Twenty years is like four or five levels of Silicon Valley Frogger. Hopefully most of them, especially from the spawning pool of Andreessen Horowitz, will be gone by then.
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The psyche of mainstream America is slowly starting to grasp what grumpy leftists have long argued: Extreme wealth does a number on peopleâs grasp on reality.
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âItâs impossible to overstate the degree to which many big tech CEOs and venture capitalists are being radicalized by living within their own cultural and social bubble,â tech writer Anil Dash wrote in a recent newsletter. âTheir level of paranoia and contrived self-victimization is off the charts, and is getting worse now that they increasingly only consume media that they have funded, created by their own acolytes.â âŚ
About this Salon senior writer:
Amanda Marcotte is a senior politics writer at Salon and the author of âTroll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself.â
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Not sure if heâs a billionaire but heâs a rich arsehome with the stupid as fuck mindset of a billionaire. He simply canât imagine something different from mining the sea floors. Canât think of an alternative. Nope. Well asteroids sometime in the future.
People arenât stupid. They get up in the morning get dressed and do complex stuff just to get to work let alone in work all day, work out how to feed themselves and their families, enjoy complex entertainment (yes, even Mission Impossible films are complex entertainment) etc. None of this is trivial and replicable by machines.
Except billionaires. They are fucking stupid little babies. Who unlike babies, are not going to grow. They are a frivolous luxury the world cannot afford. Hunt them to extinction.
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Word.
And to think we canât even muster a serious effort toward taxing their income (let alone their wealth).
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âIâve seen an awful lot of seafloor. And while there are some amazing creatures, they tend to be clustered in small habitats. What you mostly have is miles and miles and miles of nothing but clay.â
Brief pin-prick visits.
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At least heâs advocating for it for the right reasons.
âAs a staunch conservationist, I think itâs a question of the relativity of wrong here. What theyâre doing in Indonesia and the Congo and the Amazon and Peru, Chile is wrong,â he said, conceding he was an âoutlierâ when it came to his views on the push for deep-sea mining. âTo do it in the abyssal seafloor, where thereâs very little in the way of a rich and diverse community, I think is less wrong.â
Mining highly sensitive and highly diverse habitats is a very, very different thing from mining in the abyssal seafloor.â
Cameron has spent time with Indigenous communities and biologists fighting to protect biodiversity that is vanishing at an alarming rate. An acre of rainforest, which might have nearly 20,000 species in it, is being destroyed every second to make way for agriculture and extractive industries.
âThe impact on actual human beings, on actual Indigenous cultures that are being destroyed, their tribal lands are being destroyed, the habitats that they require to survive are being destroyed ⌠itâs pretty horrific.â
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I got that. The point however is that his imagination only extends to destroying habitats people live in or, letâs be nice!, destroying environments we know fuck all about. Billionaireâs diseased brain in action.
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Oh so thatâs what happened.
I do periodically ask myself how we got to this high-friction parlous state of customer âservice.â I see. Itâs because I lack a concierge and staff. And a massive pile of money.
⌠an article about the planetary middle finger that is the private jet. âA big selling point is the ability to minimise what are known as âtouch pointsâ: the individual microinteractions that take place as we move through the world, like saying hello to a gate agent or asking a fellow passenger to switch seats,â New York magazine explained. âWhen you fly commercial, there are more than 700 touch points,â Alexandra Price, a brand communications manager at the jet-charter company VistaJet told the reporter. âWhen you fly private, itâs just 20.â
It makes being ridiculously rich sound like having very high-end noise cancelling headphones, but for your whole life, so that you exist in a bubble of serenity insulated from the grubby taint of âmicrointeractingâ with the public. Itâs babyish â a sort of bought helplessness â and regal, gliding through life behind a protective cordon that prevents scrofulous peasants from reaching for the hem of your Loro Piana leisurewear.
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Meanwhile, though, we shouldnât work from home, we need to be at a hot desk in the open office so our entire day is a meeting with the whole company. 
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That was my reaction, too. This writer is telling us theyâre an extrovert, without telling us⌠
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You can take my noise-cancelling headphones from my cold dead corpse.
I have, openly to large meetings, described open plan offices in the context of disability inclusion as very near to a hate crime.
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Itâs about management that wants people to look busy rather than be productive.
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We should not want what the rich have got.
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Iâd have guessed the demand for those things would have taken a bit of a dive recently.
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Yeah, but by now itâs a sunk cost.
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Yup. Seen a lot of these in our harbour lately.
Did I mention I hate superyachts with a burning passion?
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Regarding the delusions of deluded billionaire preppers:
Finally, for millionaires whoâd rather burrow into terra firma than abandon it, there are opportunities to make oneâs home in a hardened underground bunker. The Survival Condo Project, a converted nuclear missile silo on the Kansas prairie, features a saltwater swimming pool, plus a movie theater, rock-climbing wall, bakery, bar, and dog park. Despite being underground, the 12-unit complex also offers a choice of scenery via âdigital windowsâ in each condo, as well as protection against volcanic eruptions, nuclear attacks, and, of course, Kansas twisters. The complex is designed and equipped to allow residents to stay inside for five years without leaving, if need be. The price? Up to $3 million for the larger units, plus a monthly condo fee of up to $5,000. Many such subterranean bunker homes have been built across the country and world in recent years, including the $17.5 million Luxury Underground Doomsday Bunker in south Georgia; the Subterra Castleâanother Kansas silo, this one topped by a medieval-style turretâand Atlas Missile Silo Home in upstate New York.
Few of the overprivileged preppers buying up property in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Kansas, and elsewhere made their money in the industries that produce or provide us with necessities like water, shelter, food (no, selling Subway sandwiches doesnât count), and utility services. Most have drawn their wealth from the digital economy. I wonder what theyâre thinking. That even if the fossil-fueled capitalism that has always supported them in high style crumbles, their accumulated riches can continue to reap for them the countless goods and services to which theyâre accustomed? Some of them may really think society can achieve an optimum combination of artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printing, drones, and crypto trading that will seamlessly sustain the cornucopian flow of goods and services to those who can afford them. Their hubris is appalling. In the words of Douglas Rushkoff, author of Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, they âhave succumbed to a mindset where âwinningâ means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way.â
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