The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse
Douglas Rushkoff
19-23 minutes

As a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist. The people most interested in hiring me for my opinions about technology are usually less concerned with building tools that help people live better lives in the present than they are in identifying the Next Big Thing through which to dominate them in the future. I don’t usually respond to their inquiries. Why help these guys ruin what’s left of the internet, much less civilisation?

Still, sometimes a combination of morbid curiosity and cold hard cash is enough to get me on a stage in front of the tech elite, where I try to talk some sense into them about how their businesses are affecting our lives out here in the real world. That’s how I found myself accepting an invitation to address a group mysteriously described as “ultra-wealthy stakeholders”, out in the middle of the desert.

A limo was waiting for me at the airport. As the sun began to dip over the horizon, I realised I had been in the car for three hours. What sort of wealthy hedge-fund types would drive this far from the airport for a conference? Then I saw it. On a parallel path next to the highway, as if racing against us, a small jet was coming in for a landing on a private airfield. Of course.

The next morning, two men in matching Patagonia fleeces came for me in a golf cart and conveyed me through rocks and underbrush to a meeting hall. They left me to drink coffee and prepare in what I figured was serving as my green room. But instead of me being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, my audience was brought in to me. 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. At least two of them were billionaires. After a bit of small talk, I realised they had no interest in the speech I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come to ask questions.
A shelter under construction at the Rising S Company in Murchison, Texas.
A shelter under construction at the Rising S Company in Murchison, Texas. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

They started out innocuously and predictably enough. Bitcoin or ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality? Who will get quantum computing first, China or Google? Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?

The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”.

I tried to reason with them. I made pro-social arguments for partnership and solidarity as the best approaches to our collective, long-term challenges. The way to get your guards to exhibit loyalty in the future was to treat them like friends right now, I explained. Don’t just invest in ammo and electric fences, invest in people and relationships. They rolled their eyes at what must have sounded to them like hippy philosophy.

This was probably the wealthiest, most powerful group I had ever encountered. Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology.

Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonising Mars, Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.

These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology 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 Jeff Bezos migrating to space, Thiel to his New Zealand compound, or Mark Zuckerberg to his virtual metaverse? 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.
A proposal for a Mars colony by Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX.
A proposal for a Mars colony by Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX. Photograph: SpaceX

What I came to realise was that these men are actually the losers. 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. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.

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.

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. Nor have they ever before had the technologies through which to programme their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society. The landscape is alive with algorithms and intelligences actively encouraging these selfish and isolationist outlooks. Those sociopathic enough to embrace them are rewarded with cash and control over the rest of us. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop. This is new.

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.

Instead of just lording over us for ever, however, the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame. In fact, 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. Actual, imminent catastrophes from the climate emergency to mass migrations support the mythology, offering these would-be superheroes the opportunity to play out the finale in their own lifetimes. 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.

By the time I boarded my return flight to New York, my mind was reeling with the implications of The Mindset. What were its main tenets? Who were its true believers? What, if anything, could we do to resist it? Before I had even landed, I posted an article about my strange encounter – to surprising effect.

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. 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”.

But the message that got my attention came from a former president of the American chamber of commerce in Latvia. JC Cole had witnessed the fall of the Soviet empire, as well as what it took to rebuild a working society almost from scratch. He had also served as landlord for the American and European Union embassies, and learned a whole lot about security systems and evacuation plans. “You certainly stirred up a bees’ nest,” he began his first email to me. “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.”

He felt certain that the “event” – a grey swan, or predictable catastrophe triggered by our enemies, Mother Nature, or just by accident –was inevitable. 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. “By coincidence,” he explained, “I am setting up a series of safe haven farms in the NYC area. These are designed to best handle an ‘event’ and also benefit society as semi-organic farms. Both within three hours’ drive from the city – close enough to get there when it happens.”
Amazon boss Jeff Bezos has been among the tech barons leading the privatised race into space.
Amazon boss Jeff Bezos has been among the tech barons leading the privatised race into space. Photograph: Joe Skipper/Reuters

Here was a prepper with security clearance, field experience and food sustainability expertise. He believed the best way to cope with the impending disaster was to change the way we treat one another, the economy, and the planet right now – while also developing a network of secret, totally self-sufficient residential farm communities for millionaires, guarded by Navy Seals armed to the teeth.

JC is currently developing two farms as part of his safe haven project. Farm one, outside Princeton, is his show model and “works well as long as the thin blue line is working”. The second one, somewhere in the Poconos, has to remain a secret. “The fewer people who know the locations, the better,” he explained, along with a link to the Twilight Zone episode in which panicked neighbours break into a family’s bomb shelter during a nuclear scare. “The primary value of safe haven is operational security, nicknamed OpSec by the military. If/when the supply chain breaks, the people will have no food delivered. Covid-19 gave us the wake-up call as people started fighting over toilet paper. When it comes to a shortage of food it will be vicious. That is why those intelligent enough to invest have to be stealthy.”

JC invited me down to New Jersey to see the real thing. “Wear boots,” he said. “The ground is still wet.” Then he asked: “Do you shoot?”

The farm itself was serving as an equestrian centre and tactical training facility in addition to raising goats and chickens. JC showed me how to hold and shoot a Glock at a series of outdoor targets shaped like bad guys, while he grumbled about the way Senator Dianne Feinstein had limited the number of rounds one could legally fit in a magazine for the handgun. JC knew his stuff. I asked him about various combat scenarios. “The only way to protect your family is with a group,” he said. That was really the whole point of his project – to gather a team capable of sheltering in place for a year or more, while also defending itself from those who hadn’t prepared. JC was also hoping to train young farmers in sustainable agriculture, and to secure at least one doctor and dentist for each location.

On the way back to the main building, JC showed me the “layered security” protocols he had learned designing embassy properties: a fence, “no trespassing” signs, guard dogs, surveillance cameras … all meant to discourage violent confrontation. He paused for a minute as he stared down the drive. “Honestly, I am less concerned about gangs with guns than the woman at the end of the driveway holding a baby and asking for food.” He paused, and sighed, “I don’t want to be in that moral dilemma.”

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. The “just-in-time” delivery system preferred by agricultural conglomerates renders most of the nation vulnerable to a crisis as minor as a power outage or transportation shutdown. Meanwhile, the centralisation of the agricultural industry has left most farms utterly dependent on the same long supply chains as urban consumers. “Most egg farmers can’t even raise chickens,” JC explained as he showed me his henhouses. “They buy chicks. I’ve got roosters.”

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. So for $3m, investors not only get a maximum security compound in which to ride out the coming plague, solar storm, or electric grid collapse. They also get a stake in a potentially profitable network of local farm franchises that could reduce the probability of a catastrophic event in the first place. 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.

So far, JC Cole has been unable to convince anyone to invest in American Heritage Farms. That doesn’t mean no one is investing in such schemes. It’s just that the ones that attract more attention and cash don’t generally have these cooperative components. They’re more for people who want to go it alone. 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 mindset that requires safe havens is less concerned with preventing moral dilemmas than simply keeping them out of sight.
Vivos bunker pool
Vivos hopes to fit its bunkers with features such as swimming pools and gyms. Photograph: Terravivos

Many of those seriously seeking a safe haven simply hire one of several prepper construction companies to bury a prefab steel-lined bunker somewhere on one of their existing properties. 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 $8.3m luxury series “Aristocrat”, complete with pool and bowling lane. The enterprise originally catered to families seeking temporary storm shelters, before it went into the long-term apocalypse business. The company logo, complete with three crucifixes, suggests their services are geared more toward Christian evangelist preppers in red-state America than billionaire tech bros playing out sci-fi scenarios.

There’s something much more whimsical about the facilities in which most of the billionaires – or, more accurately, aspiring billionaires – actually invest. A company called Vivos is selling luxury underground apartments in converted cold war munitions storage facilities, missile silos, and other fortified locations around the world. Like miniature Club Med resorts, they offer private suites for individuals or families, and larger common areas with pools, games, movies and dining. 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. 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.

On closer analysis, however, the probability of a fortified bunker actually protecting its occupants from the reality of, well, reality, is very slim. For one, the closed ecosystems of underground facilities are preposterously brittle. For example, an indoor, sealed hydroponic garden is vulnerable to contamination. 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. The hermetically sealed apocalypse “grow room” doesn’t allow for such do-overs.

Just the known unknowns are enough to dash any reasonable hope of survival. But this doesn’t seem to stop wealthy preppers from trying. The New York Times reported that real estate agents specialising in private islands were overwhelmed with inquiries during the Covid-19 pandemic. Prospective clients were even asking about whether there was enough land to do some agriculture in addition to installing a helicopter landing pad. But while a private island may be a good place to wait out a temporary plague, turning it into a self-sufficient, defensible ocean fortress is harder than it sounds. Small islands are utterly dependent on air and sea deliveries for basic staples. Solar panels and water filtration equipment need to be replaced and serviced at regular intervals. The billionaires who reside in such locales are more, not less, dependent on complex supply chains than those of us embedded in industrial civilisation.

Surely the billionaires who brought me out for advice on their exit strategies were aware of these limitations. Could it have all been some sort of game? Five men sitting around a poker table, each wagering his escape plan was best?

But if they were in it just for fun, they wouldn’t have called for me. They would have flown out the author of a zombie apocalypse comic book. If they wanted to test their bunker plans, they’d have hired a security expert from Blackwater or the Pentagon. They seemed to want something more. Their language went far beyond questions of disaster preparedness and verged on politics and philosophy: words such as individuality, sovereignty, governance and autonomy.

That’s because it wasn’t their actual bunker strategies I had been brought out to evaluate so much as the philosophy and mathematics they were using to justify their commitment to escape. 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? Was there any valid justification for striving to be so successful that they could simply leave the rest of us behind –apocalypse or not?

Or was this really their intention all along? Maybe the apocalypse is less something they’re trying to escape than an excuse to realise The Mindset’s true goal: to rise above mere mortals and execute the ultimate exit strategy.

This is an edited extract from Survival of the Richest by Douglas Rushkoff, published by Scribe (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

The basic architecture concepts I wish I knew when I was getting started as a web developer

• moments
• encouragement
• cadeaux
• services
• toucher

« La complexité, c’est comme le cholestérol. Il faut surtout se débarasser du mauvais. » (Proverbe gascon-malgache)

DDD est l’acronyme de Domain Driven Design. Ce n’est ni un framework, ni une méthodologie, mais plutôt une approche décrite dans l’ouvrage du même nom d’Eric Evans. Un de ses objectifs est de définir une vision et un langage partagés par toutes les personnes impliquées dans la construction d’une application, afin de mieux en appréhender la complexité. Nous ne souhaitons pas faire ici une présentation de DDD (voir plutôt ici pour une introduction). Nous voulons montrer comment DDD peut adresser certaines problématiques évoquées dans l’article “J’ai mal à mon application ! Ca se soigne ?” au travers d’un exemple d’application (“je veux vendre et acheter des légumes sur internet”), tout en s’inscrivant dans une démarche de développement Agile.

Software systems are prone to the build up of cruft - deficiencies in internal quality that make it harder than it would ideally be to modify and extend the system further. Technical Debt is a metaphor, coined by Ward Cunningham, that frames how to think about dealing with this cruft, thinking of it like a financial debt. The extra effort that it takes to add new features is the interest paid on the debt.

La loi de Murphy - Tout ce qui peut mal tourner va mal tourner.
Le principe de Pareto - 80% des effets sont le produit de 20% des causes.
La loi de Parkinson - Le travail se dilate jusqu'à remplir toute la durée disponible pour son accomplissement.
La loi de futilité - En réunion, plus le sujet est important, moins on y passe de temps.
La loi de Carlson - Un travail réalisé en continu prend moins de temps et d’énergie que lorsqu’il est réalisé en plusieurs fois.
La loi d'Illich - Au-delà d’un certain seuil, l’efficacité humaine décroît fortement, voire devient négative.
La loi de Laborit - Le comportement humain nous incite à faire en premier ce qui nous fait plaisir.
La loi de Hofstadter - Les choses prennent plus de temps que prévu, même en tenant compte de la loi de Hofstadter.
La loi de Fraisse - 1 heure n'est pas toujours égale à 1 heure. Faites une activité intéressante et le temps semblera passer plus vite.
La loi de Kotter - Les meilleurs changements commencent par des résultats immédiats.
La loi de Taylor - L’ordre dans lequel nous effectuons une série de tâches influe directement sur le temps qu’elles nous prennent.
La loi de Douglas - Plus on a de place, plus on étale ses affaires.
La loi de Brooks - Ajouter des personnes à un projet déjà en retard le retarde encore plus.
La loi de Conway - Tout logiciel reflète l'organisation qui l'a créée.
La loi de Wirth - Les logiciels s'alourdissent plus vite que ne progressent les performances du matériel.
La loi de Fitts - Le temps pour atteindre un objectif dépend de la distance et de la taille de celui-ci.
La loi de Golub - Un projet mal planifié prend trois fois plus de temps que prévu.
La loi de Tesler - Vous ne pouvez pas réduire la complexité d'une tâche donnée au-delà d'un certain point.
La loi de Lakein - En négligeant la stratégie, on libère peu de temps tout en augmentant drastiquement ses chances d'échouer.
La loi de Hick - Le temps nécessaire pour prendre une décision augmente avec le nombre et la complexité des choix.
La loi de Hostman - Les gens et leur attitude, ce sont eux qui produisent les résultats.
La loi d'Allen - L'efficacité de la communication diminue de manière exponentielle avec la distance physique entre les personnes.
La loi de Swoboda-Fliess-Teltscher - L'efficacité passe par la prise en compte de ses rythmes biologiques.
L'effet Zeigarnik - Une personne se souvient mieux des tâches incomplètes ou interrompues que des tâches terminées.

1. La Loi de Murphy
2. Loi de Parkinson
3. Loi de Carlson
4. Loi de Douglas
5. Loi de Illich
6. Principe de Pareto
7. Loi de Laborit
8. Loi de Hofstadter

Geoffroy Couprie is a consultant in software security and an independent developer. He teaches development teams how to write safe software.

This is the most seducing approach in IT security. This is also the worst. For more than 20 years now, people have believed that their network was a fortress, protected from the outside world by firewalls, NAT and DMZ. This idea is obsolete, we must change now.

20 years ago, it was still possible to see internal networks totally open, with every machine directly addressable from Internet. There were enough IPv4 addresses for everybody, the networks were small, life was good. But the security was atrocious: TCP stacks were remotely exploitable, worms were reproducing on corporate networks, internal file servers were publicly available, so people found the easiest way to secure everything on the cheap: isolate the network from the outside world. There’s nothing wrong with that approach: it made sense at the time.

As usual when someone finds a small, temporary hack instead of fixing everything, people kept improving it, approaching the local optimum. This led to firewalls on every machine, every network. People discovered that NAT could hide IP addresses, instead of simply allowing IP reuse, and thought it was a security feature. All of the nonsense about DMZ and airgapped networks appeared. Companies were actually selling hardware which would get packets from one network, disconnect (physically) from it, connect to another network, then send the packets. Airgap, yup.

It worked for a time, since a lot of exploits in the 90s focused on remote exploits in operating systems and servers. If you cannot exploit the public face of the network, everything is alright.

Unfortunately, we cannot think that way anymore. Web applications give too much entry points to your servers. Pivoting from a DMZ server to the internal network is easy, since internal users will also access those web applications. The attacker is only one wrong click on a lovingly crafted PDF file away from your network. Why would you concentrate on firewall rules when phishing is so effective?

Once the attacker is in your network, it is over. Listen to traffic, elevate your privilege, pivot to another machine, impersonate users, traverse the whole network…

Traditional IT infrastructure

The fortress metaphor, where everything behind your firewall is safe and trusted, is dead. Your walls are useful, but not that much when the attacker can get insiders to help him, willingly or unknowingly.

The goal is not to keep the attacker out of your system. It is to detect the threat, isolate it, find the attacker’s path and heal the system. The attacker may have been in your network for months. How would you be sure he is not there anymore?

There is a much better metaphor than the fortress, now. Think of your system as a city. The city can have walls, but to function properly, it should let people enter and get out. You cannot know precisely if everything in your city is legit. Chances are, someone uses his personal USB key. Someone else connected a WiFi router in his office. People are talking on Facebook, watching porn, using forbidden applications, like modern browsers. You will not be able to catch them, unless repression is your main tool, and this will not help them work. You want to reduce criminality in your city, but you will not eradicate it. You cannot prevent fires, but you can prevent them from spreading too far and too fast.

If you imagine the attacker as already present on your network, you go from plugging holes in one wall, to verifying dependencies and access control between systems. The trusted network approach is flawed, you have to think in terms of authorization from one user/app/machine to the other. The attacker will explore your network from one node to the next connected one, from one access level to the upper one, and try to combine them. Defenders think in lists, attackers think in graphs. You must assume that the internal network is as dangerous as the Internet.

Assuming that servers will be safer if they are on your own network leads to a false sense of security.

This is also why the nonsense around private cloud has to die. Assuming that servers will be safer on your own network leads to a false sense of security. A system built from scratch to handle the worst of internet has a better chance to survive. What matters is access control granularity around data, users and applications. The network is not a security boundary anymore.

Software engineers go crazy for the most ridiculous things. We like to think that we’re hyper-rational, but when we have to choose a technology, we end up in a kind of frenzy — bouncing from one person’s Hacker News comment to another’s blog post until, in a stupor, we float helplessly toward the brightest light and lay prone in front of it, oblivious to what we were looking for in the first place.