The Gray Area with Sean Illing takes a philosophy-minded look at culture, technology, politics, and the world of ideas. Each week, we invite a guest to explore a question or topic that matters. From the the state of democracy, to the struggle with depression and anxiety, to the nature of identity in the digital age, each episode looks for nuance and honesty in the most important conversations of our time. New episodes drop every Monday.
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Why are billionaires prepping for the apocalypse?
Sean Illing talks with technologist, media theorist, and author Douglas Rushkoff, whose new book Survival of the Richest explains how the ultra-wealthy are obsessed with preparing for the end of the world — and the troubling mindset that leads many rich and powerful people down this road. They discuss the blend of tech utopianism and fatalism behind this doomsday prepping, how Silicon Valley and "tech bro" culture have incentivized a kind of misanthropy, and why the world's billionaire class can't see that the catastrophes they fear are of their own making.
Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area
Guest: Douglas Rushkoff (@rushkoff), author; professor, media studies, CUNY Queens College
References:
- Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff (W.W. Norton; 2022)
- "Epson boobytrapped its printers" by Cory Doctorow (Medium; Aug. 7)
- "Cosmism: Russia's religion for the rocket age" by Benjamin Ramm (BBC; Apr. 20, 2021)
- The Selfish Gene (1976) and The God Delusion (2006) by Richard Dawkins
- Francis Bacon, Redargutio Philosophiarum (1608), tr. by Benjamin Farrington in The Philosophy of Francis Bacon (1964): "Nature must be taken by the forelock . . . lay hold of her and capture her" (p. 130).
- "Power changes how the brain responds to others" by Jeremy Hogeveen, et al., Journal of Experiential Psychology (Apr. 2014)
- What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill (Basic Books; 2022)
- Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff (W.W. Norton; 2021)
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This episode was made by:
- Producer: Erikk Geannikis
- Editor: Amy Drozdowska
- Engineer: Patrick Boyd
- Editorial Director, Vox Talk: A.M. Hall
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