Douglas Rushkoff’s latest book titled Survival of the richest: escaping the fantasies of tech billionairesgrew out of a superb 2018 Average article of the same title, which went viral and had people (i.e. its US editor) clamoring for a full-length treatment.
In each articles, Rushkoff mentions that he was invited to speak on the “future of technology” after which found himself at a luxury desert resort at an undisclosed location, where he spoke to a select audience of five anonymous hedge fund billionaires. Within minutes, the conversation takes on a distinctly prepper tone. One CEO tells Rushkoff about his newly accomplished underground shelter after which asks, “How do you maintain authority over security forces after an incident?”
Rushkoff is bewildered by all this, but in addition darkly amused. “Here they were asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to set up their doomsday bunkers,” he writes. “Then it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a conversation about the future of technology.”
A way of pondering
So far, so good, it makes my head spin. Unfortunately, nevertheless, Rushkoff moves away from billionaires and their intriguingly deceptive self-preservation tactics into the land of noble ideas.
Over the next 12 and a half chapters, Rushkoff presents the Grand Unified Theory of tech billionaire ideology. Inspired by the 1995 article “California ideology”, decides to call it “mindset” – a frustratingly vague term that doesn’t really explain things.
Sometimes “Mindset” is roughly synonymous with the ideology of libertarianism; in others it’s way more amorphous – referring to the whole lot from growth-based capitalism to colonialism to narcissism. And as Hugo Rifkind notes Times“while the line of thinking is interesting, it is not as interesting as the madmen’s escape plans to which it leads.”
If you are in search of a primer on the various ills of late capitalism, buckle up and revel in the wide-ranging, free-form fun of one of America’s funniest storytellers of digital culture.
His topics include monopolies, financialization, behavioral science, “scientism” (Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker et al.) and the sexual crimes of Jeffrey Epstein. There’s the Eighties business acumen of General Electric CEO Jack Welch and the “Western, linear pursuit of progress.” Our separation from nature. The durability of Aristotelian plot structures. Or even “Western language systems that rely more heavily on nouns than many of their counterparts.”
Merciless and breathless
Rushkoff is an accessible, concise author with no shortage of examples, analogies, and anecdotes to string together. That said, his constant synthesizing and breathless proclamations make the book feel a bit disjointed, a bit over the top. (For example, “The mindset prefers straight lines, linear progression, and infinite expansion to the ebb and flow of the real world.”)
This is very true if you happen to’re in search of what it says on the label – tech bros and their weird survival plans.
Example: Rushkoff tells a moderately long story about arguing with Richard Dawkins about morality at a celebration in Manhattan in the Nineties. Great. He then claims that Stephen Pinker and Daniel Dennett they consider that “the brain is just hardware” and “people are just robots running programs.” Bright. He then points out that Dawkins, Pinker and Dennett were photographed on Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet on their way to a TED talk. Guilt due to an association error, but OK. In the end, Epstein is described as “a truly exemplary, sovereign, transhumanist billionaire prepper.”
Here’s the problem: While Jeffrey Epstein had many terrible traits, he was not a prepper in the proper sense of the word. There isn’t any record of him saying he thought society would collapse or making any immediate plans. More generally, none of the above-mentioned 4 is a Silicon Valley titan or a billionaire – they’re three scientists and one multimillionaire Wall Street financier/pedophile. And they’re only tangentially related to the case at hand.
Gabriel Lopez Albarran/AP
Libertarian tech brothers
Also, considering what number of other areas are covered, it’s just a little surprising that Rushkoff doesn’t mention this ur-text of cyberlibertarianism, The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State (1997), by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg.
Davidson and Rees-Mogg dream of a time when individuals will probably be free of the shackles of government, fiat currency (government-issued paper money, not backed by a commodity equivalent to gold) and the law typically. (William Rees-Mogg’s son, British politician Jacob Rees-Mogg, was one of the loudest cheerleaders for Brexit.)
In this exciting latest era, the “cognitive elite” will have the option to rule – or ignore – the rest of the world as they see fit. “Sovereign Individual” is a particularly influential text in the startup world; early supporter of Facebook, co-founder of Paypal, and conservative libertarian Peter Thielwho’s infamous in New Zealand for purchasing citizenship and attempting to construct luxury bunkers in the desert, he wrote the foreword for the 2020 reprint.
Survival of the Richest includes a superb anecdote about Rushkoff being on a Zoom meeting with some tech founders on January 6, 2021, which was derailed by the breaking news of an attempted coup in the Capitol constructing (if you happen to’re pondering incorrect, wait until you hear , how programmers react!).
There is that this shocking fact:
Jeff Bezos has a helipad yacht that serves as a companion yacht to his predominant yacht, which has large sails that might get in the way of his helicopter during takeoff and landing.
There are some extremely sharp reflections on artificial intelligence:
Whether AI develops human and superhuman abilities in the next decade, century, millennium, if in any respect, may matter less now than AI’s grip on the tech elite and what that obsession tells us about mindset.
When it comes to the prospect of artificial intelligence putting tens of millions of people out of work in the near future, entrepreneurs like Reid Hoffmann (CEO of LinkedIn) and Mark Cuban (billionaire startup guy) fear that the unemployed could coalesce right into a vindictive mob resenting billionaires and attack them. Although they aren’t in any respect anxious about ruining all these people’s lives.
But – and it is a bit ironic – there could be very little biographical detail in the book about Mark Cuban, Reid Hoffmann, or any of the other homies. Their function is only a logo of predatory greed: the embodiment of Attitude. They aren’t regarded as deeply flawed but nonetheless complex human beings.
More dismissive than curious
In a way, it’s a matter of method and access. Although Rushkoff mingles with some pretty crazy crowds during his global live shows and has unexpected encounters with quirky characters, he isn’t doing any journalistic or ennographic work here.
Long story short: he hasn’t interviewed any of the tech billionaires he writes about. He doesn’t really know what motivates them – or not less than not the whole lot. When it comes to these wealthy, selfish people’s strategies to survive “the event,” Rushkoff is dismissive moderately than curious. He is adamant that the billionaire’s plan – any plan – simply won’t work.
In Chapter One, he states that “the likelihood of a fortified bunker actually protecting its inhabitants from the reality of, well, reality is very slim” because “closed ecosystems of underground facilities are absurdly fragile.” If mold or bacteria appear in your underground hydroponic garden, there isn’t a way out; you will just die.
Similarly,
small islands are completely depending on air and sea deliveries of essential items […] billionaires living in such locations are more, not less, depending on complex supply chains than those of us embedded in industrial civilization.
Seasteading – the libertarian idea of constructing autonomous, floating mini-states that operate outside state control – is mentioned but not discussed intimately. And the modest proposals of Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos et al. commercialization of space travel and the colonization of Mars, is dismissed with the remark that “only trillionaires will actually reach space to terraform planets anyway.”
This could also be true – but it is usually an ostensible theme of the book, and as such perhaps it’s value spending just a little more time on.
Billionaires’ bunkers as metaphors
So for Rushkoff, “the billionaire bunker strategy is not so much a viable strategy for the apocalypse as it is a metaphor for this disconnected way of life” – which is actually a shrewd remark. But these bunkers aren’t metaphorical; also they are very real, large, expensive and engaging of their logistical complexities and (im)possibilities.
If Survival of the Richest told us more about this crazy infrastructure and the individuals who invented it, we could higher understand undoubtedly phallic spaceships also as symbols.
Readers particularly excited by doomsday bunkers and what they might represent in ideological terms should take a look at Bradley Garrett’s book. Bunker: A constructing for the end times (2020). Mark O’Connell writes insightfully about Peter Thiel’s New Zealand safehouses as a manifestation of extreme libertarian misanthropy in Notes from the Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back (2020).
Those who want to know more personal details about the computer geeks and enterprise capital bros who hold a lot power in modern life should read Max Chafkin’s 2021 biography. Contrarian: Peter Thiel and the Quest for Power in Silicon Valleyor Ashlee Vance’s 2015 book Elon Musk: How the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is shaping our futurein addition to insightful essays on the topic by David Runciman and John Lanchester Thiel AND Musk in the London Review of Books, respectively.
Or, hell, watch it again Social network.
