Douglas Rushkoff: “Survival of the Richest”
Five wealthy investors asked Douglas how to survive environmental collapse. But what they really wanted to know was how to transcend the human world they look down upon.
This week’s Playback gets into the psyche of some big-money overlords — the ones who can’t make it to Mars with Elon, anyway.
In his wildly popular story “Survival of the Richest,” researcher douglas rushkoff starts off writing about an invitation he received last year to give a keynote speech at a deluxe private resort. Despite his misgivings about offering investment advice to incurious rich people, he went: The speaker’s fee was roughly half his annual professor’s salary.
But instead of the usual audience of wealthy retirees, he was greeted by “five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world.” On the face of it, they wanted Douglas’s advice on how to escape environmental collapse. But soon they began asking questions like “Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain” and “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?’” (“The Event,” meaning “environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything…
