Present Tense is The Swaddle Team's stream of consciousness response to the world's madness.

In case you missed it: Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping – two world leaders most cartoonishly stereotyped as supervillain overlords – were heard casually discussing immortality. At a military parade in Beijing, the Russian and Chinese Presidents engaged in a bit of light banter about how organ transplants could potentially expand human lifespans even as we age, with Putin predicting that we could possibly live to 150 in this century.

It's a relatively tiny footnote in the history of just the last fortnight -- a period that also saw a tectonic celebrity engagement between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce (and the gigantic diamond set in the ring); a new Gap jeans campaign to rival the eugenics American Eagle jeans campaign; the horny "Wuthering Heights" Emerald Fennel trailer; and Yemen's prime minister being assassinated by an Israeli airstrike.

Now is perhaps an appropriate moment to introduce the philosophy of transhumanism. It is an ideology favoured by a powerful group of elites, which posits that it is desirable for the human race to overcome its fallibilities and enter – via help from AI, nanotechnology, cybernetics and genetics – and enter a "posthuman" state. That means living longer (possibly forever), achieving cloud consciousness, having extra prosthetic gadgets by way of limbs and enhanced perception, a cyborgian form that allows us to be something more than human or machine.

Stay with us, we're taking another small detour. In A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway uses the idea of the cyborg as a lens for feminism to engage with rapid advancements in the world. Organ transplantation is an example, Haraway suggests, of how binary categories like human/animal, human/machine, natural/artificial fall apart in the 21st century. This opens up exciting, transgressive possibilities, in that the breaking down of binaries means the breaking down of socially and historically imposed constructs about how we should think of ourselves and our place in the world.

What does this have to do with anything? Only that the cyborg was once an idea that allowed us to think of humanity as something to be overcome figuratively – rejecting our inherited patriarchal, racist, and anthropocenic ideas about dominance, hierarchy, or the natural order. In the hands of a powerful elite, however, the cyborg has turned into a dangerous curse: the desire to live forever necessarily comes at the expense of those deemed "expendable."

So when Putin and Jinping laugh about the possibility of organ transplants being a pathway to immortality, they're echoing the favoured ideology of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other megalomaniacal tech overlords. Transhumanism is related to longtermism, which is invested in securing the interests of future humans, even at the expense of present-day humans, so long as we prevent extinction-level events.

The idea of transhumanism isn't just a diabolical scheme concocted by people who have nothing to do with us; it's creeping into culture, everyday society, the way we think and talk about things. Take the fact that Taylor Swift's engagement led to an uptick in the stock value of jewellery houses. Her ring contains an old mine cut diamond, which is a diamond hand-cut centuries ago in either Brazil or India under British colonial rule; before commercial diamond mining moved to Africa. "Vintage" and "classic" is certainly one way to refer to diamonds like that. But such adjectives fit squarely into Taylor Swift's mythos: a record-breaking popstar, who defines her own storied life in the vocabulary of eras, who is on a domination quest to cement her place in history as a planetary event of epic, time-blurring proportions. Casualties of the diamond wars, both past and present, are immaterial compared to the immortality of a supernova personality. See: one Swiftie's tweet reaction to the engagement ring being "Miners probably died to obtain that rock... Get it, girl." The breathless excitement over her path to marriage and a traditional future perfectly exemplifies the girl-boss era of selective feminism billionaire bootlicking.

Then there's the battle of the jeans. Gap may have had a cooler and more inclusive ad than American Eagle's jeans/genes wordplay with respect to Sydney Sweeney's blonde hair and blue eyes. But – and sorry for being the local vibe killer – all mass retailers source denim from the same sweatshops. In fact, Gap is one of the more notorious offenders when it comes to exploiting workers in Bangladesh. When the Rana Plaza factory collapse that killed over 1,000 workers prompted the Bangladesh Accords to bind companies to worker safety, Gap signed a weaker alternative of the plan. So much for representation. Is there, ultimately, a difference between blue eyes and brown eyes in a future world where the haves make it to 150 and the have-nots perish in sweatshop fires?

We'll leave the Wuthering Heights trailer discourse-free for now, except to ask you to consider the implications of a piece of popular media that combines an 1847 novel's adaptation with a Charli XCX electronic soundtrack, while whitewashing the race and class dynamics of the source material.

We are maybe incapable of simply enjoying things, but we will leave you with our relatively lighter postscript to make up for it. Here are things we remember with fondness or disdain or both; and things we predict/hope for/dread for the coming week, or as we like to call it:

Past Tense: We're thinking about the resurfaced video of Donald Trump offering relationship advice to a young woman on The Wendy Williams Show. The lady asked him what to do about a boyfriend who was insecure about her long working hours. "I think if he has that in the back of his mind—I mean, do you love him that much?" asked the future US President, before questioning why after 12 years he was still her boyfriend. Did you imagine he had it in him to be a tough-love sleepover girlfriend? This man was born to be everything other than what he currently is.

Future Tense: Did you know Elon Musk and his coterie are also pronatalists, in that they want more reproduction in the world? Not to beat a dead horse, but we're predicting baby product stocks will go up if/when Taylor and Travis have another announcement to make.