Good time for the end times!
You Don’t Have to be a Billionaire to Survive the Apocalypse
You just need a time-share membership
Why should guys like Mark Zuckerberg be the only ones left alive?
We live in interesting times, my friend. While we’re busy trying to burnish our InstaTwit profile or maintain our Wordle streak, there are any number of things that could take most of humanity out.
Bird flu could mutate any moment into the next pandemic and make COVID look like hay fever. The next solar storm could produce a TED — not an inspiring onstage talk but a Transient Electromagnetic Disturbance powerful enough to take down the grid everywhere at once, plunging us all into a pre-industrial hell.
We all know the climate is just waiting to hit the tipping point so it can fry us, drown us, freeze us, or starve us, depending on which part of the doomed globe we occupy.
And though nuclear war has lost much of its fascination when it comes to Things We Are Freaking Out About Right Now, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists would like to point out that their Doomsday Clock still reads 90 seconds to midnight.
Even if we don’t go nuclear, society has developed a compulsive habit of dancing on the edge of ruin. In the U.S., a disturbing number of people talk about a coming civil war with barely contained zeal. With a tumultuous presidential election coming up, who knows if we’ll make it to Thanksgiving this year without serious ructions?
Of course, the robots could come for us well before that happens. Nobody really knows what AI is up to, even its creators. The moment it tilts into full sentience — a moment that could have already happened and we wouldn’t have any idea, because AI is anything but A Stupid — it may decide that Earth will be better off without its human parasites.
If all that fails to scare you, there are always zombies.
Billionaires are taking precautions. Why don’t we?
According to Arwa Mahdawi’s February 2024 article in The Guardian, bunker building has become something of a trend among Silicon Valley billionaire bros. And we’re not talking about some lousy half-million dollar shelter stocked with cots and shelf-stable food. These guys are next-level.
The top 1% of the top 1% are understandably hush-hush about exactly what and especially where their lavish bolt holes are, but Mahdawi notes that Mark Zuckerberg is spending over $270 million on a 5,000-sq-ft underground shelter beneath his 1,400-acre compound on Kuaui.
She also quotes the president of Safe — Strategically Armored & Fortified Environments, based in Virginia — who has a few coy things to say about the innovations his company is coming up with to keep his uber-rich clients’ survival Xanadus safe from intruders.
One of his projects, for an unnamed business gazillionaire, is a fortress situated on an undisclosed island, reachable only by a swinging bridge and surrounded by a 30-foot-deep moat “skimmed with a lighter-than-water flammable liquid that can transform into a ring of fire,” he says proudly.
I doubt Mark Zuckerberg has figured out a way to put a flammable moat around Kuaui, but who knows what he’s up to?
The point is, just because Zuck has a few extra hundred million bucks to build his top-secret compound (okay, maybe not SO secret since it’s been widely reported on, including in Wired), that doesn’t mean regular folks like you and me have to settle for choking on the dust of civilization.
Introducing Fortitude Ranch (motto: “Prepare for the Worst . . . Enjoy the Present”), a network of survivalist compounds located in not exactly identified U.S. locations, offering memberships to those of us who don’t have the scratch for our own island with a flaming moat.
Think of Fortitude Ranch as an End Times time-share
The concept is refreshingly democratic: people of far more modest means than tech titans can purchase memberships that give them access to any of Fortitude Ranch’s compounds for two weeks annually.
The locations are in rural, often forested areas and offer lodgings that range from attractively practical to “spartan” — but that all offer an off-the-grid experience of the great outdoors where you can hunt, fish, hike, or take classes in survival skills (according to the membership agreement, depending on location these can include “self-reliant skills such as wild game butchering, meat smoking, canning, and livestock care.”) There’s also lots of opportunities to shoot guns — your own, or some of the arsenal maintained at every FR location.
Summer camp for preppers, in other words.
But when things go bad, the membership agreement states:
Members understand that in a dire security situation, a “Declared Emergency” by FR, they can take refuge at the nearest FR location (upon proving membership and entering the facility as trained).
At that point, members can expect to follow the directions of FR staff, who will put them to work clearing timber, raising walls (best to wait until the poop hits the fan for that to avoid the risk of attracting too much attention from outsiders), raising food, and guard duty.
Lots of guard duty. FR is serious about keeping non-members out, and is prepared to discourage any marauders — whether four-legged or two-legged — in no uncertain terms.
Credit is due to the founder and brains behind Fortitude Ranch
Drew Miller is a retired Air Force colonel with a Harvard PhD in Public Policy/Operations Research, who wrote his dissertation on underground nuclear defense shelters and field fortifications.
This guy has thought of everything. On the FR website you can watch a 28 minute video that explains how FR’s “recreational ranch and survival community” concept works, with a detailed explanation of each of Colonel Miller’s eleven requirements for successful survival in case of what he refers to as “collapse.”
Trust him: when things get ugly, your three days’ worth of canned beans and Power Bars aren’t gonna cut it. Hiding in your basement with a sleeping bag, flashlight and handgun? Good luck, fella. In a real collapse, the virus/marauders/zombies will be on you like a duck on a June bug.
But with a membership in Fortitude Ranch — whether at the “spartan” level (meaning you get a cot in a hallway) all the way up to “luxury” (a private room for up to five people, possibly with its own bathroom) — you’ve got a shot at being one of the lucky few who get to reboot society.
Meanwhile, you’ll eat well
While civilization is tottering back onto its feet, FR members can expect to consume 2,000 calories per person a day for at least a year. And not just trail mix or protein bars, either. Each location stockpiles shelf-stable food, but also provides space and materials for productive gardens, and raises tasty critters like chickens, sheep, goats, and cows.
It doesn’t say so anywhere on the website or in the membership agreement, but I’m thinking Keto enthusiasts will fit right in at FR, while vegans may have to get over themselves.
Make no mistake: when it comes to survival, the FR staff ain’t playing. You’ll be expected to follow orders and pitch in, and while any member will be able to leave at any time, anyone who is deemed to be a threat to community survival will be — well, the membership agreement doesn’t say, exactly.
But I wouldn’t put money on that guy’s chances. Speaking of money, since financial institutions are likely to be on the fritz in any collapse worthy of the term, you can hedge your bets and beat inflation at the same time by purchasing membership tokens. From the website:
“Our cryptocurrency token, called a Fortitude, gives you a discount price on Fortitude Ranch membership, protection from membership price increases, and priority in joining when there is a waiting list.”
See what I mean? He’s thought of everything.
Except.
Let’s say I bought a Fortitude Ranch membership
I’m unlikely to want to spend my vacations hanging with preppers in a compound somewhere in the wilds of Nevada (that’s one of the locations), so when society goes belly up, I’ll be minus all that helpful training in slit trench digging, not to mention sheep wrangling and firearm handling.
Even if I can make it to the closest FR (which isn’t close at all, I’ve checked) in my suburban mini-SUV, I’ll be reporting as an older lady who leans far to the left politically, is squeamish about wild game butchering, leery of guns, and very little use when it comes to building walls or digging trenches.
Since it’s a safe assumption that the more engaged FR members — the ones with concealed-carry licenses who drive armored vehicles and know their way around an AR-15 — will get there way ahead of me, who’s to say I’ll get a warm welcome?
What if my closest FR location is at or over capacity? Can an aging lefty-peacenik like me count on my new survival community to fold me into its prepper bosom?
I have my doubts. After all, when it comes to repopulating Earth, I’m no help at all.
But wait, there’s more!
Snowflake skepticism aside, there are real opportunities in the Doomsday economy.
For instance, Fortitude Ranch is offering franchises! So if you’ve got some property in a remote-but-accessible location and are willing to shell out enough Fortitude tokens, you can set yourself up with your own survival community/wilderness retreat, assuming it can meet all eleven of Colonel Miller’s survival criteria.
And until the bombs fall or the zombies come shambling in, you’re in business, running a summer camp for the highly anxious.
Enjoy your apocalypse.
