This is wild, holy hell This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually 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”. 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, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.
Well, your two choices in the TESCREAL universe are EA (Effective Altruism), whereby you spend your money on pet projects that will pay off when Hugo Drax has poisoned the world to clear it for the ubermensch, or E/acc (Effective Accelerationism), whereby you spend your money with Hugo Drax. It's all just fascism and eugenics, with each tribe of sociopaths plotting their allegiance by varying the amount of fascism and eugenics.
Yeah that phrasing really sticks in the mind. I could have sworn I read that article a handful of years ago, but I guess it was last year. Fits into the whole accelerationism discourse going onInstead of just lording over us for ever, 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.
Yeah this is one of the things that tickles me pink. Paul LeRoux, bless his black heart, put his money where his mouth is - he took his riches and set out to be a warlord in Somalia. Once there he discovered that feudal violence discovers a different sort of business acumen and bailed. I think one of the reasons Marc Andreesen has been such a shit lately is the whole TESCREAL crew is starting to realize that they're going to need people to follow them voluntarily and it's been decades since any of them have had to talk anyone into listening to them, rather than just buying them out or browbeating them with money. Well, that, and the fact that they're all a bunch of coddled country club kids busily plotting for an end to the only world where they have any juice.