There are any quantity of occasions that might set off a worldwide apocalypse: local weather change, a virus, nuclear conflict, an asteroid, the rise of synthetic intelligence. Would anybody have the ability to survive? A bunch of elitist know-how billionaires have critically contemplated this very query, spending an amazing deal of money and time to plan how they alone may outlive this inevitable catastrophic occasion, leaving the relaxation of us in the mud.
In Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, professor of media principle and digital economics Douglas Rushkoff (Team Human) explains how this evacuation plan got here to be and what it means for the future. When Rushkoff was invited to an unique desert resort for what he thought was a speech on the future of know-how, he was shocked to search out that his viewers was simply 5 tremendous rich males “from the upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge fund world.” As it turned out, they’d summoned him to select his mind about how greatest to insulate themselves from “the very real and present danger” of a mass extinction, even asking him whether or not New Zealand or Alaska can be rendered much less uninhabitable by the coming local weather disaster.
Each chapter of Survival of the Richest focuses on a special side of how these tech billionaires have gotten to this place in our society and the origins of their entitled approach of pondering. Rushkoff calls this Silicon Valley escapism “The Mindset,” a body of thoughts that “encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind.” He skillfully makes use of his in depth background in media principle to clarify The Mindset in such clear phrases, it’s scary. For instance, he proposes that The Mindset permits for the simple externalization of hurt to others: Its very construction requires an endgame, with a transparent winner and loser, by which the winners are the ones who’ve discovered “a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making.”
Of course the irony in all of that is that “these people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society,” Rushkoff writes. “Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch.” Numbing and mind-blowing in equal measure, Survival of the Richest is a real story that appears straight out of a science fiction story.
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