The Intentional Collapse

The elite are committed to the end of the world, but we don’t have to be.

I figure it’s time we take account of what’s going on here. Everyone has different words for it. Last spring I called it the fascist atmosphere, and described it as an almost digital sensibility of yes/no’s and binary notches that don’t allow for all the in-betweenness where life really takes place. Our civilization recognizes the ticks of the clock, but not the duration between those ticks — the actual time where there the experience happens.

But I think it’s important I explain what I see as the motivations driving some of the people — yes, human beings for now — engineering what feels like an intentional collapse of our government and society.

I first wrote about this phenomenon in my 2022 book Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. That was based on a ridiculous encounter I had with five ultra-wealthy dudes, who told me about the bunkers and other preparations they were making for what they called “the event” — the nuclear disaster or climate catastrophe, food shortage, pollution or pandemic — that makes life unlivable. What struck me at the time was that these guys were the richest and most powerful people I had ever met, yet they felt utterly powerless to influence the future. The best they could do was hire a few futurists to predict the future, and then prepare to survive it.

So the object of the game, to them, was to acquire enough money and technology to outrun the impacts of their own businesses and technologies. If they had a social media company whose net effect was to make people crazy and break democracy, then the thing to do is create a fortified island paradise that doesn’t depend on a functioning democracy back at home.

But my reaction was to laugh. I wrote a black comedy. These guys seemed crazy. They were high on their own supply, and using the excuse of a potential global disaster to build out their childhood fantasies of a virtual online clubhouse to which they could upload their brains and have sex with anime characters. I wrote that book so we could laugh at this tiny cohort of Ayn Rand skimming techno-libertarian, transhuman, proto-fascist, misogynists, not take them so seriously just because they could convince Joe Rogan of something, and — most of all — not follow in their footsteps when something like Covid or an economic crisis tempts us to put up the barricades and live behind an Amazon video doorbell. I was trying to show the ridiculousness of attempting to go it alone, and impossibility of genuinely shielding oneself from catastrophic horror. Or, as I asked in the book’s opening episode, “why are the Navy Seals in your security force going to protect you once your bitcoin is worthless?” It’s laughable.

The solution, instead, is to meet our neighbors, reduce our dependence on big corporations, and establish local resiliency. We all get to make it. When we survive together, we thrive together.

And to this day, all I get interviewed about is book’s opening chapter. It seems so preposterous, unbelievable even, that grown up billionaires would be building doomsday bunkers. And I get why that hook is so interesting. But, I’m sorry to say, the book wasn’t about those five billionaires but an entire world view: a belief that only the strongest individuals can and should survive, which is now informing the self-destructive policies of the US government. It is the world view and philosophy driving what seems like authoritarian chaos in America, as well as the logic behind its plan.

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