Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

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.

In their race to grow exponentially forever, the markets had “gone meta” one time too many. No matter how many digital signifiers we employ to represent its value, the real world just doesn’t scale forever.

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 e

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.

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.

Behavioral economics is really just a euphemism for marketing psychology, from an even more programmatic perspective.

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

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

By divorcing itself from meaning systems (especially the ones from which it emerged), science made itself particularly vulnerable to forces that sought to leverage it for domination and extraction.