When Douglas Rushkoff was invited to speak to a group of mega-rich tech elite at a private desert resort, he thought he’d come fully prepared.
He was wrong.
Rushkoff, an author, theorist and professor at the City University of New York, had been asked to present an address on “the future of technology”.
For his services, Rushkoff was offered an exorbitant fee — about a third of his annual professor’s salary — along with flights and a three-hour limo ride to the mystery location
“[When I arrived], instead of bringing me out onto a stage, they brought these five guys into this green room where I was getting ready. And they said, ‘this is it’,” he tells ABC RN’s The Drawing Room.
The small group was from the “upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge fund world” and at least two were billionaires.
Initially, Rushkoff was peppered with a few innocuous questions.
“They asked me all the typical questions that tech investors ask, like, ‘what’s better, Bitcoin or Ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality?'” he says.
But then the real conversation started. It became clear why Rushkoff had been summoned to the desert.
“How do I maintain authority over my security force after ‘the event’?” one of the men asked.
New Zealand or Alaska?
Rushkoff says ‘the event’ is a euphemism for the end of society — which could be “environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down”.
These five men were mega-rich preppers convinced that society could collapse at any moment, and were keen to get Rushkoff’s opinions on how to survive and thrive.
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