Amplified by digital technologies and the unprecedented wealth disparity they afford, The Mindset [of the Tech Billionaires] 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, and understanding of human relationships as market phenomena… 

Instead of just lording over us forever, however, the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the 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.

Excerpt from Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff, published by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., USA, 2022, pp. 11-12.

Description on Back Cover

Five mysterious billionaires summoned Douglas Rushkoff to a desert resort for a private talk. The subject? How to survive the “Event”: the societal collapse they know is coming. Rushkoff argues that these men were under the influence of The Mindset, a Silicon Valley–style certainty that they and their cohort can escape a disaster of their own making—as long as they have enough money and the right technology.

Rushkoff traces the origins of The Mindset through its current expression in missions to Mars, island bunkers, AI futurism, and the metaverse and explains why those with the most power to change the world have no interest in doing so. Anticipating the mass layoffs and institutional collapse that have recently rocked Silicon Valley, Rushkoff’s Survival of the Richest is “a necessary and timely read” (Los Angeles Review of Books) with a prophetic message about the future of tech and our human community.

More Thoughts about The Mindset

The Mindset encourages a form of “winning” that requires its human and corporate victors to rise above those who have been necessarily left behind. Winning, after all, is by definition a way of setting oneself apart from everyone else. This separateness is the very object of the game, so we shouldn’t be surprised that those who reach the top of the pyramid look down on the rest of us. (p. 35)

The Mindset’s version of capitalism doesn’t stop at necessary growth and progress. It’s about more than even just growth for growth’s sake. It’s reaching toward something beyond victory itself: total domination. The tech billionaires have already accumulated more wealth than they or their grandchildren could ever spend…. There is no such thing as enough. (p. 76)

In what might be The Mindset’s greatest crime against the human project, these totalizing solutions perpetuate the myth that only a technocratic elite can possibly fix our problems. They distract and discourage the rest of us from making substantive changes to the way we live, and divert limited funding to moonshot boondoggles—all while making the wealthiest even wealthier. (p. 112)

Maybe the fear of AI—this awareness of something they [the tech billionaires] believe to be greater than themselves—will be enough to make holders of The Mindset less disdainful of the rest of humanity, and help them begin to see themselves as on the same team as everyone else. After all, they’re not escaping from us; they’re escaping from their own creation. (p. 173)

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Douglas Rushkoff is professor of media theory and digital economics at Queens College/CUNY. Named one of the world’s ten most influential intellectuals by MIT, he hosts the Team Human podcast and has written many award-winning books that span media theory, economics, philosophy, and fiction. Team Human (2019) makes the case for retrieving the human values lost in the digital landscape. Present Shock (2013) examines what happens when society becomes obsessed with the now. Program or Be Programmed (2010), now in an updated 15th anniversary edition, remains the definitive guide to navigating algorithmic culture with agency. He lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, USA.