Vox Day's Review of "Survival of the Richest"

 Vox Day published last week a review of  Douglas Rushkoff’s 2022 book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. Rushkoff apparently has been employed as a consultant by billionaires to evaluate their preparations for the end of the world. Based on his experiences, he describes a belief--he terms it "The Mindset"--that they can somehow survive everything by escaping and leaving it all behind. Day is not impressed with the book, however:

    The Mindset, as Rushkoff tries and fails to coin a Very Important Term to describe what is quite obviously neither a religion nor a philosophy, but merely an attitude held in common by the selfish sociopaths he is describing, is nothing more than the realization that when the global economic system collapses, as it inevitably will, very rich people are going to be targets. Which, of course, is why they are building bunkers in New Zealand, buying private islands, and desperately trying to figure out how to either a) upload their brains to a hard drive or b) colonize Mars.

     Rushkoff’s solution for them, and I am not kidding you, is “be nice to your security team and pay for their daughters’ bat mitzvahs” which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about Rushkoff, the billionaires who seek his advice, and the value of that advice.

 And he adds: "There is virtually no discussion of the actual problem, which is the subversion of Western civilization and the embrace of usury that has led to the tidal wave of debt that has engulfed the global economy and benefited the selfish, short-sighted sociopaths of whom the tech billionaires are merely a subset."

    But Vox held back some of his thoughts from that review, discussing them in a post at his own blog entitled "The Billionaires are Scared." And, as he explains, they should be: "They’ve been financially raping the West in general and the USA in particular for the last 52 years, kicking the can down the road, and now the time of reckoning is rapidly approaching." He doesn't specifically mention the corruption revealed around USAID and other government programs that have come to light, but I supposed he doesn't need to. 

   There are other ways to ensure survival of the elites, and the billionaires' bolt holes is just one facet--albeit, a very personal one. But there are collective measures to keep a lid on things. For instance, as Vox Day recounts in another article, "Gangstalking is Real and Federally-Funded," there are some 300,000 people on the government's no-fly list, even though "[t]he Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General audit reports concluded that 97% of the people on the TSDB have 'No known ties to terrorism' and do not represent a threat to national security. Only .28% of the list contains the names of actual 'known and suspected terrorists.' The vast majority of this 'blacklist' is reserved for whistleblowers, activists, J6ers, parents that protest at school boards, and any enemy of the Deep State."

    Another method is simply reduce the number and influence of undesirables. Thus, at one end, as Vox Day describes in yet another article, there is a war on fertility, and on the other end are the countless ways in which white Americans are kept out of the plum universities and jobs. 

    At some point, AI and robotics will reach a point that there simply won't be any need for the elites to keep a large population of "worker bees" around. Case in point, the article "Horsepower! When everyone owned a horse . . . or did they?" notes that in the year 1900 the number of horses and mules in the U.S. was about 21.5 million (versus a human population of roughly 76 million) but had dropped to 3 million in 1960. The number of horses and mules has grown a bit since then, but the point is that when horses and mules were no longer needed, their numbers dropped precipitously.