Lady Gaga's frankenskin startup has military links — and the fan outrage to match

In 2010, Lady Gaga arrived at the MTV Video Music Awards draped in 50 pounds of flank steak. The world gasped, and the vegans wept. The rest of us assumed we had hit peak absurdity. We were wrong.

Sixteen years later, her tech-billionaire fiancé, Michael Polansky, decided the singer’s meat-centric aesthetic lacked a vital component: actual human tissue.

Their explicit goal is to fundamentally redesign the human condition.

Outer Bio, which Polansky co-founded, uses foreskins and discarded post-surgical skin to train machine-learning algorithms and develop new cosmetic ingredients. When the internet caught wind of this rather odd model, the backlash was immediate. Discontented Redditors raged, focusing heavily on Polansky's connection to Lightspeed Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that opened its first international office in Tel Aviv, to embed deeply within Israel's booming and sophisticated cybersecurity and intelligence industry. One particularly outraged comment has since been removed; the outrage one imagines still lingers.

But financial backing misses the true horror. What matters more than profit is the philosophy driving the San Francisco startup. Silicon Valley exhausted its supply of digital text, public images, and behavioral metadata. The tech industry now craves fresh meat.

This trajectory relies on a culture paralyzed by the prospect of aging. The anti-aging market is now worth more than $77 billion. By 2035, it will be worth almost twice that amount. Some 60% of Americans now regularly purchase anti-aging products.

RELATED: This scandal-rocked tech company wants your attention on its product upgrades

Getty Images

The cultural pipeline moves with frightening momentum. A 30-something patient starts with Botox to freeze a forehead furrow. That gateway drug leads directly to synthetic facial fillers. Then comes the heroin-chic look of Ozempic face, followed by invasive surgical facelifts, daily regimens of questionable supplements, expensive longevity clinics, and finally, skin creams designed by AI. Outer Bio plans to license these algorithmic discoveries directly to beauty conglomerates and pharmaceutical giants, effectively turning the pursuit of youth into a high-margin supply chain.

We built the digital world to make human labor easier. The engineering class shifted the goalposts somewhere along the line. Technologists no longer limit themselves to writing software that calculates tax returns or routes delivery trucks. Their explicit goal is to fundamentally redesign the human condition.

Artificial intelligence operates far beyond the simple automation of workplace tasks. Silicon Valley sells a future where computational power extends life spans, modifies genetic code, replaces natural organ functions, and engineers customized medicines. Polansky’s company presents itself as a benign skin-care startup, but the underlying mechanics represent an opening salvo for transhumanism.

Productizing human flesh

The process at work is a closed feedback loop. An algorithm predicts how specific chemical compounds will interact with skin tissue. Lab technicians test those predictions on discarded human cells grown in dishes. The biological results feed straight back into the computational model, refining the next run of predictions. The machine learns by experimenting on actual human material rather than lab rats.

Medical research has historically relied on animal models to test chemicals and treatments. The scientific establishment increasingly seeks to replace mice with human-derived biological material. This is troubling. A culture that views the human body as just another biological input loses the ability to define why human life holds unique value.

Consider the life cycle of a discarded surgical flap. A patient leaves a hospital operating room after a routine procedure, unaware that the facility owns his excised tissue. A biotech firm collects the discarded skin. An AI system parses the cellular data. The startup develops a patented cosmetic molecule. A multinational beauty corporation buys the license and sells a $500 jar of face cream back to the aging public.

The patient whose body provided the initial cellular material receives nothing. Corporate entities claim absolute ownership over the biological information extracted from us. The human body becomes raw material, refined by machines and packaged for the very people who supplied the biomass in the first place.

It sounds absurd, largely because it is. Yet this is the future that awaits us.

A devil's bargain?

To be fair, there are potential benefits. Research using human cells could lead to better drugs and new treatments and therapies for diseases that remain difficult or impossible to treat. If technology can create something that improves or even saves a life, it is hardly a development worth rejecting outright.

But my concern lies elsewhere, specifically in treating the body as a leasehold property rather than a sacred vessel. Technologists view natural biological decline as an engineering flaw to be corrected in the next software update. They see the body as a collection of components to be optimized, with nonstop AI tuning and synthetic “upgrades.”

We are watching the line between the organic and the artificial disappear. Silicon Valley built an empire by converting human attention into digital ad revenue. The next phase of commercial growth converts physical biology into proprietary intellectual property. The human body becomes just another cog in the corporate machine. In 2010, the vegans wept. Today, perhaps, we should all shed a tear.