So much of our attention is focused on meaningless bullshit like celebrities or random geopolitical squabbling overseas while in the real world, billionaires are preparing for a global collapse of civilization and are trying to figure out whether they can keep control of their security forces with shock collars or if using robot slaves would be better.
Taken from Douglas Rushkoff's piece, How tech's richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse:
Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk – about half my annual professor’s salary – all to deliver some insight on the subject of “the future of technology”.
I’ve never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential investments: blockchain, 3D printing, Crispr. The audiences are rarely interested in learning about these technologies or their potential impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. But money talks, so I took the gig.
After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys – yes, all men – from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own.
They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.
Which region will be less affected by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? 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?”
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 ageing 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.
They keep putting carbon in the atmosphere to maintain their obscene levels of wealth, knowing full well it will destroy human civilization on this planet. We are ruled by actual psychopaths.
Read the IPCC reports. We are headed for 3 or 4 degrees of warming by 2050. The USA spends 6 times as much on policing as we do on climate change adaptation and mitigation. With more warming comes more extreme weather, failing crops, supply chain disruptions, refugee flows, which leads to social strife, dictatorship and so on and so on.
Long story short is We are royally FUCKED* and nobody seems to acknowledge this in their day-to-day life. We get up, shit, brush our teeth, force feed, go to work for wages that pay for less and less of what we need every year as "once-in-a-century" climate disasters seem to be popping up every year. Just look at the heat dome over the Pacific Northwest this summer that killed hundreds of people. Before that weekend, the highest recorded temperature in Portland was 107 F. After, it was 112. An 80 year record. This wasn't supposed to be possible under the old climate system. Fully **half of all human CO2 emissions have been put out since 1990. 80% since the end of the Second World War. We have drastically altered the composition of our atmosphere in the span of a single human life.
The sky in my California town is orange because of the smoke from the Dixie fire. They can't put it out, they're just waiting for rain in the fall. This doesn't even begin to touch on how much of the global south will become uninhabitable leading to massive refugee flows. Hundreds of millions of people are going to flee their homes for cooler climates. Imagine the social strife that will cause. The disruption to the economy as food becomes scarce as crops dry up. And all our elites can think about is funding their security forces to kill the poors when they riot. The scientists who study this for a living tell us we'll be at that point in a matter of years, not decades at this point.
I'm not sure where I was going with this post but I think I'll leave you with this: I want you to think about the reality of your own death. Not as some kind of abstract concept like "I will die someday" but rather "My job could cease to exist and I may be forced to live with the gutter people in a camp somewhere, fighting armed riot cops for my daily survival." kind of death. In some parts of the world, this is already their reality. It could will happen here. I just want you to take it in and think about it a little. All the excesses of the last 60 years of industrialization aren't free. The last time there was this much carbon in the atmosphere, sea levels were 60 feet higher. Just reflect on that a little bit tonight.
Thanks for listening to my rant and take care of yourself and your loved ones.
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