Netflix's 'Altered Carbon' is a cautionary tale for our times

What would you do if you could live forever? In Netflix's Altered Carbon, based on the novel by Richard K. Morgan, humanity has evolved past the arbitrary expiration of the physical form. Centuries into the future, our essence is encased in a small disk and the rich wear bodies like seasonal fashion. If it sounds unnerving, it's meant to be; According to the cast, this is a deliberately cautionary tale.

"Our society is so geared on trying to be young forever, and is afraid of aging and ultimately afraid of dying," Joel Kinnaman said at a Netflix press junket. "I think Altered Carbon kind of states that the essence of being human is our mortality, and that if we give up our mortality then we also lose our humanity."

The rules are thus: Every person (voluntarily) has a small disk at the base of their neck which contains all the essential information about who they are. Some might call it a soul. The body can sustain any physical damage as long as the "stack" survives, in which case it gets rebooted into a new "sleeve" (body). There are still those who protest rebooting active stacks from dead bodies; they intone the ideology of "spirits, not sleeves" with the belief that re-sleeving is against nature and binds the soul irrevocably to life.

"If we carry on from where we are now, along present trends, that’s the world we’re gonna be dealing with – so it may well be gloomy, but it is a cautionary tale," Purefoy said. "It is saying ‘You, at home: Do you want to end up in Altered Carbon?’ Do you want to end up in that world – or do you all want to take responsibility for the consequences of each of your actions to say 'No, I don’t. I resist.'"

Beyond the question of exactly what it means to be human, the show highlights obvious class struggles in a world where the wealthy live forever and the poor move from sleeve to sleeve with minimal agency.

"A new class of people, so wealthy and powerful they answer to no one and cannot die," one character says. "Death was the ultimate safeguard against the darkest dangers of our nature."

Kinnaman plays protagonist Takeshi Kovacs, one of the last rebels against society's dependance on immortality. His stack has been re-sleeved (from an Asian man to a white man) to solve the murder of one Laurens Bancroft (Purefoy).

"All dystopian sci-fi is about that idea of taking the world we are in now, looking at present trends, extrapolating from now, and then writing about what it looks like it’s going to be," Purefoy said. "And it’s not just us; it’s Philip K. Dick and Blade Runner, it’s Metropolis."

It's also the real world, as Purefoy and costar Martha Higareda pointed out. Higareda hails from Mexico where she said she sees beautiful, expensive houses alongside the poverty of slums. Some two-thirds of the world's population, Purefoy noted, is currently in a reality that feels a lot like the contrasts depicted in Altered Carbon.

"We need to take a sharp turn," he added when calling the show a cautionary tale. "If you carry on like this, this is where you’re gonna end up," Purefoy. "We still have a chance to move things the other way."

Altered Carbon is now streaming on Netflix.