Survival of the Richest, by Douglas Rushkoff

So: this book begins with the author, a "marxist media professor", being invited out to (what he thinks is) a weird conference in the desert, where (he thinks) he'll be giving a talk about the future of tech, being paid 1/3 his annual professor's salary for it. But it turns out to just be 5 very rich men who come sit with him in a conference room for one hour and ask him questions which revolve around how to survive after The Event, i.e. the apocalypse. New Zealand or Alaska, which will be safer? And: how do you keep your team of mercenary guards – already hired, to keep away the baying mobs – from turning on you once money is worthless and they could just kill you and take over your precious compound?

I'm fairly confused about every part of it, though. Why did this bunch of billionaires think this random professor, who had not prepared anything about that topic, would have insight into it? Why didn't they make him sign an NDA?

In the second chapter, he muses on that briefly. Maybe they weren't really serious about it all, maybe they were just roleplaying or DnDing or competing with each other about their theories of the future. But, in that case, why not invite a sci-fi author as their Impartial Judge?

His take is that, actually, they weren't asking him what to do so much as trying to get permission for their philosophical take on society. He sees their big question as:

“How much money and technology do I need to insulate myself from the reality I’m creating by earning money and using technology in this way?”

"These men are actually the losers" of capitalism, he says, and they'd be better off investing in people and relationships in the present.

I basically bought this book because it was sold using the weird conference-consulting anecdote, and I thought that's what it was about, but it isn't – I think the author (correctly) figured this anecdote would pull in readers like me, but he only has 5 sentences about it, and the rest of the book is just a media theorist's views about the internet and society and wealth and stuff. Not bad as it goes, but not worth one of your few book-slots in life.

The only other two things I'll remember from the book are:

• the claim that Q Anon is just "end stage internet addiction," a fun endless online puzzle, like the rest of us get from Twitter etc.
• the metaphor/image that tech elites are like Wiley E Coyote, thinking that their intelligence and wits will let them spring perfect traps for the dumb little birds, but Roadrunner somehow glides effortlessly over the traps, and then Coyote has them blow up in his own face much worse than he could have imagined. We'll see! So far they seem to be doing pretty well out of it, from where I sit.

I've often wondered about the very very rich. When I see them on Twitter, they all seem (frankly) miserable: they are wasting their life bickering about dumb shit with people who hate them, violating the Buddha's warning that anger is like a hot coal you hold in your hand to throw at someone else. But then, what's more selection-biased than "people who waste their time on twitter"? Maybe theres a whole other class of billionaires who are having a grand old time, hanging out with their pals and staying off the internet. I hope so, I suppose, otherwise what's the point?