Deathwork at the End of Empire

I think of this era as apocalyptic, but not in the sensational way we are trained to imagine apocalypse—fire raining from the sky, sudden collapse, the drama of endings—but in the slow, structural way that endings are administered. Not as an event, but as a system. The apocalypse is not far off in the distance, soon to come. It is here. And it is managerial.

I look at the forces shaping our lives right now as the Four Horsemen of the modern world. Not because I believe in biblical literalism, but because I believe in naming and making the pattern visible.

The horsemen I see are these:

Colonization, or conquest.

American Imperialism, or war.

Climate consequence, or famine.

And Necrocapitalism: the pale horse of death.

These are not abstract categories. These are our daily conditions, our atmosphere, the water we drink, and what we inherit. It is within this landscape that I do death work.

To be a death doula now is to stand at the bedside while Empire hums in the background. To offer tenderness while the world accelerates toward collapse, and hold someone’s hand at the end of their life while a machine insists life is only valuable when it is profitable, optimized, endlessly productive.

Death work in this era is not neutral. It is resistance.

Conquest Was the First Horse

Colonization is conquest, yes—but it is also a worldview. It teaches that nothing is sacred, only extractable and ownable.

Land becomes property; people become labor; spirit becomes superstition; death becomes an industry. Colonization is not just the theft of territory; it is the theft of relationship. It disrupts our ancestral intimacy with the cycles of life and dying and replaces it with domination.

The colonizer cannot accept death as a type of belonging; death must be conquered, too. That impulse and desire to override the limits of the body, nature, and time is still with us.

War as the Business Model

The second horseman is American Imperialism: war as policy, economy, and national identity.

A nation that has been at war for nearly all of its existence cannot imagine peace. War becomes the organizing principle, and it is always a death project. Not only because it kills directly, but because it normalizes disposable life. It teaches a hierarchy of whose death matters and whose does not. It teaches urgency, fear, and obedience.

War trains the body to accept the unacceptable.

It is no accident that death becomes more industrialized under these conditions. When a society is structured around violence, it must also develop rituals to manage the psychic fallout of that violence. Instead of communal grieving, we are offered privatized funeral packages. Instead of collective mourning, we are offered consumer upgrades.

War hollows out the soul, and capitalism sells us replacement parts. When you franchise the problem, you franchise the solution.

Before the Civil War, death in the United States was largely intimate. Communities prepared bodies and families held wakes in parlors. Death was not romantic, but it was relational. It belonged to the home.

But chattel slavery had already established a hierarchy of death:

Black death was routine.

Black death was ungrieved by the State.

Black death was economic.

The Civil War simply expanded mass death into the white public consciousness. Bodies needed to be transported long distances. White families wanted their sons returned home intact. And so embalming—once rare—became industrial. The funeral industry as we know it was born out of wartime nationalism and racialized death economies. This shift matters because the modern American funeral is not simply a ritual. It is a consumer event shaped by capitalism and white supremacy. The funeral home replaces the community; the package replaces the practice. Grief is streamlined into transactions. Death becomes something to manage quickly so that productivity may resume.

Climate Consequence Is Famine by Design

The third horseman is what I call climate consequence. Not climate change—because that language still suggests something passive, something accidental. Consequence implies accountability.

Famine is not only food scarcity. It is water wars, heat death, displacement, fire season, insurance collapse, and more. It is the slow violence of knowing the future is being foreclosed. It is not evenly distributed. It never is.

Black and Indigenous communities, poor communities, People of the Global Majority—those who contributed least to the crisis are made to bear it first. Meanwhile, those who profit continue to build bunkers. What becomes clear is this: the elite do not fear apocalypse, because they believe apocalypse is for other people.

Climate consequence is mass death, but to the ruling class, mass death is simply an externalized cost.

The Pale Horse: Necrocapitalism

Then comes the pale horse, the one that scripture names plainly: Death.

Here, death is not natural; it is monetized.

Necrocapitalism, introduced by Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee, is the system in which death is not an aberration but a business strategy. Where institutions generate wealth through premature death, sickness, incarceration, exploitation, and abandonment.

Necrocapitalism does not merely allow death, it produces it. And it produces it disproportionately for anyone that Empire deems undesirable or unwanted. Death is our infrastructure.

Hospitals as profit centers.

Prisons as warehouses.

Borders as graveyards.

Insurance companies as gods deciding who gets to live.

Necrocapitalism trains us to accept this as normal. It trains us to see dying as an individual failure rather than a collective reality. It trains us to fear death so deeply that we will pay anything to avoid it.

Which brings us to the obsession at the heart of the elite project: Immortality.

The Billionaire as Death-Phobic Archetype

We are watching, in real time, the ruling class spiral into an immortality cult. 

Consider Bryan Johnson, a man spending millions to reverse aging, measuring his body as if it were a corporate asset, coercing his son into participating in his experiments so he may live longer.

This is control and conquest turned inward. It is a refusal to accept the human contract: that life is finite, and therefore precious.

Silicon Valley executives speak openly about “solving death.” They fantasize about uploading consciousness, escaping the body, and transcending decay. AI becomes part of this project—not simply innovation, but metaphysical ambition.

They want eternity without accountability.

They want legacy without lineage.

They want infinite extraction without consequence.

And they are willing to burn the world down in pursuit of it.

AI as Enslavement, AI as Envy

Artificial intelligence is not neutral technology. It is a continuation of the colonizing impulse: to replicate life without reverence for life. AI is built on stolen labor—both literal and spiritual. It scrapes human creativity, exploits global workers, and consumes unimaginable resources. Underneath it is a kind of longing they refuse to name—a desire to create without dependence.

To generate without the people whose bodies, care, and relational labor have always made the world possible—gender-expansive people, women, transwomen, and all those tasked with bringing life forward.

The ruling class wants to birth without vulnerability and produce life while remaining untouched by life’s limits.

Death is the teacher they cannot monetize.

So they try to erase it.

The Immortality Class and the Privatization of Survival

The ruling class does not experience death the way the rest of us do. This is one of the clearest fault lines of necrocapitalism: death is distributed unequally, but so is the ability to prepare for it, soften it, manage it, delay it. The wealthy do not simply have better healthcare. They have distance, buffers, options, and contingency plans.

At the start of COVID-19, this became impossible to ignore.

Some people were delivered death by the tens of thousands—nursing home residents, essential workers, incarcerated people, and disabled people, all abandoned by policy. Meanwhile, the elite retreated into privately ventilated homes, bought access to testing before the public had it, accessed treatments first, and protected themselves with layers of invisible infrastructure.

Public health later became politicized not because the virus was confusing, but because death management was profitable.

The wealthy could afford to treat COVID-19 as both a threat and an opportunity. They could protect themselves while watching chaos unfold. They could invest in pharmaceutical futures, in tech surveillance, in corporate restructuring. They could quietly manage long COVID-19 symptoms with specialists and leave everyone else to self-diagnose on the internet, gaslit by employers, dismissed by doctors, and punished for needing rest.

And now, even as death continues—quietly, in excess mortality rates and chronic illness—mask bans are more and more common. Collective care is framed as paranoia. The responsibility is individualized and the message is clear:

You are on your own. The system will make money either way.

This is necrocapitalism’s genius: it does not need you to live, only to participate until you can’t.

Apocalypse as a Business Strategy

This is why climate consequence does not move them, and why mass death does not change the ruling class trajectory. The elite are not building a future for everyone. They are building an escape pod. They do not imagine survival as collective. They imagine it as exclusive.

Their obsession with immortality is paired with their willingness to let the rest of us die. This is the bargain at the core of empire: Some lives will be extended at the expense of all others.

The billionaire longevity project, the Mars fantasies, the AI acceleration, the bunker architecture—it is all one story. A death phobia turned into domination. A refusal to accept finitude, paired with an eagerness to outsource mortality downward. Which is why death work is more crucial than possibly, ever. Deathworkers are not in the business of escape.

We are in the business of presence.

Death Urgency as White Supremacy Culture

Tema Okun names urgency as a core characteristic of white supremacy culture: the insistence that everything must be fast, immediate, efficient, resolved. But death is not efficient, and grief is not linear. The dying process cannot be optimized.

So necrocapitalism hates it.

It hates the slowness of sitting with a body that is leaving.

It hates the way grief interrupts schedules.

It hates the truth that some things cannot be fixed.

Urgency is how systems avoid accountability. Urgency is how institutions prevent reflection. Urgency is how we are pushed past mourning into numbness.

The funeral industry often mirrors this: 

Three days.

Two hours.

A slideshow.

A catered meal.

Five days of bereavement leave, then back to work.

But death does not end because the service ended, and grief does not conclude because flowers were delivered. The urgency is a lie that keeps us spiritually malnourished.

Death Work as Sacred Work

Long before embalming tables and corporate funeral chains, death work belonged to the people, particularly women.

It belonged to aunties, midwives, conjurers, caretakers.

It belonged to those who understood the threshold.

The same hands that welcomed babies also washed the dead. The same communities that sang life into being sang people out. Death was not outsourced. It was held.

In African diasporic traditions, in Indigenous traditions, and in folk traditions across the world, death was not an emergency to be hidden. It was a passage.

Death work has never belonged exclusively to institutions. Which is why death doulas stand in direct opposition to necrocapitalism. We are not here to sell immortality. We are here to tell the truth: Death is not failure. That is the condition of being human.

The Death Doula as Opposition

The death doula refuses the fantasy of endless accumulation.

We refuse the idea that the body is a machine to be endlessly optimized.

We refuse the billionaire mythology that death is merely a glitch to solve.

We sit with the dying. We slow down. We listen. We make space for grief. We insist that care is not transactional. We remind people that dying is not an emergency—it is a sacred unfolding.

And when we do this, we are doing something profoundly political: We are re-humanizing a culture that has been trained to fear finitude. We are rebuilding death literacy. We are returning death to the community.

When a society can face death, it becomes harder to manipulate. When people are not terrified of mortality, they are less willing to trade away the planet for temporary comfort. When we accept that our children will inherit what we build, we begin to act differently.

Death doulas, in this way, are not simply attendants at the end of life. We are witnesses against Empire. We are practicing the future by telling the truth about the inevitable.

Finitude as Liberation, Death Work as Future Work

What I keep returning to, again and again, is that necrocapitalism depends on our denial. It needs death to remain unspeakable so that it can continue to operate as a shadow economy—profiting from illness, incarceration, warfare, environmental collapse, and from the severing of community.

Necrocapitalism requires that we do not look too closely. Because if we looked directly, we would see that what is being sold to us as progress is often just a more sophisticated form of disposal.

Grief Is a Threat to Empire

Grief is disruptive and inconvenient. Grief makes people stop working. Grief makes people tell the truth. Grief makes people ask questions that capitalism cannot answer:

Why did this person die?

Who benefited?

Who was abandoned?

Grief is an organizing force. It is one of the only forces strong enough to crack the narrative of inevitability. This is why Empire works so hard to privatize grief, rush it, pathologize it. To make mourning something you do quietly, alone, in the smallest possible window before returning to productivity.

Communal grief is revolutionary. Grief, when shared honestly, becomes recognition. Recognition becomes refusal.

In conclusion

Sometimes I think the greatest lie of this era is that death is the worst thing that can happen.

Necrocapitalism wants us to believe that dying is the ultimate failure, that aging is a defect, that grief is an inconvenience, that endings are always an emergency. It wants us terrified enough to comply—terrified enough to consume, to optimize, to surrender our bodies and our planet to the false promise of forever.

Death has never been the enemy. Death is not what makes life meaningless. Death is what makes life real.

The enemy is the system that decides some lives are worth extending indefinitely while others are left to disappear without care. The enemy is conquest dressed up as innovation. The enemy is war disguised as progress. The enemy is famine reframed as “market forces.” The enemy is profit extracted from our most intimate thresholds.

Death work is not only about the end of life. It is about returning life to its rightful scale: cyclical, communal, sacred, shared.

Maybe that is how we outlive the apocalypse—not through immortality projects or consciousness uploads or colonizing other planets, but through remembering what it means to belong here. To each other. To the earth. To our bodies. To the truth that we are temporary stewards, not eternal masters.

Let us build a world that does not require anyone’s premature death to function. Let us build a culture that knows how to grieve. Let us build a future that is not obsessed with forever, but devoted to care.

That is the sacred opposition. That is the work. That is the threshold I will keep holding.