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Hey pals. It’s been a minute. We’ve been busy cooking up a new slate of episodes for you, and we’re excited to kick off our fourth season today with what we can safely say is one of the headiest and most fascinating conversations we’ve ever had on the pod.
Have you ever wondered why the Silicon Valley oligarchs seem so obsessed with preparing for the end of the world? In our first episode of 2023, we join media theorist Douglas Rushkoff on an epic journey through the universe of million-dollar bunkers, Libertarian island micronations, and hypothetical Mars colonies to explore just why these billionaire elites want to get away from us so badly when the apocalypse hits — and what this says about the consequences their business practices and technologies are having on the world right now (i.e., why they’re not especially interested in preventing said apocalypse in the first place).
As a professor at Queens College and the author of 20 books spanning everything from early cyberculture to alternative currencies, Rushkoff has a knack for putting words to the abstract forces that govern our online lives. In fact, he’s the guy who popularized concepts like “viral media,” “digital native,” and “social currency.” In this new book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, he turns his attention to something he calls “the Mindset.”
“[It’s] this kind of tech-billionaire belief that with enough money and technology, they can escape the catastrophes that result from their own acquisition of money and use of technology,” he says. “It’s the belief that humanity is a problem that can be solved with technology.”
We trace the roots of this worldview back past the “Californian Ideology” of the ‘90s dot-com bubble to the dawn of interest-backed currencies and the rise of scientism in the era of Francis Bacon; hear a fun story about Timothy Leary and his theory that tech bros are using technology to recreate the experience of the womb; and discuss why letting go of our societal obsession with economic growth may be the only way to resist the Mindset and its extractive impact on labor, communities, and the environment. It’s a hopeful conversation, too, with Rushkoff ultimately offering us actionable solutions to what living one’s life in opposition to the technocapitalist status quo might look like.
Listen to Rushkoff’s podcast, Team Human, which is based on his book of the same name
Read Rushkoff’s blog
Bunker, Mars colony, or seastead?