From left, Oliver Daemen, Jeff Bezos ’86, founding father of Amazon and area tourism firm Blue Origin, Wally Funk, and Bezos’ brother Mark in entrance of the Blue Origin New Shepard rocket after their launch from the spaceport close to Van Horn, Texas, July 20, 2021.
Tony Gutierrez/AP
Rushkoff’s new ebook particulars how the ultra-wealthy plan to flee from the remainder of us
In 2017, Douglas Rushkoff ’83 was invited to provide a speak about “the way forward for know-how.” The writer, know-how commentator, and media theorist was an early author on the subject and would converse to teams of rich tech buyers about it. To his shock, Rushkoff discovered himself in a room with 5 billionaires and millionaires, slowly discerning what they actually needed: recommendation on surviving “the occasion,” as one among them known as it. The approaching “environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robotic hack that takes every thing down,” as Rushkoff later wrote in a viral Medium essay. To arrange, one of many males was constructing an underground bunker system and questioned how to make sure his safety personnel wouldn’t activate him.
From that encounter, Rushkoff realized that the very people who find themselves most damaging the world consider that disaster is coming — and are looking for to flee it. “Success is known as separation,” Rushkoff tells PAW, citing Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos ’86’s preoccupation with settling Mars as additional examples. “The brand new American dream is to make sufficient cash with the intention to insulate your self from the harm you’re creating by incomes cash in that manner.”
How we acquired thus far, and what we should always do about it, is the topic of Rushkoff’s latest ebook, Survival of the Richest. It interweaves critiques of know-how, capitalism, and media with humorous firsthand accounts of his interactions with the tech millionaire set — the givers of TED Talks, the buyers in and inventors of “moonshots” and “unicorns,” and the holders of what Rushkoff dubs “The Mindset.” He defines that mindset as the idea that, with sufficient cash and know-how, it’s attainable to outrun the affect of our growth when the legal guidelines of physics, economics, and morality say in any other case.
Rushkoff begins by revisiting the early days of the web, which he remembers as a free-spirited, idealistic area, and the second it grew to become co-opted by funding capital. After the ’90s dot-com crash, “cash was now not seen as a technique to fund new applied sciences; new applied sciences grew to become understood purely as methods of creating quick cash — so long as you would get out in time,” he writes.
From right here, he zooms again to the bigger historical past of centralized foreign money and the age-old follow of creating wealth from interest-bearing loans. The underlying math of monopolistic enterprise incentivizes corporations to continue to grow till they turn out to be forces for ailing, wiping out current native industries, concentrating energy away from staff, and extracting all they’ll. He attracts a line between the genocidal and colonialist growth of the primary mega-corporations, just like the British and Dutch East India corporations, and the world-dominating mindset of at this time’s tech entrepreneurs. Then as now, “financiers making loans solely profit from massive new initiatives requiring huge quantities of capital.”
What’s totally different now, nevertheless, are the brand new heights of abstracted financialization the web permits (Rushkoff calls it “going meta”). Within the outdated economic system, there was a restrict to how far issues might scale; “manufacturing hits the laborious limits of human labor and bodily matter itself,” Rushkoff writes. “The digital realm appeared to resolve this Industrial Age downside by transcending the legal guidelines of physics.”
The result’s web sites like eBay or Google that earn money from the actions of their customers fairly than promoting merchandise of their very own; platforms like Kayak that combination information from different websites (which might be themselves aggregators); and social media corporations that flip their very own customers into each product and labor pressure, promoting their knowledge to market researchers. Monetary abstractions like derivatives and mortgage-backed securities ushered within the 2008 monetary disaster; at this time, buyers have leveled as much as new scalable abstractions like cryptocurrency and NFTs.
Rushkoff, who teaches digital economics lessons at CUNY, additionally interrogates the empirical and data-oriented considering of the tech world, which he sees as “capitalism’s crucial to render every thing into an appropriate type for {the marketplace}.” Underneath this mindset, something that can not be simply quantified (“the squishy stuff”) will get discarded.
Luckily, not each tech billionaire desires to depart humanity behind. However even those that need to keep and assist are hobbled by “The Mindset,” Rushkoff says. The result’s that the options they espouse are equally totalizing and top-down — and thus, inherently dangerous. From biohacking to area colonization to common fundamental revenue, “technosolutions are too generally knowledgeable by the values inherent in know-how itself: exponential development, automation over human intervention, ahead momentum, platformization, and a disregard for current situations on the bottom,” he writes. They contain throwing extra technological innovation on the very issues attributable to know-how, or insisting that it’s attainable to have it each methods.
For instance, Rushkoff cites the continued push for wide-sweeping, all-at-once funding in photo voltaic vitality, when the metals mining and big quantities of water required to make the panels might be simply as dangerous to the Earth. Changing issues slowly as they put on out is healthier for the planet than fully leveling an outdated system and changing it with a brand new one — however buyers don’t earn money that manner. Rushkoff writes about assembly a celebrated entrepreneur who desires to construct a self-sustaining eco-village — and clear a swath of forest to take action. At a gathering of tech elites aimed toward fixing world issues, Rushkoff tells them about current organizations already doing the issues they’re proposing. Tellingly, any individual replies, “In the event that they’re so good, why haven’t I heard of them?”
“These totalizing options perpetuate the parable that solely a technocratic elite can probably repair our issues” whereas diverting funding to long-shot “boondoggles,” Rushkoff writes. However all they accomplish is making the rich even wealthier.
The options to our woes are modest, incremental, and collectivist, Rushkoff believes — the antithesis to “The Mindset.” “Folks hate to listen to this,” he says, “however I’m arguing for degrowth.” As he writes, “Repairing what we now have, scaling again, and even looking for incremental progress doesn’t make for an thrilling podcast, on-line panel, or TED Discuss. However neither does it require huge capital funding, gross sales speeches, or ‘buy-in.’”
On the particular person stage, degrowth means assembly one’s neighbors, partaking in mutual help and different neighborhood efforts, touring much less, shopping for native, changing issues slowly as they put on out, and supporting co-ops. It means a round economic system that doesn’t rely on development. When Rushkoff mentioned this to these 5 uber-wealthy males, “they rolled their eyes.” However nonetheless, he urges the rich to embrace, not escape, humanity. He concludes, “Both all of us make it, or none of us makes it.”
