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Yet this Silicon Valley escapism – let's call it The Mindset – encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind. The farm itself was serving as an equestrian centre and tactical training facility in addition to raising goats and chickens. This is an edited extract from Survival of the Richest by Douglas Rushkoff, published by Scribe (£20). Was there any valid justification for striving to be so successful that they could simply leave the rest of us behind –apocalypse or not? He paused, and sighed, "I don't want to be in that moral dilemma. 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. The next morning, two men in matching Patagonia fleeces came for me in a golf cart and conveyed me through rocks and underbrush to a meeting hall. You've got a friend in me net.org. So far, JC Cole has been unable to convince anyone to invest in American Heritage Farms.
These are designed to best handle an 'event' and also benefit society as semi-organic farms. The enterprise originally catered to families seeking temporary storm shelters, before it went into the long-term apocalypse business. 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. U got a friend in me. If they wanted to test their bunker plans, they'd have hired a security expert from Blackwater or the Pentagon. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? They had come to ask questions.
JC Cole had witnessed the fall of the Soviet empire, as well as what it took to rebuild a working society almost from scratch. Surely the billionaires who brought me out for advice on their exit strategies were aware of these limitations. Virtual reality or augmented reality? They started out innocuously and predictably enough. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down. Meanwhile, the centralisation of the agricultural industry has left most farms utterly dependent on the same long supply chains as urban consumers. 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. You got a friend in me song. The way to get your guards to exhibit loyalty in the future was to treat them like friends right now, I explained. But if they were in it just for fun, they wouldn't have called for me. What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader? Prospective clients were even asking about whether there was enough land to do some agriculture in addition to installing a helicopter landing pad. What sort of wealthy hedge-fund types would drive this far from the airport for a conference? JC is currently developing two farms as part of his safe haven project.
Nor have they ever before had the technologies through which to programme their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply. What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? What were its main tenets? Just the known unknowns are enough to dash any reasonable hope of survival.
They would have flown out the author of a zombie apocalypse comic book. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? If/when the supply chain breaks, the people will have no food delivered. 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 knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. Like miniature Club Med resorts, they offer private suites for individuals or families, and larger common areas with pools, games, movies and dining.
"Honestly, I am less concerned about gangs with guns than the woman at the end of the driveway holding a baby and asking for food. " Who will get quantum computing first, China or Google? It only got worse from there. After a bit of small talk, I realised they had no interest in the speech I had prepared about the future of technology.
They sat around the table and introduced themselves: five super-wealthy guys – yes, all men – from the upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge-fund world. In fact, like the plot of a Marvel blockbuster, the very structure of The Mindset requires an endgame. How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? He felt certain that the "event" – a grey swan, or predictable catastrophe triggered by our enemies, Mother Nature, or just by accident –was inevitable. Their language went far beyond questions of disaster preparedness and verged on politics and philosophy: words such as individuality, sovereignty, governance and autonomy. Five men sitting around a poker table, each wagering his escape plan was best?
Or was this really their intention all along? "The only way to protect your family is with a group, " he said. JC was also hoping to train young farmers in sustainable agriculture, and to secure at least one doctor and dentist for each location. I heard from a real estate agent who specialises in disaster-proof listings, a company taking reservations for its third underground dwellings project, and a security firm offering various forms of "risk management". Solar panels and water filtration equipment need to be replaced and serviced at regular intervals. 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.
"Most egg farmers can't even raise chickens, " JC explained as he showed me his henhouses. Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonising Mars, Palantir's Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. I tried to reason with them. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed "in time". When it comes to a shortage of food it will be vicious. 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 company logo, complete with three crucifixes, suggests their services are geared more toward Christian evangelist preppers in red-state America than billionaire tech bros playing out sci-fi scenarios. As the sun began to dip over the horizon, I realised I had been in the car for three hours.
The hermetically sealed apocalypse "grow room" doesn't allow for such do-overs. "The ground is still wet. " I asked him about various combat scenarios. Bitcoin or ethereum? "Wear boots, " he said.
What, if anything, could we do to resist it? Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? As a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist. So for $3m, investors not only get a maximum security compound in which to ride out the coming plague, solar storm, or electric grid collapse. Many of those seriously seeking a safe haven simply hire one of several prepper construction companies to bury a prefab steel-lined bunker somewhere on one of their existing properties. "By coincidence, " he explained, "I am setting up a series of safe haven farms in the NYC area. JC showed me how to hold and shoot a Glock at a series of outdoor targets shaped like bad guys, while he grumbled about the way Senator Dianne Feinstein had limited the number of rounds one could legally fit in a magazine for the handgun.
This was probably the wealthiest, most powerful group I had ever encountered. "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. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where "winning" means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. Instead of just lording over us for ever, however, the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame. It's just that the ones that attract more attention and cash don't generally have these cooperative components. 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? " They seemed to want something more. 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. There's something much more whimsical about the facilities in which most of the billionaires – or, more accurately, aspiring billionaires – actually invest. 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. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned. They also get a stake in a potentially profitable network of local farm franchises that could reduce the probability of a catastrophic event in the first place. They left me to drink coffee and prepare in what I figured was serving as my green room.
Actual, imminent catastrophes from the climate emergency to mass migrations support the mythology, offering these would-be superheroes the opportunity to play out the finale in their own lifetimes. Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us. 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. I made pro-social arguments for partnership and solidarity as the best approaches to our collective, long-term challenges. Here was a prepper with security clearance, field experience and food sustainability expertise.