Splitsville APOCALYPSE NOW-ISH

The Completely Re-Invigorated Newsletter for Fans of THE SPLIT

Of all the various ways we’ve contemplated the state of the nation as being one of Splitsville—in which two distinct “nations” occupy a single geo-political entity—the vast majority of them have consisted of two populations roughly comparable in size. And now for something completely different: Today the US consists of a very large group of people who want to go on living in the US, and a very small group of people who want to live elsewhere, even if “living elsewhere” involves remaining within America’s borders.

This tiny contingent has more financial clout, oomph, and resources than most of the rest of the country put together. And they are possessed—by a vision of themselves as an elite vanguard of hyper-alpha achievers in a conceit worthy of the nerdiest 14-year-old who ever finished Atlas Shrugged with his mind aflame; by a sense of impending catastrophe about to befall the planet, conceivably with their help; and by insatiable, bottomless greed.

They are, you will be the opposite of surprised to learn, our tech oligarchs—the billionaires who have made vast fortunes creating new technologies, or selling new-ish (or gussied-up old) technologies to the government. These people, having benefited from the economic, cultural, and political advantages of this country, now want to leave it, or destroy it, or both.

You can, and should, read all about it in a long, scathingly-written piece in The Guardian by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor entitled “The Rise of End-Times Fascism.” The usual suspects are all here (Musk, Trump, Thiel, Andreessen, Vance) along with some unusual suspects (Srinivasan, Yarvin). They’re all billionaires or billionaire-adjacent. And they all, in one form or another, entertain a fantasy that goes by the generic term “exit.” They don’t want to live in a liberal democracy any more, you see. As Klein and Taylor write:

Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.

Sound like fun? They think so. And they’ve come up with a variety of ways to exile—sorry; liberate—themselves from ordinary people, including:

· “Network states”—Separate, self-contained corporate polities run by a CEO and free of such bothersome, fuddy-duddy rituals as “elections.” Where will they be located? You tell us! One plan targeted the Presidio in San Francisco.

· “Freedom cities”—A fantasy put forth by Donald Trump and, as such, probably doomed to remain a mere two weeks away from coming to fruition, forever. The idea was, presumably, to create ten self-ruling, no-tax entrepreneurial havens on Federal land. The idea of creating bespoke cities from scratch strikes us as nuts. Cf. Neom, a hubristically massive planned city in Saudi Arabia. The Saudis have unlimited money and an authoritarian government, and they’re having problems.

· Seasteading—A pet project of Peter Thiel who, along with Elon Musk, made a bundle when eBay bought their creation called PayPal (which is now an independent, publicly-owned company). Seasteading—if only theoretically—involved the establishment of politically-independent nation-states crafted, if that’s the word, out of barges and platforms and what-all, anchored in international waters. We, personally, took the abandonment of this scheme very hard, as it would have been hilarious to watch it make its way in this big, bad world, afloat out there on the bounding main. (For a satirical treatment of the seasteading ethos, go here.)

· Prospera—This exists! Not only that, it describes itself as being “where innovation meets Caribbean charm.” (Which reminds of a tiny, fake ad in an old National Lampoon for the island of Aroogah, “where the ocean meets the sea.”) In any case, Prospera is (in the authors’ words) “a glorified gated community combined with a wild west med spa on a Honduran island.” The web site has the feel of a strenuous promo for a teen-entrepreneur’s summer camp, but what do we know?

· Deluxe prepper bunkers—Yeah, yeah, we all know about these: hidey-holes dug into the sides of mountains, where you’re supposed to live with your family for the duration of the half-life of uranium-238 (i.e., 4.458 billion years), or custom-made, bomb-proof shelters on a plain in the middle of nowhere, right? Wrong! These offer first-class accommodations and no fifty-pound bags of dried beans. Thiel tried to build one on 500 acres in New Zealand (they didn’t let him), while Mark “I Still Believe in the Metaverse” Zuckerberg has a 1,400-acre estate on the Hawaiian island of Kauai (where a lot of rock stars live), including a 5,000 square-foot underground hideaway.

Zuck isn’t just wasting his time, sitting around waiting for the nuclear holocaust. He’s raising high-quality beef cattle. What will they eat? Glad you asked. “The cattle are wagyu and angus, and they'll grow up eating macadamia meal and drinking beer that we grow and produce here on the ranch.”

· Starbase—Musk’s headquarters for SpaceX in what was Boca Chica, Texas; it was recently permitted to incorporate and become an independent town. Many long-time residents were happy to accept SpaceX’s offer to buy their homes. If any who balked are still there, it will be like living in a house stuck in the middle of an airport, only with fewer (but way louder) takeoffs and landings. Oh, and with the ever-present danger of shrapnel, fuel, and hot, flaming junk falling from the skies when a rocket explodes.

· Mars—Yes, that Mars. This is Musk’s hobbyhorse, the safe space to which he foresees “mankind” escaping after life on Earth becomes impossible. It has no air, no water, and no magnetosphere to block lethal cosmic rays. Talk about a fixer-upper!

It will have occurred to you that this is hardly a coherent movement. Half of it seeks innovator nirvana in a variety of capitalist utopias, while the other half seeks to ride out Doomsday. Klein and Taylor suggest three things that prompt the oligarchs’ conviction that the end is nigh: First, of course, is climate change. All of them have quietly reneged on whatever mitigation promises they rashly made in the past. Second was COVID, which delivered convincing proof that our globalized, connected world is, indeed, a perfect petri dish for the flourishing of a communicable disease. The third is AI, and the threat of its unpredictable and uncontrollable evolution.

Of course, the tech billionaires are promoting AI, and crypto, both of which are destined to require more and more electricity generated by more and more fossil fuels, exacerbating climate change. Thus:

The startup country contingent is clearly foreseeing a future marked by shocks, scarcity, and collapse. Their high-tech private domains are essentially fortressed escape pods, designed for the select few to take advantage of every possible luxury and opportunity for human optimization, giving them and their children an edge in an increasingly barbarous future. To put it bluntly, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.

(We don’t even have space to go into the congruence of these End Times fears/fantasies with the trooly meshugah Christian eschatology of the Rapture, for which thousands of Evangelicals are rooting every day. For a thorough--but painless! and amusing!--introduction to the unbelievable things some Rapturists believe, go here.)

That said, start with the Guardian piece and read the whole thing. It even ends on an uplifting, somewhat hopeful note.

But first: Imagine receiving a billion dollars. (Fun Fact: A billion is a thousand million.) Think of what you would do with that money. And then reflect on what these people are doing with dozens, if not hundreds of billions.

Seriously. Of all the ways to live; of all the things to spend their money on; of all the kinds of satisfactions available to people who help other people or institutions, this is what they choose to do: Segregate themselves in corporate states, hermetically sealed off from anything unpredictable or unfamiliar (and, thus, nourishing to the spirit), in a tech-nerd’s idea of paradise guaranteed to repel a) most women; b) artists of all sorts; c) nice people; d) everything that, and everyone who, make the wider world more enjoyable, interesting, and satisfying than a WeWork floor.

You wouldn’t think that with so much money they’d be so scared.