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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhy Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-valley-billionaires-are-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-in-new-zealandHow an extreme libertarian tract predicting the collapse of liberal democracies written by Jacob Rees-Moggs father inspired the likes of Peter Thiel to buy up property across the Pacific
by Mark OConnell
Thu 15 Feb 2018 01.01 EST
If youre interested in the end of the world, youre interested in New Zealand. If youre interested in how our current cultural anxieties climate catastrophe, decline of transatlantic political orders, resurgent nuclear terror manifest themselves in apocalyptic visions, youre interested in the place occupied by this distant archipelago of apparent peace and stability against the roiling unease of the day.
If youre interested in the end of the world, you would have been interested, soon after Donald Trumps election as US president, to read a New York Times headline stating that Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal and was an early investor in Facebook, considered New Zealand to be the Future. Because if you are in any serious way concerned about the future, youre also concerned about Thiel, a canary in capitalisms coal mine who also happens to have profited lavishly from his stake in the mining concern itself.
Thiel is in one sense a caricature of outsized villainy: he was the only major Silicon Valley figure to put his weight behind the Trump presidential campaign; he vengefully bankrupted a website because he didnt like how they wrote about him; he is known for his public musings about the incompatibility of freedom and democracy, and for expressing interest as though enthusiastically pursuing the clunkiest possible metaphor for capitalism at its most vampiric in a therapy involving transfusions of blood from young people as a potential means of reversing the ageing process. But in another, deeper sense, he is pure symbol: less a person than a shell company for a diversified portfolio of anxieties about the future, a human emblem of the moral vortex at the centre of the market.
It was in 2011 that Thiel declared hed found no other country that aligns more with my view of the future than New Zealand. The claim was made as part of an application for citizenship; the application was swiftly granted, though it remained a secret for a further six years. In 2016, Sam Altman, one of Silicon Valleys most influential entrepreneurs, revealed to the New Yorker that he had an arrangement with Thiel whereby in the eventuality of some kind of systemic collapse scenario synthetic virus breakout, rampaging AI, resource war between nuclear-armed states, so forth they both get on a private jet and fly to a property Thiel owns in New Zealand. (The plan from this point, youd have to assume, was to sit out the collapse of civilisation before re-emerging to provide seed-funding for, say, the insect-based protein sludge market.)
If youre interested in the end of the world, you would have been interested, soon after Donald Trumps election as US president, to read a New York Times headline stating that Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal and was an early investor in Facebook, considered New Zealand to be the Future. Because if you are in any serious way concerned about the future, youre also concerned about Thiel, a canary in capitalisms coal mine who also happens to have profited lavishly from his stake in the mining concern itself.
Thiel is in one sense a caricature of outsized villainy: he was the only major Silicon Valley figure to put his weight behind the Trump presidential campaign; he vengefully bankrupted a website because he didnt like how they wrote about him; he is known for his public musings about the incompatibility of freedom and democracy, and for expressing interest as though enthusiastically pursuing the clunkiest possible metaphor for capitalism at its most vampiric in a therapy involving transfusions of blood from young people as a potential means of reversing the ageing process. But in another, deeper sense, he is pure symbol: less a person than a shell company for a diversified portfolio of anxieties about the future, a human emblem of the moral vortex at the centre of the market.
It was in 2011 that Thiel declared hed found no other country that aligns more with my view of the future than New Zealand. The claim was made as part of an application for citizenship; the application was swiftly granted, though it remained a secret for a further six years. In 2016, Sam Altman, one of Silicon Valleys most influential entrepreneurs, revealed to the New Yorker that he had an arrangement with Thiel whereby in the eventuality of some kind of systemic collapse scenario synthetic virus breakout, rampaging AI, resource war between nuclear-armed states, so forth they both get on a private jet and fly to a property Thiel owns in New Zealand. (The plan from this point, youd have to assume, was to sit out the collapse of civilisation before re-emerging to provide seed-funding for, say, the insect-based protein sludge market.)
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Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand (Original Post)
CousinIT
Jul 2021
OP
Worried2020
(444 posts)1. Memories of reading "On The Beach" by Nevil Shute back in the 60s
.
And watching the movie with Gregory Peck decades later
Theorists have promoted the idea that if/when nuclear global war breaks out - it will be mostly over North America and Europe,
making Australia and New Zealand the most likely to to surivive longer than the rest of us, but not indefinitely
(sigh)
W
Budi
(15,325 posts)2. So that's why he headed to NZ shortly after tRump was inaugurated.
He knew of the coming pandemic apocolypse & the total demise of the US Govt & alignment of world authoritarianism.
I mean who'd want to stick around for THAT!
His NZ hidey hole was long ago ready for him, like a doomsday prepper.
Well. Until Biden was inaugurated on Jan 21, 2021.
Opportunities missed, plans changed.
7wo7rees
(5,128 posts)3. The Trick is
How to keep your security detail from executing you.
Good luck, Pete!