Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

understanding of human relationships as market phenomena,

Capitalism itself, at least as currently practiced in Silicon Valley, certainly supports widespread disregard for the vanquished. Poverty is largely considered the fault of the poor. As NYU business professor Scott Galloway has explained, “we’ve decided that capitalism means being loving and empathetic to corporations, and Darwinistic and harsh tow

We are not products of these platforms so much as the labor force. We dutifully read, click, post, and retweet; we become enraged, scandalized, and indignant; and we go on to complain, attack, or cancel. That’s work.

The billionaire bunker is less a viable strategy for apocalypse than a metaphor for this disconnected approach to life. The lifestyle it suggests bears more resemblance to a private, defended fortress than a welcoming oasis, because even the billionaires are aware that they’ve been sustaining their businesses and lifestyles on borrowed time and bor

From my perspective, this wasn’t the beginning of the Internet Revolution, but the end. We were starting to care less about how this technology could augment humanity and more about how it could bolster a flagging stock exchange.

There lies the most fundamental problem with Mindset-derived solutions: they only move in one direction.

This drive toward totalitarian technocracy is what educator and media theorist Neil Postman called technopoly, the “submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology.”

It’s not a matter of banishing linearity and progress altogether, but rather integrating it within the greater cycles that define our existence. Not a line or a circle, but a spiral, with history never quite repeating but almost always rhyming as it moves forward through time.

In their effort to become more like banks, businesses cannibalized themselves, liquidating any divisions that were on the ground actually creating value.