The world watched as two of its richest men – Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos – sent themselves into space last year. After Bezos returned, he held a press conference where he thanked Amazon employees and customers for making his trip possible. Bezos and the rest of the world’s tech billionaires are obsessed with finding ways to escape Earth, like colonizing Mars or building an alternative reality in the metaverse.
That includes evading problems like pandemics, social unrest, and climate disasters — because just as Bezos was orbiting the earth, COVID was still raging, a massive fire in California was sending ash and smoke to New York, and Germany was reeling from devastating floods.
The billionaires’ doomsday obsession isn’t about seeking solutions for humanity, but securing their own gilded parachutes to avoid the crises they helped create. That’s according to Douglas Rushkoff, author of “Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.”
“It's the idea that they can somehow either have enough money or create a technology, like a car that could drive fast enough to escape from its own exhaust. That humanity is this problem to be solved with technology,” he tells KCRW. “But the further they go, the more damage they create. And the more incumbent upon them it is to somehow escape from the disasters they are leaving in their wake.”
The idea for the book came from the early days of the pandemic when he and others sheltered at home.
“Their value system was trickling down to all of us one way or another. It was during COVID when I realized, ‘Well, maybe I've always felt guilty about my Amazon Prime account. But now it's kind of good that I have one — and FreshDirect and Grubhub and all these things. And maybe I will get Disney+ and HBO Max and The Criterion Channel and just hole up here until the coast is clear. We all fell into that mindset.”
He says the best way to defeat the capitalistic attitude is by stripping away the power of big businesses.
“Since when is it our job as people to support the economy? The economy was supposed to support us. What we do is … we take some power away from capitalist giants, these kinds of obese corporations, by caring for one another, sharing stuff with one another and getting off that treadmill. And that's psychological as much as it is spiritual or social.”
Douglas Rushkoff’s latest book is “Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.” Credit: W. W. Norton & Company.
Read an excerpt from Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff.