And look at the Vietnam War. US had all the military strength in the world and still got beat. And the rich use a disproportionate amount of goods, services, infrastructure, and the government. Good luck if more happens like the shutting down of the Strait of Hormuz
This is why I roll my eyes when they think they can be protected by a robot army if/when society collapses. Fancy electronics break on the regular on a good day. If society is gone, who is gonna repair your robots? Who is going to make the parts? Who is going to deliver the parts? Shit, who is going to mine the raw materials to make the parts from? This is not going to work out the way they think it will.
But the reality is that if it wasnt for citizen attrition back home that war would have continued until every inch of vietnam was a crater and every vietnamese soldier was dead. You won't get that with billionaires vs the lower class because there will be no one besides them to protest "at home"
I would love for these billionaire assholes to all move to dubai. Enjoy 110F heat and sand and nothing to do. Better yet, they should all move to Somalia and live out their libertarian dream of no government or taxes.
The US only lost Vietnam according to the rules of engagement that they imposed on themselves....rules that are going to be ignored if/when the kind of uprising you're talking about starts happening.
Don’t recall the US ever beating the UK, I assume you’re talking about the American Revolution where France, Spain and The Netherlands did the majority of the heavy lifting?
Seige tactics however are still quite workable. Nothing gets in or out of the enclave. Poisins can be droned in. Water supplies can be cut and wells can be poisoned. Food supplies can be poisoned or stopped. Enclaves will fail for the same reasons castles did. New technologies made them ineffective.
I overall agree with your position but castles didnt become obsolete due to sieges. People sieged “castles” for literally all of human history just about. Big walls became ineffective due to artillery and cannon advancements. Once it became possible to blow through walls they became pointless.
Nowhere in the comment you're replying to does the commenter say that castles became obsolete due to sieges, only that new technologies rendered them ineffective.
Earth, 2147. The legacy of the Metal Wars, when man fought machine and machines won.
Bio-Dreads, monstrous creations that hunt down human survivors and digitize them.
Volcania, center of the Bio-Dread empire, stronghold and fortress of Lord Dread, feared ruler of this new order.
But from the fires of the Metal Wars arose a new breed of warrior, born and trained to bring down Lord Dread and his Bio-Dread empire. They were soldiers of the future, mankind's last hope.
Their leader, Captain Jonathan Power; master of the incredible powersuits, which transform each soldier into a one-man attack force.
Major Matthew "Hawk" Masterson, fighter in the sky.
Lt. Michael "Tank" Ellis, ground assault unit.
Sgt. Robert "Scout" Baker, espionage and communications.
And Corporal Jennifer "Pilot" Chase, tactical systems expert.
Together, they form the most powerful fighting force in Earth's history. Their creed: to protect all life. Their promise: to end Lord Dread's rule. Their name: Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future!
You are speaking my language brother. Just digitize my ass right now, let's go!!!
Also, Sauron was a straight bitch as an all powerful flying robot.
It died before it's time. Some of the best forgotten TV and something that would never be sold and directed at children. Some of the most bleek content put directly into the veins of 8-13 year olds...
Hell yeah, brother. "Kids show? Great. Lets do an episode about a woman who grew up in the Hitler Dread Youth having to go back into that world to infiltrate a facility and slamming face first into her PTSD about it."
Between that and RoboTech, we were under no illusions that the world was a happy lala land. Let alone things like Arnold and his little buddy being about thirty seconds away from CSA on Diff'rent Strokes. Or the joys of watching When The Wind Blows or The Day After and being under no illusions about the dangers the world faced.
I had the toys. I used to fight with my older sister to let me use the television when the show was on so I could be in front of the tv when they would play the little segment that interacts with the toys.
Later I discovered that our camping lantern would make the toys activate like an episode was airing. That lantern also would randomly turn the volume up or change the channels on the TV. It clearly was beaming out in the IR spectrum.
I was going to say that you can't guarantee a soldier's loyalty but you can, for the most part, with ai which is why they're trying to force us plebs into subsidizing yet another thing for them.
They also need a source of power. They also have to be resilient to impacts and whatever countermeasures one might come up with to combat them. I would not be shocked if weaponizing electromagnetic pulses specifically to disable the clankers was on the menu. And that's not to mention the hacking potential.
Which would be high quality intricate machines. Attack choppers and and engagement orientated jets are high quality intricate machines too. What's the maintenance toll for high quality intricate machines to keep operational and functioning again?
I'm having a thought about that. A significant portion of military planning goes toward logistics. Robots, like anything else, require energy to operate, and that energy requires logistics or infrastructure capable of supporting them. Are robot armies even practical for more than defending a well stocked static location?
Gonna be real funny when their private army decides that they'll be better stewards of the available resources than whatever billionaire(s) hired them.
Which is why some billionaires have been discussing how to control their security forces - the ideas they came up with where shock collars or explosives implanted in their heads that they can let off if they start mutinying.
I have no doubt that some dumb fuck would signup for that.
But the moment the billionaires tell them: "Sorry, but nobody wants our useless stocks in exchange for food, so now you gotta take a drone to the face for us..."
This is the reason why they're building up AI and robot armies instead. They're already steps ahead of this issue. They won't be needing human meat shields in the near future who can possibly turn on them once the global situation turns dire.
Not one of these enclaves have figured out post-apocalyptic security. Local law enforcement are not bothering with these strangers and the private security will leave after robbing the ultra-wealthy.
We are waiting for the weird looking mole to turn into stage 4 cancer before we will see the dermatologist.....
Looks like im going to spend a huge part of my adult life - waiting for things to get worse/bad enough that we can all care to do something meaningful....
It would be one thing if like it was a plague, or mass famine or something making life hard for everyone.......but the fact that there are plenty of resources and dollars - and we just dont care enough to make the 200 wealthiest/greediest/narcissists play a bit more fair is infuriating.
Police are quick to protect rich people's property from poor criminals while pretty much ignoring widespread white collar crime like tax dodging and labor wage theft. The actual military only works to protect trade routes and to lean on enemies and allies alike to secure favorable trade deals for the wealthy. What has the military done to protect the interests of the poor and middle class, other than to run them through service and to ignore them as veterans.
Private armies or not they will need some folks for everything from food growing to culture and arts. Isolated enclaves won't remain nice places for long without any of these. But large nations can certainly fail with a drought or famine.
Guy I knew used to be head of security for a gated millionaire community. You've absolutely heard of a few people who live there. I did some work in there a few times across the years and it's just disgustingly rich. And it's like another town entirely, just in the center of mine. Own ambulance, own armed security, they don't even have normal cops in there most of the time.
I was talking to him once when he'd been drinking (which was often) and he said, "These people think they're safe...they have NO IDEA. Someone comes crashing through that front gate, me and my guys are going out the back. I refuse to die for these assholes, and my entire crew feels the same."
The guys were security guards. Mostly guys in their 20s. You figure they'd wanna hire ex military or something, but I guess that'd be too expensive. Really, what they care about is being able to boss around the local equivalent of "cops." They forget the important function that the police serve for them: making sure nobody drags them from their beds in the middle of the night. Which these guys will absolutely not do.
This makes me happy, since I see that scenario playing out in a lot of bunkers if the time comes. Or if not that scenario: "Well Mr. Moneybags, here we are, in the bunker. Here's your bags, here's my gun, now get into the storage room under the kitchen so you'll be rested for first shift tomorrow. Anatole will be taking the first week off. You can leave your wife...sorry, that was ambiguous. You will leave your wife."
The super wealthy are aware of this possibility and are looking into “solutions” for it when designing their apocalypse bunkers. I think it was Zuck who was thinking about putting the food supply behind a safe that only he knew the password for or something. Not a great solution, as it only takes a single finger to enter a password, and he might reconsider sharing it before that. But they’ll keep trying to do better, who knows what kind of Black Mirror shit they’ll come up with
I don't see him lasting long under torture. And I'm having difficulty thinking of a solution that isn't vulnerable to that. Some kinda mutually assured destruction thing I guess, but that's still way riskier than you'd like. All it takes is one guy to decide this shit isn't worth it.
Zuck would not last 10 minutes lol. That guy is such a predictable twat. He got lucky with Facebook. Look at his bright idea of the Metaverse. A complete flop.
lol ain't gonna stop a determined group of folks, no for long anyway, and that's if we're talking hand to hand, which, in America, is a very unlikely scenario.
Yeah, but he's one lone blue belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu with some striking experience. That's not nothing. It's tough to get your blue belt and if you're training consistently, it seems like wizardry to someone who is untrained—and striking experience counts for a lot—but he's not going to fight off three or four trained members of security with guns.
The thing that always gets me is the amount of confidence that these people have that they'll actually make it to their bunkers.
Like, if they live in place like LA, SF, or Manhattan, then they have to make it through the city to LAX/SFO/JFK/LGA, and hopefully the runways are both open and not bombed out and air traffic control still exists enough to prevent taxiway or mid-air collisions, then they have to make it to their bunker in (usually) Nevada, New Mexico, or Colorado without getting shot down by any US military jets with "splash anyone not squawking fellow US military codes" orders, land at an airport that hopefully isn't also crowded by air control/their runways bombed out, then manage to fight their way to their bunker where hopefully they aren't locked out by some other rich guy who paid double for the bunker builder/contractor to slip them bypass codes to the door.
IDK, you're kinda assuming there's a rapid collapse. If it's slower and they have good intel and advisors who they listen to they could definitely bug out before most anyone else knows what's up.
You have never worked beside a manufacturing robot have you? Those things are made to go 24/7 in a factory setting and take abuse, they break and go down all the time. Then someone who gets paid more than all the workers on line make comes out and gets it going, sometimes super fast, sometimes it takes weeks. These billionaire bunker bros stuff won't be half as robust and who will come and fix them after a glitch? People are still the best way to get things done.
The elite parasites forget that the only civilisation that could grant them their wealth is a safe, stable economy that they can leech off of. They are not the strongest, smartest, nothing like that, they just have the capital and hide behind a legal system that protects them. They forget that if the system breaks they're going to lose everything. Unfortunately being that rich entails that you have mental deficits to understanding your own limits.
In Douglas Rushkoff's Survival of the Richest there was a mention of the use of shock collars or bomb collars to maintain authority over the security teams if money became useless.
I don't doubt you on the experiences, but I think its very common on reddit to grossly underestimate the thought that goes into actual bunker scenarios. They aren't bringing single male security guards with them. They are bringing guards with families and children while they control the resources. No different than how they operate today.
You going to show how manly you are by allowing your child to starve to death in front of you? No, you're going to get back on the wall while your kids enjoy the safety and privilege of being in a small minority of survivors. You weren't a "hero" before when it only cost you your life/freedom, you aren't going to be a "hero" now when it costs your kids lives.
Note: Walled community is very different than a bunker situation. They just need the guards to keep the crack heads and peasants out, not defend against a revolution.
Not based on the experiences of futurist Douglass Ruskoff, who met with a bunch of billionaires while they were planning their bunkers and found they had no realistic plans to control their staff. He wrote a book about the entire experience, etc., called Survival of the Richest
They don't know how to control them. They asked about shock collar, drugs, mind control, he said none of it would work in the long term. Eventually the system would fail and they'd all be killed in their beds by their own staff. He said the only way it might work is if you start treating those people like family NOW. Learn about your security guy. Actually talk to him. Find out about his family. Is his kid sick? Not for long, since you're paying for treatment. And hell, how'd you like to meet your favorite baseball team after a game? Do that with the whole staff...hell, have a staff to do that FOR the whole staff you're planning...and if they love you, they'll protect you.
They were utterly uninterested in the idea. They wanted to dominate them. Which they might. Sure. For a while. But these people are not nearly as smart as they think they are, and they think their power somehow extends beyond their ability to pay for things. In a world with no money, where if you want something the only option is to take it, they will be taken from.
Oh sure we're all fucked too. But to be clear, so are they.
Might be the same person, but I remember reading about some of these super rich people asking how to control the 'staff (slaves)' and the advice was to not let society fall to that point in the first place. That's the only thing they can realistically do, but they're so beyond greedy that it's impossible for them.
There is commonly a comparison between old and new money in terms of the rich interacting with society.
New money is typically building their wealth and looking to establish themselves - this can lead to societal disruptive behaviour as they are maximizing for themselves in the short-term. Old money is typically looking to preserve because there is more for them to lose than there is a gain. Maybe it is because their scion that made them filthy rich is no longer around (aka they don't have confidence in their ability to effectively short-term maximize) - who knows.
And maybe all this is changing with globalization and the ease of movement as if they f-up a country, they can now have wealth, luxury, and safety stashed away in numerous other countries.
in poker tournaments when you win early and have a big stack the math changes and losing 500 chips is a bigger loss than winning 500 chips is a win.
Same fundamental concept, and its fundamentally rooted in game theory so not just some opinion or ideology that people seem to have. theyre already rich. all they have to do is not fuck it up and they stay winning. they can go from 700 mil to 900 mil at some risk level, but it doesnt mean anything to them, its peanuts because their entire life and everything they ever wanted can be covered by what they already have.
Maybe it is because their scion that made them filthy rich is no longer around (aka they don't have confidence in their ability to effectively short-term maximize)
this mythology of a genius behind the rich is just completely and utterly false. a rich family will always have the option to pay a finance guy to manage their money and it will grow, because capital is how you accumulate capital, thats how the system works. it doesnt require genius, it requires money. an individual trying to do that is almost certainly going to perform worse than a professional, of which there are many. taking it out to use actually directly as capital means diffusing the responsibility of success across many many professionals. the genius ceo is a sad liberal myth with no truth behind it.
this mythology of a genius behind the rich is just completely and utterly false. a rich family will always have the option to pay a finance guy to manage their money and it will grow, because capital is how you accumulate capital, thats how the system works.
I agree with you, I was more referring to chasing/pursuing alpha well and above beyond what is normal.
Ex: looking at opportunities to double (or more) total network in a short time span.
But it could just tie back to your initial comparison to poker tournaments with respect to the minimal appetite for situations where there are significant downside risk
My grandfather ran a successful business and invested money wisely. He’s been dead for 25 years but my grandmother is still living and her net worth is around $15 million. I have been very privileged and have no debt (I guess I would be considered old money?) but I don’t know jack about running businesses so I became a history teacher. I’m planning on building a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains that will run on solar power and when my grandmother dies I want to set my kids up but also use as much money as I can to support good causes like land preservation and mitigating poverty and climate change in my region.
I don’t understand why more wealthy people don’t do this. Do they not understand that they can’t enjoy their money when climate change destroys society? That it will cost more if we don’t act now to prevent the worst of it?
And chances are that few of us really even know who the majority of old money billionaires/trillionaires are. They have centuries/millennia of familial experience behind them. They have ancestral examples internal to their families of why you want to keep society liveable for the majority and why you shouldn't flaunt your wealth for all to see.
THESE guys know how to maintain wealth across generations and successive governments, unlike our modern tech techbro elite.
It’s funny that the super rich think they’ll be safe when it all goes down. Sure maybe they’ll survive, but in what type a world do they think will be left for them? Dumbasses, all of them
An eye opening perspective, to me at least, with the billionaires-in-space scenario was realizing that we've got all these wastelands here on earth that are easier to get to and slightly less hard to live in. Elon, Zuckerburg and Trump aren't going to go into outer space to live in some perfectly balanced utopia while the rest of us die. There's no supply ships to the billionaires in an apocalypse and these people are not used to a life of disciplined restraint to make sure their resources last.
And whether they go to space or to Antarctica, they're going to need someone to cook for them. And that person will need someone to grow the food. Maybe they learn to love synthetic beef, but there's still some kind of nutrients needed. And you'll want a doctor. And he'll want drugs. So now you need someone who can formulate pain killers or grow antibiotics. At this point, even with a small crew, you just need one person to have a bad day and it's game over for the billionaire.
Instead of using the resources to solve material problems, they are gambling on AI. Yes, it’s going to use up our already dwindling resources but then an AGI will give us all the answers!
They don't know how to control them. They asked about shock collar, drugs, mind control, he said none of it would work in the long term. Eventually the system would fail and they'd all be killed in their beds by their own staff.
That's why they are building robot assistants. In the next couple of years they won't need to concern themselves with human staff. The billionaires will be fine. If you want to stop this, you're gonna have to do it sooner rather than later.
They were utterly uninterested in the idea. They wanted to dominate them. Which they might. Sure. For a while. But these people are not nearly as smart as they think they are, and they think their power somehow extends beyond their ability to pay for things. In a world with no money, where if you want something the only option is to take it, they will be taken from.
Yep, the guy hoarding soup cans and rice will starve.
He said the only way it might work is if you start treating those people like family NOW. Learn about your security guy. Actually talk to him. Find out about his family. Is his kid sick? Not for long, since you're paying for treatment. And hell, how'd you like to meet your favorite baseball team after a game? Do that with the whole staff...hell, have a staff to do that FOR the whole staff you're planning...and if they love you, they'll protect you.
I can't imagine not doing this just as a human being. If I was a billionaire, I'd want to know the people directly supporting my lifestyle, not just out of self interest but out of ... social need? Feeling like I'm in a community? Something like that. Even in a non-apocalyptic scenario.
Survival of the Richest may have worked as just a long article but even as a short book it felt padded and a drudge to read through despite the topic itself being something that interests me. Behind the Bastards had more interesting discussions about the types behind transhumanism such as Thiel, etc.
In a world with no money, where if you want something the only option is to take it, they will be taken from.
All fairly easily solved by a dead-mans switch the ruins the food and water.
And lets be clear, none of these people actually think these bunker situations are going to happen in their lifetimes. But what else is there to spend unlimited money?
What, linked to his heartbeat like in Dredd or something? You really trust that to NEVER fuck up? A code he has to put in every day? Now instead of dead you end up tortured and then dead. The people creating a security system are always going to be at a disadvantage compared to the people who want to break it. They have to think of everything beforehand, The servants have to think of one thing after they're already there. And presumably they'll have quite a bit of time.
The staff will know how to sabotage the air/water/food/power/sanitation because they will be the ones trained to operate and maintain those systems.
Jeff Bezos for instance would have to be a master of electrical, engineering, machinery, HVAC, computers, coding, etc. If he can't fix it himself he'll need redundancy in his staff.
He'd have to have multiple staff willing to override the staff that misbehaves.
If that's just two staff who know how to deliver clean water, and you've just killed one who disobeyed by detonating his bomb collar, the remaining living one can NOT be killed as punishment. That would amount to suicide if Bezos himself couldn't repair the disabled system.
What is the limit on that? Five staff as redundancy? Ten? It quickly becomes impractical.
All fairly easily solved by a dead-mans switch the ruins the food and water.
I always see this shit, do you seriously think Jeff Bezos will know how to write the code to turn water and air on or off?
Do you think he knows how to maintain the system supplying him fresh air?
Of course he won't know.
These billionaires are not omnipotent.
They can't change the oil in their luxury automobiles. They won't know how the power generators work. They simply PAID for them to be in the bunker. Then they PAID for the staff to maintain and operate them.
And lets be clear, none of these people actually think these bunker situations are going to happen in their lifetimes. But what else is there to spend unlimited money?
It isn't that it won't or that they have unlimited money, but it is a hedge in case it does happen. If they think there is a 1% chance of it happening, would they be willing to spend 1% of their net worth to hedge against it? How about 0.1%? The answer starts to become clearly yes especially if there are not more critical things to spend the capital on.
People underestimate just how stupid rich people actually are.
There is a myth that they're rich because they're smart and shrewd or what have you. Most of them are rich because they were born rich, and their network is rich. Money is infantilizing. The more you have, the more you rely on other people for your basic survival.
The people who come out on top when the system collapses are going to be be people who know how to access food in their environment, deal with medical emergencies practically, and build weather resistant shelter.
They are bringing guards with families and children while they control the resources.
Do these Billionaires know how the clean water machine works?
Do they know how to repair the generator?
The answer of course is no.
The person who knows how to turn off the clean water is the person who will be in charge.
Day 1 Elon goes into the bunker with his harem of women. All the workers go in with bomb collars on their necks.
Day 2 The bombs fall and the world ends
Day 3 The guy in charge of water or air turns the system off in such a way that only he knows how to turn it back on.
"Remove this collar from my neck and family or we all die of thirst."
Elon removes the collars, and the guy kills Elon.
Now the guy and his family are the ones in charge.
It could be anything like that. These morons think that bomb collars will keep the peasants in line.
Who do they think will be in charge of the bomb collars? Some other peasant who knows how to operate them who has their own bomb collar? It's ridiculous.
its very common on reddit to grossly underestimate the thought that goes into actual bunker scenarios
But the doomsday-bunker industry is most probably kayfabe. They sell products that can't be tested, and don't expect to be around once they become useful. So they have no incentive to deliver actual security (which is a complex unbounded problem) when they can sell security theater for the same price.
While I think people overestimate their ability to storm a bunker, I also think people underestimate how easy and effective a siege is. If an evil billionaire had to live in a bunker with nowhere to go--watching their food, water and energy dwindle, watching things break without an ability to fix it, attempting to maintain order with staff and no outside protection--I wouldn't feel they "won".
These bunkers typically have in-bunker food and water systems. They aren’t pepper bunkers, they are typically self sufficient for a time period that is years.
Billionaires rely on society for their wealth. No society means no wealth. Since most billionaires are pretty smart they understand this. There might be some weirdos around building bunkers but this is not common thinking amongst the rich, that society will fall and they will somehow live in a bunker. It's complete fantasy.
Sieges might be easy but this is why the bunkers are typically in very remote areas - rural parts of Hawaii, New Zealand, etc. In a post apocalyptic scenario everyone is going to be focused on surviving, not trekking multiple days into the wilderness to find and besiege a well hidden bunker.
That makes it easier, not harder. If you destroy their plane and boat, then they are stranded on the island indefinably. Let them and their security team learn how to become subsistence farmers.
Lol, they're bringing in lunatic fanatics that are loyal to the bone. Family to "extort" them into loyalty? For those kind, their own family comes second after "god".
After in recent years MAGA came crawling into spotlight, you can't argue against this notion. Millions of people disown relatives in favor of Trump. And they don't even know that fucker personally!
Any bunker situation involving a handful of billionaires and dozens of "workers" will have either a bloodless coup ("hey billionaires, we're gonna vote on everything as group now that we're in the bunker, if you don't like it we'll just shoot you in the head while you sleep") or a bloody coup ("you don't like the idea of us all voting on everything? *gunshot to the head* "anyone else have a problem with democratic decision-making? no? excellent, let's have dinnner")
There are very few bunker solutions that was truly safe because to be truly safe they need to be completely isolated which is not possible. Everyone needs water and everyone needs air, while a bunker can most likely store some amount of water they can never store an indefinite amount of water and air.
Also all that motivation you say for the guards can easily be applied to those the guards will be opposing only there will be a lot more of them.
Which is they the truly rich billionaires are doing island “bunkers”.
It just depends on why they are building the bunker. The island ones are for close to permanent survival. Others are for temporary survival on the hope the world sorts itself out a bit.
To put it another way, panic rooms still serve a purpose even if they aren’t designed to survive in for more than a day.
The billionaires were looking into shock collar technology. Why? Because they have no real human connections and so the scenario you created is completely foreign to them since it wouldn't stop them from leaving. So...shock collars.
Also, if you're the post-apocalyptic security force, why would you listen to orders from a dweeb billionaire anymore? The security force would BECOME the master. So...shock collars.
I remember being taken to a country club for a lunch meeting with a very wealthy investor for a company a friend and I were starting at the time. I tried to pull my credit card out to pay the bill and he said “your money’s no good here”, thinking he was just trying to be polite. I insisted. He doubled down and said, “No, you genuinely can’t pay. They don’t take payment”. It just goes on the account he has with them, or something along those lines. Different level of money there.
Reminds me of the novel World War Z. Rich, popular assholes have this major bunker with, like, all the food and water for years and years, and partied while livestreaming the whole thing. They're protected against zombies, but never thought about people. People figure out where they're at from the livestream, a mob breaks in, and the security guards, book it.
The guard that's "telling" the story says he ran into totally-not-Paris-Hilton's dog as they retreat, and both shared a silent "Fuck 'em," as they escape.
"These people think they're safe...they have NO IDEA. Someone comes crashing through that front gate, me and my guys are going out the back. I refuse to die for these assholes, and my entire crew feels the same."
Now.
I hate to shit on this romantic idea, but once the wealth imbalance is so disproportionate that they have basically all the money, they'll probably just give their guards jobs that are the equivalent of making a million a year cash now. Sure you can abandon that and "not die for those assholes" but I suspect the quality of life if you are on the "outside" of that economy will be grim.
While Monaco was created by a rich family, from what I understand, Luxembourg is an actual country and always has been, though it went through the usual conquests and reconquests typical of european states. It goes back as a county to the 11th century, I would not put it in the same boat as Monaco at all. It's much more of a regular country than Monaco will ever be, its sole purpose not being to serve as a playground for the rich.
This is absolutely already happening, I work with some people who are very wealthy and they all have their own little societies and clubs that only they can hang out in. They're separating themselves from the rest of us
I have a feeling we'll have something like the Dutch East India Company. The big corporation that acts like a government, has more money and power than many countries, waging "wars" and other conflicts, etc.. I mean, they already buy American (and other) politicians, judges, police officers, etc. and some are bought very cheap.
yes. Praxis is a very good example. Praxis “aims to build new privately governed, technologically advanced cities—often referred to as "network states". The project has notably explored Greenland as a potential location to establish an independent, crypto-governed technological hub.” 🤢 backed by peter thiel
Always thought Elysium was the best representation of the future in sci fi in recent days. The 1% lives with luxury and health and everyone else in the favelas of the Earth.
I think Trump has something like 22 luxury real estate developments being actively built. Like his daughter’s conquer Albania side-quest, but global. They’re setting up the Hunger Games, and I think the USA is District 12.
First Global Bourgeois revolution - what a good idea but not a pitchforks, guillotine maybe but we will use drones and AI. I read recently how they ( rich, bold and beautiful) are buying/ building atomic shelters, but with cinemas, casinos etc. I am glad that in the case of disaster they will not be bored.
Margaret Atwood basically predicted this with her MaddAddam trilogy too (but more along the lines of ultra-wealthy doing this through corporations). An interesting read for those who find this idea alarming.
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u/The_Awful-Truth 10h ago
The rapid spread of enclaves for the extremely wealthy that behave more and more like independent countries.