Survival of the Richest

A book review of Douglas Rushkoff's 2022 book on tech billionaires

A friend gave me Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires last week. I read it, less because I care what Rushkoff, supposedly “one of the world’s ten most influential intellectuals” thinks about anything than because I think it’s important to keep a wary eye on what the current Narrative in the business world happens to be.

And it’s not exactly a surprise to discover that Rushkoff, a Marxist media theorist, believes that very rich people are selfish sociopaths who don’t care about anyone but themselves. How and why this is believed to be a brilliant new discovery and worthy of particular note escapes me, but apparently it is news to the likes of PUBLISHERS WEEKLY and someone named FRANCIS MOORE LAPPE, both of whom describe the book as “eye-popping” in the lengthy list of accolades that precede the actual book in the paperback edition I was given.

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.

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. Nor is there any analysis on the ways that Russia and China have been successfully addressing the problem by leashing their erstwhile oligarchs and putting the national interest ahead of economic theories and ideologies that just happen to justify The Mindset.

What I came to realize as I sat sipping imported iceberg water and pondering doomsday scenarios with our society’s great winners is that these men are actually the losers. The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.

Yet this Silicon Valley escapism—let’s call it The Mindset—encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind. Maybe that’s been their objective all along. Perhaps this fatalist drive to rise above and separate from humanity is no more the result of runaway digital capitalism than its cause—a way of treating one another and the world that can be traced back to the sociopathic tendencies of empirical science, individualism, sexual domination, and perhaps even “progress” itself.

Yet while tyrants since the time of Pharaoh and Alexander the Great may have sought to sit atop great civilizations and rule them from above, never before have our society’s most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unlivable for everyone else. Nor have they ever before had the technologies through which to program their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society. The landscape is alive with algorithms and intelligences actively encouraging these selfish and isolationist outlooks. Those sociopathic enough to embrace them are rewarded with cash and control over the rest of us. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop. This is new.

Amplified by digital technologies and the unprecedented wealth disparity they afford, The Mindset allows for the easy externalization of harm to others, and inspires a corresponding longing for transcendence and separation from the people and places that have been abused. As we will see, The Mindset is based in a staunchly atheistic and materialist scientism, a faith in technology to solve problems, an adherence to biases of digital code, an understanding of human relationships as market phenomena, a fear of nature and women, a need to see one’s contributions as utterly unique innovations without precedent, and an urge to neutralize the unknown by dominating and de-animating it.

Instead of just lording over us forever, however, the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame. In fact, like the plot of a Marvel blockbuster, the very structure of The Mindset requires an endgame. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned. Actual, imminent catastrophes from the climate emergency to mass migrations support the mythology, offering these would-be superheroes the opportunity to play out the finale in their own lifetimes. For The Mindset also includes a faith-based Silicon Valley certainty that they can develop a technology that will somehow break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to offer them something even better than a way of saving the world: a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making.

- Chapter 1: Meet the Mindset

The fundamental problem here, of course, is that these newly-minted billionaires who subscribe to The Mindset obviously didn’t create the apocalypse or even pave the way for it. They are contributing to it, and they certainly aren’t doing anything to stop it, but the foundation for the current situation was laid decades before they were even born.

The book isn’t completely worthless. Rushkoff does have an accurate sense that something is fundamentally wrong with the world order and that technology is producing diminishing returns for everyone, including the tech billionaires who most benefit from the way that technology has, like the rest of the economy, been financialized for the benefit of a tiny number of people.

I expect Rushkoff understands, unlike most of his elite media brethren, why President Trump’s popularity has risen as the stock markets take a vicious beating; 92 percent of all Americans don’t benefit from the stock market at all.

But aside from some ironic amusement at the plight of the poor frightened billionaires and former cyberpunk enthusiast and self-described “citizen of Cyberspace” Rushkoff’s belated realization that digital transhumanism is not going to save Mankind from economic calamity or natural catastrophe, you’re not going to get anything useful out of Survival of the Richest.

Especially if you’re a tech billionaire.