billionaire prepping
--
The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse
(…) Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse they helped create.
(…) 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.
(…) What I came to realise was that these men are actually the losers. The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way.
(…) It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.
(…) 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. 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.
from: Douglas Rushkoff, The Survival of the Richest
