The Bugging Out Billionaires By John Steele

The Conversation.com.au has an interesting piece looking at the phenomenon of billionaires building survival retreats and fortified underground super-bunkers. There was much speculation about the motives of Meta's Mark Zuckerberg doing this on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Zuckerberg's compound is over 5,500,000 square metres, and at a cost of AUS $ 400 million, enough to feed many tens of thousands of starving Africans. People are fascinated by the underground bunker, and many have asked on YouTube, what is he preparing for? The bunker is the icon of the doomsday prepper.

The opposing view is that what we are seeing is a re-emergence of feudalism, techno-feudalism, where the elite will create a self-sustaining ecosystem, where they will control all, and rule all. I agree that there is much in common here with Zuckerberg and the kings of the medieval period. Yet, what is missing in this narrative is that the super-capitalists have retreated from mainstream society in setting up these alternative ecosystems. Their goal is personal survival, rather than ruling over the rest of society. The bunker really is the key symbol since it is based upon the scenario of the likely destruction of mainstream society; why else go underground? The self-reliant ecosystem exists, not as a Green experiment, but to keep the elites alive.

Thus, Zuckerberg posted pictures of himself about to tuck into a massive slab of meat, home grown. Whatever would the World Economic Forum think of that? Oh, they eat meat too, it is just us ordinary folk who will have to eat bugs!

https://theconversation.com/billionaires-are-building-bunkers-and-buying-islands-but-are-they-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-or-pioneering-a-new-feudalism-223987

"At first blush, these tycoons might seem to be "prepping" for a familiar 20th-century style apocalypse, as depicted in countless disaster movies. But they're not.

Yes, their vast estates do include bunkers and other technologies traditionally associated with prepping. For example, the mansions of Ko'olau Ranch are connected through underground tunnels that feed into a large shelter.

However, Zuckerberg, Winfrey, Ellison and others are actually embarking on far more ambitious projects. They are seeking to create entirely self-sustaining ecosystems, in which land, agriculture, the built environment and labour are all controlled and managed by a single person, who has more in common with a mediaeval-era feudal lord than a 21st-century capitalist.

Some have argued the tech industry has invented a new form of "technofeudalism" or "neofeudalism" that depends on "data colonization" and the corporate appropriation of personal data.

We agree, but also suggest what's going on in Hawaii is actually aligned with traditional understandings of feudalism. As Joshua A. T. Fairfield, author of Owned: Property, Privacy and the New Digital Serfdom, puts it:

In the feudal system of medieval Europe, the king owned almost everything, and everyone else's property rights depended on their relationship with the king. Peasants lived on land granted by the king to a local lord, and workers didn't always even own the tools they used for farming or other trades like carpentry and blacksmithing.

Here it's easy to see a contrast between Ko'olau Ranch and earlier attempts by billionaires to build bunkers to "escape" some future cataclysm.

Take, for instance, libertarian venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel's failed attempts to build an elaborate, bunker-like underground lodge in Aotearoa New Zealand's South Island, taking up more than 73,700 square metres of land. The plan was rejected because of hostilities between Thiel and the local council.

What we see with Zuckerberg's project isn't an overt conflict between billionaire and community. In Kauai, members of a community have consented, or conceded, to grant a plutocrat the stewardship of their land, in the name of preservation. This is a business model that leads directly (back) to feudalism.

This insight is lost in the media's obsession with the "craziest features" of Zuckerberg's Hawaiian folly. Rather, what is emerging among billionaires is a belief that survival depends not (only) on hiding out in a reinforced concrete hole in the ground, but (also) on developing, and controlling, an ecosystem of one's own.

It's all too easy to assume that, because some of the world's richest people are buying up estates on remote islands and fitting them out with bunkers, they must be privy to some secret inside information. But the truth is simpler, and more brutal, than that. Billionaires are building elaborate properties … because they can.