Survival of the Richest, by Douglas Rushkoff (W.W. Norton, 212 pages)
Five years ago, Douglas Rushkoff was offered a large sum of money (half of what he makes each year as a professor) to give a speech at a secluded resort somewhere in the West. He arrived expecting his audience to be “a hundred or so investment bankers” who wanted to hear his thoughts on the future of technology. Instead, he had an audience of five hedge-fund billionaires, and they were only peripherally interested in technology. What they really wanted to talk about was how they can better survive the coming apocalypse.
Writing about this experience in 2018 on Medium, Rushkoff said that the billionaire preppers didn’t have a particular apocalypse in mind, just a general collapse of the world as we know it, which they called “the event.” “That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.”
The men were already building their apocalypse-proof compounds, but needed guidance on how to protect themselves from people: not only the mobs who would want to get in, but the security forces they’ve already hired and have on standby at this very moment. How do they keep their post-apocalypse employees from turning on them? How will they deal with the uncomfortable moral dilemma of shutting doomed people out?
It’s a safe bet that Rushkoff hasn’t been invited back for a follow-up session, as he takes a dim view of the billionaires’ worldview and suggests that some of their business practices are what make an apocalypse possible in the first place. He expounds on that criticism in Survival of the Richest, the book-length expansion of that initial Medium essay. It’s a relatively short but compelling look inside the apocalypse industrial complex, even if it does make your bug-out bag look woefully insufficient and the billionaires look morally bankrupt. (For the record, he’s not talking Musk and Bezos billionaires, but “low-level” billionaires, meaning they’re probably guys we wouldn’t have heard of even if Rushkoff had named them.)
There are, living among us, people whose everyday lives are all about imminent annihilation — not for them maybe, but for the rest of us. In New York, for example, there’s a venture called American Heritage Farms that is designed as communities where people can thrive after a grid collapse. In Texas, a company called Rising S is selling luxury underground bunkers in which people who can afford the $8.3 million can ride out a nuclear strike with their own underground pool and bowling setup. And perhaps weirdest of all, there’s an entire “aquapreneur” subset of billionaire preppers who are planning a Waterworld-type escape by living on their own seagoing city-states. “Why fear rising oceans if you’re already living on the ocean?” Rushkoff asks.
Rushkoff, who is a professor of media theory and digital economics at Queens/City College of New York, explains his theory of how the billionaire prepper mindset evolved contrary to the promise of the internet, which was supposed to unite humanity. Instead, he argues, it created the techno-bubble that drove us further apart, not only in terms of income inequality but also in how we see the world and our place in it. The billionaires, he says, see themselves as uniquely valuable, which forms the moral basis for their plans for self-preservation. “The would-be architects of the human future treat the civic sector as antagonistic to their grand designs. They believe they can do it better,” Rushkoff writes. As an example, he devotes one chapter to the “Great Reset” promoted by World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab, who promotes sweeping technological changes such as biometrics, mass surveillance and geoengineering in order to repair the sins of capitalism. Some of our political and technological overlords, he argues, are not only preparing for doomsday but actively trying to bring it on.
Despite the grand talk of building a better world with or without a life-as-we-know-it-altering event, Rushkoff says the billionaires see the rest of us as “little more than iron filings flying back and forth between the magnetic poles set up by the rich and powerful.”
But he doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook. All of us suffer to some degree from the apocalypse-now mindset. “We either mirror the mindset or rebel in a way that reaffirms it,” Rushkoff writes.
It’s only in the last pages that he offers hope: “We are not yet over the cliff. We still have choices,” he writes, then throws out a few pages of suggestions, many of which seem to have nothing to do with the various doomsday scenarios at the fore of the conversation today. (It’s hard to see how “buy local” and “promote the rights of gig workers” relate to Vladimir Putin launching nukes at Ukraine.) But he has a powerful message in his indictment of the billionaires whose strategy for armageddon is leaving the rest of us behind. “Our nervous systems do not operate independently but in concert with other nervous systems around us. It’s as if we share one collective nervous system. Our physical and mental health is contingent on nurturing those connections. Leaving others behind is futile and stupid.”
It’s a bit of a kumbaya ending to a generally incisive book. More hopeful is a quote he includes from an interview with aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta, who said, “Apocalypses are never just complete extinction, you know. My people have been through heaps of apocalypses and they’re quite survivable, as long as you’re still following the patterns of the land and the patterns of creation. As long as you’re in touch and moving with the landscape.” So even if you can’t afford an underground bunker, there’s hope. B+
— Jennifer Graham
