Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

There lies the most fundamental problem with Mindset-derived solutions: they only move in one direction.

The rhetoric of Silicon Valley—whether in the pitch decks of young developers, the talks by TED speakers, or the Joe Rogan interviews with tech billionaires—always bears the same hallmarks as these business plans. Progress. The future. Optimism. Transformation. Winning. But usually these are just euphemisms for conquest, colonization, domination, a

Under scientism, humans are just robots running programs—either the ones dictated by our genes, or destructive pathogens like spirituality. However, by refusing to understand how meaning-making is a subtle community project related to the ways we live together, this orthodox scientism denies any scheme of things where human agency—hand in hand with

Yes, nature is in trouble, but The Mindset’s approach to addressing this collective crisis is always to do something. Fix it. Hack it. Reboot it. Develop it. Scale it. Automate it. As if doing less, or even doing nothing, were not an option.

At some point, manufacturing hits the hard limits of human labor and physical matter itself.

Too many of today’s technological processes stem from this same urge to distance consumers from the reality of labor.

We conform to the reward structure of the technological environment in which we live, always making more accommodations to whichever operating system our technologies—and the billionaires behind them—demand of us.

However we may slice it, The Mindset favors the extraordinary achievements of wealthy individuals using technology to set themselves apart from the common folk, control the natural environment, and overcome the cycles of life.

The problem is, the very technologies we use to connect under these conditions also undermine our empathy for those outside our Covid bubbles.

From my perspective, this wasn’t the beginning of the Internet Revolution, but the end. We were starting to care less about how this technology could augment humanity and more about how it could bolster a flagging stock exchange.