The enterprise originally catered to families seeking temporary storm shelters, before it went into the long-term apocalypse business. They would have flown out the author of a zombie apocalypse comic book. You got a friend in me song. But instead of me being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, my audience was brought in to me. They're more for people who want to go it alone. The "just-in-time" delivery system preferred by agricultural conglomerates renders most of the nation vulnerable to a crisis as minor as a power outage or transportation shutdown.
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Farm one, outside Princeton, is his show model and "works well as long as the thin blue line is working". What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader? There's something much more whimsical about the facilities in which most of the billionaires – or, more accurately, aspiring billionaires – actually invest. Youve got a friend in me. What, if anything, could we do to resist it? Bitcoin or ethereum? Then he asked: "Do you shoot?
The second one, somewhere in the Poconos, has to remain a secret. If/when the supply chain breaks, the people will have no food delivered. You've got a friend in me nyt for sale. They also get a stake in a potentially profitable network of local farm franchises that could reduce the probability of a catastrophic event in the first place. They rolled their eyes at what must have sounded to them like hippy philosophy. Yet this Silicon Valley escapism – let's call it The Mindset – encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind. After a bit of small talk, I realised they had no interest in the speech I had prepared about the future of technology.
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For example, an indoor, sealed hydroponic garden is vulnerable to contamination. "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. " Actual, imminent catastrophes from the climate emergency to mass migrations support the mythology, offering these would-be superheroes the opportunity to play out the finale in their own lifetimes. Solar panels and water filtration equipment need to be replaced and serviced at regular intervals. Those sociopathic enough to embrace them are rewarded with cash and control over the rest of us. I made pro-social arguments for partnership and solidarity as the best approaches to our collective, long-term challenges.
By the time I boarded my return flight to New York, my mind was reeling with the implications of The Mindset. As a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist. Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Maybe the apocalypse is less something they're trying to escape than an excuse to realise The Mindset's true goal: to rise above mere mortals and execute the ultimate exit strategy. 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. On a parallel path next to the highway, as if racing against us, a small jet was coming in for a landing on a private airfield. 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. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down. If they wanted to test their bunker plans, they'd have hired a security expert from Blackwater or the Pentagon. That's because it wasn't their actual bunker strategies I had been brought out to evaluate so much as the philosophy and mathematics they were using to justify their commitment to escape. So far, JC Cole has been unable to convince anyone to invest in American Heritage Farms. Who were its true believers?
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The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. JC invited me down to New Jersey to see the real thing. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? They seemed to want something more. Ultra-elite shelters such as 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. Covid-19 gave us the wake-up call as people started fighting over toilet paper. What sort of wealthy hedge-fund types would drive this far from the airport for a conference? The people most interested in hiring me for my opinions about technology are usually less concerned with building tools that help people live better lives in the present than they are in identifying the Next Big Thing through which to dominate them in the future. The New York Times reported that real estate agents specialising in private islands were overwhelmed with inquiries during the Covid-19 pandemic. Small islands are utterly dependent on air and sea deliveries for basic staples. Who will get quantum computing first, China or Google? I tried to reason with them. The hermetically sealed apocalypse "grow room" doesn't allow for such do-overs. As the sun began to dip over the horizon, I realised I had been in the car for three hours.
For The Mindset also includes a faith-based Silicon Valley certainty that they can develop a technology that will somehow break the laws of physics, economics and morality to offer them something even better than a way of saving the world: a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making. These are designed to best handle an 'event' and also benefit society as semi-organic farms. Could it have all been some sort of game? The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. Or was this really their intention all along? "Most egg farmers can't even raise chickens, " JC explained as he showed me his henhouses. "It's 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.
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They were working out what I've come to call the insulation equation: could they earn enough money to insulate themselves from the reality they were creating by earning money in this way? JC is no hippy environmentalist 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. That was 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 hadn't prepared. He paused, and sighed, "I don't want to be in that moral dilemma. It's just that the ones that attract more attention and cash don't generally have these cooperative components. How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? They had come to ask questions. Both within three hours' drive from the city – close enough to get there when it happens. But this doesn't seem to stop wealthy preppers from trying. Why help these guys ruin what's left of the internet, much less civilisation? Should a shelter have its own air supply?
But if they were in it just for fun, they wouldn't have called for me. Now they've reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch. The next morning, two men in matching Patagonia fleeces came for me in a golf cart and conveyed me through rocks and underbrush to a meeting hall. Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? JC Cole had witnessed the fall of the Soviet empire, as well as what it took to rebuild a working society almost from scratch. Vertical farms with moisture sensors and computer-controlled irrigation systems look great in business plans and on the rooftops of Bay Area startups; when a palette of topsoil or a row of crops goes wrong, it can simply be pulled and replaced. For one, the closed ecosystems of underground facilities are preposterously brittle.
They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. The farm itself was serving as an equestrian centre and tactical training facility in addition to raising goats and chickens. A limo was waiting for me at the airport. At least two of them were billionaires. 3m luxury series "Aristocrat", complete with pool and bowling lane. Amplified by digital technologies and the unprecedented wealth disparity they afford, The Mindset allows for the easy externalisation of harm to others, and inspires a corresponding longing for transcendence and separation from the people and places that have been abused. These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned.
More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where "winning" means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. "By coincidence, " he explained, "I am setting up a series of safe haven farms in the NYC area. What were its main tenets? I asked him about various combat scenarios. Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. And these catastrophising billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy – the supposed champions of the survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that's fuelling most of this speculation to begin with. The billionaires who reside in such locales are more, not less, dependent on complex supply chains than those of us embedded in industrial civilisation. Rising S Company in Texas builds and installs bunkers and tornado shelters for as little as $40, 000 for an 8ft by 12ft emergency hideout all the way up to the $8. Was there any valid justification for striving to be so successful that they could simply leave the rest of us behind –apocalypse or not?