"Most egg farmers can't even raise chickens, " JC explained as he showed me his henhouses. He felt certain that the "event" – a grey swan, or predictable catastrophe triggered by our enemies, Mother Nature, or just by accident –was inevitable. I heard from a real estate agent who specialises in disaster-proof listings, a company taking reservations for its third underground dwellings project, and a security firm offering various forms of "risk management". You've got a friend in me nyt reviews. By the time I boarded my return flight to New York, my mind was reeling with the implications of The Mindset. For example, an indoor, sealed hydroponic garden is vulnerable to contamination. A limo was waiting for me at the airport.
These are designed to best handle an 'event' and also benefit society as semi-organic farms. Yet this Silicon Valley escapism – let's call it The Mindset – encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind. It only got worse from there. Prospective clients were even asking about whether there was enough land to do some agriculture in addition to installing a helicopter landing pad. JC invited me down to New Jersey to see the real thing. You got a friend in me youtube. That is why those intelligent enough to invest have to be stealthy. Ultra-elite shelters such as the Oppidum in the Czech Republic claim to cater to the billionaire class, and pay more attention to the long-term psychological health of residents. Here was a prepper with security clearance, field experience and food sustainability expertise. It's just that the ones that attract more attention and cash don't generally have these cooperative components. That doesn't mean no one is investing in such schemes. He had done a Swot analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats – and concluded that preparing for calamity required us to take the very same measures as trying to prevent one. "You certainly stirred up a bees' nest, " he began his first email to me. JC is no hippy environmentalist but his business model is based in the same communitarian spirit I tried to convey to the billionaires: the way to keep the hungry hordes from storming the gates is by getting them food security now.
They provide imitation of natural light, such as a pool with a simulated sunlit garden area, a wine vault, and other amenities to make the wealthy feel at home. His business would do its best to ensure there are as few hungry children at the gate as possible when the time comes to lock down. And these catastrophising billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy – the supposed champions of the survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that's fuelling most of this speculation to begin with. Surely the billionaires who brought me out for advice on their exit strategies were aware of these limitations. What, if anything, could we do to resist it? That's when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Then he asked: "Do you shoot? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? The New York Times reported that real estate agents specialising in private islands were overwhelmed with inquiries during the Covid-19 pandemic. Both within three hours' drive from the city – close enough to get there when it happens. I made pro-social arguments for partnership and solidarity as the best approaches to our collective, long-term challenges. That's why JC's real passion wasn't just to build a few isolated, militarised retreat facilities for millionaires, but to prototype locally owned sustainable farms that can be modelled by others and ultimately help restore regional food security in America. Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Vertical farms with moisture sensors and computer-controlled irrigation systems look great in business plans and on the rooftops of Bay Area startups; when a palette of topsoil or a row of crops goes wrong, it can simply be pulled and replaced.
Amplified by digital technologies and the unprecedented wealth disparity they afford, The Mindset allows for the easy externalisation of harm to others, and inspires a corresponding longing for transcendence and separation from the people and places that have been abused. The way to get your guards to exhibit loyalty in the future was to treat them like friends right now, I explained. Farm one, outside Princeton, is his show model and "works well as long as the thin blue line is working". Most billionaire preppers don't want to have to learn to get along with a community of farmers or, worse, spend their winnings funding a national food resilience programme.
The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. JC is currently developing two farms as part of his safe haven project. I tried to reason with them. The farm itself was serving as an equestrian centre and tactical training facility in addition to raising goats and chickens. Instead of just lording over us for ever, however, the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame. Almost immediately, I began receiving inquiries from businesses catering to the billionaire prepper, all hoping I would make some introductions on their behalf to the five men I had written about. Those sociopathic enough to embrace them are rewarded with cash and control over the rest of us. For The Mindset also includes a faith-based Silicon Valley certainty that they can develop a technology that will somehow break the laws of physics, economics and morality to offer them something even better than a way of saving the world: a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making.
They sat around the table and introduced themselves: five super-wealthy guys – yes, all men – from the upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge-fund world. Could it have all been some sort of game? As the sun began to dip over the horizon, I realised I had been in the car for three hours. "It's quite accurate – the wealthy hiding in their bunkers will have a problem with their security teams… I believe you are correct with your advice to 'treat those people really well, right now', but also the concept may be expanded and I believe there is a better system that would give much better results. It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Who were its true believers? "The ground is still wet. " Rising S Company in Texas builds and installs bunkers and tornado shelters for as little as $40, 000 for an 8ft by 12ft emergency hideout all the way up to the $8. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. He paused, and sighed, "I don't want to be in that moral dilemma. Bitcoin or ethereum? Never before have our society's most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unliveable for everyone else.
They were working out what I've come to call the insulation equation: could they earn enough money to insulate themselves from the reality they were creating by earning money in this way? They would have flown out the author of a zombie apocalypse comic book. They had come to ask questions.