He paused for a minute as he stared down the drive. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? But instead of me being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, my audience was brought in to me. At least two of them were billionaires.
- U got a friend in me
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- You have got a friend in me
U Got A Friend In Me
But while a private island may be a good place to wait out a temporary plague, turning it into a self-sufficient, defensible ocean fortress is harder than it sounds. They're more for people who want to go it alone. U got a friend in me. Vertical farms with moisture sensors and computer-controlled irrigation systems look great in business plans and on the rooftops of Bay Area startups; when a palette of topsoil or a row of crops goes wrong, it can simply be pulled and replaced. Now they've reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch. It's as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.
That was really the whole point of his project – to gather a team capable of sheltering in place for a year or more, while also defending itself from those who hadn't prepared. On closer analysis, however, the probability of a fortified bunker actually protecting its occupants from the reality of, well, reality, is very slim. Should a shelter have its own air supply? They provide imitation of natural light, such as a pool with a simulated sunlit garden area, a wine vault, and other amenities to make the wealthy feel at home. I tried to reason with them. You have got a friend in me. But this doesn't seem to stop wealthy preppers from trying.
JC Cole had witnessed the fall of the Soviet empire, as well as what it took to rebuild a working society almost from scratch. You've got a friend in me nyt today. It's just that the ones that attract more attention and cash don't generally have these cooperative components. They rolled their eyes at what must have sounded to them like hippy philosophy. For one, the closed ecosystems of underground facilities are preposterously brittle. What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination?
You've Got A Friend In Me Nyt Today
For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us. These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. "It's quite accurate – the wealthy hiding in their bunkers will have a problem with their security teams… I believe you are correct with your advice to 'treat those people really well, right now', but also the concept may be expanded and I believe there is a better system that would give much better results. What, if anything, could we do to resist it? Five men sitting around a poker table, each wagering his escape plan was best? 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. This is an edited extract from Survival of the Richest by Douglas Rushkoff, published by Scribe (£20). The second one, somewhere in the Poconos, has to remain a secret. That's when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology.
What I came to realise was that these men are actually the losers. What were its main tenets? But the message that got my attention came from a former president of the American chamber of commerce in Latvia. Could it have all been some sort of game?
Nor have they ever before had the technologies through which to programme their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society. "The fewer people who know the locations, the better, " he explained, along with a link to the Twilight Zone episode in which panicked neighbours break into a family's bomb shelter during a nuclear scare. They were working out what I've come to call the insulation equation: could they earn enough money to insulate themselves from the reality they were creating by earning money in this way? Ultra-elite shelters such as the Oppidum in the Czech Republic claim to cater to the billionaire class, and pay more attention to the long-term psychological health of residents. On the way back to the main building, JC showed me the "layered security" protocols he had learned designing embassy properties: a fence, "no trespassing" signs, guard dogs, surveillance cameras … all meant to discourage violent confrontation. 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? " Was there any valid justification for striving to be so successful that they could simply leave the rest of us behind –apocalypse or not? It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Instead of just lording over us for ever, however, the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame. In fact, like the plot of a Marvel blockbuster, the very structure of The Mindset requires an endgame. The farm itself was serving as an equestrian centre and tactical training facility in addition to raising goats and chickens.
You Have Got A Friend In Me
Will it be Jeff Bezos migrating to space, Thiel to his New Zealand compound, or Mark Zuckerberg to his virtual metaverse? Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. He felt certain that the "event" – a grey swan, or predictable catastrophe triggered by our enemies, Mother Nature, or just by accident –was inevitable. JC is currently developing two farms as part of his safe haven project. Or was this really their intention all along? If they wanted to test their bunker plans, they'd have hired a security expert from Blackwater or the Pentagon. This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. As a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist.
JC is no hippy environmentalist but his business model is based in the same communitarian spirit I tried to convey to the billionaires: the way to keep the hungry hordes from storming the gates is by getting them food security now. The mindset that requires safe havens is less concerned with preventing moral dilemmas than simply keeping them out of sight. And these catastrophising billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy – the supposed champions of the survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that's fuelling most of this speculation to begin with. The "just-in-time" delivery system preferred by agricultural conglomerates renders most of the nation vulnerable to a crisis as minor as a power outage or transportation shutdown. That's why JC's real passion wasn't just to build a few isolated, militarised retreat facilities for millionaires, but to prototype locally owned sustainable farms that can be modelled by others and ultimately help restore regional food security in America. These are designed to best handle an 'event' and also benefit society as semi-organic farms. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. "Wear boots, " he said. JC invited me down to New Jersey to see the real thing. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare?
I don't usually respond to their inquiries.