A review of Douglas Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires (London: Scribe, 2022)
Joe P. L. Davidson
21 September 2022
Prepping for the apocalypse used to be easy to ridicule. The can-collecting and gun-toting survivalist was clearly delusional. This was the premise of reality television shows like Doomsday Preppers, which ran in the early 2010s. Viewers could enjoy the tragicomic spectacle of suburbanites playing at survivalism, observing the bizarre practices of those who believed that we are on the brink of breakdown.
Certainly, the preppers’ fear that the end of the world as we know it is imminent – whether by nuclear catastrophe or economic collapse – could be seen to channel some other desire. Perhaps the preppers, often white men associated with far-right political movements, were working through gender- or race-based anxieties, using the apocalypse to imagine a post-collapse world of unrestrained white supremacy and masculine prowess. But the idea that they might be right, that the shit will truly hit the fan, could be quickly dismissed.
Those were the days. The apocalypse has now become mainstream. In a world of climate chaos, the Covid-19 pandemic and Putin’s nuclear threats, it has become difficult to maintain an entirely ironic distance from the preppers. Moreover, some of the most powerful people on the planet are seriously entertaining the prospect of the end of the world. Tech billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are not only gripped by apocalyptic fears but are also willing to put their money where their mouth is. Whether it be investing in armoured bunkers in New Zealand or planning for an escape from the Earth via the colonisation of Mars, they have gentrified prepping. Forget about canning beans, build a spaceship!
It is this world of first-class survivalism that Douglas Rushkoff focuses on in Survival of the Richest. Rushkoff, a long-time observer of the foibles and fantasies of Silicon Valley, is understandably disturbed by the new-found apocalyptic fervour of the tech sector. The message of the book is clear. The billionaires wish to escape the catastrophes that they themselves have been instrumental in creating. As Rushkoff writes, “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.” Whereas previous generations of digital plutocrats might have hoped for a technological or philanthropic solution to the climate catastrophe and burgeoning economic inequality, a new attitude is forming: be rich enough to save yourself. A rising tide lifts some boats and floods the rest.
The arrogance of this attitude is clear from the encounter that sparked Rushkoff’s interest in billionaire apocalypticism. In the mid-2010s, he was invited to a shadowy meeting of businessmen at a spa in the desert. Intrigued by Rushkoff’s work on digital media, the group regarded him as, if not quite a prophet, then at least someone with his finger on the pulse of the future. The rich and powerful men at the spa hoped that Rushkoff could give them some clues on the practical dilemmas that might confront your average billionaire in a post-apocalyptic world. What if your armed guards, once money is meaningless, decide to kill you and take over the bunker? Perhaps it would be better to build some robots to do the job of protecting you?
Rushkoff admits that he initially found all of this simultaneously perplexing and hilarious. That the rich and the powerful are concerned about the end of the world does appear odd. “[T]hese catastrophizing billionaires”, Rushkoff writes, “are the presumptive winners of the digital economy.” They have everything that they could possibly want and more – and yet they are weighed down by concerns about the imminent end of current society. A more appropriate response for people with the money and the means would be to retire to a private island and live out their days in peace. That they appear unable to do this is suggestive. Once all of the everyday worries experienced by the vast majority of people – unemployment, bills, healthcare, education and so on – have been overcome, existential dread about the fate of humanity begins to grow.
Survival of the Richest, to its credit, does not simply revel in the strange spectacle of rich people getting angsty about the apocalypse. A number of recent books, including Mark O’Connell’s Notes from an Apocalypse (2020) and Bradley Garrett’s Bunker (2021), have delved into the lived experience of anticipating end-times from the vantage point of the private jet. By contrast, Rushkoff zooms out, tracing the origins of billionaire catastrophism to the structure of contemporary capitalism and the distinctive business practices of the tech industry. There has been a latent apocalypticism in Silicon Valley long before Musk dreamed of colonising Mars.
In particular, billionaire catastrophism was present in the suspicion of the government that has long gripped the moguls of the internet-era. The rise of digital culture in the 1990s was marked by a desire to liberate the internet from regulatory control, something best expressed by John Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”, published in 1996. Rushkoff himself was caught up in the momentum of this moment, self-identifying as a citizen of the newly declared republic of the internet.
The Manichean opposition between the internet and government contained the seeds of contemporary apocalypticism. If the state is the slow-moving leviathan of cyberpunk dreams, then what hope is there that it will protect us from the threats on the horizon in the contemporary moment? It is hardly surprising that those who regard the government as the enemy also think that it is up to each individual to save themselves in the event of a disaster. In the state of nature, life is nasty, brutish and short – unless you can build a bunker.
Of course, when it comes to the apocalypse, there is some justification for this suspicion of the state. Many existential threats, most particularly nuclear warfare and biological weapons, are closely associated with the military prowess of powerful states in the Global North. Still, the tech billionaire desire to escape the state translates into a distrust of any form of collective action. When Rushkoff “cheekily suggested” to the billionaire survivalists that “the way to make sure your head of security doesn’t slit your throat tomorrow is to pay for his daughter’s bat mitzvah today”, they laughed him out the room. He received a similar response when he suggested to a tech entrepreneur that, if he is so worried about climate change, maybe he should join Extinction Rebellion in blockading London. In the post-apocalyptic war of all against all, there is no room for this touching faith in the capacity of people to come together on the basis of something other than threats of violence.
If one side of billionaire apocalypticism is a rejection of collectives, then the other side is the desire for an exit strategy. Survival of the Richest focuses on the affinity between surviving the apocalypse and the ability of tech moguls to navigate the business cycles of the economic world. Both are governed by a similar logic: jump ship before everything collapses.
The digital economy follows a familiar path. Companies begin with a huge injection of cash from venture capitalists, they then demonstrate the potential for future profits by amassing millions of users, and eventually go public, thus giving the initial investors a handsome return. What happens to the company after this is irrelevant; the point is to get in, make a profit, and then get out. The apocalyptic end of humanity is mapped out in a similar fashion. The world is gradually reaching a disastrous crescendo, with the exploitative actions of the billionaires overheating the climate and stoking social tensions. They must now complete a delicate manoeuvre, keeping one foot on the ground in order to continue to build their wealth while using the other to leap off the planet to safety.
With the elite survivalist poised in this awkward position, a pratfall awaits. Rushkoff compares the billionaires to Wile E. Coyote, who thinks he can catch Roadrunner by building a bigger and better trap but, each time, it backfires. Likewise, the survivalist moguls are setting themselves up for failure. “No matter how smart they are, how superior to their prey, how technologically advanced, how well funded, and how preemptively insulated,” Rushkoff notes, “they are fooling themselves if they think they’re safe”.
Survival of the Richest thus recuperates the mocking tone of shows like Doomsday Preppers. If a catastrophe does happen, at least a good laugh can be had at the expense of billionaire survivalists. They might retreat to an island in the middle of the ocean but good luck trying to grow enough food there. They might have a luxury bunker but that won’t be much use when the air filtration system fails. And, it is difficult to believe that a society on Mars will last very long.
Schadenfreude is probably appropriate then. Yet, there is a gnawing doubt at the heart of Survival of the Richest. Rushkoff is clear that the methods of the billionaires are wrong – one cannot survive the apocalypse alone. But he is less sure about whether they are wrong to be pessimistic about the future. The book takes it as given that some catastrophic event is in the works. Indeed, for all the foibles of the elite preppers, at least they have a strategy for approaching the end – and one that preserves their class interests in the present to boot.
Indeed, one of the most intriguing aspects of Survival of the Richest are the flashes of a different strategy for surviving the apocalypse – one based on solidarity rather than competition. It is at these moments of the book that Rushkoff turns to those who already inhabit what Frantz Fanon called the zone of nonbeing. That is, peoples who are subject to white supremacy or settler colonialism who have already lived through, and survived, past apocalypses. Racial capitalism will not only produce catastrophes in the future. Whether through the enslavement of Black Africans or genocide of Indigenous peoples, it has already destroyed societies.
As Tyson Yunkaporta, an Indigenous Australian scholar, explains to Rushkoff: “My people have been through heaps of apocalypses and they’re quite survivable, as long as you’re still following the patterns of the land and the patterns of creation.” There are ways of facing the apocalypse without falling into the patterns of competition and exploitation embodied by the billionaire survivalist. Rushkoff also highlights the value of Black cooperative communities formed in the ruins of slavery.
These alternative pathways into the future only appear in flashes. This is, in one sense, understandable. Given the wealth and power of the billionaire preppers, as well as the absurdity of their plans for the future, Rushkoff is not wrong to foreground their strategy for survival. At the same time, it raises the possibility of whether it is possible to imagine, borrowing Fanonian terminology again, a “survival of the wretched”. How can the experiments in alternative ways of living that have been developed by the oppressed in moments of catastrophe and disaster be excavated? Is there a prepping that eschews the politics of domination and embraces that of liberation?
Answering these questions would require another book, but it is testament to the richness of Survival of the Richest that it provokes them. It is also symptomatic of the contemporary conjuncture. It is difficult to entirely dismiss the apocalyptic nightmares of the billionaires as a fantasy. Catastrophic predictions are more than a cover allowing the tech moguls to reproduce and reinforce their exalted position. “Whatever time remains for us”, German philosopher Günther Anders noted in the context of Cold War-fears of nuclear Armageddon, “remains the ‘time of the end’ because it cannot be replaced by another time, but only by the end.” The terrain of struggle is the apocalypse but the result of this struggle, as Rushkoff’s book subtly asserts, is not yet determined.