Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

by Douglas Rushkoff

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.

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.

We are not products of these platforms so much as the labor force. We dutifully read, click, post, and retweet; we become enraged, scandalized, and indignant; and we go on to complain, attack, or cancel. That’s work. The beneficiaries are the shareholders. For what Silicon Valley really chose to learn from the AOL debacle is that the true product of any of these companies is the stock.

The capacity that digital companies have for abstracted, exponential growth has allowed them to amass political and economic power unheard of even in the time of the Gilded Age robber barons.

Numerous studies have concluded that economic elites now enjoy substantially more impact on government policy, while “citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

the experience of wealth and power is akin to removing the part of the brain “critical to empathy and socially appropriate behavior.”

As NYU business professor Scott Galloway has explained, “we’ve decided that capitalism means being loving and empathetic to corporations, and Darwinistic and harsh towards individuals.”

Those who have made it there through questionable means do not want to look back at the devastation they left in their path. They need an exit strategy, and may prefer to imagine a future where they are forced to isolate themselves from those they have exploited. Then they won’t have to feel any guilt, shame, or fear of retribution.

As Leary the psychologist saw it, the boys building our digital future were developing technology to simulate the ideal woman—the one their mothers could never be. Unlike the human mother who failed them, a predictive algorithm could anticipate their every need in advance and deliver it directly, removing every trace of friction and longing.

When the tech fetishist’s childlike hope for a digital womb combines with the billionaire’s faith in a winner-takes-all competitive marketplace, look out. It results in a brand of activist futurism that sees the present—our reality, including us—as an impediment to their vision of what could and what should be.

In order to remove evidence of suffering laborers, tech companies poison them further.

The problems inherent in violent, extractive, growth-based capitalism are not mitigated, but rendered as invisible as the fingerprints of the poisoned workers assembling our cell phones.

Aristotle described it, Shakespeare perfected it, and Hollywood turned it into a formula.

Rising action, climax, sleep. Like a male orgasm curve.

“It’s cultural propaganda,” Bernie concluded. “Create a problem in the first act, and then solve it the last. Whatever your solution—war, love, god, honor—that’s the value the audience learns.”

the very existence of inequality in an unregulated market favors those with the most wealth.

Social justice infractions are easier to prosecute in a digital media environment, where everyone’s offhand statements from a decade or two ago are indelibly recorded and retrievable for later inspection. But the perfect memory of these platforms also makes it harder for people to endorse progress—especially if new rules may recast once “acceptable” behavior in a new light. Doing the right thing or using appropriate language with regard to race, gender, or sexuality today could very easily be considered wrong tomorrow. That’s the nature of progress, yet it’s incompatible in a world where everything is recorded and every recording is prosecutable.

“If you are in a job where you have to think, you need to start paying attention because I guarantee you, your employer is trying to figure out ways to use technology and neural networks to do a lot of thinking that employees are currently doing.”

The principles for building a more circular economy that isn’t dependent on growth are straightforward. Keep resources and revenue recirculating through the community, and accessible to the working class. Leverage the power of mutual aid to lift up one member of the community at a time, each according to their need. Maintain independence from big employers and disinterested investors by owning businesses cooperatively with other workers.

We can actually do less, consume less, and travel less—and make ourselves happier and less stressed in the process. Buy local, engage in mutual aid, and support cooperatives. Use monopoly law to break up anticompetitive behemoths, environmental regulation to limit waste, and organized labor to promote the rights of gig workers. Reverse tax policy so that those receiving passive capital gains on their wealth pay higher rates than those actively working for their income.

everything down here on the ground could be just fine if we weren’t burdened with satisfying the needs of the abstracted map we created to represent our world for the benefit of the obscenely wealthy.