Zuckerberg hunkers down in Hawaii to wait out apocalypse On a remote part of Kauai, the fourth largest island in the Hawaiian archipelago, someone with a lot of money is bankrolling an extensive construction project. It's all very hush-hush. Security guards and cameras watch the perimeter of the 1,400-acre site, a six-foot wall blocks locals from peeking, and vetted workers are …
The question then is that if the ultra-rich are so worried about the planet's future, why aren't they shaking their infinite money trees to do something about it instead of digging holes just to save their own hides?
Sadly, I am not in the least surprised. Why would I be when considering the sort of mean sociopath who makes it to the top of these exploitative corporations?
Knowing the electricity, and thus fuel, that the megacorps use to make their megabucks, it's hardly a surprise that the people at the top aren't trying to do anything about protecting the environment. They're among the biggest damagers of it.
When can we ban the collection and sale of personal data, and the use of targeted advertising? It should result in the dramatic lowering of electricity usage, on top of being the ethically right thing to do.
Well, you say that, but psychopaths - or 'people with Anti-Social Personality Disorder or ASPD' as we should refer to them now, are really good at looking after themselves when the manure hits the windmill sails. So I like to consider it to be more of a syndrome than a 'disorder', particularly as psychologists have a tendency to label any personality feature they personally dislike (or don't think they have themselves) as a disorder. It is not so long ago that the US Psychologists 'bible', the DSM, labelled homosexuality a disease. And then medicine discovered that gay people tend to be related to particularly 'fertile' women (who have lots of babies).
Of course what Zuck and the others building bunkers for the next apocalypse do not seem to understand is that the number of specialists needed to maintain a 21st Century lifestyle, just as far as healthcare goes is really quite high. You need doctors, dentists, oncologists, radiologists and sonologists, physiotherapists, opticians, not to mention plumbers, electricians, engineers of all sorts ('wet', electrical, construction, electronic and mechanical) and a whole load of gardeners, cooks, chefs, farmers veterinary surgeons, and the people to make medicines. And I've hardly begun.
So, really, Mr Zuckerberg, expend your money and effort in making the world a better place would be so much better and fruitful;, and then maybe we'd start liking you.
I am not entirely sure that counts as a medical essential, but I bow to your superior knowledge.
But every time I consider the 'survivorlists' attitudes and expectations I wonder what they are thinking. In the event of actually surviving a civilisation destroying event, why do their 'bug out bags' omit essential items like a compass, or an axe? If nuclear armageddon has occurred, we're basically stuffed, so maybe a geiger-counter would be useful too? And when I consider the breadth of expertise I rely on, the sheer number of different skills needed is enormous, and I mean hundreds of people. So it is far far better to try to prevent armageddon than prepare for a few months of survival afterwards, and fighting your 'guard force' and 'land slaves' in order to maintain 'control'. But then I'm not a multi-billionaire Harvard graduate/drop-out, so what do I know?
"I wonder what they are thinking."
They are not thinking. They are reacting to a story that is playing out in their heads.
Plate and camo and dress-up bits on a rifle (how cute! They've found a Barbie substitute!) are not requisite tools for surviving the apocalypse, regardless of what the doom & gloom marketers tell them.
Nuclear war is probably survivable, but extremely unlikely
An oxygen crisis (anoxic event) is not and vastly more likely. Look at what's happening in the Leptav Sea
What all these preppers and doomers forget is that in such a world they'll probably go insane very quickly. The last chapter of Ben Elton's "Stark" should be mandatory reading
They get to do the stuff they can do with all their money BECAUSE of the complexity and Great Unwashed. If "society" goes away they get to live a very bleak (if luxurious) life of limited horizons and unrelenting views of the same few walls - a self-imposed prison sentence
> "Kauai is volcanic in origin. An ideal location for a secret underground lair."
It's a hot spot. Kauai is the oldest island still emerging (except for smaller Nihau). So, there is no danger of new eruption anymore (the tectonic plate has already moved). The only danger is gradual sinking and it's not immediate.
Seriously, if you had $100 billion, why not drop a few hundred million on something like this -- just in case? You'd hardly notice the expense, and you'll never really need all of that money -- unless of course you're dumb enough to do something like buy a microblogging site at an inflated price, and then drive it into the ground...
I do wonder how they expect to get from where they live to where their secret bunker is. Sure, sometimes they live in the above-ground part of that place, so if "the event" happens while they're there, then they might be fine. If they're in California when "the event" starts off, it's not going to do them much good, is it? This also depends heavily on what exactly the event is, but I'm not sure they've thought far enough to have any useful answer to that question. If I had infinite money and for some reason couldn't spend it on useful things, I'd consider something like this, but I'd have answers to the questions that caused me to do so.
"I do wonder how they expect to get from where they live to where their secret bunker is."
Private jet, sitting in the hanger all fueled up and ready to go at a moment's notice. A 1400 acre private property pretty much in the middle of nowhere will have the required runway. Extra points if the dweeb actually knows how to fly it for himself.
Palo Alto airport to his Sooper Sekrit Lair is under 2,500 miles, easily in range of a small business jet.
If the runway's AFU and he can't take off, plan B would be a second plane at a second local airport easily in reach of his helicopter from Palo Alto. (3rd plane & airport, etc. as needed.) Plan C would be an oceangoing yacht at a local harbo(u)r. Or perhaps a couple of yachts (just in case) at a couple of local harbo(u)rs. The guy is made of money, he can afford all the above, and the staff to keep it all maintained and ready to go.
Me, I keep my neighbors very, very gruntled and already share extra food ... they know I grow it, and they can not, so we should be OK. Hopefully :-)
I have this feeling that if the event is sudden enough that you know you should go to your secret emergency location, it is probably also sudden enough that the people working the airports where your plane is decide they don't need to be working today, or if they do, that your flight is less important than the emergency transport going through that airport. Unless you have a private runway and a pilot who doesn't have a reason to want to go somewhere else, air transport is probably insufficient. Similarly for a ship, they usually take a lot of people to run properly and those probably are not sticking around when something bad happens so you can get going when you say now.
It's always puzzled me as to how many people are prepared to perform the most unpleasant acts on other humans to enforce the whims of their overlords - whether it's a local crime family, something more organised, or a passing dictator... there's always someone happy to do the dirty work.
Read Dogs of War and Bear Head by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
As a reading recommendation that's great, but in real life we're probably further from uplifted animals than we are from one way trips to Mars.
And for the latter, read A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. (TL,DR: not a good idea with our current knowledge, only an idiot would be into.)
Depends what the hypothetical Event is, but Hawaii does have some disadvantages.
Pearl Harbour, 1941... wasn't that Hawaii?
A random place in inland Canada would be harder to target I guess. Also less likely to be hit if the Event turns out to be related to tidal waves. (Would still be affected by atmospheric stuff though: huge meteorite might spare you for a while but not for long.)
Oh but Hawaii might be nicer if what you actually want to do is run a theme park.
... which their social media sites were somewhat responsible for by addicting people to online hate, division, misinformation, etc.
If they really want to survive, their best bet is changing their ways and working to try and lower the chances of it happening in the first place.
《Yup, I am ready to believe the Zuck is using shoggoths in his building projects, and maybe even in the backoffice at Meta》
Got to love it :)
If Cthulhu revives then a deep hole in Hawaii isn't going to be much use especially when R'yleh is SSE.
Perhaps Zuck is planning to put his head in a jar and decamping to Mars where he and Musk can have their cage fight in the Metaverse.
For the rest of us rampaging chthonic gods cannot be any worse than these berks.
Lovecraft has somewhere mindless gods in the void dancing to insane flute music which resonates with the world that these lunatics are building.
..it's quite interesting. These guys have, through a combination of perseverance and luck, isolated themselves from society whilst putting themselves in positions of relative power. They've stopped being subject to normal social events (like loosing your job, worrying about retirement, being subject to small community rules etc.). There aren't many role models for that.
So it's perhaps not unexpected that their attention shifts from the "small things" to "big issues". Humans like to have something to worry about, and if it's not that your neighbour's trees are blocking your light, it has to be something else. In these cases, having been told that they are influencers, leaders of men, powerful people, the worries become grander. Yet even Zuckerberg cannot stop the next pandemic, or mass social unrest. And before long, they're worrying each other about "the event", they're trying to fix society with cack-handed cod psychology like accelerationism or they're speed running government corruption. Especially in the tech world, here are a bunch of guys who's only social education is the funky sci-fi books they read whilst growing up, trying to deal with the "big questions" that you're suddenly faced with when the day to day distractions of paying the mortgage have gone away.
Terry Pratchett would have had a field day with this lot.
At the same time, it makes you appreciate how relatively benign some billionaires actually are.
Agreed - after thinking of him as the devil when he ran Microsoft, he's turned into a far more respectable "elder statesman" than I could have ever expected. I'd be genuinely interested to chat over dinner with him, which is more than could be said of much of the current crop of billionaires.
....... is that even after some sort of apocalypse this sort of thing is staffed by locals. And locals loyalty is only available when they need you. So come apocalypse day whats to stop said locals booting Zuckerberg out on his arse to allow more space for their actual friends and family. Even those special 'security consultants' are going to be bright enough to see which way the wind is blowing.
Dirty secrets are less important after some unspecified world-ending event. If you have the choice to get some supplies from the bunker because the guards are siding against the owner of them, would being told that the guard was fired for embezzlement really change your view on whether you would like to eat? If the secret was much more severe, you'd also have reason to question whether the allegation was even true (so you're telling me you didn't have a problem hiring a serial killer as your guard?) which wouldn't help either. I don't know what scenario we're really looking at here, but it clearly involves a significant amount of societal collapse. For example, you can no longer earn the support of people by paying them, presumably because money is now worthless, and in such a scenario, personal information is not so important either because everyone is focused on survival. How we get into that scenario is another question, but not one I think they have an answer to.
"Otherwise humanity's greatest hope will be a race of CEO-descended inbred mole people. "
An initial gene pool consisting of billionaires and hand picked motivated and healthy assistants is not a bad start, they will be smart enough to prevent inbreed.
Allegiance of the place guard.
As the recent coup in Niger proved, the palace guard poses the highest danger for the leader.
Zuckerberg will have to hire someone who is capable to organize defenses, keep the guards in fighting condition and who can be trusted.
In case the property is attacked by desperate mobs, loyalty of the guards engaged in defending is guaranteed, mostly mobs will kill everyone after overcoming defenses.
However, one can argue that the Führer bunker concept is a failure from the start.
Building a Byzantium is a much better idea. It could be a village with land around it, make it work like its own little country, and be prepared for a global event that prevents harvests or even living on the surface for like five years. Allow only handpicked, healthy, high IQ people to live in it. Such a community would thrive in a time where IQ in the West is nose diving, the good initial gene pool will result in a sustainable society.
A fly in the ointment is the phenomenon of regression towards the mean in the context of particulate (genes) inheritance of IQ and other attributes measurable on an interval scale.
Suckerberg offspring are expected to have IQ's less than the mean value of their presumably brilliant (a likely false assumption) parents and closer to the population mean; undershooting is possible.
Similarly, run-of-the-mill populations occasionally throw-up highly intelligent children.
The population of the Zuckerbunker will be far too small to guarantee survival of a gene pool for brilliance. In fact, survival following post-apocalyptic emergence from the bunker shall depend upon physical labour and subsistence level farming. Therefore, Suckerberg ought to plan for sustaining a population of peasants throughout the apocalyptic crisis. In later years, cross-breeding among Suckerberg's effete collection and the hardy peasant stock will offer the prospect of adequate genetic diversity. From the peasants, and from the cross-breeding, a trickle of talent shall emerge. To be valued will be characteristics related to community leadership (not merely company board management and playing with spreadsheets), robust health, hunting skills, and foresight.
In this context, Suckerberg and his descendants are most unlikely to retain tribal leadership. Indeed, Suckerberg, not the most appealing of persons, might be deposed long before emergence from the Zuckerbunker.
Ditto for occupants of similar merdebunkers.
Interesting comments, both of these.
I suppose that in case of something that is not a real extinction level event, but something less, the collapse of modern society will kill everyone who is not already "primitive". Populations that are already primitive (people living in self sufficient small communities without modern technology and medicine and whatever) will most probably survive quite unscathed (unless the bomb hits them directly). Even in a fallout scenario they are best suited to actually suffer from it (cancer, etc) but not be wiped by it. In the end they will survive because they still have something to eat and drink, even if it's somehow contaminated. They will live 30 years instead of 80, but they will live on as a species, if not as individuals, just like the wildlife has done around Chernobyl even in the worst radioactive places.
When they mention how much money these whatevers have the numbers just wash over but sometimes it does hit home. I am a lowly sysadmin and will never even begin to climb to the top of any greasy poles - especially now I am late fifties. So when I hear that he is dropping $270 million on a personal theme park I change that to sterlying £212M odd and reflect that I will never see even 1/212th. What do you do with all that? I have an expensive dream with a nice boat that would cost likely £650K as my absolute dream.
Highly unoriginal but then this is an unoriginal time of year.
The Zuckerberg creature will hunker down during a period of pre-apocalypse civil disorder. The Beast's security contingent will not be so enthusiastic as to place their own lives at serious risk. Also, the security force could rise up and take over the facility for themselves, and their families, After all, the Suckerberg will have served its purpose by having the refuge built, and the creature shall henceforth be of no value to anybody.
Dissidents in the locality of the Zuckerbunker could prepare now by ascertaining as much as possible about the layout of the underground facility. There must be points of weakness; for instance, intakes to the air filtration system.
You never know Mr & Mrs Zuckerberg may pay a visit to see the construction, stay overnight in a luxury tent and in the early morning some kind soul may accidently pour 50 tons of fast drying cement over them by accident. They can at least claim their future and relationship has a solid foundation.
From memory (it's been many years since I read it) in Ben Elton's early novel, Stark, plenty of the billionaires and trillionaires who took themselves into a secure, low-earth orbit space station whilst the planet fried ended up offing themselves or each other, because it turns out that a refuge *full* of egomaniac sociopaths is not actually the nicest place to be.
Though I wonder what's to stop the USA succumbing to the same fate as Niger, CAR, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Argentina of the 1980s i.e. being ruled by a military junta....
Not like even the veterans in MAGAworld are going to overcome even 1/2 the US military....I find it amusing so many of the MAGA persuasion "it'll be like Afghanistan, we'd wear them down through constant insurgency" - whilst ignoring that the taliban were on the run until shrub pulled special forces away for his Iraqi boondoggle and that the average wannabe "insurgent" in the US would be dead within days at most given they wont give up their cellphones, will communicate with others either on non encrypted apps or via encrypted apps but with people who are in fact feeding intel back to the military, whose family / friends / coworkers will give them up, who will slip up - their plates will be captured on camera, said plates will also appear a gas station where they won't be wearing a face covering and clearview AI will ID them (let alone anything else the NSA etc have at their disposal) and shortly after any of the following depending on how hairy things have already gotten (invocation of military martial law for example) - arrest and trial, capture and internment - Guantanamo Bay is still open for starters...., shoot on sight, drone strike.
People say "well that's Africa not here" and ignore what happened in the last civil war for one..."Andersonville" should serve as a warning of what could happen...
I advise anyone and everyone to have a store of food and water purification systems. A few £100 could transform your chances of a better outcome should a major event occur.
The richer you are, the more you have to lose and the more insurance you can afford.
There are plenty of opportunity for a major event due to nature. Though a major event caused by a corporation, government or religion is way more probable.
I've seen this mentality develop on a smaller scale. In martial arts, some go beyond the traditional and fun self defense training. They add more and more weapons and outlandish scenarios. Open and concealed guns and knives, weapons stashed around the house. Expensive security systems and surveillance cameras. One friend will not go to the bathroom unarmed.
The more they prepare, the more afraid they get. Everywhere they look, they see people threatening their privileged status and power. The more you have, the more you stand to lose. No wonder these multi-billionaires become paranoid.
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