Tech thinker Douglas Rushkoff was recently invited for a very private, secluded weekend with a handful of tech billionaires to answer their questions and talk about the future. They offered him an enormous sum of money for his trouble, which he did not spurn. He was then flown first-class into the middle of nowhere, then taken three hours by limousine even deeper into the middle of nowhere, to a plush resort in the high desert where he was situated (it already being very late) in a private pavilion with its own outdoor hot tub.1
That such a lavish facility existed in such complete isolation was astonishing enough to Rushkoff, who assumed he’d been summoned to advise the group on the near-term future of technology to inform their investment plans. His next astonishment was in learning why they really wanted to talk to him.
Fetched the next morning by two men decked out in Patagonia fleece and driven to a meeting hall in a golf cart, he finally met his five billionaire hosts, who moved right past the future-of-tech presentation he’d prepared and began to inundate him with questions. At first those questions were innocuous – VR vs. AR, bitcoin vs. Ethereum, the future of quantum computing, and so on – but before long, the questions got real, and Rushkoff understood what they were actually concerned about.
What regions will be least damaged by climate change? Which threat is greater, climate change or biological warfare? How long should a shelter be completely self-sustaining? Should it have its own air supply?
Then it got really weird: ‘I will need a security force in my shelter to protect me from looters and angry mobs; how do I keep that security force loyal to me?’
Rushkoff understood. These guys were seriously preparing to ride out the end of the world, and they wanted the best advice on where to put their effort – and their money – to boost their chances of living through it.
More astonishing still, he was having this conversation with the very men who had done the most to enable the impending collapse (which they had codenamed ‘The Event’), who had designed/built/deployed the world’s disinformation infrastructure, whose digital toy factories relied on slave labor, whose political machinery was aimed squarely at shielding them from accountability.
“Taking their cue from Telsa founder Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether,” Rushkoff wrote. “Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.
“These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch. Will it be Bezos migrating to space, Thiel to his New Zealand compound, or Zuckerberg into his virtual Metaverse? And these catastrophizing billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy – the supposed champions of the survival-of-the fittest business landscape that’s fueling most of this speculation to begin with.”
Rushkoff gently pushed back, suggesting the obvious: that perhaps the best way to survive The Event was to marshal their considerable power, wealth, and resources to prevent it from happening in the first place – to develop some collective sense of social responsibility. This argument fell on deaf ears.
What he sensed among them as he listened to them, he dubbed The Mindset – “a staunchly atheistic and materialist scientism, a faith in technology to solve problems, an adherence to biases of digital code, an understanding of human relationships as market phenomena, a fear of nature and women, a need to see one’s contributions as utterly unique innovations without precedent, and an urge to neutralize the unknown by dominating and de-animating it.
“Instead of just lording over us forever, however, the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame,” he continued. “In fact, like the plot of a Marvel blockbuster, the very structure of The Mindset requires an endgame. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned. Actual, imminent catastrophes from the climate emergency to mass migrations support the mythology, offering these would-be superheroes the opportunity to play out the finale in their own lifetimes. For The Mindset also includes a faith-based Silicon Valley certainty that they can develop a technology that will somehow break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to offer them something even better than a way of saving the world: a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making.”
Moving beyond his astonishment, Rushkoff dove deeper into this wacko elite consortium by connecting with one of its enablers – J. C. Cole, a security consultant catering to rich catastrophe preppers. Cole is in the business of providing Event-proof shelters under the brand “Safe Haven”, fully-stocked and secure hideaways within three hours’ drive from New York City. He was delighted to give Rushkoff a tour of one in New Jersey, but demurred on the site in the Poconos (“The fewer people who know the locations, the better.”). His next step – American Heritage Farms – will offer developed properties for self-sufficient, post-apocalyptic homesteading, complete with livestock and the same survival amenities as the Safe Havens, for the not-unheard-of price of $3 million each.
Rushkoff discovered that Cole is not alone; he’s part of a burgeoning shadow industry catering to the uber-wealthy escape fantasists - including the Rising S Company out of Texas, which offers facilities ranging from simple 8x12 bomb shelters for $40,000 to the opulent Aristocrat luxury series, which includes pool and bowling alley, for just over $8 million.
Rushkoff’s exploration and analysis of this unhinged shadow world led him, in the end, to conclude that he was witnessing the ultimate libertarian fever dream: freedom from all accountability, responsibility, even connection to humankind, for those who could afford the fare. The Mindset, he realized, was “a way of redefining one’s sovereignty from the bottom up, being always absolutely in charge of one’s own personal allegiance, expression of values, and obligation to the law.
“It is a vision for something like a global un-conference, where each individual or family builds or buys their own high-tech floating villa or ‘nano-nation’, and then floats to whichever module cluster-nation offers the best system of government. If you stop liking the way the government is operating, you simply disconnect and propel yourself to another cluster, somewhere else in the ocean. In a free market free-for-all, startup societies will compete for inhabitants much like social networks compete for users or Burning Man camps compete for visitors. Moreover, free of national regulations, [they] will be able to develop technologies and make scientific breakthroughs impossible in countries imposing legal or moral restrictions on genetic engineering, cloning, or nanotechnology.
“Shrouded in the urgency of environmentalism and the optimism of technology innovation, self-sovereignty fantasies like this betray the underlying urge amount the techno-libertarian elite to stop submitting to congressional inquiries, anti-monopoly regulations, or regressive technophobia, and to take their ball and go play elsewhere.
“Whether on land, on sea, or in outer space, the quest for self-sovereignty is less important as an example of apocalypse preparedness than it is an expose of the underlying, Ayn Rand fantasies of the tech elite: the most rational and productive among us escape to pursue their self-interests, empowered to build an independent economy of their own, free from the moral consequences of their actions.”
It’s sobering to realize that Rushkoff’s investigation is boots-on-the-ground journalism, rather than the plot of a dark Seth Rogan comedy. The modern Top-10-of-Top-1 neoliberal really does think this way; it is, in the end, all about the most complete liberation imaginable. Not just liberation from taxes, regulation, oversight, accountability, but even law itself – liberation from having to answer to anyone. Freedom, ultimately, from humanity itself.
These are the people we gave all the money to. These are the people we’ve entrusted with building the future – people who aren’t interested in sharing even a little of that future with those of us who paid their way.
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