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Are the Wealthy Plotting To Leave Us Behind? (medium.com)
"The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind," writes Douglas Rushkoff, describing what he learned from a high-paying speaking gig about the future of technology for "five super-wealthy guys...from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world," -- and what it says about perceptions of technology today.
The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down. This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader...?
That's when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a 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 really about just one thing: escape.
There's nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else. It's less a vision for the wholesale migration of humanity to a new state of being than a quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and complexity.... It's a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along for the ride... The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively. This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities... Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor.
The piece -- titled "Survival of the Richest" -- is an interesting read, and ends by suggesting this inspiring counter-philosophy.
"Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It's a team sport."
That's when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a 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 really about just one thing: escape.
There's nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else. It's less a vision for the wholesale migration of humanity to a new state of being than a quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and complexity.... It's a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along for the ride... The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively. This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities... Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor.
The piece -- titled "Survival of the Richest" -- is an interesting read, and ends by suggesting this inspiring counter-philosophy.
"Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It's a team sport."
That, and most of the services the government provides is not of service to these guys. Police? Many have and pay for private security anyway. Education? They send their kids to private schools. Direct entitlements like food stamps, welfare, low cost housing, free cell phones (in California at least), Medicare/medicade, all are lost to these guys because we stop them from having access to these entitlements.
Wow, that's so ridiculously wrong that it's bordering on the absurd.
The richer you are, the more in need you are of property protection, meaning police and courts. Private security cannot replace the police. In developed countries, private security are glorified doormen (they, by law, usually have no ability to actually do anything of any consequence). Even if the private security guys can shoot, they cannot investigate crimes and arrest people. You need the police for that. There is no private service you can pay for that will prosecute, try, convict, and lock away criminals - you need the public prosecutors and the government-funded court system.
As for education, in developed countries private schools are mostly about creating an exclusive social circle (kids with rich parents hanging out exclusively with other kids with rich parents), not about a higher quality education. Usually, the private schools have to follow whatever the national approved curriculum is (or at least some core elements of it), which means they lean heavily on the public education system (who develops that curriculum? not the private schools). The price of the private school is there to keep poor people out, not to pay for some above-and-beyond education.
Btw, who do the rich employ to work for them, and therefore, earn their money for them? Legions upon legions of people schooled in the public education system. Whether its basic literacy or numeracy, or people with advanced university degrees, the rich's ability to become rich and keep being rich is heavily dependent on millions of people educated using government money.
As for the "entitlements" of the poor - they are there to stop the poor from creating a revolution and stripping their rich of their wealth (and their heads, literally). The rich are the top of the pyramid, but for there to be a top, there has to be a pyramid, a base - and the foundations have to be solid. Do you really think all of the elements of the welfare state that developed over the past 200 years were just pressure from the poor and the lower classes and not a great chunk of the elite realizing that all shit breaks loose when you let people become hungry and desperate (a la France 1789, Russia 1917, and many other examples)?
So yes, the rich benefit from food stamps, welfare, and low-cost housing for the poor. In a very clear way.