Thumbs in the Dike

Let's look at a few likely climate change 'solutions' the people who got us into this mess will try to push.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Episode four Thumbs and the Dike. We have had too
much anarchy in our city, the mayor says, and with
the county sheriff and city police chief behind him, he
lays out the city's aggressive plan to sweep the encampments
and strike back at criminals hiding in the guise of
a social justice movement. He's talking about you, Tom, Aaron,

(00:22):
and a growing group of friends and allies who spent
most of October and November doing eviction resistance. It all
started with the right wing vigilantes who carried out a
series of drive by attacks on the camps. At first,
they just lobbed firecrackers, but that soon evolved into emptying
handguns into tents. In response, the camps organized roving defensive teams.

(00:43):
There were a couple of gunfights and one death, although
you weren't around for any of those. By the time
the attack stopped, you had a large, organized group of
people used to taking direct action. From that point, making
the jump to proactively stopping evictions wasn't such a big deal.
Half the landlords in your part of town had jumped
ship for other cities with less intense climates. Many of

(01:06):
their properties were sold to banks, or large rental companies.
Unemployment in your city hit as high as thirty percent
by some counts, and more people nationwide are out on
the street than there have ever been at any point
in your life, at least where you live, though people
have options. There are now five camps hosting more than
five thousand people. Two of them are based out of

(01:26):
large apartment complexes, two were in city parks, and the
fifth is made from several square blocks of the city
that had an eviction rate topping eighty percent. Some of
the people joining collectives are asking for help are folks
who months ago surely supported the cops cracking down on encampments.
Now they're on your side, driven by desperation. You try

(01:46):
not to let that piss you off. What matters is
that you're in this together now, and aggressive eviction offense
has kept hundreds of your neighbors in their homes and
helped the population in the camps stay manageable. But of
course the landlords aren't happy with that, and local business
owners keep blaming the camps for graffiti and hampering the recovery.
You spend enough time online to know this ship is

(02:08):
happening all around the country and eviction defense action in
Portland turned into a gun battle. Activists in l A
responded to the tear gassing of an encampment by bombing
an l A p D van, and worst of all,
the NYPD killed three activists while clearing out a squat
in Brooklyn. Every day, two different digital collectives allied with
the encampments gather not just news of different protests around

(02:31):
the country, but tactical information and after action reports. You, Tom,
and all of the other hundreds of people in the
Defensive Committee have been taking notes. You've welded together cal
trips and dote vehicle barricades, rigged up paint cannons to
coat police car windshields, and experimented with a dozen other
tactics to protect the main camps. This is bigger than

(02:51):
your hometown and your little movement. The federal government has
responded to the absolute societal free fall of the last
year by blaming anarchists in government, extremists, and an addiction
to government entitlements. Disaster funding keeps being slashed, which is
where a lot of this started anyway, But the President
just announced a raft of emergency police funding using money

(03:12):
the last administration had remarked for climate resiliency projects. You've
spent the last few days going about your duties with
a sense of doom hanging over your head. It's not
just the imminent government crackdown. The food situation has gotten
increasingly tenuous. Wheat crops saw less than half their normal harvest.
Even potatoes dropped significantly. Several of the camps have started

(03:34):
permaculture projects in greenhouses, but no one is growing anything
like what you need to feed all these people. Donations
helped for a while, but everyone's tapped. For the last
few weeks. You've been able to close the gap by
sending out dumpster diving teams into the neighborhoods with stocked
grocery stores and functioning restaurants. One of your neighbors works
in an Amazon warehouse, and he provided Tom with information

(03:55):
on how to break in and where to find the
dried goods. All this has helped, but the police have
grown increasingly aware of your efforts. People in the rich
neighborhoods have been using a community defense app to warn
the police about criminals stealing food. Mark, a guy you
sort of knew from a few past eviction defenses, was
shot dead outside of a safeway two nights back. We

(04:16):
can't keep going on like this, Tom says, And he
tells you he's been reaching out to an old marine
buddy of his who lives on a farm a couple
hours out of town. They've got food, but their grid
is still fucked from the summer, and half the small
farms out there have lost so much production that they're
on the edge of eviction themselves. We have electricians, we
can get equipment, and we've got manpower people who will
help harvest and stand up against the sheriff's department if

(04:38):
there's an eviction. You'd be lying if you said Tom's
suggestion didn't scare you a little bit. By bit, the
daily grind of survival, building resiliency and protecting your community
has grown to feel more seditious. That seems a bit strong.
But now you're talking about treating fighters for food to
defend a farming town against the police. That's nuts. Fuck it.

(05:00):
You tell Tom, let's get the others together and talk
about it. Seems like a good idea to me. In night,
climate scientist James Hansen testified to the Senate and claimed
for the first time that human influence on warning was
discernible and separate from natural variability. James was not the

(05:23):
first expert to warn about what we now call climate change,
but he was the first one to get up in
front of the country and give a warning in such
a clear and unequivocal way at a time when many
of his fellows would him and haw about natural variability.
At the time, there was tremendous debate, fueled by donations
from the fossil fuel industry and politicians eager for a

(05:43):
culture war, about whether or not Hansen was a doomsayer
or a prophet. We now know that he was, if anything,
too optimistic. The warming trends we have seen put us
roughly thirty years ahead of his most dire predictions. It's
worth digging into exactly how has happened part of the
story you already know. Companies like Exxon spent hundreds of

(06:05):
millions of dollars over the last forty years funding think
tanks and propaganda campaigns designed to so doubt over the
reality of climate change or global warming. As a child
growing up in the Bible Belt, nearly everything I learned
about climate change was filtered through this lens. The picture
painted by media pundits and best selling authors like Michael

(06:25):
Crichton was that scientists were at worst corrupt shills pushing
an environmentalist agenda, and at best alarmist's ginning up panic
over minor fluctuations in climate. Paul Erlick came up quite
often in this context. In the late nineteen sixties, he
was an entomologist at Stanford University who released a book
called The Population Bomb. Its first sentence was, the battle

(06:48):
to feed all of humanity is over. Paul predicted that
in the nineteen seventies, hundreds of millions of people were
going to starve to death due to overpopulation, and there
was nothing anyone could do to prevent it. The Population
Bomb sparked a global panic and an anti population growth
movement that led to repressive laws around the world. It
also didn't come true, thanks in large part to the

(07:10):
green Revolution sparked by Agronomius. To Norman Borlog's work, there
was no mass starvation. Borlog has been rightfully lauded for
creating new hybrid seeds that vastly increased the amount of
calories farmers in places like India were able to produce.
His work is credited with saving as many as a
billion lives. I first learned about him on Penn and

(07:31):
Teller's Bullshit, a libertarian themed science he show that was
popular in the early aughts for the same reason as
South Park. Both shows managed to be anti liberal without
being right wing in the traditional sense. For kids raised
conservative but disillusioned with the Republican Party due to the
Iraq War, these shows provided seemingly clever arguments for why

(07:52):
both sides were dumb and the smartest thing to do
was make fun of them. This is not a bad
thing under all circumstances. If you reflexively to like both
the Republican and Democratic parties, you will be right more
often than you were wrong. But in the early at
some prominent Democrats, most significantly al Gore, did try to
warn people about climate change. These folks were framed as alarmists,

(08:15):
like Paul Erlick. Penn and Teller were one of a
number of popular voices that specifically used Borlog's example to
attack environmentalists worried about global warming. We'd better develop and
ever improved science and technology, including the new by technology
to produce the foodia needed for the world to day. Unfortunately,

(08:38):
the humanitarian efforts of people like Dr Borlog are undermined
by Greenpeace and other assholes. Now, Pinjillette has somewhat come
around on climate change in recent days, but even in
twenty nineteen, in this interview for the Origins podcast, he's
stuck to the same line about al Gore being an alarmist.
I think that there's no way you can deny that

(09:00):
is climate change. I've completely changed on that, although completely
changed is a little bit confusing because I never went
beyond I don't know what bothers me about. The climate
change thing was a great disservice done by al Gore

(09:22):
of exaggerating. We now know that not only did Algor
not exaggerate, but it would actually be fair to attack
him for painting far too rosie a picture of what
climate change would cause and the adaptations are society would
need to adopt in order to mitigate it. I'm harping
on Penn and Teller in particular because this exact line
of thinking has led to the most durable sort of

(09:42):
climate denial I've seen in my own life. Earlier this year,
my father and I endured the most severe snowstorm in
Texas history together. When I tried to talk about climate change.
He brought up Paul Erlick and the fact that even
if climate change is as bad as they say, some
Norman Borlog will along with a scientific solution that will
save us. There is no sign of this so far.

(10:06):
Carbon capture technology, which works by capturing carbon before it
can reach the atmosphere, has proved to be extremely disappointing.
Only about point one percent of annual global emissions from
fossil fuels are captured at present, and of the carbon
captured to date has been used to extract more oil
from wells by pumping that carbon into the ground to

(10:26):
force oil out. But still Boorlog shadow looms large over
the climate question. Today's episode is about the different paths
to mitigation and adaptation that we might see in the

(10:47):
future as the damage caused by climate change becomes too
great to ignore. Weight and hope for a super genius
is certainly the path some individuals and probably some politicians
will continue to take. The myth of the Leonaire inventor
and the personality colts around men like Elon Musk and
their own little green projects has made this a popular
school of thought over the last decade. The good news

(11:10):
is that we've already reached a point of calamity great
enough that support for this sort of solution is probably
past its peak. On the day I write this chapter, July,
the Guardian has just published an article warning that yet
another heat dome is set to settle over the entire
continental United States. The article quoted Michael Verner, a senior
scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, quote, you expect

(11:34):
hotter heat waves with climate change, but the estimates may
have been overly conservative. With the Pacific Northwest heat wave,
you conclude the event would almost be impossible without climate change,
But in a straightforward statistical analysis from before this summer,
you'd also include it would be impossible with climate change too.
That is problematic because the event happened. For years, climate

(11:56):
scientists have been attacked as alarmist, Yet the growing can
census is that they were actually too conservative with their warnings.
The situation was more severe than most reports portrayed. Before
we go further, it's worth looking at why this was.
I found a good scientific American article from two thousand
nineteen by the authors of a book called Discerning Experts,

(12:17):
which analyze the methods by which experts had assessed environmental
damage in order to provide policy recommendations. They found a
consistent tendency by scientists to underestimate the severity of threats
and the rapidity with which they might unfold quote. Among
the factors that appear to contribute to underestimation is the
perceived need for consensus, or what we might label univocality,

(12:40):
the felt need to speak in a single voice. Many
scientists worry that if disagreement has publicly aired, government officials
will conflate differences of opinion with ignorance and use this
as justification for an action. Others worry that even if
policymakers want to act, they will find it difficult to
do so if scientists fail to send an unambiguous message
there or they will actively seek to find their common

(13:02):
ground and focus on areas of agreement. In some cases,
there will only put forward conclusions on which they can
all agree. How does this lead to underestimation? Consider a
case in which most scientists think that the correct answer
to a question is in the range of one to ten,
but some belief that it could be as high as
one hundred. In such a case, everyone will agree that
it is at least one to ten, but not everyone

(13:23):
will agree that it could be as high as one hundred. Therefore,
the area of agreement is one to ten, and this
is reported as the consensus view. Wherever there is a
range of possible outcomes that includes along a high end
tail of probability, the area of overlap will necessarily lie
at or near the low end. The other cause of problems,
they conclude was a common mental model practiced by the

(13:46):
media as well as by scientists, which tends to unconsciously
consider facts to be something which all reasonable people should
be able to agree upon. If there is a mass
disagreement over the conclusions of a report, then it must
be because those conclusions are based on opinion rather than facts.
And the third reason for underestimation involves a very simple

(14:06):
worry of a reputation. In good science, being wrong shouldn't
be bad for your career, as a large part of
the discipline is making hypotheses which are either proven or
disproven by testing. But when we're talking about a field
as politicized as climate science, going too far in a
prediction gets you labeled an alarmist by media talking heads.

(14:27):
This leads to an understandable trend to conservatism and climate predictions.
All these factors have already caused huge problems for our society,
and as we move forward towards trying to adapt, these
trends will, if not disrupted, caused further calamity. In the
nineteen fifties, fighter pilot Colonel John Boyd coined the term

(14:47):
ODA loop to describe the cycle by which human beings
and organizations make decisions at the operational level during military
campaigns ODA stands for observe, orient, decide, act, and Colonel
Boyd's terminology has been applied in a dizzying variety of
situations since, from training troops for combat to training corporations

(15:07):
for cyber security. The ODA loop helps explain how an
agile and creative opponent can disrupt and defeat a seemingly
much more powerful enemy. The basic idea is that if
you can break any part of your enemy's ODE loop,
you can stop them from properly reacting in a given
situation and eventually defeat them. Stop the enemy from observing

(15:28):
you and they can't orient themselves to your attack, decide
how to respond to you or take action, disrupt the
enemy's ability to make decisions, and even if they see
the problem, they won't be able to act on it
for years. Our ability to properly observe and orient ourselves
to the problem of climate change has been hampered by
all the things we just discussed. As I type this,

(15:49):
wildfires are burning across the width of Canada. Subways in
multiple major world cities have become watery tombs. The scope
of the issue is finally beyond a reasonable doubt in
almost everyone's mind, yet we still find ourselves disrupted when
we reach d There will come a time when the
governments of the world will decide and then act with
much more of a concerted plan than we've seen before.

(16:11):
When it comes to predicting what that decision, or more realistically,
those decisions might be, the best book I found is
Climate Leviathan by Joel Wainwright and joff Man. The term
Leviathan comes from a book by Hobbes, The Philosopher not
the Tiger, which argues that peace and unity can only
be achieved by the creation of a sovereign power responsible

(16:32):
for protecting the commonwealth and given absolute authority to do so.
It's essentially an argument for a big, all powerful state
or sovereign to keep everything nice. Wainwright and Man's book
stems from the premise that most people, out of fear
or desperation, will probably back some sort of leviathan as
an answer to climate change. Quote. We contend that the

(16:52):
drive to defend capitalist social relations will putch the world
towards climate leviathan, namely adaptation projects to allow capitalist eletes
to stabilize their position amidst planetary crises. This scenario, we
pose it implies a shift in the character and form
of sovereignty, the likely emergence of planetary sovereignty defined by
an exception proclaimed in the name of preserving life on Earth.

(17:14):
We are not suggesting that sovereignty will be characterized by
the quasi monarchical rule of a single person, but we recognize,
as some suggest, Hobbs himself and even Carl Schmidt at
least after ninety two, also recognized that it is almost
certainly to be exercised by a collection of powers coordinated
to save the planet and to determine what measures are
necessary and what and who must be sacrificed in the

(17:36):
interests of life on Earth. Wainwright and Man envision a
few different types of possible leviathan one elucidated above is
a neoliberal, capitalist leviathan. Think of it as an extension
of the Western States and the attitudes we've seen so far,
the smiling face of someone like Joe Biden talking about
the importance of using paper bags while giving Exxon tax

(17:58):
breaks so they can invest in cloud seating technology. One
of the most frightening things about this possibility is that
the very same corporate actors responsible for fighting any action
on climate change up until now will surely find a
key space for themselves partaking in state funded mitigation efforts.
Think of Jeff Bezos suggesting that polluting industrial buildings be

(18:18):
moved into space, or imagine Chevron using some of their
vast fortune to invent snow piercer style technology to blanket
the atmosphere and reduce warming. These possibilities are frightening because
any solutions dreamed up under this regime are likely to
be as selfish and ill considered as the long campaign
to deny the reality of climate change. In this future,

(18:38):
the architects of our present misery and shrine themselves forever
as our protectors. Wainwright and Man also envision what they
somewhat cheekily call climate Mao an anti capitalist state centered Leviathan,
possibly based around China or a block of Southeast Asian nations.
While Climate Leviathan would be an attempt to maintain the
present capitalist world order while stabilising the environment, Climate Mao

(19:01):
was a quasi revolutionary attempt to replace it with a
system just as centralized, but not based around the moneyed
interests that got us here from the book Climate Leviathan.
Even today, when an increasingly non Maoist Chinese state invokes
its full regulatory authority, it can achieve political feats unimaginable
in liberal democracy. Perhaps the most notable instance of state

(19:23):
coordinated climate authority is the matter in which Beijing's air
quality was re engineered during the two thousand eight Olympics.
Flowers potted all over the city, traffic barred, trees planted
in the desert, and factories and power plants closed, all
to successfully blew the skies for the games. Another effect
of this power is the way in which the Chinese
state effectively killed General Motors gas guzzling Hummer in early

(19:44):
two thousand ten, when it blocked the division's sale to
Sichuan Tenjong Heavy Industrial Machinery due to the vehicles of
missions levels. One might also point to the Great Green
Wall against Desertification, which if successfully completed, will cross four thousand,
four eighty meters of northern China, and various tree planting
programs that will purportedly give the country forest cover. By

(20:07):
and since vowing in the summer of two thousand ten
to apply an iron hand to the task of reducing emissions,
the Communist Party closed more than two thousand steel mills
and other carbon emitting factories by March two thousand eleven.
In mid two thousand sixteen, the government announced new dietary
guidelines encouraging people to consume no more than seventy five
grams of meat per day. Reducing meat consumption was justified

(20:30):
on health and environmental grounds and hailed as by climate activists.
Such policies foretell the possibility of a climate MAO were
China to become a global hedgemon and also change under
revolutionary pressures. To be clear, that is a very big if.

(20:57):
If Leviathan is an attempt to maintain the capitalest world
ordered in an ego friendly manner, behemoth by far the
darkest potential future is an acknowledgment that the situation is
well and truly fucked. The damage is done, and all
that can be done is grab as much power and
as many resources as possible and concentrate them in the
hands of a chosen few, be it a specific nation

(21:19):
or perhaps an ethno state. Behemoth is the fascist state
solution to climate change. It's only children will be endless
resource wars. Now, these are fairly broad categories, and we
are likely to see variations of each of these archetypes attempted.
You may note my lack of enthusiasm for any of
the possibilities. This is a result of my own bias.

(21:39):
I am not a statist, and while Behemoth is obviously
the nightmare solution, I am not excited by either the
neoliberal climate Leviathan or climate MAO. Top down solutions to
big problems can work, clearly, but they have a nasty
tendency to crush people in order to fit them into
a system. An example of why I fear climate Leviathan
in particular came on June one, when the Los Angeles

(22:03):
Police Department rated the home of a man with a
significant quantity of illegal fireworks in the midst of the
deadliest fire season in living memory. The Boys at the
top decided that cops would need to crack down on
fireworks fenders. It seems logical enough from a high vantage point,
and elected leaders always like to send police in to
see ship because then they can say X pounds of

(22:23):
substance y was confiscated, and that makes for an easy
sound bite. But on this occasion, the l ap D
fucked up. Their technicians loaded what they thought were sixteen
point five pounds of explosives into an armored truck in
order to safely detonate it. Instead, they set off forty
two pounds, which started a chain reaction that turned the
entire armored truck into a massive I e. D. The

(22:46):
resulting explosion destroyed multiple homes and led to the deaths
of two people plus numerous injuries. These are the sort
of decisions we can expect from climate Leviathan, and the
sort of consequences too. In their book, Wainwright and Man
the least likely but best case scenario as something they
call climate X. This would be a decentralized, ground up

(23:06):
adaptation to the realities of climate change, a reorganization of
society not around the lines forced on it by some Leviathan,
but by regular people rejecting both the consumptive, destructive patterns
of old and the need for a strong dictatorial power
to envision a future for them. This is the least
likely scenario for a number of reasons. For one thing,

(23:27):
Climate X requires getting a large number of people to
embrace a future radically different and fundamental organization from the
world they've known. Climate MAL has to do this too,
but within the sort of strong state framework that is
at least much more familiar and thus more comfortable to
billions of people. We can envision the state taking charge
and instituting radical change much more easily than we can

(23:49):
imagine hundreds of millions of people making the decision to
alter their lives for the betterment of billions of strangers.
Climate Leviathan offers a very plausible set of predictions for
the different paths that are most likely, but of course
it is still not guaranteed that our nation, or other
large blocks of nations, will ever complete their climate ode
Loup Mike Davis is a historian and a social critic

(24:11):
with an enviable reputation for predicting the future. In nineteen
ninety he published City of Courts, an analysis of Los
Angeles that many saw as predicting the epic riots that
convulsive the city. In nineteen ninety two, his work was
respected enough within Los Angeles that the Crips and the
Bloods brought him on as an adviser to help negotiate
peacemaking deals. In nine Davis wrote Cataclysm of Fear, which

(24:36):
predicted the next twenty plus years of life in southern California,
with the line cataclysm has become virtually routine. In two
thousand five, he published a book on the Avian flu
as a plague of capitalism, titled The Monster Inters. Davis
quoted the influencer researcher Robert Webster saying, if a pandemic
happened today, hospital facilities would be overwhelmed and understaffed because

(24:59):
many medical personnel would be afflicted with the disease. Vaccine
production would be slow, critical community services would be immobilized.
Reserves of existing vaccines and medical equipment would be quickly depleted,
leaving most people vulnerable to infection. Sounds familiar. Permanent bio
protection against new plagues, Davis added, would require more than vaccines.

(25:21):
It would need the suppression of these structures of disease emergence.
The revolutionary reforms in agriculture and urban living that no
capitalist or state capitalist country whatever willingly undertake. Also, by
the way, Mike Davis predicted the two thousand eight economic
crash in an article for the Los Angeles Times, the
point is he's the kind of guy you should listen

(25:41):
to when he makes predictions. In two thousand ten, Mike
looked at the utter failure of international efforts to mitigate
climate change and imagined a not improbable scenario in which
mitigation would be quietly abandoned in favor of accelerated investment
and selective adaptation for Earth's first class passengers. And it's
here I might bring us briefly back to the subject

(26:02):
of Jeff Bezos's flight to space. An analysis by Media
Matters found that the NBC, ABC, and CBS morning shows
devoted two hundred twelve minutes to Bezos's flight. By contrast,
those same shows spent two hundred and sixty seven minutes
covering climate in all of twenty twenty. Now, rich people
flee to space isn't the likeliest solution the elites will

(26:23):
shoot for. It's more probable that they'd continue what they've
been doing for decades. Diverting more resources towards creating permanent
safe zones shielded from the worst of climate change and
isolated enough from population centers that their security forces can
protect them from interlopers. There will be token efforts carbon
taxes and famine relief, but on the whole, the world's
poor and much of the middle class will be abandoned

(26:45):
to misery and death. The only public field the powerful
will invest in his law enforcement. We've seen shades of
this already last spring, when the coronavirus started its deadly
rampage through the Western democracies. The Internet filled with a
flurry of year identical articles from Bloomberg Coronavirus escape Rich
Americans head to New Zealand, the New Yorker Doomsday prep

(27:07):
for the super Rich Vanity Fair inside the survivalist bunker
where some wealthy people hope to ride out coronavirus. And
from the Guardian super rich jet off to disaster bunkers
amid coronavirus outbreak. The gist of all these articles is
that the ultra wealthy have built a global system of
safe houses and bunkers in places they deemed secure in

(27:27):
the event of a wide variety of catastrophes. What I
find interesting about this is that their preparations are not
particularly focused in what we know does not suggest any
sort of collapse the wealthy sea coming due to the
special knowledge they have as members of the elite. Rather,
the evidence suggests they've simply fallen into the same assumption
as millions of regular people. Something terrible is on the horizon.

(27:51):
In two thousand seventeen, Lincoln co founder Reid Hoffmann told
The New Yorker that he estimated fifty percent of Silicon
Valley billionaires had already purchased some sort of a ocalypse
escape plan. And honestly, if you had that kind of money,
why wouldn't you? This is bleak as hell. Of course,
the individuals most responsible for encouraging and profiting from the
reckless consumption that has endangered us all abandoning society via

(28:13):
the most literal application of fuck you, money and history.
But when you dig into the whole story here, it's
actually somewhat optimistic, because the thing is, these people are
clearly just as terrified as the rest of us. That's
why they do things like spend one point five million
dollars a piece for a nine hundred and twenty square
foot room and a survival condo built into an underground

(28:34):
missile silo in Kansas. The best thing many of them
can think to do is build isolated miniatures of the
outside world. Staff it with former Navy seals and hope
for the best. These are not people who have a plan.
This was really driven home to me in a two
thousand eighteen article by Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist and
writer whose work has been extremely influential among tech elites.

(28:56):
In two thousand seventeen, he was invited to what he
described as a super deluc private resort to deliver a
keynote speech on the future of technology. Quote. After I arrived,
I was ushered into what I thought was the green room,
But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken
to a stage, I sat around a playing round table
as my audience was brought to me five super wealthy guys, yes,

(29:17):
all men from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world.
After a bit of small talk, I realized they had
no interest in the information I had prepared about the
future of technology. They had come with questions of their own.
Those questions quickly led to the climate crisis, and they
wanted to know if New Zealand or Alaska was a
safer escape bet. One of these CEOs had just finished
building his own underground bunker system and wanted to know,

(29:39):
how do I maintain authority over my security force after
the event? Quote the event that was their euphemism for
the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or
Mr robot hack that takes everything down. The single question
occupied us for the rest of the hour. The new
armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from

(30:00):
the angry mobs, but how would they pay the guards
once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from
choosing their own leader. The billionaires considered using special combination
locks on the food supply that only they knew, or
making guards where 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.

(30:20):
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 Elon Musk, colonizing Mars,
Peter Tile, reversing the aging process, or sam Altman and
Ray Kurz. While uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were
preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot
less to do with making the world a better place
than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and

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insulating themselves from a 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
really about just one thing escape. At one point, rush
Off suggested that if these billionaires were really concerned about
the loyalty of their hired security long term, their best

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bet would be to start treating those people like family. Now.
Money loses value after the event, love does not. He
also noted that if they were to use their power
and influence to extend this ethos of inclusivity more broadly
in their business practices, it might make such an event
less likely to occur. Quote, they were amused by my optimism,

(31:26):
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, and that right
there is why I am actually optimistic, because these people
are the enemy. We are at present engaged in a
battle to determine how the future of our species and
life on earth will look. We, and by we I

(31:49):
mean people who want a better, freer, healthier future for all,
have a few different enemies, but our most powerful foes
are the people currently standing atop the pyramid, fighting tooth
and nail against any change to society that reduces their
privilege and power. These men and women will go to
their graves to preserve the present power structure as long
as the rest of us go first. For decades, the

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enemy has had the upper hand, using disinformation, propaganda, the
violence of the state, and an arsenal of lesser weapons.
They disrupted every attempt to build a less extractive, more
sustainable society. But now that the fires are at everyone's
back door, they have no plan beyond locking themselves away
from the consequences of the world they insisted on building.
Reality can no longer be denied, and that's disrupted their

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ode loop. This means those of us on Team Better
World finally have a chance to get the upper hand.
To do that, though we're going to have to make
some decisions of our own