If an international armageddon genuinely befalls us, will the extremely abundant have the ability to ride it out, thanks to their cash and tech? That may not be something that the majority of us question every day, however it’s a subject that Dougle Rushkoff has actually reviewed thoroughly.
” Their strategies are simply outrageous! They’re absurd! All of them,” he informs PopSci
For the unaware, it’s tough to overemphasize how prominent Douglas Rushkoff is when it pertains to digital culture’s bleeding edge. Increasing to prominence as a cyberpunk leader theorist who assisted promote the early 90’s rave scene, Rushkoff has actually palled around with the similarity Timothy Leary, Grant Morrison, and William Gibson. He properly anticipated both the dotcom and real estate market collapses, in addition to the created expressions “social currency,” “digital local,” and “viral media.” He worked together with the late Genesis P-Orridge within the famous speculative music supergroup, Psychic television, and authored a little library’s worth of books, tech writings, comics, digital manifestos, documentaries, and spiritual expeditions. MIT when ranked him among the “21 Most Influential Thinkers” alive, and he presently acts as a Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY Queens.
[Related: Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter (again).]
So when Rushkoff states billionaire tech brothers’ strategies to make it through the possibly upcoming End Times are all ridiculous, you most likely wish to keep in mind.
Rushkoff shakes his head and smiles over video chat while remembering the circumstances drifted to him back in 2017, when 5 billionaires flew him to a swank desert retreat for what he thought to be a visitor speaking engagement. “Money talks, therefore do I, [especially] if it assists money my crazy-ass, Marxist, anarcho-syndicalist, psychedelic-inspired writing,” he states.
Rushkoff’s resumé frequently gets him identified a futurist, something he rejects. “Anybody who discusses innovation is extremely frequently incorrect for being a futurist. [People] believe it’s the exact same thing,” he states. “I’m a ‘presentist.’ I take a look at conditions on the ground and how things are, and I get hired extremely frequently by tech individuals– or, typically, tech financiers– who would like to know what’s coming.”
Hence, his invite to the desert. As soon as there, nevertheless, things rapidly went downhill.
” Instead of taking me out onto a phase, they brought these 5 men into the green space, and sat us around a little table,” he keeps in mind. “They began asking me where to position their bets: Bitcoin or Ethereum? Virtual truth or enhanced truth? And after that, lastly, Alaska or New Zealand?”
[Related: Real-life climate disasters are mirroring doomsday myths.]
Rushkoff recognized then why he was really welcomed: To assist his thoughtful hosts get ready for the coming Event– that feared civilizational turning point when things get much even worse for the majority of us. Things like storm rises, wildfires, another pandemic, social discontent. Choose; we’ll all catch it while the worthiest (read: most affluent) wait everything out in their comfortable tech wombs– or so they obviously believe.
” Once it’s decreasing, you step on other individuals’s heads to leave the sinking boat,” he states.
His latest book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, utilizes his unfortunate desert jaunt as a springboard to dive into the myriad plans created by the uber-wealthy males set on leaving any collapsing ecological and social communities of their own making. Be it submitting your awareness into the Cloud, colonizing Mars, or pulling away to your extremely own personal, swank tropical paradise end ofthe world bunker, the expected visioneers of tomorrow are racing to recognize their futureproof catastrophe readiness strategies prior to it’s far too late.
” I began to compose a major, frightening book, and after that it simply ended up being … more of a black funny when I understood, ‘Oh my God. These men are absurd,” he states. “I wished to inform stories about these men that make them smaller sized, so that we do not decrease that course,” Rushkoff states.
In truth, high-end escape shelters are such a hot market that there now exists a whole (really rewarding) market committed