My new book Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, is available for pre-order!
We always knew but now we *know*. The tech elite mean to leave us all behind.
The Mindset holds that if they have enough money and the right technology, these men can break the laws of physics and morality to escape a disaster of their own making: a future that has less to do with making the world a better place than transcending the human condition.
These billionaires once showered the world with optimistic plans for how tech might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced progress to a game one wins by finding the escape hatch. Will it be Bezos migrating to space, Thiel to his NZ compound, or Zuckerberg to his Metaverse?
This “out of sight, out of mind” externalization of poverty and poison trickles down through the Mindest to the rest of us; but the collateral damage doesn’t go away just because we’ve covered our eyes with VR goggles. The longer we ignore the social, economic, and environmental repercussions of our actions, the more of a problem they become. This, in turn, motivates even more withdrawal, isolationism and apocalyptic fantasy.
Those of us who recognize that we’ve been here before are the ones who have to call attention to where we are heading. Today, that means acting as a counterculture to The Mindset, introducing circularity where they see only arrows, and more thoughtful, long-term thinking when they can only strive for escape. We still have choices.
Mine, was to chronicle my experiences with the tech elite over the years, and call out the ways in which our dreams for a better future too often involved externalizing harm to others, or ignoring today’s impacts for tomorrow’s promised gains. Just the announcement of this book has already led to the cancellation of two speaking events by sponsors who fear being associated with a critique of runaway exponential capitalism (which is what many of them are still trying to sell as a desired and attainable outcome). I take this as a good sign.
Yes, I’d love you to support this book by pre-ordering it or (better yet) asking your library to carry it. It’s being published by an employee-owned company, and in as friendly a fashion as possible. But more importantly, I’m hoping you’ll read it by any means necessary, and join me and others in imagining a better path forward.
We do not have to buy-in to the apocalypse for which these billionaires are actively preparing and, in some cases, they are intentionally accelerating. There’s no way out, except together.
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| wwnorton.com |
The tech elite have a plan to survive the apocalypse: they want to leave us all behind., Survival of the Richest, Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, Douglas Rushkoff, 9780393881066
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