Source: Cohen L (2018) A Survival Condo in a Missile Silo? It’s a Thing. Zillow

Preface. There are many reasons why people might want a bunker, but peak oil, peak food, peak everything for that matter were not mentioned in Rushkoff’s “Survival of the Richest” or the articles below. When billionaires and millionaires emerge they’ll have no skills to survive. You can’t run from the “end of the world” to a bunker or anywhere else. A bunker will just be a very fancy tombstone or place for the locals to look for food and other goodies when they run out.

My architect friends are all talking about the $1.5 trillion Neom projects in Saudi Arabia, and recommended this 13 minute video on youtube: Saudi Arabia FINALLY Reveals NEOM’s 10 New Regions!  Nine of them look like billionaire bunkers for Saudi royalty to me. For the ordinary people, “The Line” is being built, the best-known and largest project within the Neom development; a city for nine million people that will stretch 170 kilometers (106 mi) across the north of the country. The entire city will be contained within two parallel, 500-meter-high (1640 ft), linear skyscrapers standing 200 meters /650 ft apart that will be clad with mirrored facades. To read about all 10, see “All 10 regions that will make up Neom now revealed“. 

Architects think of it as a moral and ecological atrocity, an amazing absurdity, megalomanic vision, a dystopian nightmare and over-the-top vanity project, a dystopian nightmare. Surely they will cook to death in the tall glass buildings when the A/C goes out due to lack of fossil fuels and the elevators will stop working (see Skyscrapers: A bad idea as energy declines). The glass will be scoured so they can’t see out, and much more damage than that (sandstorm articles 1, 2, and 3).

Bunker photos: Bendix, A. 2019. 45 unreal photos of ‘billionaire bunkers’ that could shelter the superrich during an apocalypse. businessinsider.com

And more from the terravivos.com website “The Backup Plan For Humanity. Secure your space in a Vivos underground shelter to survive virtually any catastrophe“. 

Below are my kindle notes from “Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires” by Douglas Rushkoff. It was very disappointing, because it said very little about this and was mostly a rant about techno billionaires as if they were a new kind of capitalist, with “A Mindset” when they’re no different.  And very little about what they’re up to, what they’re thinking is the catastrophe to run away from and so on.  I know that Peter Thiel hung out with some postcarbon folks and very much understands peak oil and what that implies, that’s his reason for getting a bunker in New Zealand.  Which my friends there laugh about, they know exactly where to go when they get hungry…  Rushkoff is right that the way to get through the bottleneck is cooperation with others, not hiding away in a cave.

Related articles

2023 Mark Zuckerberg’s Hawaii Compound Includes Secret Bunker, 11 Treehouses.

Mr Zuckerberg’s compound consists of approximately 12 structures, encompassing guest houses and facilities related to agriculture and ranching. Ko’olau Ranch is on the island of Kauai about 9 miles east of Princeville. The 1,400-acre property comes with a 6-foot stone wall. Cumulatively, these buildings are designed to accommodate “at least 30 bedrooms and 30 bathrooms. The primary residential components are two mansions, purportedly equipped with opulent features like a gym, pools, sauna, hot tub, cold plunge, and tennis court. However, the most intriguing aspect of the residence may lie beneath the surface. According to Wired, the architectural plans indicate that the two primary residences “will be connected by a tunnel that leads to a 5,000-square-foot underground shelter.” This bunker is said to include living spaces, areas for mechanical equipment, and an escape hatch. The entrance to the shelter is described as similar to those found in bomb shelters, reinforced with concrete. Sources shared with the publication that the entire compound is designed for self-sufficiency, featuring an 18-foot-tall water tank and pump system, along with extensive food production capabilities already established on the property.

2022 ten minute video on Netflix: Love, Death, and Robots. Three Robots: exit strategies. 

And also my 6 book reviews of Graff, G.M. 2018. Raven Rock. The Story of the U.S. Governments Secret Plan to Save Itself–While the Rest of Us Die 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.  Top U.S. leaders will be sheltered in underground mountains to carry on democracy after nuclear war destroys the planet.

This giant sailing yacht sounds better than a bunker, 20 years or more of food on board, no problem when there’s no fuel, and escape possible far from marauders: 2021 First Look at Jeff Bezos’ New Toy: Record-Breaking Oceanco Sailing Yacht Y721 Launched. The $500 million superyacht will come with a series of world records, including the title of the world’s largest sailing yacht

Reilly 2020 Inside the luxury nuclear bunker protecting the mega-rich from the apocalypse. A volcanic-ash scrubber, a decontamination room, a waterslide — when it comes to surviving a nuclear apocalypse, the Survival Condo has everything you could need, at a price.

2020 A Million People Live in These Underground Nuclear Bunkers. In the late ’60s and ‘70s, anticipating the devastation of a Cold War-nuclear fallout, Chairman Mao directed Chinese cities to construct apartments with bomb shelters capable of withstanding the blast of a nuclear bomb. In Beijing alone, roughly 10,000 bunkers were promptly constructed. But when China opened its door to the broader world in the early ’80s, Beijing’s defense department seized the opportunity to lease the shelters to private landlords, eager to profit from converting the erstwhile fallout hideaways into tiny residential units. Now when night falls, more than a million people—mostly migrant workers and students from rural areas—vanish from Beijing’s bustling streets into the underground universe, little known to the world above.

2019 Hunting the One Percent’s Doomsday Bunkers in New Zealand (video)

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

They sat around the table and introduced themselves: five super-wealthy guys— all men—from the upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge fund world. At least two of them were billionaires.

They started out innocuously and predictably enough.

• Bitcoin or Ethereum?
• Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska?
• Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis?
• Which was the greater threat: climate change or biological warfare?
• How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help?
• Should a shelter have its own air supply?
• What is the likelihood of groundwater contamination?
• 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?

That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.

They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy SEALs to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually 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.

I tried to reason with them. I made pro-social arguments for partnership and solidarity as the best approaches to our collective, long-term challenges. The way to get your guards to exhibit loyalty in the future is to treat them like friends right now, I explained. Don’t just invest in ammo and electric fences, invest in people and relationships. They rolled their eyes at what must have sounded to them like hippie philosophy.

Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the 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 about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.

Before I had even landed, I posted an article about my strange encounter—to surprising effect. Almost immediately, I began receiving inquiries from businesses catering to the billionaire prepper, all hoping I would make some introductions on their behalf to the five men I had written about. I heard from a real estate agent who specializes in disaster-proof listings, a company taking reservations for its third underground dwellings project, and a security firm offering various forms of “risk management.

But the message that got my attention came from a former president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Latvia. J. C. Cole had witnessed the fall of the Soviet empire as well as what it took to rebuild a working society almost from scratch. He had also served as landlord for the American and European Union embassies, and learned a whole lot about security systems and evacuation plans. “You certainly stirred up a bee’s nest,” he began his first email to me. “I find it 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.

preparing for calamity requires us to take the very same measures as trying to prevent one. “I am setting up a series of Safe Haven Farms in the NYC area. These are designed to best handle an ‘event’ and also benefit society as semi-organic farms. Both within three hours’ drive from the City—close enough to get there when it happens. 

Here was a prepper with security clearance, field experience, and food sustainability expertise. He believed the best way to cope with the impending disaster was to change the way we treat one another, the economy, and the planet right now—while also developing a network of secret, totally self-sufficient residential farm communities for millionaires, guarded by Navy SEALS armed to the teeth.

J.C. is currently developing two farms as part of his Safe Haven project. Farm 1, outside Princeton, is his show model and “works well as long as the Thin Blue Line is working.” The second one, somewhere in the Poconos, has to remain a secret. “The fewer people who know the locations, the better,” he explained, along with a link to the Twilight Zone episode where panicked neighbors break into a family’s bomb shelter during a nuclear scare.  If/when the supply chain breaks, the people will have no food delivered. Covid-19 gave us the wake-up call as people started fighting over TP. When it comes to a shortage of food it will be vicious. That is why those intelligent enough to invest have to be stealthy”.

The farm itself was serving as an equestrian center and tactical training facility in addition to raising goats and chickens. J.C. 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 Diane Feinstein had arbitrarily limited the number of rounds one could legally fit in a magazine for the handgun. J.C. knew his stuff. I asked him about various combat scenarios. How does one defend against a whole gang of thugs invading one’s farm? “You don’t”, he said, “The bottom line of prepping is to get away”.

“The only way to protect your family is with a group,” he said. That’s 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 haven’t prepared. “The SWAT team of a city police force have visited here. They all said they’d be here at the first sign of trouble.” J.C. is also hoping to train young farmers in sustainable agriculture, and to secure at least one doctor and dentist for each location.

On the way back to the main building, J.C. showed me the “layered security” protocols he had learned designing embassy properties: a fence around the whole place, NO TRESPASSING signs, guard dogs, surveillance cameras … all disincentives meant to prevent a violent confrontation. He paused for a minute as he stared down the drive. “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”.

 

That’s why J.C.’s real passion isn’t just to build a few isolated, militarized retreat facilities for millionaires, but to prototype locally owned sustainable farms that can be modeled by others and ultimately help restore regional food security in America.  The centralization of the agricultural industry has left most farms utterly dependent on the same long supply chains as urban consumers.

J.C. is no hippie environmentalist. He refers to Hillary Clinton only as “her” and publishes pieces online about America’s deep state misadventures and the coming oil wars. 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.

So far, J. C. Cole has been unable to convince anyone to invest in American Heritage Farms.  That doesn’t mean no one is investing in such schemes. It’s just that the ones that attract more attention and cash don’t generally have these cooperative components. They’re more for people who want to go it alone. Most billionaire preppers don’t want to have to learn to get along with a community of farmers or, worse, spend their winnings funding a national food resilience program. The mindset that requires safe havens is less concerned with preventing moral dilemmas than simply keeping them out of sight.

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. Rising S Company out of Texas builds and installs bunkers and tornado shelters for as little as $40,000 for an eight-by-twelve-foot emergency hideout all the way up to the $8.3 million luxury series “Aristocrat,” complete with pool and bowling lane.

These are pretty spartan facilities, anyway—more like repurposed shipping containers than James Bond-level fantasy hideouts. The enterprise originally catered to families seeking temporary storm shelters, before it went into the long-term apocalypse business. 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.

There’s something much more whimsical about the facilities in which most of the billionaires—or, more accurately, aspiring billionaires—actually invest. A company called Vivos is selling luxury underground apartments in converted Cold War munitions storage facilities, missile silos, and other fortified locations around the world.  Ultra-elite shelters like 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. 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.

Just the known unknowns are enough to dash any reasonable hope of survival. But this doesn’t seem to stop wealthy preppers from trying. The New York Times reported that real estate agents specializing in private islands were overwhelmed with inquiries during the Covid-19 pandemic.  Prospective clients were even asking about whether there was enough land to do some agriculture in addition to installing a helicopter landing pad. 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. Small islands are utterly dependent on air and sea deliveries for basic staples. Solar panels and water filtration equipment need to be replaced and serviced at regular intervals. The billionaires who reside in such locales are more, not less, dependent on complex supply chains than those of us embedded in industrial civilization.

If they wanted to water-test their bunker plans, they’d have hired a security expert from Blackwater or the Pentagon. They seemed to want something more.  

Their various self-sovereignty escape initiatives amount to the same techno-libertarian world-building fantasy exemplified by the ultra-billionaire’s competition to colonize Mars, but designed for implementation right here on Earth.

In the Minecraft-meets-Waterworld future envisioned by “aquapreneurs,” wealthy people are to live in independent, free-floating city-states—giant clusters of high-tech rafts using clean, renewable ocean thermal energy to power themselves and escape from a civilization of oil-drilling land dwellers. The hype around these initiatives may have died down, but several billionaires and even some legitimate organizations including the United Nations and MIT are still hard at work on humanity’s return to the sea.

The tech entrepreneurs investing in these ocean schemes seek to retrieve the Wild West free-for-all associated with the early internet. It has little to do with the water and everything to do with political autonomy—freedom to live ruled only by The Mindset. Unfettered and unregulated by the backwards thinking of nation-states, aquapreneurs will be free to reimagine civilization as an ultra-libertarian experiment.  They will rapidly prototype new forms of government, and determine what—if any—nods to civics or collectivism are even necessary.

Shrouded in the urgency of environmentalism and the optimism of technology innovation, self-sovereignty fantasies like this betray the underlying urge among the techno-libertarian elite to stop submitting to congressional inquiries, anti-monopoly regulations,

We didn’t realize that banishing government from the internet would create a free zone for corporate colonization. We hadn’t yet discovered that government and business balance each other out—a bit like fungus and bacteria in the body. Get rid of one, and the other runs rampant.

Google began as a project by two Stanford University students looking for a better way to search the web than Yahoo’s top-down classification system. Their bottom-up system would look at the ways websites linked to one another, and use that to determine search rankings. Although the company was wildly successful and profitable simply from putting a few “sponsored links” next to its search results, investors wanted more. Luckily for them, every web search conducted by Google’s billions of users also generates a surplus of “collateral data”—whole histories of searches and clicks and other information the company didn’t care much about. As Shoshana Zuboff chronicled in her book Surveillance Capitalism, instead of simply continuing to deliver search results to users, Google got into the even more profitable business of delivering user data to its real customers—the market researchers seeking to target users and manipulate their behavior.

they tend to pivot away from helping other people and solely toward increasing their own capital gains. It’s as if accumulating wealth in this way has a negative effect on their ability to perceive themselves as members of a society.

While anyone can end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, the scientists with whom Epstein chose to hobnob weren’t selected at random. Their decidedly scientistic approach to human development, interpreted through Epstein’s sociopathic lens, dovetailed ever-so conveniently with his master plans for the human race. Epstein was truly the model, self-sovereign, transhumanist billionaire prepper. He owned a private island (where he made his own laws) and several retreats—including a ranch in New Mexico where he planned to house and impregnate twenty women at a time. He gave millions to scientists he considered too maverick for the politically correct sensibilities of modern funders and institutions—researchers he believed could help him dominate the human gene pool, avoid death, or, if necessary, freeze his head and penis for future reanimation.

Another thought to engage the world’s youth in a more hip, media-savvy approach to climate change. I suggested she instead support Extinction Rebellion (XR), who were camped out on London’s bridges at that very moment, or the Sunrise Movement, which was planning a protest just a few blocks away. I told everyone about the Post-Carbon Institute and EarthRights International, which were already producing actionable plans and policy recommendations. “If they’re so good,” someone asked, “why haven’t I heard of them?” There’s The Mindset, again. Why support an initiative already in progress when you can cut the ribbon on a new enterprise?

ReGen Villages, for example, is the brainchild of former game designer James Ehrlich, an entrepreneur-in-residence at Stanford and a teacher of “disaster resilience” for Singularity University. ReGen is a total solution for the creation of regenerative and resilient communities that are capable of producing their own organic food, sourcing clean water, and educating their young, all with renewable energy and in a circular economy. Ehrlich is getting some traction—at least, with fellow Singularitarians and some of the press—with his compelling renderings of people living in high-tech harmony with nature. They grow food in domes, live in solar-powered cottages nestled into the earth, eat fresh fruit in open community courtyards, and are surrounded by woods and animals. Or at least they will be, once Ehrlich is able to convince someone to give him the funding so he can break ground.

He had left game design to study organic food preparation and ended up producing a TV show, The Hippy Gourmet, originally broadcast from Burning Man and eventually syndicated on PBS. That’s how he learned about the challenges facing America’s family farms, and dedicated himself to applying his skills to addressing them. We ate vegan wraps in a Palo Alto café as he shared his plan for spawning ReGen Villages anywhere in the world. He’s taken every conceivable system into consideration, from topsoil management and effluent processing to local currencies and governance. Yet even though a lot of this is supposed to be determined from the bottom up, by the people in a particular region and based on the specific climate and natural resources, the whole idea sounds a bit more like a game of SimCity than the process for a real-world community to develop. For at its core, ReGen is what Ehrlich calls a “software stack for starting, managing, and eventually autonomously improving neighborhoods”.

So, Ehrlich’s achievement has been to study many different aspects of farming, plumbing, recycling, and so on, and then develop plug-and-play computer programs that a community can use to manage its watering, seeding, electrical systems, and so on. One of them could orchestrate the processing of effluent through mango groves to produce potable water, and another could maintain proper hydration of giant contained tubes of agricultural topsoil used to grow vegetables with a minimum of watering.…

Assuming all the pieces work—and that’s a big assumption in itself—it’s a beautiful picture for an organic, techno-utopian paradise.  Like the Epcot Center at Disney World, but with no need for deliveries from the outside world. Almost like a space colony. Ehrlich readily admits, “We are really looking at the full stack of life support systems—sort of Mars-style, but here on Earth.” Rather than helping an existing village or neighborhood utilize more regenerative principles, the ReGen project itself must be spawned on virgin territory, from the ground up, ex nihilo. For Ehrlich, if he ever finds the funding, this means buying a swath of forest and then clearcutting the land he needs for the farming community nestled within it.  This is the way “God games” like SimCity and Civilization always work. You start with a blank slate

Problem is, we’re not living on a blank slate. There are people here. And birds and trees and rocks and bacteria we barely understand. The profound irony of clearcutting a natural forest in the name of sustainability is lost in this model. Yes, nature is in trouble, but The Mindset’s approach to addressing this collective crisis is always to do something. Fix it. Hack it. Reboot it. Develop it. Scale it. Automate it. As if doing less, or even doing nothing, were not an option.

ReGen Villages are themselves just one possible component of an even bigger initiative conceived by Ehrlich’s friend and supporter Jim Rutt. The former chairman of leading systems theory thinktank the Santa Fe Institute, Rutt has been working on his own reboot of the world from the bottom up, called Game B. Game B is meant to be a “civilization level social operating system,” where we go from what we currently think of as Western civilization (the failing, self-destructive Game A we are now playing) to a more self-organized, networked, decentralized, and resilient way of life. Rutt has applied his widely acknowledged expertise in complex systems and game theory to work through a myriad of issues and arrive at a new model of human organization. Instead of being dominated by corporations and nation-states, we are to live and work in small, self-sovereign, kibbutz-like collectives, each with its own governance structure but linked to the others through trade, culture, and technology. It’s a systems theorist’s ultimate vision for a cooperative and collaborative society, working like a fractal, on many levels of coordination at once. And, I must admit, its embrace of local determination and its responsive, bottom-up approach to change is consonant with my own hopes for a society guided by communities, cooperativism, local production, and mutual aid.

There’s no time to repent or repair. We have to just bring everyone along with us into the better future we’ve already worked out. Start fresh. Clean slate. New planet, ecovillage, or social operating system.

When I saw the bodyguards coming into the hotel lobby, I assumed they were for Al Gore, who was scheduled to speak that afternoon. But when the phalanx finally made it around the corner, I realized they were protecting not the former veep but New Age legend Deepak Chopra. Why would Chopra need a security detail, I wondered, particularly at a secluded resort in Puerto Rico? We had all been summoned there by Nobel laureate Oscar Arias for the first meeting of the Alliance for the New Humanity, billed as “the first-ever global response to the opportunity for peaceful people to work together on humanity’s common challenges.” This was back in 2003—over a decade before the UN adopted its 17 Sustainable Development Goals—when the idea that “societies put too much value on competition, wealth, and individualism” still felt new and somewhat radical to the elite who had benefited from those very values. I was identified as someone who “shared the vision of a New Humanity,” and invited to attend as a member of the Honorary Council, along with a variety of peacemakers and personalities from Desmond Tutu, Marianne Williamson, and Anand Shah to Guy Oseary, Jerry Hall, and Marisa Tomei. Ricky Martin was supposed to keynote, but—like pretty much all the celebrities on the list—didn’t show up. Instead, various chanters, healers, meditators, spiritualists, and retired politicians gathered before a crowd of about three hundred paying participants to share optimistic visions of how the new humanity would someday overtake our society of violence and pollution. As Al Gore delivered the latest iteration of his PowerPoint speech “The Earth in Balance,” I strolled to the back of the room. There, spread out on folding tables, were flyers advertising even more expensive workshops in prosperity, ethical business, self-care, and spiritual enlightenment, to be taught by the other panelists at various resorts around the world. There were also flyers for Chopra’s most recent book, Golf for Enlightenment. These spiritual teachers weren’t there to forge a new movement; this was business. I marveled at how skilled they were in the art of the upsell, seamlessly weaving reference to “the remaining few spots” at their next retreats into the beginning and end of any panel discussion.

their unthinking acceptance of The Mindset and its underlying premises renders their solutions untenable. The worse things get, the easier it is to justify The Mindset. The more we justify The Mindset, the worse things get.

For instance, Al Gore has been perhaps America’s most effective champion of solar and alternative energy. Given that fossil fuels are leading to both wars and global warming, solar panels seem like a no-brainer. So, all we have to do is get venture capitalists to invest in renewable energy technologies instead of oil companies, and all this smart money will lead us to energy independence and a carbon neutral, zero-emissions, clean, green, industrial utopia. And the investors can even get richer in the process. Win win. The problem is, while conversion of the energy grid to solar would make a lot of money for the companies building and installing solar panels, the total carbon footprint and environmental impact may not be so much better—if at all. The sun may be a renewable energy source; solar panels are anything but. They don’t grow on trees, but require the mining of aluminum, copper, and rare earth metals, already in low supply. The manufacturing of solar panels is itself an extremely energy-intensive process that involves the superheating of quartz into silicon wafers, vast quantities of water, and large quantities of toxic byproducts and runoff. The solar panels themselves begin degrading just a few years after installation, and need to be replaced every decade or two. Solar panel disposal creates a host of other toxicity and environmental problems, and as long as it remains cheaper for manufacturers to dump them as landfill, we won’t be seeing a robust recycling program for them anytime soon.

There lies the most fundamental problem with Mindset-derived solutions: they only move in one direction. Like anything else inspired by empirical science, the solutions all seek to dig deeper and harness some as yet unleveraged aspect of nature to serve our will.  Like the consumer-driven, growth-based capitalism on which The Mindset is premised, these solutions usually involve finding new resources, exploiting them, selling them, and then disposing of them so more can be mined, manufactured and sold. We are free to address our environmental challenges, as long as we get more growth in the process.

If we accept capitalism and the domination of nature as basic requirements for the human project to continue, this all makes perfect sense. Solutions must make money—more money than their predecessors—in order for anyone to be incentivized to deploy them. Growth is good. “Sustainability,” on the other hand, implies an unacceptable plateau in growth and development. It means partnering with nature and scaling back instead of dominating and doubling down. That’s unacceptable.

This is the philosophy underpinning the Great Reset, a campaign launched with a website and book by World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab. He argues for “a better form of capitalism” that encourages big investment in the businesses and technologies that can solve climate change, global poverty, and everything in between.

The Great Reset proposes a “crisis as opportunity” model of intervention, where every pain point is really just a trigger for rolling up our sleeves, getting to work, and “building back better”—with plenty of capital investment and return on that investment. The origins of the Great Reset may actually have less to do with sustaining the planet than sustaining capitalism. It’s the culmination of a twenty-year public relations campaign that began in response to protests at the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle and the Group of Eight summit in Genoa at the turn of the century. The world was changing, and environmentalists, union leaders, immigrants, and the anti-war movement were all coming to recognize global corporatism as the central cause of many of their complaints.

The idea that the world is on fire and we must immediately transition to “real zero” emissions by reducing our actual energy expenditure—contradicts the premise of the Great Reset. Schwab and the WEF believe that slowing down would be a big mistake and that market forces, unencumbered by local or national regulations can be applied to any problem and make investors wealthier in the process.

As he puts it in the book, “If no one power can enforce order, our world will suffer from a ‘global order deficit.’ Unless individual nations and international organizations find solutions to better cooperate at the global level, we risk entering an ‘age of entropy’ in which retrenchment, fragmentation, anger and parochialism will increasingly define our global landscape, making it more disorderly.” In other words, the people at the very top must use their money and technologies to restore order.

It’s as if Klaus Schwab and the Davos crew have finally accepted John Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, in which he claimed that nation-states were obsolete. Only a new order, some sort of technocratic network or benevolently programmed blockchain, would be up to the challenge of coordinating humanity through the coming crises. Schwab and the traditional banking elite finally bought The Mindset and are nominating themselves to lead the systemwide reboot—and to get in on the ground floor of the 21^st century’s greatest investment opportunity.

The Green New Deal is banking on the idea that the great energy transition to come will not only save the planet but give everyone jobs. They cheer when the United States or the European Union adopts new, more ambitious goals for rapid transformation of the energy infrastructure, anxious to reach carbon neutrality before global temperatures rise beyond repairable levels. They see their main challenge as convincing American workers that it’s in their own best interests to get retrained for the green revolution. This is the growing industry of tomorrow. The market’s requirement for growth is not an impediment to social, economic, and environmental justice, but the way to fund and reward those who bring it all about. Energy and money for everyone.

The only real answer, the really simple one that neither philanthrocapitalists nor green technologists want to hear, is that we have to reduce our energy consumption altogether. Degrowth is the only surefire way to reduce humanity’s carbon footprint. It would also give us time to transition to less energy-intensive technologies. Instead of debating whether to buy electric, gas or hybrid, just keep the car you have. Better yet, start carpooling, walking to work, working from home, or working less. Like Jimmy Carter tried to tell us during his much-ridiculed fireside chats, turn down the thermostat and wear a sweater. It’s better for your sinuses, and better for everyone.

Bill Gates has employed this logic to become the biggest private owner of farmland in the United States. From an investment perspective, it allows him to meet carbon-neutral targets for sustainable portfolios, serving as a counterbalance to his many tech investments. But it also gives him the chance to orchestrate better land management from above. While small farmers using low-tech or even indigenous practices already know how to maintain topsoil, rotate crops, and manage runoff, Gates is certain he can improve on all that with analytic thinking. He believes he can apply science, technology, and more venture capital to develop more productive seeds, cheaper biofuels, and more advanced farming practices. Gates operates as if by purchasing resources like land and water, those with superior intelligence and foresight can manage it on behalf of all of us—using logic and technologies the rest of us couldn’t understand, anyway.

Elon Musk began a barrage of tweets in the following weeks, predicting that AI will be the cause of World War III, and that governments will be willing to seize AI from private firms “at gunpoint” if they see it as necessary. The misuse of AI by the wrong humans became one of Musk’s primary talking points. As he explained during his South by Southwest keynote in 2018, “I think the danger of AI is much greater than the danger of nuclear warheads by a lot and nobody would suggest that we allow anyone to build nuclear warheads if they want. That would be insane. And mark my words, AI is far more dangerous than nukes. Far.

As Stephen Hawking explained his justification for signing onto the 2015 open letter, “Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.

I’m not going to offer a plan for how to save the world here, but I can point to some of what we need to do to mitigate the effects of these guys’ machinations, and develop some alternative approaches.

We are not yet over the cliff. We still have choices. Most simply, we can stop supporting their companies and the way of life that they’re pushing. We can actually do less, consume less, and travel less

Buy local, engage in mutual aid, and support cooperatives. Use monopoly law to break up anticompetitive behemoths, environmental regulation to limit waste, and organized labor to promote the rights of gig workers. Even if everyone does a whole lot less, we still have more than enough food and energy to go around.

We’d actually have more of it. In her well-regarded paper “Beyond Growth,” Gaya Herrington, a sustainability analyst for the accounting giant KPMG, explained that “Amidst global slowdown and risks of depressed future growth potential from climate change, social unrest, and geopolitical instability, to name a few, responsible leaders face the possibility that growth will be limited in the future. And only a fool keeps chasing an impossibility.” She shows that while pursuing continuous growth is not possible without catastrophic climate collapse, “resource scarcity has not been the challenge people thought it would be in the 70s, and population growth has not been the scare it was in the 90s.” There is ample food, water, and energy for everyone. There’s just not enough to satisfy economic models that depend on infinite exponential growth.

We are not up against the limits of our physical reality, but the limits of our digital balance sheets.

The challenge of real reality is that there’s other people here. Our own well-being is contingent on theirs. Maybe this is the scary truth that’s been driving The Mindset all along. That’s why they want to win and then get away from the rest of us as quickly and completely as possible.

we just need to define our sense of self a bit differently than the algorithms do. We’re not individuals to be counted, surveilled, data-analyzed, and manipulated under a pretense of convenience and connectivity. We are instead individual sensing organisms, moving into deeper relationships with other people and nature.