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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, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequences
As a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist. The people most interested in hiring me for my opinions about technology are usually less concerned with building tools that help people live better lives in the present than they are in identifying the Next Big Thing through which to dominate them in the future. I don't usually respond to their inquiries. Why help these guys ruin what's left of the internet, much less civilisation?
Still, sometimes a combination of morbid curiosity and cold hard cash is enough to get me on a stage in front of the tech elite, where I try to talk some sense into them about how their businesses are affecting our lives out here in the real world. That's how I found myself accepting an invitation to address a group mysteriously described as "ultra-wealthy stakeholders", out in the middle of the desert.
A limo was waiting for me at the airport. As the sun began to dip over the horizon, I realised I had been in the car for three hours. What sort of wealthy hedge-fund types would drive this far from the airport for a conference? Then I saw it. On a parallel path next to the highway, as if racing against us, a small jet was coming in for a landing on a private airfield. Of course.
The next morning, two men in matching Patagonia fleeces came for me in a golf cart and conveyed me through rocks and underbrush to a meeting hall. They left me to drink coffee and prepare in what I figured was serving as my green room. But instead of me being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, my audience was brought in to me. They sat around the table and introduced themselves: five super-wealthy guys – yes, all men – from the upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge-fund world. At least two of them were billionaires. After a bit of small talk, I realised they had no interest in the speech I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come to ask questions.
They started out innocuously and predictably enough. Bitcoin or ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality? Who will get quantum computing first, China or Google? Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: "How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?" The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?
The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed "in time".
I tried to reason with them. I made pro-social arguments for partnership and solidarity as the best approaches to our collective, long-term challenges. The way to get your guards to exhibit loyalty in the future was to treat them like friends right now, I explained. Don't just invest in ammo and electric fences, invest in people and relationships. They rolled their eyes at what must have sounded to them like hippy philosophy.
This was probably the wealthiest, most powerful group I had ever encountered. Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. That's when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology.
Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonising Mars, Palantir's Peter Thiel reversing the ageing 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. 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 Jeff Bezos migrating to space, Thiel to his New Zealand compound, or Mark Zuckerberg to his virtual metaverse? And these catastrophising billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy – the supposed champions of the survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that's fuelling most of this speculation to begin with.
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.
Yet this Silicon Valley escapism – let's call it The Mindset – encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind.
Never before have our society's most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unliveable for everyone else. Nor have they ever before had the technologies through which to programme their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society. The landscape is alive with algorithms and intelligences actively encouraging these selfish and isolationist outlooks. Those sociopathic enough to embrace them are rewarded with cash and control over the rest of us. It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop. This is new.
Amplified by digital technologies and the unprecedented wealth disparity they afford, The Mindset allows for the easy externalisation of harm to others, and inspires a corresponding longing for transcendence and separation from the people and places that have been abused.
Instead of just lording over us for ever, however, the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame. 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.
By the time I boarded my return flight to New York, my mind was reeling with the implications of The Mindset. What were its main tenets? Who were its true believers? What, if anything, could we do to resist it? Before I had even landed, I posted an article about my strange encounter – to surprising effect.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 12 2022, @05:37PM (5 children)
It will kill us all.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday September 12 2022, @05:50PM (2 children)
Not all of us: only those stupids who never have enough money and are willing to do ANYTHING (even kill the Earth) for more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more....
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 12 2022, @06:26PM (1 child)
Unfortunately, it looks like those "stupids" who never have enough money are going to take all the rest of us along for their insane joy ride to the destruction of the Earth.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Monday September 12 2022, @06:43PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday September 12 2022, @06:35PM
That would be the humane way to do it!
So clearly, long and torturous is the way we'll go!
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday September 13 2022, @02:13AM
AGreed.
Humanity failed.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Monday September 12 2022, @06:36PM (1 child)
Well, maybe not Rupert Murdoch, or George Soros. Feed them to the dogs. Problem partially solved.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Funny) by acid andy on Tuesday September 13 2022, @02:19AM
No, that's animal cruelty!
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by khallow on Monday September 12 2022, @09:57PM (30 children)
That beats some of the rich of history. And by history, I mean those rich people not constrained in their ambitions by "perversely limited rules". If you look at a Crassus [wikipedia.org] or a Neville [wikipedia.org], they were only stopped when they crossed other powerful people. A few rich people sulking in bunkers is vastly better.
If we look at history, the genuine most powerful players (not his audience BTW) would be holding on tooth and nail, actively making the situation worse. The bunker mentality, described in this story, is an implicit acknowledgement that these rich guys don't perceive themselves as the most powerful players.
Once again, we see the paradox of our society managing its rich and ambitious people better than ever before, but this is treated as some sort of failing because the author found rich people with the wrong attitudes.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2022, @01:52AM (22 children)
FTFY
By the proliferation in numbers of these kind of people and their impact on other people and environment, I can't agree "managing" can be associated with the "keeping them under control and reducing the harm to others". Once again, you're undertaking an exercise in stretching semantics to the breaking point.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday September 13 2022, @04:29AM (21 children)
Let's break that down a bit. First, does this alleged proliferation actually exist? Sure, it's reasonable to expect that if the overall population increases, then so would the subpopulation of people afflicted with this particular mental illness.
But I think there's a bunch of metrics that show negative impact of such are on the decline - such as a reduction in corporal punishment and child abuse in the developed world, substantial improvement in pollution and workplace safety in the developed world, and a net decline in loss of life from warfare globally. That indicates whatever impact/harm is happening, it is being successfully contained as advertised.
Moving on, one of the tools for reducing the harm from such is competition. In a competitive society, you should expect to see more sociopathic rich people, because the fewer there are, the more concentrated the power is. That is more dangerous than raw numbers or raw wealth.
In this story we also see the cognitive dissonance of the author. He quails at the power these people supposedly have while simultaneously wondering at the constraints he really doesn't understand. Would someone truly as powerful as these people are alleged to be prepare a bolt hole rather than some more far reaching plan? There's a gap between the alleged power and the prepper schemes. It's just a slick narrative.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2022, @09:51AM (20 children)
What is less advertised is the impact the developed world has on environment and the life of the under-developed one.
Top 5 countries with the highest total ecological deficits (in gha) [worldpopulationreview.com]" China (which exports to all the developed countries, allowing them to save the eco-footprint), USA, India, South Korea and Japan.
Unsustained assertion.
Not quite. I have to admit those are among the dumb sociopaths preppring in bunkers. The clever ones moved into countries with chances to remain stable
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-valley-billionaires-are-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-in-new-zealand [theguardian.com]
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/money/2022/05/number-of-wealthy-investors-interested-in-buying-golden-passports-to-new-zealand-skyrockets.html [newshub.co.nz]
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/06/google-billionaire-larry-page-has-granted-new-zealand-residency.html [cnbc.com]
Others dream to not die at landing on Mars
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday September 13 2022, @12:00PM (19 children)
Also less advertised is that this is the era of the greatest improvement [soylentnews.org] in the human condition ever. It comes at a price.
If you unsustainably assert so. The two examples of massively wealthy bastards from the past got that way by using the power of the state to steal. The prepper batch above had some sort of exchange of value for wealth.
They are running rather than fighting whether clever or stupid. That indicates they don't agree with the assessment that they're the most powerful around.
And I think the great irony here is that this sort of narrative puts the wealthy on a pedestal. Their power is greatly exaggerated, both the power of wealth and the power of magic sociopath/psychopath cooties.
I think the real difference between you and those prepper billionaires is that they have more money.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2022, @02:12PM (1 child)
Slash eyes rolling
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday September 13 2022, @05:23PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2022, @07:17PM (16 children)
You cannot be a billionaire without being a sociopath, and you cannot acquire such wealth without using the power of the state to help you steal it. It is undeniable (though you will try), and just plain impossible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2022, @10:41PM (3 children)
The sociopath is the guy on TV telling you he beat inflation as the Dow plunges 1250 points due to inflation.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 14 2022, @01:38AM (2 children)
Why is that a sociopath? Maybe he did beat inflation - there are various tricks for doing that. And inflation-based plunging of stock markets is just an indication that the advice might be timely.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2022, @03:54PM (1 child)
Printing money and calling it an "inflation reduction act" is not a trick to reduce inflation. This is the sociopath, lying to your face about a $1.6 Trillion pratfall and getting away with it. CPI being artificially depressed by drawing down on the strategic oil reserve is also not beating inflation. Delaware is where the sociopath receives visitors without an entry in WH visitor logs. The pity-playing sociopath frequently has or will cure [dailymail.co.uk] cancer so long as it can successfully extract resources from you. An ammonia shortage or rail and port strike initiated by the PEB will not reduce inflation but watch them try and claim credit for fixing a problem they created.
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Wednesday September 14 2022, @10:24PM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 14 2022, @12:57AM (11 children)
Except of course, when you can. Not much point to making assertions you can't back up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2022, @07:35AM (1 child)
But you can't, it's just not possible, simple as that. You will never prove otherwise
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 14 2022, @12:02PM
Such as that infamous sociopath, Paul McCartney [wealthygorilla.com]? Using the power of the state to steal from screaming teenagers!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2022, @07:57AM (6 children)
Khallow is going to be a valet to one of the richies, and once inside the survival bunker, blast doors sealed, harem of nubile young women along for the money, and no effective supervision or possible consequences. This was the main problem they seemed to have: how do you ensure the loyalty of your ex-Navy porpoises when money is no longer worth anything, and khallow has already selected the best body types? It's a quadrary. Shows signs of two-dimensional (Khann!!!!!!), or male adolescent thinking.
.
.
But imagine khallow's surprise, when he realizes the nubile females were only bait for what they were actually interested in. Just think of the money, khallow! Keep thinking of the money!
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Wednesday September 14 2022, @12:44PM (5 children)
I think what's particularly silly are the fantasy narratives explaining why I defend common sense economics. Clearly, I'm aiming to be on the 'A' ark with all the richies because that's what posting on SN does for you!
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday September 14 2022, @08:45PM (4 children)
What was it that Albert Einstein said about common sense?
He had something insightful to say about World War III too.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 14 2022, @10:30PM (3 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 15 2022, @05:25PM (2 children)
Hahahahahahahahahahahhahahahaha
You numbskull!!
Common sense? Is that why we had to create the EPA to stop the COMMON SENSE dumping of hazardous chemicals? The runaway growth models that have encouraged mass pollution of our atmosphere, water, and arable land? Hopefully we're evolving as a society to stop listening to over inflated egos that only learned how to bluster their way through.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 15 2022, @07:05PM (1 child)
I could be reading too much into this, but it doesn't sound to me like you think that is COMMON SENSE. My take is that common sense has some decent solutions to externalities already.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2022, @06:48AM
NEVER argue economics with khallow. The boy has an idea fixe that comes from VonMises radical libertarian cult thinking, and you will not be able to make a dent in it, no matter how much reason and logic you use. So just pat him on the head, and say, "Good khallow! Nice khallow! Fluffy khallow!" while slowly backing away. Trying to engage in a useful debate will only cause more barking.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2022, @11:24AM (1 child)
The problem is that a large portion of billionaire wealth comes from rent-seeking, which contributes no economic value. A 2016 report found that 74% of billionaire wealth in the United States comes from rent-seeking behavior. Shouldn't billionaires have to earn their money by contributing something of value? That is, after all, what everyone else is expected to do.
Wealth obtained from rent-seeking behavior is unearned, but it constitutes the majority of billionaire wealth in the United States. That is a big problem.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 14 2022, @12:38PM
Oh look, another crap paper [oxfam.org] from Oxfam! The deep flaw in the paper is that it treats a lot of stuff as if it were rent-seeking: such as information asymmetry, network externalities, inheritance, and globalism. Basically, anything that isn't directly the fault of the billionaire - like picking a market with a huge opportunity.
When you screw up that definition so badly, it's no wonder that the author found so much rent-seeking. One wonders how it fell short so much at a mere 74%!
And of course, right under the title of that paper is a typical Oxfam garbage statistic: "The 85 richest people own as much as the 3.5 billion poorest people." What's missed in this is that someone without a cent to their name and no income is worth about as much as 2-2.5 billion of those people (~30% of Earth's population [observer.com] is roughly the breakeven point). If you have net debt, you're considered to be negative wealth, even if you earn enough to pay that off in a few years.
You first have to understand what "something of value" is before being able to answer that question. For example, I asked this question a few years ago:
Is "creating tens of millions of man-years of high paying work, a company worth half a trillion dollars, and some of the most widely used software on the planet for the past three decades" something of value?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2022, @01:42AM (4 children)
Those prepper billionairs are bound to be looking for second, third, etc., sources, not willing to trust the opinions of the author of tfa. When they come snooping around SN looking for an oracle/futurist/consultant, I nominate khallow as our representative.
All in favor?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 14 2022, @12:46PM (3 children)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2022, @05:08PM (2 children)
Yes billionaires are sociopaths unless they do some good work with their money. Investing back into planet destroying consumerism does not count.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 14 2022, @10:32PM (1 child)
Even the James Bond villains routinely did good work with their money.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday September 16 2022, @01:43AM
Which means some of them are less sociopathic than real-world billionaires.
I don't know what's funnier, that you tend not to make the point you think you're making with your posts, or that you're too much of a dead-eyed psychopath to understand why this is so.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday September 14 2022, @01:21PM (1 child)
Please Note, by the majority of the world's population. Even the "poor people" in places like the USA/Canada/UK/Most of the EU are considered rich.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 15 2022, @05:28PM
Yet many less devoped countries have better healthcare and food than poor people in the US. Your argument is frequently used but just bad, having a TV and smartphone does not make someone rich, just more bead and circuses with you as the frontman.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2022, @03:09AM (3 children)
Attack on Carnegie Mellon professor over criticism of British imperialism [wsws.org]
#FreeAnya
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2022, @05:20AM (2 children)
For Bezos, there are several things. One is never being able to be a royal, no matter how much money he makes. Second, no one will really celebrate his death, as the funeral announcements were ordered through Amazon. Third, exploding penis rockets. Making the world a better place? Bezos is such a looser!
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 13 2022, @11:02AM (1 child)
Could be worse: just imagine Bezos being a tighter (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2022, @07:49PM
Perhaps I have already said too much.
For all insects and porpoises, #Freearistarchus!!!!
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday September 14 2022, @02:33PM
Now, just add mad-scientist like experimentation. At least one eccentric billionaire doing his own thing that at least partially works, and Aliens (from outerspace). Then, you've got some of the major plot points for the Fallout series.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Touché) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday September 16 2022, @01:42AM
Except it's the size of the whole planet.
Personally, I say let them attempt to escape to Mars. Without a spacesuit.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...