close to universaclass="underline" In “Survival of the Richest” (Medium, July 5, 2018), the futurist Douglas Rushkoff described his experience as a keynote speaker at a private conference attended by the superrich—these patrons not themselves technologists but hedge-funders he came to feel were taking all of their cues from them. Quickly, he writes, the conversation attained a clear focus:
Which region will be less impacted 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.” In Rushkoff’s telling, this is a kind of catchall phrase for anything that might threaten their status or security as the world’s most privileged—“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,” Rushkoff continues.
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.
In To Be a Machine, Mark O’Connell traced the same impulse through Silicon Valley’s whole Brahman caste. The book opens with an epigraph from Don DeLillo: “This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other.” The quote comes from White Noise, in particular from its narrator’s colleague and sidekick Murray Jay Siskind, who is both the novel’s comic foil and its “explainer.” It was never clear to me just how seriously we are meant to take Murray’s pronouncements, but this one does quite sharply describe the contemporary tech two-step: freaking out about “existential risks” while simultaneously cultivating private exits from mortality.
For Rushkoff, these are all facets of the same impulse, broadly shared by the class of visionaries and power brokers and venture capitalists whose dreams for the future are received as blueprints, especially by the armies of engineers they command like impetuous fiefdoms—investing in new forms of space travel, life extension, and technology-aided life after death. “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,” he writes. “For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.”
“An Account of My Hut”: Christina Nichol, “An Account of My Hut,” n+1, Spring 2018. Nichol explains the title this way:
I once read a story called “An Account of My Hut,” by Kamo no Chōmei, a 12th-century Japanese hermit. Chōmei describes how after witnessing a fire, an earthquake, and a typhoon in Kyoto, he leaves society and goes to live in a hut.
Seven hundred years later, Basil Bunting, the Northumberland poet, wrote his own rendition of Chōmei’s story:
Oh! There’s nothing to complain about.
Buddha says: “None of the world is good.”
I am fond of my hut…
But even if I wanted to renounce the world, I wouldn’t be able to afford a hut in California.
as old as John Maynard Keynes: Keynes extended the prediction—much, much talked about ever since—in an essay notably published in 1930, just after the stock market crash of 1929: John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” Nation and Athenaeum, October 11 and 18, 1930.
“You can see the computer age”: This line first appeared in Robert M. Solow, “We’d Better Watch Out,” review of Manufacturing Matters by Stephen S. Cohen and John Zysman, The New York Times Book Review, July 12, 1987.
a million transatlantic flights: Alex Hern, “Bitcoin’s Energy Usage Is Huge—We Can’t Afford to Ignore It,” The Guardian, January 17, 2018.
“If we don’t act quickly”: Bill McKibben, “Winning Is the Same as Losing,” Rolling Stone, December 1, 2017. “Another way of saying this: By 2075, the world will be powered by solar panels and windmills—free energy is a hard business proposition to beat,” McKibben wrote. “But on current trajectories, they’ll light up a busted planet. The decisions we make in 2075 won’t matter; indeed, the decisions we make in 2025 will matter much less than the ones we make in the next few years. The leverage is now.”
“The future is already here”: The quip first appeared in The Economist in 2003.
less than 10 percent of the world: IDC, “Smartphone OS Market Share,” www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/os.
somewhere between a quarter and a third: David Murphy, “2.4BN Smartphone Users in 2017, Says eMarketer,” Mobile Marketing, April 28, 2017, https://mobilemarketingmagazine.com/24bn-smartphone-users-in-2017-says-emarketer.
global decarbonization in 2000: These figures come from Robbie Andrew, a senior researcher at the Center for International Climate Research, and his presentation “Global Collective Effort,” which he published on his website in May 2018 (http://folk.uio.no/roberan/t/2C.shtml). He was drawing on figures put forward by Michael R. Raupach et al. in “Sharing a Quota on Cumulative Carbon Emissions,” Nature Climate Change (September 2014).
only one year: “UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres Calls for Climate Leadership, Outlines Expectations for Next Three Years,” UN Climate Change News, September 10, 2018: “If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences for people and all the natural systems that sustain us.”
poured more concrete in three years: Jocelyn Timperley, “Q&A: Why Cement Emissions Matter for Climate Change,” Carbon Brief, September 13, 2018, www.carbonbrief.org/qa-why-cement-emissions-matter-for-climate-change.
the world would need to add: Ken Caldeira, “Climate Sensitivity Uncertainty and the Need for Energy Without CO2 Emission,” Science 299 (March 2003): pp. 2052–54.
in four hundred years: James Temple, “At This Rate, It’s Going to Take Nearly 400 Years to Transform the Energy System,” MIT Technology Review, March 14, 2018, www.technologyreview.com/s/610457/at-this-rate-its-going-to-take-nearly-400-years-to-transform-the-energy-system.
official death count is 47: U.N. Information Service, “New Report on Health Effects Due to Radiation from the Chernobyl Accident,” February 28, 2011, www.unis.unvienna.org/unis/en/pressrels/2011/unisinf398.html.
as high as 4,000: World Health Organization, “Chernobyclass="underline" The True Scale of the Accident,” September 5, 2005, www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38.