medium.com
>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?
>For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future.
>The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.
>This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from 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.
>That’s when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a 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 really about just one thing: escape.
Welcome to Libertarian Hellworld
humans are a problem, but they can be improved via sperm donation eugenics. these billionaires could pay people to have smart kids. That would change the future.
>When the hedge funders asked me the best way to maintain authority over their security forces after “the event,” I suggested that their best bet would be to treat those people really well, right now. They should be engaging with their security staffs as if they were members of their own family. And the more they can expand this ethos of inclusivity to the rest of their business practices, supply chain management, sustainability efforts, and wealth distribution, the less chance there will be of an “event” in the first place. All this technological wizardry could be applied toward less romantic but entirely more collective interests right now.
>They were amused by my optimism, but they didn’t really buy it. They were not interested in how to avoid a calamity; they’re convinced we are too far gone. For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future. They are simply accepting the darkest of all scenarios and then bringing whatever money and technology they can employ to insulate themselves—especially if they can’t get a seat on the rocket to Mars.
>Luckily, those of us without the funding to consider disowning our own humanity have much better options available to us. We don’t have to use technology in such antisocial, atomizing ways. We can become the individual consumers and profiles that our devices and platforms want us to be, or we can remember that the truly evolved human doesn’t go it alone.
>Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It’s a team sport. Whatever future humans have, it will be together.
Funny thing is, those rich bunkercunts are the likeliest cause of the "Event" they fear so much. The rest of us should start mapping where they're building these bunkers, and becoming familiar with the operation of earth-moving equipment, so we can dig the fuckers out like the fat little grubs they are and roast them over a pit
There was a guy doing that in the 1990s, he set up a sperm bank that accepted only donations from scientific noble prize winners and stringently screened the applicant couple to make sure they had intelligence, degrees, and wealth
But the way to change the future is stop hoping/planning for the hellworld and work together instead of maximising wealth as an individual consumer
There are examples of this
The recovered factory movement in Argentina
The Mondragon co-operative conglomerate in Spain
Yes their business model is about breaking society down into atomized individual isolated cut off consumers
Holy cringola
>But the way to change the future is stop hoping/planning for the hellworld and work together instead of maximising wealth as an individual consumer
That sounds nice and all, but I really pine for a taste of crackling banker flesh in the ruins of tomorrow, cooked until golden brown
I'll even share some with their security detail
You will never be able to change the world in such a way that self-interest is not a huge guiding force. You can only try to direct it.
There is self interest in working together
There is self interest in building a public transit system
There is self interest in implementing a national healthcare service
The problem we have is the self interest of an elite few who have accumulated vast wealth
Which then warps the system to their own needs above all else
And it is through the market violating government intervention they lecture the rest of us about, the whole tech boom is subsidised by the government funding R&D for years and decades.