Source: Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest
definition
The Mindset:
- “favors the extraordinary achievements of wealthy individuals using technology to set themselves apart from the common folk, control the natural environment, and overcome the cycles of life.
- prefers straight lines, linear progress, and infinite expansion over the ebbs and flows of the real world
- would rather break new ground, change state, or reach a singularity than succumb to the inevitable, compensatory undertow of natural systems.
- So they ignore, repress, and attempt to outrun those cycles until eventually comes the catastrophic comeuppance.”
3 main tenets for corporate colonialism, exploitation & domination
- Empirical scientism ~ Detachment & superiority: “see oneself as separate from nature, and thus regard natives as less than human. ”
- EG: “the New World was “virgin land,” awaiting settlement by white Europeans.”
- empirical science → capitalism
- Extraction
- “The more value is extracted, the fewer opportunities people have to create and exchange value through any means other than participating in the systems of domination and control that have robbed them in the first place. ”
- EG: “British West India Company. Colonists were permitted to grow and pick cotton, but they were supposed to sell their bales directly to the company at set prices. The company shipped the cotton all the way back to England where it was made into fabric or clothing, then shipped and sold it back to the colonists at a profit.”
- Relentless pursuit of growth
- “this whole drive toward colonial expansion was instigated by the underlying math of interest-bearing currency. Everything is predicated on paying back more than is borrowed.”
- EG: mistake growth for economic health, GDP
vs cybernetics
“If The Mindset can be understood as a unidirectional arrow of unbridled intention—westward progress, hero’s journey, male climax, the eschaton—then cybernetics can be seen as the resurgence of the cyclical rhythms of nature.”
Excerpt From Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires Rushkoff, Douglas This material may be protected by copyright.
Excerpt From Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires Rushkoff, Douglas This material may be protected by copyright.