Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

In other words, 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.

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.

What the technologists working at the very heart of the world’s biggest tech companies realize, however, is just how disempowering such individuation can be.

Until now, the mere effort of striving and forward motion has been enough to help many of the world’s most aggressive conquerors and capitalists avoid the negative effects of their own activities.

It’s not a matter of banishing linearity and progress altogether, but rather integrating it within the greater cycles that define our existence. Not a line or a circle, but a spiral, with history never quite repeating but almost always rhyming as it moves forward through time.

For our purposes here, objectifying “things”—whether for scientific identification, economic ownership, or social control—decontextualizes them from the systems of which they are a part.

The billionaire bunker is less a viable strategy for apocalypse than a metaphor for this disconnected approach to life. The lifestyle it suggests bears more resemblance to a private, defended fortress than a welcoming oasis, because even the billionaires are aware that they’ve been sustaining their businesses and lifestyles on borrowed time and bor

The Mindset is incapable of such observations. It depends on a Western, empirical approach to science that breaks everything down into parts rather than emphasizing the connections and interactions between all these things.

As the underlying logic, technology, messaging, and remote control of The Mindset is palpable everywhere—school, work, healthcare, warfare, the environment—it’s no wonder so many people are frightened and angry. But instead of pushing for an alternative to the dehumanized, misogynist, antisocial, and catastrophic biases of The Mindset, the resistan