How ‘Longtermism’ Is Helping the Tech Elite Justify Ruining the World

^{"transhuman" by new 1lluminati is licensed under CC BY 2.0.} 

“It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.”

These words were the takeaway from a meeting that Douglas Rushkoff, who describes himself as a “Marxist media theorist,” had with five extremely powerful people in tech who were looking to survive the impending climate catastrophe. Rushkoff’s account of this in Survival of the Richest reveals something sinister: that righ-ranking elites in tech genuinely know what’s coming — but rather than stopping it, they’re planning on saving themselves from it in the form of underground luxury bunkers and armed guards comprised of Navy SEALs.

The people who are almost directly responsible for the world’s biggest problems today — the climate crisis, eroding institutions of democracy, and the sale of people’s own attention for profit — don’t find themselves to be accountable. Not only that, accountability, or even fixing today’s problems, isn’t even a desirable goal for them. At least not, according to ‘longtermism’ — the philosophy undergirding much...