. The tech elite mean to leave us all behind.

I learned this when I traveled to a remote resort to deliver what was supposed to be a talk for a group of tech investors. It turned out to be something of a “consult” to five ultra-wealthy men on their apocalypse survival strategies.

The experience led to a much-circulated piece 

. But it also set me off on a multi-year journey to understand “The Mindset” leading the wealthy to believe that as long they have enough money and the right technology, they can break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to escape a disaster of their own making. They are preparing for a digital future that has less to do with making the world a better place than transcending the human condition altogether.

These billionaires once showered the world with optimistic business plans for how tech might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch. Will it be Bezos migrating to space, Thiel to his New Zealand compound, or Zuckerberg to his Metaverse?

This “out of sight, out of mind” externalization of poverty and poison trickles down through the Mindset to the rest of us; but the collateral damage doesn’t go away just because we’ve covered our eyes with VR goggles. The longer we ignore the social, economic, and environmental repercussions of our actions, the more of a problem they become. This, in turn, motivates even more withdrawal, isolationism, and apocalyptic fantasy.

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, an understanding of human relationships as market phenomena, a fear of nature and women, a need to see one’s contributions as utterly unique innovations without precedent, and an urge to neutralize the unknown by dominating and de-animating it.

The technosolutionist future climaxes by uploading our economy to the blockchain and our minds to the cloud. We “level up” in the ultimate exit strategy. 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.

This fatalist drive to rise above and separate from humanity is no more the result of runaway digital capitalism than its cause — a way of treating one another and the world that can be traced back to the sociopathic tendencies of empirical science, individualism, sexual domination, and perhaps even “progress” itself. But this Mindset can be denaturalized and replaced.

We must act as a counterculture to The Mindset, introducing circularity where they see only arrows, and more thoughtful, long-term thinking when they can only strive for escape.

Those of us who recognize that we’ve been here before are the ones who have to call attention to where we are heading. Today, that means acting as a counterculture to The Mindset, introducing circularity where they see only arrows, and more thoughtful, long-term thinking when they can only strive for escape. We still have choices.

Mine, was to chronicle my experiences with the tech elite over the years, and call out the ways in which our dreams for a better future too often involved externalizing harm to others, or ignoring today’s impacts for tomorrow’s promised gains. Just the announcement of this book has already led to the cancellation of two speaking events by sponsors who fear being associated with a critique of runaway exponential capitalism (which is what many of them are still trying to sell as a desired and attainable outcome). I take this as a good sign.

 or (better yet) asking your library to carry it. It’s being published by an 

, and in as friendly a fashion as possible. But more importantly, I’m hoping you’ll read it by any means necessary, and join me and others in imagining a better path forward.

We do not have to buy-in to the apocalypse for which these billionaires are actively preparing and, in some cases, they are 

 Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

. Rushkoff is a weekly columnist on Medium, and the author of books including

 Team Human, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Present Shock

, a graphic novelist, and a professor of media theory and digital economics.

This Bread Pudding Will Give You All the Fall Feels

I recently went to the mountains with my friends. We were celebrating 50 years of friendship. It was very special. Six of us were to be together spending time in the mountains.

I had never been to that place nor heard of the name. I was told by my friends that they had done all the bookings. I had to just pack and join them at the station.

Both are growing areas of apples, pears, apricots, almonds, cherries, and plums in Himachal Pradesh.

We were to go on the fast train called Shatabdi from Delhi to Kalka and the onward journey would be in an SUV called an Innova.

We reached Kalka and the cab was waiting for us. We were excited souls. We reached the mountains at 8.30 PM after a long and arduous journey and were even wondering whether it was worth it.

We reached our destination. It was calm quiet with the soft rustling winds whistling through the trees.

The clean neat guest house The Wheeler Lodge B&B looked amazing and inviting.

The host and the hostess at the Wheeler lodge were waiting to welcome us. The warm welcome we received from them made us feel very much at home. The hostess had a major kidney surgery which we did not know about. They did not cancel our booking having committed to it.

She smiled and was very soft-spoken. Their two children were equally warm and treated us with respect, happiness, and kindness.

They served us fresh food. We enjoyed the simple but tasty homemade food. The whole family served the food and kept us busy with anecdotes about the small village. I could see that they were all proud of their beautiful village.

They were humble and lovely as a family. We came to know that these young girls between the age of 10 and 13 walk 4kms to school every day on the steep elevated mountains. Winter and summer they bear it all. This makes the children hardy and strong.

The girls also help out at the two beautiful orchards that they possessed at the time of sowing and picking the fruit. The orchards had fruit trees of apples, apricots, almonds, and cherries.

Taking a round of the orchards I found that a large number of people were working there. I enquired whether these people were specially hired for the work in the orchard. While some of them were laborers that come in from Nepal and Bihar other people were owners of orchards who had come to help as they believed in helping the community and worked in each other’s orchards when the need arose.

The people looked happy and relaxed and completely tension-free. The air was pure. There was no pollution. It was cool weather. The village consisted of only 150 people who helped each other all the time.

The community experience was something like the Japanese Ikegai in that the community work gave each person a sense of belonging and a purpose to do some work together. People are happy and committed to each other. They work together in unison.

This purpose of life and good physical work keeps their bodies fit too. They sleep well.

In fact in the quiet village with pollution-free and pure air we all from big cities slept extremely well. Every night was refreshing.

People in the village were very patient. Farming teaches you a lot of patience. Once you sow the trees, it takes four years for the fruits to arrive. The trees last between 10–15 years giving fruit. Once the buds begin to flower it takes six months for the apples to be ripe and sold on the market.

During that time the farmers are free to do other jobs and patiently wait for a good crop.

I found cherries to be the most cumbersome. Each cherry had to be picked individually. If they hit the ground they would spoil the crop. It could neither be eaten nor kept. The crop gets wasted.

They are also afraid that the hail storm and other pests would spoil the crop. So all the trees are covered with nets.

The apple and pear trees are netted to avoid destruction from weather and pests. 

People in this village live a long life. It is stress-free living there. The parents are highly respected by their children.

Even people in the community respect the elders and mingle with them and do their work.

In return, the old people offer life lessons storytelling and happiness to people.

Some cook excellent dishes and send them to the youngsters. This life is like a partnership between young and old.

Photo of the old lady who is so happy and stress-free. 

We met this lovely lady who was 92 years old. She was happy. She sang songs for us and made us dance around her. She laughed and told us anecdotes of her young years.

Before leaving Kumarsain she presented each one of us with a box of cherries. According to customs guests should not go empty-handed from your house. It is a gesture of love and goodwill to give them something.

The lessons about happiness that we learned from the people of the Kumarsain Village were the following:

To greet people with a lovely smile even though there is some inconvenience to you.

To make people feel welcome when they come to your house.

To have a common purpose in life. Community work shared with the purpose of being useful to other people helps in bringing happiness to your life.

Whatever you do in life requires patience to bring fruits to the effort made by you. Wait with patience to get rewards.

To spread love and happiness in the lives of people.

Being respectful towards elders and good exchanges between younger and old generations always helps in personal growth.

To live in a stress-free environment take a retreat in the mountains where you do not require anything but love and fresh air to live a good life.

Longevity is when life has less stress and more fun.

Travel

This Bread Pudding Will Give You All the Fall Feels

Lessons Of Happiness I learned from a Mountain Village