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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."
Pipe dream escapism companies. None of them are going to get people off Earth into sustainability elsewhere. They're hucksters advertising a product and the CEO's are overcompensated. None of that matters in the end.
Pick the most extreme, uninhabited artic/desert condition here on Earth - then remind yourself that Mars is less comfortable. They'll be sick for a long time, and they will get osteoporosis. The children will definately get it, if they form properly at all. You might not think a prison sentence sounds welcoming, but the odds of going to a maximum security prison - and surviving - are better than life on Mars.
Also space is filled with deadly radiation. When you look around it's mostly empty, right? That's because it's utterly hostile to life.
There is no Earth 2.0. Ever. Not for the rich, or in the future, or anywhere at all. There is one Earth with a system of life tuned to its oceans and its roughly 24 hr day, and if the descendants of humanity ever move comfortably about on a different planet, it may very well be without legs, or with compound eyes and a chitinous shell.
Good luck to everyone who leaves Earth 1.0 - Final Edition
At that point you will have the people rich enough to live an extra fifty years and everyone else. And those super rich people will work to mold the society to suit them because their horizon is longer than ours.
If that means they finally treat climate change and environmental destruction as the serious problems they really are, then I'm all for it.
When you get a class of very rich people it tends to come with a sense of entitlement. These people eventually want to arrange the world around them and consolidate their power. It also means that their solutions to global problems may only serve them. Suppose you have a catastrophic global warming scenario, then one approach to it is, how can we avoid it or minimize the damage. Another approach is, how can we create a fortress paradise which is safe from the rest of the world.
You don't need to believe the purpose of the surveillance state was to protect the wealthy from the rest, to see that it is bound to end up that way. Fear of the external enemy serves that purpose that very well, whether it's terrorists or Russians.
Checks and balances should apply for all concentrations of power, also those who claim to protect us and also private wealth.
It's a government of the psychopath, by the psychopath and for the psychopath. Of course psychopaths can never be trusted, especially by psychopaths. Escape of the rich, the psychopath is a total delusion, as the ratio of psychopaths rises, so a society destroys itself, not by accident but on purpose. When psychopath do not have the rest of society, the normal human being to parasite off, to attack and abuse to feed the egos and lusts of the psychopaths, they will attack and destroy each other, till the scattered handful and left to die, howling in the wilderness, nothing left to parasite off.
They can not escape self destruction, it is their nature, just as we allow them to pillage and destroy our planet, to our destruction, they insane compulsion to consume, destroy and pollute far beyond anything even slightly resembling reason, even when they have less, far far less as a result, as long as in their insanity, they have far more then the rest of us, now left with nothing but a burned out planet and the insane living in concrete holes in the ground.
Well, as it turns out they have already lost, that we are publicly discussing and tearing apart the insanity, their insatiable greed and lusts and we know, we absolutely know the final outcome of their continued rule, the extinction of humanity. All to easy to avoid, simply extinction of the psychopath, their genetic removal in the womb, to save homo sapiens from in reality homo psychopath, a genetic aberration, a parasitic sub species.
Allow psychopaths to lead us to extinction or get rid of the psychopaths and colonise other worlds around other stars, that is the factual choice.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
My idea I started mentioning about 20 years ago. Every year we have a big party to celebrate the richest 1:1,000,000; the 1% of the 1% of the 1%.
"Yay! you won life!" we'll all cheer, and honor them, and then execute them.
It really depends on how and when people made their wealth.
Normally you are considered rich when you have enough money that your return on your investments exceeds the money you make doing a job.
Some people got there with a long term plan to become wealthy (often sacricing a lot of personal opportunities in the mean time). These will probably get rich again unless they assume these trade offs for wealth were not worth it.
Some had been given a large sum of money say a few million dollars after graduating college from rich parents. They have a safety net that allows risk taking and plenty of extra to save in case of a mistake. These people if to start over may not make it again as they never knew how to live poor and wouldn’t be able adjust their life style.
Then there are rich because of luck. They happened to have a good idea that people actually wanted it at the time, and they are riding the wave of its success. Starting over again would probably need that luck to happen again.
Now that hypothetical situation of taking everyone’s wealth away and start over will need to find a way to clear everyone’s reputation as well
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
They'll be sick for a long time, and they will get osteoporosis. The children will definately get it, if they form properly at all.
You are assuming the human genome will stay the same. We can already precisely edit DNA, and it shouldn't be too difficult to fix the genes associated with bone calcium and other low gravity issues. By the time SpaceX is ready to start shuttling people to Mars, we can already have a modified sub-population ready to go.
Tightly regulated capitalism with sharply progressive taxation to redistribute income. Within the next few decades capitalism as we know it will have to be phased out entirely before post-scarcity effects and a lack of participation opportunity for workers due to automation force a hard crash of the system.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Yeah, but the stake of the other 95% goes to a lot of essential spending like law enforcement, baseline defense, administration, and of course entitlements.
These rich guys pay so much more, and that helps our government spend money on research, and have discretionary spending, like the satellite that tracks weather.
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.
I'm not saying it shouldn't be that way, but understand what the value proposition looks like from their chair before you judge.