Excerpts: “Yet while tyrants since the time of Pharaoh and Alexander the Great may have sought to sit atop great civilizations and rule them from above, never before have our society’s most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unlivable for everyone else” (p. 11).

“After all, space stations and Mars colonies for the lucky few don’t get built without legions of workers left behind on the dying home planet” (p. 48).

“Nir Eyal, an ‘applied consumer psychologist,’ plays both sides of the table. His first bestselling book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, adapted B.J. Fogg’s FBM into an even simpler marketing-friendly framework Eyal call the Hook Model” (p. 107).

“Employed uncritically and by a homogenous elite, the technocratic urge leads to one of two primary outcomes. At its worst, it is abused by leaders to build a totalitarian surveillance state in which every citizen’s privileges are dictated algorithmically based on the data collected about them. On the other side, a more liberal technocracy is still likely to succumb to the utilitarian biases of its technologies, unintentionally neglecting the people and things that were left out of its initial calculus” (p. 125-126).

“Postman says that the gods of the technology are efficiency, precision, and objectivity, leaving no room at all for human values, which exist in an entirely separate and unacknowledged ‘moral universe'” (p. 128).

“The basic laws of physics are impossible to violate. The only real answer, the really simple one that neither philanthrocapitalists nor green technologists want to hear, is that we have to reduce our energy consumption altogether” (p. 139).

“For Bannon, the real purpose of accelerationism is to crash the system itself: run the processors and processes of technocapitalism so fast and so hard that they break down or break apart. That’s why it doesn’t matter what people are told or what they believe, whether it’s real news or fake news, as long as it undermines their faith in the administrative state” (p. 149).

“We’ve never seen a society avoid fascism when it gets to this stage of economic inequality, or a civilization avoid collapse when it has taxed it physical environment to this extent” (p. 181).

“In each and every one of their grand plans, technology solutions, and great resets, there’s always an ‘and’ or a ‘but’–some element of profit, some temporary compromise or cruelty, some externality to be solved at a later date, or some personal safety valve for the founder alone, along with his promise to come back for us on the next trip” (p. 189).

Rushkoff, Douglas. (2022). Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.