Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

by Douglas Rushkoff

The leap from a Fitbit tracking one’s heart rate to an annual full-body cancer scan, or from a doorbell surveillance camera to a network of autonomous robot sentries, is really just a matter of money. We are all, to some extent, in this same game.

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That’s why the first thing wealthy preppers worry about when fantasizing doomsday bunkers is how to maintain the allegiance of the mercenaries protecting them.

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The food was already being carried through underground tunnels and up multiple stairways. The real purpose was to spare Jefferson’s dinner guests the sight of the enslaved servants huffing and puffing. The food simply appeared. No observable human suffering.

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Cherry-picking compatible ideas from science, economics, and philosophy, they have assembled a mindset that actually encourages them to build a highly technologized society capable of supporting denial at scale.

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“Anchoring bias” refers to our tendency to rely on the first information we hear.

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“The power to dominate and destroy through the sharp blade gradually supplants the view of power as the capacity to support and nurture life,” she explains. “Men with the greatest power to destroy—the physically strongest, most insensitive, most brutal—rise to the top, as everywhere the social structure becomes more hierarchic and authoritarian.” Everything changed to support the dominator mindset, until people born into this new culture assumed its rules and values as the given circumstances of nature. The Kurgan invaders were so successful, in fact, that they were eventually idealized by Nietzsche and Hitler as the only original, pure European race. It’s a dynamic we’ll see repeated a lot: a new technology emerges, someone copies the idea then uses it to colonize a market or

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The Mindset holds that if there’s enough profit to be made, someone will figure things out.

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There is no such thing as enough.

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So the very existence of inequality in an unregulated market favors those with the most wealth. That’s why they use that wealth to push for deregulation, which in turn wins them more wealth.

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The cloud doesn’t care. The teenage girl has ceased to be a girl. She has become pure, abstracted data.

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the manipulators of public opinion are the true, invisible power in any society.

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software companies are no longer programming computers; they are programming us people.

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Notifications, swipes, Likes, and “leveling up” were all developed and optimized for their ability to trigger dopamine releases on cue and foster compulsive behaviors.

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Naomi Klein told me that she screened the movie to her undergraduate students at Rutgers. Watching the Center’s leaders opine about the dangers of platforms, the students said, “They’re willing to see everything except capitalism.”

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As Peter Thiel’s philosophical guide René Girard would put it, the angry mob, whipped up into a mimetic frenzy, will eventually look for a scapegoat.

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In what might be The Mindset’s greatest crime against the human project, these totalizing solutions perpetuate the myth that only a technocratic elite can possibly fix our problems.