[P2P-F] Fwd: Survival of the Richest...

Wed Jul 25 12:47:29 CEST 2018

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ryan Fortune <ryan.fortune2012 at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Jul 24, 2018 at 2:21 PM
Subject: Survival of the Richest...
To: michel at p2pfoundation.net

US media theorist Douglas Rushkoff on how the wealthy are plotting to leave
us behind...
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=6b70c70b13&e=96e15d4563>

*Survival of the Richest: The Wealthy Are Plotting to Leave us Behind*
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=6f4a28ebe5&e=96e15d4563>
*By Douglas Rushkoff* *MEDIUM, 5 July 2018*
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=fc66b56875&e=96e15d4563>

Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a
keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment
bankers.

It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk — about
half my annual professor’s salary — all to deliver some insight on the
subject of “the future of technology.”

I’ve never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end up
more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest technology
buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential investments:
blockchain, 3D printing, CRISPR.

The audiences are rarely interested in learning about these technologies or
their potential impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to
invest in them.

But money talks, so I took the gig.

After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But
instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat
there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five
super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge
fund world.

After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the
information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come
with questions of their own.

They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum
computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their
real topics of concern.

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.* That was 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. 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.

That’s when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned,
this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon
Musk colonizing Mars
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=c5d9b168fe&e=96e15d4563>,
Peter Thiel reversing the aging process
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=835b8b5ba0&e=96e15d4563>,
or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=3760315b2d&e=96e15d4563>,
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.

For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.

There’s nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology
might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia
is something else. It’s less a vision for the wholesale migration of
humanity to a new a state of being than a quest to transcend all that is
human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and
complexity.

As technology philosophers have been pointing out for years, now, the
transhumanist vision too easily reduces all of reality to data, concluding
that “humans are nothing but information-processing objects
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=557c4cd9ef&e=96e15d4563>
.”

It’s a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by
finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along for
the ride. Will it be Musk, Bezos, Thiel…Zuckerberg? These billionaires are
the presumptive winners of the digital economy — the same
survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fueling most of this
speculation to begin with.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way. There was a brief moment, in the
early 1990s, when the digital future felt open-ended and up for our
invention. Technology was becoming a playground for the counterculture, who
saw in it the opportunity to create a more inclusive, distributed, and
pro-human future. But established business interests only saw new
potentials for the same old extraction, and too many technologists were
seduced by unicorn IPOs.

Digital futures became understood more like stock futures or cotton futures
— something to predict and make bets on. So nearly every speech, article,
study, documentary, or white paper was seen as relevant only insofar as it
pointed to a ticker symbol. The future became less a thing we create
through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined
scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively.

This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities.
Technology development became less a story of collective flourishing than
personal survival. Worse, as I learned, to call attention to any of this
was to unintentionally cast oneself as an enemy of the market or an
anti-technology curmudgeon.

So instead of considering the practical ethics of impoverishing and
exploiting the many in the name of the few, most academics, journalists,
and science-fiction writers instead considered much more abstract and
fanciful conundrums: Is it fair for a stock trader to use smart drugs
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=15d060537b&e=96e15d4563>?
Should children get implants for foreign languages
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=5906e45a62&e=96e15d4563>?
Do we want autonomous vehicles to prioritize the lives of pedestrians
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=d19b198c06&e=96e15d4563>
over
those of its passengers? Should the first Mars colonies be run as
democracies
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=e3ef997653&e=96e15d4563>?
Does changing my DNA undermine my identity
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=5b3270196d&e=96e15d4563>?
Should robots have rights
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=d5d350a178&e=96e15d4563>
?

Asking these sorts of questions, while philosophically entertaining, is a
poor substitute for wrestling with the real moral quandaries associated
with unbridled technological development in the name of corporate
capitalism.

Digital platforms have turned an already exploitative and extractive
marketplace (think Walmart) into an even more dehumanizing successor (think
Amazon). Most of us became aware of these downsides in the form of
automated jobs, the gig economy, and the demise of local retail.

But the more devastating impacts of pedal-to-the-metal digital capitalism
fall on the environment and global poor. The manufacture of some of our
computers and smartphones still uses networks of slave labor
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=886acd1616&e=96e15d4563>
.

These practices are so deeply entrenched that a company called Fairphone,
founded from the ground up to make and market ethical phones, learned it
was impossible
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=ceb6521e14&e=96e15d4563>.
(The company’s founder now sadly refers to their products as “fairer”
phones.)

Meanwhile, the mining of rare earth metals and disposal of our highly
digital technologies destroys human habitats, replacing them with toxic
waste dumps, which are then picked over by peasant children and their
families, who sell usable materials back to the manufacturers.

This “out of sight, out of mind” externalization of poverty and poison
doesn’t go away just because we’ve covered our eyes with VR goggles and
immersed ourselves in an alternate reality.

If anything, the longer we ignore the social, economic, and environmental
repercussions, the more of a problem they become. This, in turn, motivates
even more withdrawal, more isolationism and apocalyptic fantasy — and more
desperately concocted technologies and business plans. The cycle feeds
itself.

The more committed we are to this view of the world, the more we come to
see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution. The very
essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a feature than bug.
No matter their embedded biases, technologies are declared neutral. Any bad
behaviors they induce in us are just a reflection of our own corrupted core.

It’s as if some innate human savagery is to blame for our troubles. Just as
the inefficiency of a local taxi market can be “solved” with an app that
bankrupts human drivers, the vexing inconsistencies of the human psyche can
be corrected with a digital or genetic upgrade.

Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future
climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps better,
accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor. Like
members of a gnostic cult, we long to enter the next transcendent phase of
our development, shedding our bodies and leaving them behind, along with
our sins and troubles.

Our movies and television shows play out these fantasies for us. Zombie
shows depict a post-apocalypse where people are no better than the undead —
and seem to know it. Worse, these shows invite viewers to imagine the
future as a zero-sum battle between the remaining humans, where one group’s
survival is dependent on another one’s demise.

Even Westworld — based on a science-fiction novel where robots run amok —
ended its second season with the ultimate reveal: Human beings are simpler
and more predictable than the artificial intelligences we create. The
robots learn that each of us can be reduced to just a few lines of code,
and that we’re incapable of making any willful choices. Heck, even the
robots in that show want to escape the confines of their bodies and spend
their rest of their lives in a computer simulation.

The mental gymnastics required for such a profound role reversal between
humans and machines all depend on the underlying assumption that humans
suck. Let’s either change them or get away from them, forever.

Thus, we get tech billionaires launching electric cars into space — as if
this symbolizes something more than one billionaire’s capacity for
corporate promotion. And if a few people do reach escape velocity and
somehow survive in a bubble on Mars — despite our inability to maintain
such a bubble even here on Earth in either of two multibillion-dollar
Biosphere trials — the result will be less a continuation of the human
diaspora than a lifeboat for the elite.

When the hedge funders asked me the best way to maintain authority over
their security forces after “the event,” I suggested that their best bet
would be to treat those people really well, right now. They should be
engaging with their security staffs as if they were members of their own
family.

And the more they can expand this ethos of inclusivity to the rest of their
business practices, supply chain management, sustainability efforts, and
wealth distribution, the less chance there will be of an “event” in the
first place. All this technological wizardry could be applied toward less
romantic but entirely more collective interests right now.

They were amused by my optimism, but they didn’t really buy it. They were
not interested in how to avoid a calamity; they’re convinced we are too far
gone. For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect
the future. They are simply accepting the darkest of all scenarios and then
bringing whatever money and technology they can employ to insulate
themselves — especially if they can’t get a seat on the rocket to Mars.

Luckily, those of us without the funding to consider disowning our own
humanity have much better options available to us. We don’t have to use
technology in such antisocial, atomizing ways. We can become the individual
consumers and profiles that our devices and platforms want us to be, or we
can remember that the truly evolved human doesn’t go it alone.

Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It’s a team sport.

Whatever future humans have, it will be together.
------------------------------

*Douglas Rushkoff is an American media theorist
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=f71be4db01&e=96e15d4563>,
writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist, and documentarian. He is
best known for his association with the early cyberpunk
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=709f0f4c5d&e=96e15d4563>
culture,
and his advocacy of open source
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=c4002dd8ec&e=96e15d4563>
solutions
to social problems.*

*Rushkoff is most frequently regarded as a media theorist
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=394753063d&e=96e15d4563>
and
is known for coining terms and concepts including viral media
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=ca7cc7562a&e=96e15d4563>
(or
media virus), digital native
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=158cdacf76&e=96e15d4563>,
and social currency. He has written ten books on media, technology and
culture. He wrote the first syndicated column on cyberculture
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=890d45aed8&e=96e15d4563>
for The
New York Times Syndicate
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=62c21d22ea&e=96e15d4563>,
as well as regular columns for The Guardian
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=d872910fb2&e=96e15d4563>
of
London, Arthur
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=5656202def&e=96e15d4563>,
Discover
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=3de6306dab&e=96e15d4563>,
and
the online magazines
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=baf5b57985&e=96e15d4563>
Daily
Beast
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=e646af816e&e=96e15d4563>,
TheFeature
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=32196d7fb3&e=96e15d4563>.com
and meeting industry magazine One+. Rushkoff is currently Professor of
Media Theory and Digital Economics at the City University of New York
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=8fc2903ca8&e=96e15d4563>,
Queens College. He has previously lectured at The New School University
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=f58e60eaff&e=96e15d4563>
in
Manhattan and the ITP at New York University
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=7a4e0f9e26&e=96e15d4563>'s
Tisch
School of the Arts
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=e3939b3477&e=96e15d4563>,
where he created the Narrative Lab.  He also has taught online for the
MaybeLogic Academy. *

*Original Article Link*
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=5e88e2ec33&e=96e15d4563>
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=5947048ed0&e=96e15d4563>
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=f41df9b96a&e=96e15d4563>
<https://twitter.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=00451369d2404e52ccee430a8&id=654907c5b2&e=96e15d4563>
*Copyright © 2018 Ryan Fortune, All rights reserved.*
Because we have borrowed this world from our children...

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