Дуглас Рашкофф об апокалиптическом мышлении миллиардеров и их бункерных стратегиях

I was invited to do what I thought was a talk to like bankers or something at a resort and instead of me going out on stage to do a talk they brought these five guys into the green room who started peppering me with all these questions about the digital future you know like you know Bitcoin or Ethereum and augmented reality or virtual reality I figured it was one of these things where it's just these five billionaires looking for you know investment strategies from someone who's on the ground in the cyber revolution and eventually they got around to the question of you know Alaska or New Zealand right so they wanted to know mainly how to prepare for the inevitable collapse of society and the question we spent most of the time on was how do I maintain control of my security force after the event because their money is going to be worthless and these guys will turn on them and it just struck me that here are the wealthiest and most powerful man I've ever encountered yet they feel utterly powerless to influence the digital future that the best they can do is prepare for the inevitable collapse and you know insulate themselves from the reality that they're creating by earning money in the way they're earning it and it was it was sad but it was indicative of the way these folks are thinking you know the the high-level billionaires like the the Elon Musk's and Jeff Bezos they want to get off the planet altogether really just leave us behind but the mid-level billionaires who can't afford rocket ships there want to build you know bunkers and secret communities and get robot guards and, you know, and to protect themselves from the rest of us. You know, they really think that this is where it's going, or at least they're convinced enough that they're putting in 20, 30 percent of their wealth into these survivalist scenarios. And it's just, it's a dark place for us to have gotten, you know, particularly the people who are building the technological infrastructure. Yeah. And I think your conclusion to that was, well, if you want to stop your, your kind of security force, basically mutineying, you're going to have to treat them well. Basically, the only things that actually are going to be useful in those environments are things like trust, love, care, and the soft skills, because you can't actually, the money isn't going to help. Right. And a legacy of doing that. You can't just start when they arrive. I mean, the joke was, I said, you know, if you really want, you know, you want your head of security to protect you, you know, pay for his daughter's bat mitzvah today. You know, and they all laugh because none of their heads of security are Jewish guys with, you know, daughters getting bat mitzvahs. But they understood what I meant. You know, if you've paid for someone's daughter's bat mitzvah, then when push comes to shove, it's going to be hard for them to kill you, you know, 20 years later in the shelter, because they'll think, this guy paid for my daughter's bat mitzvah. I can't just, you can't just kill them. And invite them, invite the dudes, but invite their families too, you know, so that it's a community, but then you might as well invite everybody. So instead of figuring out how to insulate yourself from the future world, what have you spent your effort figuring out how to make the world a place you don't need to insulate yourself from, you know, which is the real answer. And they should be smart enough for that. And what was the impact of that on you? Like that experience? Were you shocked or surprised by it? I was, I guess I was surprised by it because I figured if I was ever in a place with really rich people, I'd be spending the time like asking them for money to do a theater project or something or, you know, and instead I experienced them all as such kind of low level thinkers. I mean, they're smart, you know, and they could play out all of the walking dead scenarios with me, which is where they're at.

It's sort of a, um, they're all like Sim City kind of people. They all look at everything from this, uh, I don't know. It's like a, a programmer's view, a game developer's view. So they're looking at the way the game is being played and they've gotten to, to, to the idea that there's going to be a last man standing, that it's this weird poker game and that one person's going to end up winning, but be utterly alone. Um, so I guess that the thing that surprised me was, was there's sort of their inability to think in certain ways, kind of no matter what books they read or they can't think outside of this, uh, very, uh, individualist understanding of things. that I mean, maybe it's partly it's what happens when you get all this money that people treat you differently. So they are really alone and they're in the worst position possible, but I don't see why it necessarily, it has to happen that way. But yeah, I was a little sad. They just seemed really young. They seem like they had very, uh, childlike understandings of the world.