[ExI] Survival of the Richest

[Stuart LaForge]

John Grigg wrote:

> "They were amused by my optimism, but they didn’t really buy it. They were
> not interested in how to avoid a calamity; they’re convinced we are too
> far gone. For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can
> affect the future. They are simply accepting the darkest of all scenarios
> and then bringing whatever money and technology they can employ to
> insulate themselves — especially if they can’t get a seat on the rocket
> to Mars."

LOL, if Douglas Rushkoff is telling the truth here, then the hedge fund
managers  are trying to figure out a way to "short" humanity's future. I
think they are assholes for doing so. But why lump them together with Musk
and Kurzweil for crying out loud? Is Kurzweil even that rich?

What I dislike most about financiers are that they wield so much power
with so little purpose and zero sense of responsibility. Making money for
the sole purpose of making more money without generating any other value.
The ideology of cancer.

May they fail their margin call.

" "Luckily, those of us without the funding to consider disowning
> our own humanity have much better options available to us. We don’t have
> to use technology in such antisocial, atomizing ways.

We don't have to, but a large number of us none-the-less do. Anybody using
social media for example is consenting to be pigeon-holed into an
echo-chamber with like-minded people instead of being connected to the
world at large. The global village is composed of countless factions that
refuse to talk to one another.

> We can become the
> individual consumers and profiles that our devices and platforms want us
> to be, or we can remember that the truly evolved human doesn’t go it
> alone."

Is this guy truly unaware of the Malthusian trap looming on the horizon?
Or is he is one of those socialists who would burn the lifeboats on a
sinking ship if there weren't enough to go around? Humanity is a moving
target and it will be the survivors who get to decide what being human
means.

And humanity can't evolve if society subsidizes the survival of all for
simple virtue of being born or more ridiculously yet -- conceived. Cheap
oil kind of let us get away with this for almost a century but if this guy
thinks it is a sustainable state of the world, then he is out of touch
with reality.


> "Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It’s a team
> sport. Whatever future humans have, it will be together."

This guy seems to foolishly think that we are all supposed to be on the
same team. The irony is that it is his brand of global neoliberalism that
has brought the world to our current straits. The progressive insistence
that every country should be equivalently developed and monetized. Like
somehow it would be good for the global economy if the everyone on the
planet ate Big Macs and drove SUVs. Death by homogeneity . . . of the
middle class at least.

But he is right about one thing. There is no escape for the rich. Mars
will be no greater advantage to the rich surviving the fall of our
civilization than the island of Capri was to the Roman Emperors surviving
the fall of theirs. Therefore I sincerely hope at least some of them have
the sense to take the long bet on humanity.


Stuart LaForge

"We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to
ourselves but
also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring." - Carl Sagan