Survival of the Richest
by Douglas Rushkoff · first published 2022
46% recommend54% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Argues that tech billionaires' bunker and escape plans reveal a deeper flaw in their thinking. Readers value its sharp first-hand reporting from conversations with the wealthy and its critique of Silicon Valley.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Named One of the Most Anticipated Books of 2022 by Kirkus and Literary Hub The tech elite have a plan to survive the apocalypse: they want to leave us all behind. Five mysterious billionaires summoned theorist Douglas Rushkoff to a desert resort for a private talk. The topic? How to survive the “Event”: the societal catastrophe they know is coming. Rushkoff came to understand that these men were under the influence of The Mindset, a Silicon Valley–style certainty that they and their cohort can break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to escape a disaster of their own ma
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Anything by Douglas Rushkoff. I particularly enjoyed Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. Another good one is Irrational Man by William Barrett. The only truly comprehensive look at existentialism I've read.
on “Ask HN: Best books read in 2022” ↗I think that's what they believe, but I buy Douglas Rushkoff's argument that this is a collective illusion on the part of the billionaire class. See https://rushkoff.com/books/survival-of-the-richest-escape-fa...
on “Greater than 90% chance of El Niño persisting into Northern Hemisphere winter” ↗There is a fun book about this phenomenon called Survival of the Richest by Douglas Rushkoff. He met other billionaires who were planning to build apocalypse bunkers with private security forces, They were all flummoxed by his question: how will you prevent your security from…
on “Zuckerberg's bunker plans fuel speculation on billionaires building bunkers” ↗Regarding the Silicon Valley Mindset, Douglass Rushkoff wrote a quite good book on the topic: https://bookshop.org/p/books/survival-of-the-richest-escape-...
on “Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit” ↗For a deeper dive, Douglas Rushkoff wrote about this in Survival of the Richest https://rushkoff.com/books/survival-of-the-richest-escape-fa...
on “The Mega-Rich Are Turning Their Mansions into Impenetrable Fortresses” ↗From the outside (that is europen view) it looks like they're planning that this change in four years - or even two - will not happen. We'll see. A good read would be Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.
on “The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE” ↗…Sam Altman has an arrangement with Peter Thiel, first revealed to The New Yorker, where the pair will take a jet to one of Thiel’s New Zealand properties in the case of an apocalyptic event. In his book Survival of the Richest, media theorist Douglass Rushkoff describes meeting with a group of billionaire preppers who bombarded him with questions about how best to configure their bunkers to survive the end times." And who…
on “Mark Zuckerberg's Top-Secret Hawaii Compound” ↗…annihilation or incredibly bleak. I would wish best of luck to the techbros that anointed themselves our enlightened leaders and refer to everyone outside of tech as "normies" and "lemmings", but I've also read Survival of the Richest.
on “Silicon Valley’s Titans Are Realizing a Lot of People Don’t Like Them” ↗…wealthy tech and hedge-fund investors flew out media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, ostensibly for a speaking engagement. Rushkoff wrote it up first as a Guardian essay and later expanded it into his 2022 book Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. The problem's super duper obvious if you studied history, but it is also pretty obvious if you can think about second order effects. In collapse the wealthy…
on “Programming Still Sucks” ↗…disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time." [0]: https://onezero.medium.com/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0...
on “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich (2017)” ↗https://onezero.medium.com/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0... "Survival of the Richest" > I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech ... to deliver some insight on the subject of “the future of technology” ... my audience…
on “No, billionaires won’t “escape” to space while the world burns” ↗Apparently soon available in book form: https://wwnorton.com/books/survival-of-the-richest/
on “Survival of the Richest (2018)” ↗He’s gotta be one of the people who inspired Rushkofd to write Survival of the Richest. And I think Elmo is his role model not Jobs
on “RIF developer counters Reddit CEO’s claims” ↗