The high-tech giants are obsessed with fear, says Douglas Rushkoff: That's why they are constantly thinking about how they can escape the world

It was a few years ago. The American media theorist Douglas Rushkoff was invited to give a lecture. He expected to speak to investment bankers about the future of digital technology. But this time, things were a bit different. The fee was equivalent to about a third of Rushkoff's annual university salary. He flew business class, and the plane served warmed nuts. He was picked up at the airport in a limousine and driven to the desert.

Finally, in the middle of nowhere: a vast area, futuristic buildings made of stone and glass. Like something out of a Bond film. To find the pavilion where he was staying, Rushkoff needed a map. The next day, he was picked up and driven to a conference center. Instead of an auditorium, there was a large table. Instead of a hundred investment bankers, there were five super-rich men from the tech and hedge fund scene. He wasn't allowed to name their names, Rushkoff says. He had to sign an agreement. This is how he describes it in his new book, "Survival of the Richest."

Then it began. A bit of small talk about blockchain and virtual reality. Who will have the first functional quantum computer, China or Google? Rushkoff soon sensed that the gentlemen weren't at all interested in his thoughts on the future of technology. They were concerned with something else entirely. Finally, they asked the question they had invited him to discuss: New Zealand or Alaska?

Where, that would mean, could one seek safety if climate change had rendered large parts of the world uninhabitable? Where would one be least affected by a war that might involve the use of biological weapons? Does the place of refuge need its own air supply system? And: How do you ensure that your own security forces don't suddenly conspire against you?

Rushkoff writes that the tech giants' view of the future is dominated by one expectation: that the "event" will occur. It isn't specified. But those in the know know what this could entail: environmental collapse, solar storms, social unrest up to and including civil war, the explosion of a nuclear bomb, a virus epidemic, or hacker attacks that paralyze computer systems and bring entire economies to a standstill.

Rushkoff was shocked. "I tried to bring them to their senses," he writes in the book. The challenges facing the world were best met together, he explained. But that didn't convince the five men. "This was probably the richest, most powerful group of people I had ever met," he summarizes, "and now these men were asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to build their doomsday bunkers."

Only later, Rushkoff writes, did he understand that the talk at the end of the world was actually a conversation about the future of technology for these people. He tried to decipher the worldview behind the ideas of escape and the obsession with doom. The men's thinking was shaped by the ideas of Palantir founder Peter Thiel, by AI developers like Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil, and by SpaceX visionary Elon Musk. They were investors, entrepreneurs, who owed their success largely to the risks they were willing to take.

Actually, Rushkoff thought, these people should think quite differently. Their goals should be to lead the world into a bright future where people no longer age, perhaps become immortal. Unlimited possibilities for all. Instead, these people thought about only one thing: how to save their own skin when the world becomes uninhabitable.

In "Survival of the Richest," Rushkoff attempts to fathom the mindset that led his desert subjects to build underground bunkers. Or high-tech rafts that float through the oceans outside of national territorial waters. His conclusion: For these tech billionaires, technology ultimately doesn't exist to improve people's lives, but rather as a way to escape the world. Into space, to another planet. Or into a metaverse in which the distinction between virtual, augmented, and banal everyday reality dissolves into nothingness.

For Rushkoff, this "mindset" is based on a strange contradiction: On the one hand, there is an almost blind faith that all of humanity's problems can be solved through technology. On the other, there is the deep conviction that this very technological development will create problems that are no longer solvable and will lead the world into an abyss from which only a few can escape: "It's," says Rushkoff, "as if they wanted to build a car that goes fast enough to escape its own exhaust fumes."

But for Rushkoff, that's only one side of the coin. In his view, the tech giants' worldview also reflects the fundamental dynamics of the Western pursuit of progress. By this, he means a worldview determined by the promise of eternal ascent, whose adherents cannot live with the depletion of resources and growth. This is where the Marxist Rushkoff speaks up.

Until now, he teaches somewhat vaguely, every advance has enabled the elites to escape the negative effects of the progress they promoted. To a new level of progress. Onward and onward, even when there seemed to be no further. That's it now. The only possible escape, he says, is to leave the system itself. To a private maximum-security facility in the woods of Pennsylvania or to faded visions of life in the metaverse.

No salvation then? Actually, no, but maybe somehow, Rushkoff believes. In any case, we must abandon the idea of ​​growth. How, he doesn't say, of course. The term "circular economy" will have to suffice. That's not much. But it fits a book in which precise observations about the thinking of the tech giants are occasionally lost in self-indulgent chatter.

A melancholic tone runs through Rushkoff's thinking. He's actually a tech freak. In the early days of the internet, he was one of the cyberpunks. That was in the early 1990s, and the world seemed to have just expanded by a new dimension. Digital, of course. But a dimension that promised unlimited possibilities: a more democratic and just world.

Things turned out differently. The internet, according to Rushkoff, was discovered by the evil economy as a place to do business. It became commercial and thus uninteresting for the dreams of internet hippies. Rushkoff still mourns the loss of a better world. And he sees with a touch of glee that the tech billionaires' fantasies of escape are just as illusory as his hopes for the digital revolution were 30 years ago. "There is no escape," he states, with a hint of self-satisfaction. And perhaps forgets how close the hopes of the cyberpunks of yesteryear are to the ideas of today's tech giants.

Douglas Rushkoff: Survival of the Richest. Why we're not even safe from tech billionaires on Mars. Translated from English by Stephan Gebauer. Suhrkamp-Verlag, Berlin 2025. 281 pp., Fr. 34.90.