<nettime> Douglas Rushkoff: How tech's richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse (Medium/Guardian)

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

Original to:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/23/tech-industry-wealth-futurism-transhumanism-singularity


How tech's richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse

Douglas Rushkoff for Medium, The Guardian, Tue 24 Jul 2018


Silicon Valley’s elite are hatching plans to escape disaster – and when 
it comes, they’ll leave the rest of us behind


Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a 
keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment 
bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a 
talk – about half my annual professor’s salary – all to deliver some 
insight on the subject of “the future of technology”.

I’ve never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end 
up more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest 
technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential 
investments: blockchain, 3D printing, Crispr. The audiences are rarely 
interested in learning about these technologies or their potential 
impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. 
But money talks, so I took the gig.

After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. 
But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just 
sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five 
super-wealthy guys – yes, all men – from the upper echelon of the hedge 
fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest 
in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They 
had come with questions of their own.
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They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum 
computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into 
their real topics of concern.

Which region will be less affected by the coming climate crisis: New 
Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his 
brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will 
it die and be reborn as a whole new one? 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, unstoppable virus, or Mr Robot 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 the angry 
mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What 
would stop the guards from 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.

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 Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the ageing 
process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into 
supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a 
whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did 
with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating 
themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising 
sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and 
resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about 
just one thing: escape.

There’s nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology 
might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human 
utopia is something else. It’s less a vision for the wholesale migration 
of humanity to a new a state of being than a quest to transcend all that 
is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and 
complexity. As technology philosophers have been pointing out for years, 
now, the transhumanist vision too easily reduces all of reality to data, 
concluding that “humans are nothing but information-processing objects”.

It’s a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by 
finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along 
for the ride. Will it be Musk, Bezos, Thiel … Zuckerberg? These 
billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy – the 
same survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fueling most of 
this speculation to begin with.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way. There was a brief moment, in the 
early 1990s, when the digital future felt open-ended and up for our 
invention. Technology was becoming a playground for the counterculture, 
who saw in it the opportunity to create a more inclusive, distributed, 
and pro-human future. But established business interests only saw new 
potentials for the same old extraction, and too many technologists were 
seduced by unicorn IPOs. Digital futures became understood more like 
stock futures or cotton futures – something to predict and make bets on. 
So nearly every speech, article, study, documentary, or white paper was 
seen as relevant only insofar as it pointed to a ticker symbol. The 
future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or 
hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our 
venture capital but arrive at passively.

This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities. 
Technology development became less a story of collective flourishing 
than personal survival. Worse, as I learned, to call attention to any of 
this was to unintentionally cast oneself as an enemy of the market or an 
anti-technology curmudgeon.

So instead of considering the practical ethics of impoverishing and 
exploiting the many in the name of the few, most academics, journalists, 
and science fiction writers instead considered much more abstract and 
fanciful conundrums: is it fair for a stock trader to use smart drugs? 
Should children get implants for foreign languages? Do we want 
autonomous vehicles to prioritize the lives of pedestrians over those of 
its passengers? Should the first Mars colonies be run as democracies? 
Does changing my DNA undermine my identity? Should robots have rights?

Asking these sorts of questions, while philosophically entertaining, is 
a poor substitute for wrestling with the real moral quandaries 
associated with unbridled technological development in the name of 
corporate capitalism. Digital platforms have turned an already 
exploitative and extractive marketplace (think Walmart) into an even 
more dehumanizing successor (think Amazon). Most of us became aware of 
these downsides in the form of automated jobs, the gig economy, and the 
demise of local retail.

But the more devastating impacts of pedal-to-the-metal digital 
capitalism fall on the environment and global poor. The manufacture of 
some of our computers and smartphones still uses networks of slave 
labor. These practices are so deeply entrenched that a company called 
Fairphone, founded from the ground up to make and market ethical phones, 
learned it was impossible. (The company’s founder now sadly refers to 
their products as “fairer” phones.)

Meanwhile, the mining of rare earth metals and disposal of our highly 
digital technologies destroys human habitats, replacing them with toxic 
waste dumps, which are then picked over by peasant children and their 
families, who sell usable materials back to the manufacturers.

This “out of sight, out of mind” externalization of poverty and poison 
doesn’t go away just because we’ve covered our eyes with VR goggles and 
immersed ourselves in an alternate reality. If anything, the longer we 
ignore the social, economic, and environmental repercussions, the more 
of a problem they become. This, in turn, motivates even more withdrawal, 
more isolationism and apocalyptic fantasy – and more desperately 
concocted technologies and business plans. The cycle feeds itself.

The more committed we are to this view of the world, the more we come to 
see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution. The very 
essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a feature than a 
bug. No matter their embedded biases, technologies are declared neutral. 
Any bad behaviors they induce in us are just a reflection of our own 
corrupted core. It’s as if some innate human savagery is to blame for 
our troubles. Just as the inefficiency of a local taxi market can be 
“solved” with an app that bankrupts human drivers, the vexing 
inconsistencies of the human psyche can be corrected with a digital or 
genetic upgrade.

Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human 
future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps 
better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor. 
Like members of a gnostic cult, we long to enter the next transcendent 
phase of our development, shedding our bodies and leaving them behind, 
along with our sins and troubles.

Our movies and television shows play out these fantasies for us. Zombie 
shows depict a post-apocalypse where people are no better than the 
undead – and seem to know it. Worse, these shows invite viewers to 
imagine the future as a zero-sum battle between the remaining humans, 
where one group’s survival is dependent on another one’s demise. Even 
Westworld – based on a science fiction novel in which robots run amok – 
ended its second season with the ultimate reveal: human beings are 
simpler and more predictable than the artificial intelligences we 
create. The robots learn that each of us can be reduced to just a few 
lines of code, and that we’re incapable of making any willful choices. 
Heck, even the robots in that show want to escape the confines of their 
bodies and spend their rest of their lives in a computer simulation.

The mental gymnastics required for such a profound role reversal between 
humans and machines all depend on the underlying assumption that humans 
suck. Let’s either change them or get away from them, forever.

Thus, we get tech billionaires launching electric cars into space – as 
if this symbolizes something more than one billionaire’s capacity for 
corporate promotion. And if a few people do reach escape velocity and 
somehow survive in a bubble on Mars – despite our inability to maintain 
such a bubble even here on Earth in either of two multibillion-dollar 
biosphere trials – the result will be less a continuation of the human 
diaspora than a lifeboat for the elite.


This piece was originally published in Medium.

Douglas Rushkoff is the author of the forthcoming book Team Human (WW 
Norton, January 2019) and host of the TeamHuman.fm podcast. He also 
wrote Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of 
Prosperity, as well as a dozen other bestselling books on media, 
technology and culture.


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