Peter Thiel: his plan to construct a bunker-type lodge in distant NZ was stymied. Carolyn Kaster/AAP
Douglas Rushkoff’s latest ebook, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, grew out of a superb 2018 Medium article of the identical title, which went viral and had individuals (aka his US editor) clamouring for a full-length therapy.
Evaluation: Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires – Douglas Rushkoff (Scribe Publications)
In each items, Rushkoff recounts being invited to talk about “the way forward for know-how”, solely to search out himself at a luxurious desert resort in an undisclosed location, chatting with a choose viewers of 5 unnamed hedge fund billionaires. Inside minutes, the dialog takes on a distinctly prepper-ish tone. One of many CEOs tells Rushkoff about his newly accomplished underground shelter, then asks, “How do I preserve authority over my safety drive after the occasion?”
Rushkoff is bemused, but in addition grimly amused by all of it. “Right here they have been, asking a Marxist media theorist for recommendation on the place and how you can configure their doomsday bunkers,” he writes. “That’s when it hit me: at the very least so far as these gents have been involved, this was a speak about the way forward for know-how.”
Learn extra:
With threats of nuclear struggle and local weather catastrophe rising, America’s ‘bunker fantasy’ is woefully insufficient
The Mindset
To this point, so head-spinningly good. Sadly, nonetheless, Rushkoff strikes away from the billionaires and their intriguingly delusional self-preservation ways, right into a realm of excessive concepts.
Over the following 12 and a half chapters, Rushkoff presents a Grand Unified Principle of tech billionaire ideology. Impressed by a 1995 article, “The Californian Ideology”, he chooses to name this “The Mindset” – a frustratingly imprecise time period that doesn’t actually make clear issues.
At occasions, “The Mindset” is roughly synonymous with the ideology of libertarianism; at others, it’s far more amorphous – referring to every part from growth-based capitalism, to colonialism, to narcissism. And as Hugo Rifkind notes in The Instances, “whereas the Mindset is attention-grabbing, it’s not almost as attention-grabbing because the bonkers escape plans to which it leads”.
For those who’re after a primer on the assorted ills of late capitalism, then strap your self in and revel in this wide-ranging, freewheeling romp by one of many US’s most entertaining digital tradition raconteurs.
His topics embody – however not should not restricted to – monopolies, financialisation, behavioural science, “scientism” (Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker et al.) and the intercourse crimes of Jeffrey Epstein. There’s the Nineteen Eighties enterprise savvy of Common Electrical CEO Jack Welch and “the Western, linear drive in direction of progress”. Our estrangement from nature. The persistence of Aristotelian plot buildings. And even “Western language methods, which are typically extra noun-based than lots of their counterparts”.
Relentless and breathless
Rushkoff is an accessible, pithy author, with no scarcity of examples, analogies and anecdotes to string collectively. That mentioned, his relentless synthesising and breathless proclamations additionally make the ebook really feel a bit shambolic, a bit over-reachy. (As an example, “The Mindset prefers straight strains, linear progress and infinite growth over the ebbs and flows in the true world.”)
That is particularly so in the event you’re looking for the what-it-says-on-the-label bits – the tech bros and their weird survival plans.
Inside seasteading – one of many ‘bonkers escape plans’ billiionaires are contemplating.
Working example: Rushkoff tells a quite-long story about arguing with Richard Dawkins about morality at a Manhattan feast within the Nineteen Nineties. Nice. He then claims that Stephen Pinker and Daniel Dennett consider “the mind is mere {hardware}” and “people are simply robots working applications”. Certain. Subsequent, he factors out that Dawkins, Pinker and Dennett have been all photographed on Jeffrey Epstein’s personal jet on their technique to a TED discuss. Guilt by affiliation fallacy, however okay. As a finale, Epstein is described as “really the mannequin, self-sovereign, transhumanist billionaire prepper”.
Right here’s the issue: whereas Jeffrey Epstein was plenty of horrible issues, he wasn’t a prepper, within the correct sense of that phrase. There’s no document of him saying he thought society was about to break down, or that he was making any just-in-case plans. Extra typically, not one of the aforementioned 4 are Silicon Valley titans, or billionaires – they’re three scientists and one multimillionaire Wall Avenue financier/paedophile. They usually’re solely tangentially related to the matter at hand.
Jeffrey Epstein’s stone mansion on Little St James Island, within the US Virgin Islands.
Gabriel Lopez Albarran/AP
Learn extra:
Learn how to survive a tactical nuclear bomb? Defence specialists clarify
Libertarian tech bros
Additionally, given how a lot different floor is roofed, it’s a little shocking that Rushkoff doesn’t title test that ur-text of cyber libertarianism, The Sovereign Particular person: Learn how to Survive and Thrive In the course of the Collapse of the Welfare State (1997), by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg.
Davidson and Rees-Mogg dream of a time when people will probably be free of the shackles of presidency, fiat foreign money (government-issued paper cash, not backed by a commodity equivalent to gold) and legislation on the whole. (William Rees-Mogg’s son, UK politician Jacob Rees-Mogg, was probably the most vocal cheerleaders for Brexit.)
On this thrilling new age, a “cognitive elite” will have the ability to rule – or ignore – the remainder of the world, as they see match. The Sovereign Particular person is a massively influential textual content within the start-up world; early Fb backer, Paypal co-founder and conservative libertarian Peter Thiel, who’s notorious in New Zealand for getting his citizenship and trying to construct luxurious bunkers within the wilderness wrote the foreword to the 2020 reprint.
Survival of the Richest incorporates a wonderful anecdote about Rushkoff being in a Zoom assembly with some tech builders on 6 January 2021, which is derailed by the breaking information of an tried coup on the Capitol constructing (in the event you assume that’s dangerous, wait until you hear how the programmers react!).
There’s this jaw-dropping factoid:
Jeff Bezos has a yacht with a helipad that serves as a companion yacht to his predominant yacht, which has giant sails that might get in the way in which of his helicopter throughout takeoff and touchdown.
There are some extraordinarily sharp reflections on synthetic intelligence:
Whether or not AI will develop human and superhuman skills within the subsequent decade, century, millennium, if ever, could matter much less proper now than AI’s grip over the tech elite, and what this obsession tells us about The Mindset.
Concerning the prospect of synthetic intelligence placing hundreds of thousands of individuals out of labor within the close to future, entrepreneurs equivalent to Reid Hoffmann (LinkedIn CEO) and Mark Cuban (startup dude, billionaire) are apprehensive that unemployed people would possibly coalesce into vengeful, billionaire-resenting mobs and assault them. Although they’re not apprehensive about ruining all these individuals’s lives within the first place.
However – and this can be a little ironic – there’s treasured little biographical element about Mark Cuban, or Reid Hoffmann, or any of the opposite bros within the ebook. Their perform is only as symbols of rapacious greed: embodiments of The Mindset. They aren’t examined as deeply flawed, however nonetheless advanced human beings.
Journalist Baz MacDonald searches for proof of the survival bunkers being shipped to New Zealand.
Learn extra:
What will we owe future generations? And what can we do to make their world a greater place?
Dismissive quite than curious
In some methods, this can be a query of technique, and entry. Whereas Rushkoff mixes in some fairly wild firm on his world talking gigs, and has serendipitous encounters with some outlandish figures, he’s not doing any journalistic or enthnographic legwork right here.
In brief: he hasn’t interviewed any of tech billionaires he writes about. He doesn’t actually know what motivates them – or at the very least, not all of it. In relation to these rich, egocentric individuals’s methods to outlive “the occasion”, Rushkoff is dismissive quite than curious. He’s adamant {that a} billionaire’s prepper scheme – any scheme – simply received’t work.
In Chapter One, he contends that “the likelihood of a fortified bunker really defending its occupants from the fact of, effectively, actuality, may be very slim”, as a result of “the closed ecosystems of underground amenities are preposterously brittle”. In case your underground hydroponic backyard is overrun by mould or micro organism, there’s no “do-over”; you’ll simply die.
Equally,
small islands are completely depending on air and sea deliveries for fundamental staples […] the billionaires who reside in such locales are extra, not much less, depending on advanced provide chains than these of us embedded in industrial civilization.
Seasteading – the libertarian concept of constructing autonomous, floating mini-states, which function outdoors of state management – is talked about, however not mentioned in any element. And the modest proposals of Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos et al. to commercialise house journey and colonise Mars are rejected with the statement “solely trillionaires will really make it to house to terraform planets, anyway”.
This could be true sufficient – nevertheless it’s additionally the ostensible topic of the ebook, and as such, maybe price spending a bit extra time on.
How Area X and NASA plan to colonise Mars.
Billionaire bunkers as metaphors
For Rushkoff, then, “the billionaire bunker technique is much less a viable technique for apocalypse than a metaphor for this disconnected lifestyle” – a canny perception, to make sure. However these bunkers aren’t solely metaphorical; they’re additionally very actual, and enormous, and costly, and interesting of their logistic intricacies and (im)prospects.
If Survival of the Richest had advised us extra about this insane infrastructure, and in regards to the individuals who dreamed it up, we would have the ability to higher perceive the unmistakably phallic spaceships as symbols, too.
Readers with particular curiosity in doomsday bunkers, and what they may signify in ideological phrases, ought to hunt down Bradley Garrett’s Bunker: Constructing for the Finish Instances (2020). Mark O’Connell writes insightfully about Peter Thiel’s New Zealand boltholes as a symptom of utmost libertarian misanthropy in Notes from an Apocalypse: A Private Journey to the Finish of the World and Again (2020).
These wishing to be taught extra private particulars in regards to the laptop nerds and enterprise captial bros who maintain such outsized sway in modern life ought to learn Max Chafkin’s 2021 biography The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Energy, or Ashlee Vance’s 2015 ebook Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Is Shaping Our Future, in addition to David Runciman and John Lanchester’s incisive essays about Thiel and Musk respectively within the London Evaluation of Books.
Or, what the hell, rewatch The Social Community.
Tom Doig doesn’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or organisation that might profit from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their educational appointment.
