendency to treat every human condition as a problem requiring a technical fix rather than a circumstance requiring wisdom.

Our Response

Acknowledging these critiques does not require abandoning the project. It requires improving it.

The risk of exploitation can be addressed through regulation and governance frameworks, as other researchers have proposed. Cultural humility means recognizing that different traditions may have different relationships with mortality, and that is legitimate.

However, Ferrández’s framing contains its own assumptions. She treats death acceptance as psychologically healthy and death resistance as pathological. This is not self-evident. The desire to preserve consciousness and extend life is found across cultures. It is not uniquely Western.

More importantly, the existence of bad actors or potential misuse does not invalidate a technology. Fire can burn, but it also cooks food and provides warmth. The question is not whether digital immortality can be misused but whether we can develop it responsibly.

The transhumanist response to mortality is not the only valid response. But it is a valid response. Ferrández’s critique helps us see what we might do badly. It does not prove we should not try.

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Source: Ferrández, R. (2025). Strategies for Colonizing Death: The Online Dead, Griefbots, and Transhumanist Dragons. Religions. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16040532