Douglas Rushkoff – Survival of the Richest
Douglas Rushkoff wrote his book “Survival of the Richest” back in 2022. The book has just been published in German, and we are taking the opportunity to revisit our article on it from 2022. Now that the power of the super-rich has grown even further, it is more relevant than ever.
How the super-rich want to protect themselves – from us
The warnings of climate collapse are becoming ever more urgent. How can we understand that we continue to read, hear and understand the warnings – and yet carry on as before? In the film “Don’t look up”, it is not the climate crisis but a comet that is threatening humanity – the viewer learns that there are only a few months left until the comet hits. But the news prompts neither politicians nor the public to act. What follows in the film is a biting, satirical look at strategies of repression and denial. A symbol of these strategies is already contained in the title “Don’t look up”: When the threat becomes more real, when the comet is already so close that it can be seen with a telescope and soon after with the naked eye – then simply don’t look up.
In reality, we are in a similar situation. The “scientists’ warning to humanity” is being repeated at ever shorter intervals: At the end of 1992, this warning began with the words: “Humans and the natural world are on a collision course.”
By November 2017, 15,364 scientists had already signed up to this warning. The third warning of the climate emergency followed in November 2019. In 2021, this was updated: Critical elements of the Earth system are approaching or have already exceeded the tipping point. Fundamental system changes are required. The immediate, drastic reduction of greenhouse gases – especially methane – must be prioritized. Of 31 “planetary vital signs”, 18 have reached record levels (as of 2022).
The 1.5 degree target of the Paris Agreement has now been exceeded.
There are people who have fully understood the danger of collapse. And prepare themself: The super-rich. Those who are contributing most to the climate catastrophe. According to Oxfam, the richest 1% of the world’s population have consumed more than twice as much CO2 over the past 25 years as the poorest 50% – that’s 3.1 billion people. And as inequality continues to rise, these disproportionate impacts will also increase.
The super-rich are expecting social collapse
How the “preppers” among them think, how they imagine the apocalypse, and, above all, how they plan to survive it, is shown in the Guardian article by Douglas Rushkoff in September 2022. Rushkoff describes himself as a “humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives,” and as such he is sometimes asked to write by the tech elite. The blurb for “Survival of the Richest”: “The super-rich have a plan to survive the apocalypse: they want to leave us all behind.”
How to survive “the event”
What Rushkoff describes is strikingly similar to the science fiction satire “Don’t look up,” but it is real: Five mysterious billionaires have had Douglas Rushkoff chauffeured to a desert resort for a private conversation. The topic? How to survive “the event,” the social catastrophe they know is coming. Rushkoff describes the “mindset” of these men: The Silicon Valley-style certainty that they can break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to escape a self-inflicted catastrophe—as long as they have enough money and the right technology to do so. This mindset is evident in missions to Mars, island bunkers, and the metaverse. And in the questions Rushkoff is asked by the men—at least two of whom are billionaires: “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”, wrote Rushkoff, “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”.”
A car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust
“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.”
“(…) 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.”
Rushkoff describes very vividly that there has long been a lucrative “apocalypse business.” And there is something quirky about the facilities that most billionaires – or more accurately, would-be billionaires – invest in:
“A company called Vivos is selling luxury underground apartments in converted cold war munitions storage facilities, missile silos, and other fortified locations around the world. Like miniature Club Med resorts, they offer private suites for individuals or families, and larger common areas with pools, games, movies and dining. Ultra-elite shelters such as the Oppidum in the Czech Republic claim to cater to the billionaire class, and pay more attention to the long-term psychological health of residents. They provide imitation of natural light, such as a pool with a simulated sunlit garden area, a wine vault, and other amenities to make the wealthy feel at home.”
“On closer analysis, however, the probability of a fortified bunker actually protecting its occupants from the reality of, well, reality, is very slim. For one, the closed ecosystems of underground facilities are preposterously brittle. For example, an indoor, sealed hydroponic garden is vulnerable to contamination. Vertical farms with moisture sensors and computer-controlled irrigation systems look great in business plans and on the rooftops of Bay Area startups; when a palette of topsoil or a row of crops goes wrong, it can simply be pulled and replaced. The hermetically sealed apocalypse “grow room” doesn’t allow for such do-overs.”
“Just the known unknowns are enough to dash any reasonable hope of survival. But this doesn’t seem to stop wealthy preppers from trying.”
Rushkoff’s descriptions are both disturbing and enlightening – the idea of the super-rich being able to isolate themselves from the reality they have created themselves, the idea of simply leaving the rest of humanity behind, the fantasies of omnipotence and immortality, all of this is more of a childish, fantastic megalomania, of extreme immaturity and the inability to understand the world they want to escape from.
In the film “Don’t look up”, Peter Isherwell is the CEO of a large technology company who is also less interested in humanity than in the comet’s limited resources on Earth. Isherwell is a little reminiscent of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, of Jeff Bezos as well as Richard Branson and Peter Thiel. At the end of the film, he and other super-rich people make a run for it, escaping into one of the cryogenic chambers of the spaceship with which the group is trying to reach a planet with an atmosphere similar to Earth to start anew there – something that Bezos and Musk also dream of. In the film, at least, these dreams are shattered in a brilliant, bitter ending – for everyone.
Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires