Tech billionaires are purchasing luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a possible societal collapse, The Guardian has reported.
Douglas Rushkoff, professor of media theory and digital economics at City University of New York, Queens College, explained in the publication that the extreme wealth and privilege of this group has ''served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the 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 about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.''
Rushkoff pointed out that these types of people ''once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they've reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch.''
The professor said that this Silicon Valley escapism, which he calls The Mindset, ''encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind.''
More than anything, Rushkoff wrote, ''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. It's as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.''
He emphasized that ''amplified by digital technologies and the unprecedented wealth disparity they afford, The Mindset allows for the easy externalization of harm to others, and inspires a corresponding longing for transcendence and separation from the people and places that have been abused.''
Rushkoff wrote that ''the very structure of The Mindset requires an endgame. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned. 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."
He stressed that ''The Mindset also includes a faith-based Silicon Valley certain 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.''
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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