Just in case there’s an apocalypse, the super-rich are buying bunkers. Big bunkers. Bunkers with swimming pools, indoor gardens, cinemas, and, in the case of Peter Thiel’s proposed New Zealand hideout, a meditation room — a vital amenity in the advent of a nuclear war.
Ever since the invasion of Ukraine, with Putin threatening to use nuclear weapons to defend Russia, paranoia has been booming. One of the biggest names in the bunker building business, Rising S — run from an anonymous-looking, corrugated iron factory in Murchison, Texas, just across the road from a campsite called ‘Stay A While’ — flogs as many as five units a day, at between $70,000 and $240,000 a pop. The company’s slogan is ‘We Don’t Sell Fear, We Sell Preparedness’ (the first image that greets you when you Google them is of a city being gutted by seven nuclear bombs). Their premium, $8.3 million ‘Aristocrat’ model includes a sauna, gym, bowling alley, and gun range, although they do warn that ‘some features that require a great deal of power may not run effectively using the solar powered systems’. On their testimonials page, ‘Pete from Georgia’, perhaps unaware from the inside that the apocalypse hasn’t yet started, writes that his ‘bunker is still going strong’.
Then there’s Vivos, which claims to be the largest developer of ‘life assurance solutions’ in the world — with a vast, 80-person complex in Indiana already complete, and three others around the world on the way. Their website — which, fittingly, looks as though somebody had to rebuild it from scratch, equipped with only HTML and MS Paint, after the global collapse of the internet — is a delight. The contact page states: ‘Contact Us While You Still Can’. Elsewhere, it warns of a likely rise in fatal meteor shower, when a star called Gliese 710 passes ‘within 1.1 light years’ of the solar system — in, erm, ‘1.4 million years’. Despite claiming to have the only private human DNA vault on Earth — ‘The Backup Plan For Humanity’ — Vivos appears not to be able to render its logo at the correct size without it pixellating. There are teething problems offline, too: speculation has it that Vivos Europa One, its proposed ‘invite-only’ complex in a disused Cold War bunker in Rothenstein, Germany, will have to be canned due to local fire regulations.
Still, people must be taking this stuff seriously. Vivos’s owner, Robert Vicino, claims to have 25,000 members and over a thousand fully paid-up shareholders. Other companies, such as Atlas Survival Shelters, Survival Condo, and Minus Energie are all reportedly thriving. And that’s before we get to the real elite, the billionaires rather than the millionaires, many of whom are reportedly building vast secret bunkers of their own — one with a private team of twelve Navy Seals, ready to gun down any desperate soul who comes too close.
Looking at all of this, you might be tempted to conclude that the super-wealthy, having sown the potential seeds of humanity’s destruction — algorithms, artificial intelligence, drones equipped with guns, genetic engineering, not to mention a hefty contribution to climate change — are now finding ways of securing themselves against the possible consequences of their own actions. And, well, you’d be right. Multimillion-dollar bunkers are just the latest in the growing list of double standards: from social media tycoons hooking your kids on smartphones while banning them in their own homes, to Mr Metaverse Mark Zuckerberg buying up 1,500 acres of prime Hawaiian land, ‘do as I say, not as I do’ seems to be the order of the day.
Then again, if, as Yuval Noah Harari has warned, the ‘vast majority’ of us now belong to an irrelevant, ‘useless class’ of economically worthless losers, why should the same rules apply to us? It doesn’t help that so many of Silicon Valley’s loftier ambitions — uploading minds, cryogenically freezing bodies, escaping to Mars — smack of a barely-concealed desire to leave the masses behind. Or even, if the media theorist Douglass Rushkoff is right, an active desire to see things collapse: to be one of the final few remaining ‘victors’ when everything goes squiffy. As Rushkoff puts it, ‘The Mindset’ — his term for ‘Silicon Valley escapism’ — ‘requires an endgame. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned.’
I don’t think that’s quite right, though. The apocalypse, if it happens, won’t be brought about on purpose — it’ll simply be the unfortunate but necessary by-product of our one true mission as a species: ‘progress’. You see, for most of the super-rich, a world in which we didn’t at least attempt to create super-humans, didn’t at least attempt to create AI smarter than us, didn’t at least attempt to hack into our genetic code and rebuild it from the bottom up, would be insufferable — more insufferable, indeed, than a world in which billions of people died as a consequence of our trying. The scariest thing for these guys — the closest thing they have to a concept of hell — is an unchanging, static, motionless world. What would be the point? What would be the point of all these sad, cold, meaningless human lives, copied and pasted into the future ad infinitum, with no clear sense of direction at all?
This restless anxiety was perhaps best expressed by the disgraced — but undeniably honest — transhumanist Hugo de Garis in his famous book The Artilect Wars: ‘I do not want to stop my work. I think it would be a cosmic tragedy if humanity freezes evolution at the puny human level…. The prospect of building godlike creatures fills me with a sense of religious awe that goes to the very depth of my soul and motivates me powerfully to continue, despite the possible horrible negative consequences.’
Not everybody puts it in quite De Garis’s terms. But many in tech share his intuition that simply stopping progress would be, in a sense, a ‘cosmic tragedy’. In their eyes, the destiny of mankind is a kind of game: how far can we get? Hence the gung-ho attitude towards pretty much all scientific research, however dubious. Hence the bizarre idea that, rather than halting risky technological experiments, we simply invent ’moral enhancement’ drugs that allow us to handle our new powers with greater responsibility.
The Silicon Valley titans don’t want to die wondering: what if we had created cyborgs? What if we had made super-intelligent military drones?
It’s easy — indeed, right — to be profoundly troubled by all this. But it would be wrong to think the elites are somehow unique. They simply have the resources to give material expression to something we all share: a profound fear, embedded deep in our cultural psyche, of standing still; a sense that the only real meaning in life is constant forward motion.
The underlying roots of this restlessness are relatively easy to divine, albeit varied. There’s the Enlightenment idea of progress. There’s the Darwinian notion of natural selection: the survival of the best-adapted, and the continuous, advancing evolution of the species. There’s our adherence to, as Bryan Appleyard put it, the ‘restless, modern form of knowledge that we now simply call science, but the intellectuals of the seventeenth century knew as ‘Scienza Nuova’ — with its emphasis not on leisurely contemplation of permanent truths, but on continuously ‘annexing the unknown’.
There’s the Christian idea of linear, not cyclical, history, with its journey from beginning to final, perfected end. There’s the modernist motif of the ‘great will’, best encapsulated by André Gide’s characterisation of Nietzsche:
‘What is man capable of? What is a single individual capable of? The question is accompanied by a terrible fear that man could be something else, something greater, that he could be more: that he has stopped abjectly at the first stage, unconcerned about his ultimate fulfilment.’
Over the centuries, these factors grew together, like discrete species co-evolving, side by side, in a constant dialectic dance. Sometimes they appeared outright to contradict one another. But we kept trying to weave them into a single coherent vision, and they were reconciled perhaps most neatly in the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the controversial Jesuit palaeontologist, who extrapolated from the theory of evolution that we should, with technological intervention and eugenics, seize control of our destiny and work actively towards the ‘Omega Point’ — the inevitable moment in the future when the universe reaches its final godlike state. Teilhard has been said to have been one of the first ever ‘transhumanists’ — and has had a profound influence on generations of tech utopians ever since.
Still, today, there’s one obvious way in which we deviate from Teilhard: most of us aren’t religious anymore. And it’s perhaps this — the emptiness of a godless universe — that amplifies our restlessness most of all. De Tocqueville once noted that Americans, to avoid thinking about God’s steady retreat from the world, distracted themselves obsessively with various forms of day-to-day entertainment. We try to placate ourselves with something a little bigger: the narrative of, as Teilhard’s secular counterpart, the biologist and eugenicist Julian Huxley put it, ‘progress without a goal’.
With the loss of religion, comes too, in time, the willingness to dispense with the idea of the inherent sanctity of all lives. Nobody wants to see the apocalypse, but aren’t 80 ‘meaningful’ lives on Mars better than 8 billion tired, meaningless ones on Earth? Nobody’s individual experiences matter — only the survival of human life does. As Elon Musk put it, talking about his plans to set up an outpost on Mars: ‘I think this is an incredibly important thing for the future of life itself… there’s always some chance that something could go wrong on Earth. Dinosaurs are not around anymore!’
But the idea that progress can, on its own, provide us with ultimate meaning is, in the end, bunkum. Every next step is but another mirage in the desert that, as soon as we approach, promptly disappears — a never-ending metaphysical distraction technique.
So the super-rich will discover, if and when it’s just them left in their bunkers. As for me, if I ever find myself in a field of mushroom clouds, gasping my last breaths, I guess I’ll at least be able to comfort myself with knowing how ‘Mankind: The Game’ finally ended.