From the wealthy crackpots files: Prepping for Armageddon! 😍

The Guardian reports on a fun new trend among billionaires. This one is a total hoot. No one can make this stuff up -- it is real, raw life in America today. Enjoy:

The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse

Time to bunker down under the ground

Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse they helped create, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequences

As a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist. 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. I don’t usually respond to their inquiries. Why help these guys ruin what’s left of the internet, much less civilization?

Still, sometimes a combination of morbid curiosity and cold hard cash is enough to get me on a stage in front of the tech elite, where I try to talk some sense into them about how their businesses are affecting our lives out here in the real world. That’s how I found myself accepting an invitation to address a group mysteriously described as “ultra-wealthy stakeholders”, out in the middle of the desert.

A limo was waiting for me at the airport. As the sun began to dip over the horizon, I realized I had been in the car for three hours. What sort of wealthy hedge-fund types would drive this far from the airport for a conference? Then I saw it. 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. Of course.

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. They left me to drink coffee and prepare in what I figured was serving as my green room. But instead of me being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, my audience was brought in to me. They sat around the table and introduced themselves: five super-wealthy guys – yes, all men – from the upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge-fund world. At least two of them were billionaires. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the speech I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come to ask questions.  

Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.  

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?  

The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear 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”.  

This was probably the wealthiest, most powerful group I had ever encountered. Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology.

Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonising Mars, Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether.

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Well, there we have it my fellow preppers, survivalists, freaks, zealots and crackpots. 

What’s on the minds of some of our wealthy elites? Saving themselves. They have no concern about lifting a finger to try to deal with the serious problems they are knowingly causing. They are not worrying about the rest of us, species extinctions, climate change or saving democracy. They are only concerned about saving their own worse than worthless, morally rotted hides. 

Apparently, it has not occurred to these wealthy people that they are pursuing a crackpot fantasy. Think about it. Armageddon happens and the rich just manage to squeak into their bunkers, with the Navy Seals, food, professional chefs, ample supply of young, highly attractive, nubile, juicy sex workers (😍😍), vast amounts of porn (😘), water, air, guns, bullets ’n whatnot before the planet becomes an uninhabitable hellscape. 

Sex workers for the billionaires

More sex workers

More sex workers

Then the rich ones hang out in the dirt for, let’s say, four years before they have to resurface to resupply. Guess what they will come up to? The same or about the same thing that drove them into the dirt in the first place. Oopsie doodle, the rich folks be hosed, assuming the Navy Seals hadn’t already offed them to keep the food, sex workers and whatnot for themselves! Those naughty, naughty Seals. ☹️ (keep your hands off those sheep!)

I like the idea of fitting the Seals with a kill collar that beheads the wearer if he tries to shoot, stab or otherwise kill, injure or insult a billionaire overlord.

By Germaine: Entertainer and acute observer of social trends