How Billionaires Are Preparing For Doomsday - Douglas Rushkoff

Rushkoff highlights basic oversights in elite prep plans—like food systems, spare parts, germs, and the loyalty of hired security—that make isolated underground compounds and remote farms highly brittle compared with community-rooted resilience.

Experienced preppers he’s met focus on teaching neighbors foraging, farming, and self-defense because survival is more likely in a cooperative network than as a lone, fortified household.

From Epson’s planned-obsolete printers to social-media execs who won’t let their own kids use their products, Rushkoff argues many fortunes are built by acting as though the world is already disposable—then justifying this behavior with apocalyptic narratives and dreams of exit.

Because online ideas spread at high speed without real-world friction, both “woke” and anti-woke responses become over-amplified, leaving little room for nuance, learning, or repair and making hubristic, all-or-nothing schemes more attractive.

While individual agency is valuable, Rushkoff and Williamson note how wealthy people often evolve from productive independence into a “me and mine, screw everyone else” mentality that erodes civic ties and can morph into prepping to abandon society entirely.