Friday 12 October 2018

Silicon Billionaires Prepping for the Apocalypse?

Billionaires anticipating the collapse of democracy and the nation state?  Mark O'Connell writes in a Guardian article (Why Silicon Billionaires are Prepping for the Apocalypse in New Zealand).

O'Connell quotes from a book called The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age.  The title looks harmless enough, but inside it contains the recipe for what feels to me, a kind of nihilism. It preaches:

"1) The democratic nation-state basically operates like a criminal cartel, forcing honest citizens to surrender large portions of their wealth to pay for stuff like roads and hospitals and schools.
2) The rise of the internet, and the advent of cryptocurrencies, will make it impossible for governments to intervene in private transactions and to tax incomes, thereby liberating individuals from the political protection racket of democracy.
3) The state will consequently become obsolete as a political entity. 

4) Out of this wreckage will emerge a new global dispensation, in which a “cognitive elite” will rise to power and influence, as a class of sovereign individuals “commanding vastly greater resources” who will no longer be subject to the power of nation-states and will redesign governments to suit their ends."

I don't know just how much influence these billionaires have, but this book reveals contempt for life as well as a hatred for democracy.   They are claiming that their money and power will help nation states collapse.  

Civil society is threatened by far right hate groups funded by dark money.

Are spills from oil pipelines accidents or intended outcomes from trans national corporations, to further the goal of weakening democracy and centralizing power? Was the postwar push to pave towns and villages with highways created to further our addiction to fossil fuels?

What will save us from this absolute destruction of all things fair and civil? What will keep fascism from destroying Canada in the way Germany was destroyed by Nazi's in the thirties. What will keep Canadians from becoming slaves to megalomaniacs? 

Well there are books like Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and Klein's No Is Not Enough, imagining the many dangers of a world without morality, empathy and social responsibility. 

Are all the world's nations being destroyed to clear the way for global fascism? 

We need to be curious enough to ask the most disturbing questions when threatened by highly organized evil minds, and to re-invest in the creative community power we are capable of. 

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