Very amusing to see these pictures of very glamorous panic rooms. In case of the scale of disaster for which such fortifications would be warranted, one would assume months and years of living underground. The service providers to keep the place ship-shape would need to be present and functioning as they would in a normal world.
What if they decided to band together in this new dystopia and toss the owners above ground. The balance of power and the priorities that drive people would change a great deal if there is huge population thinning and the world becomes largely uninhabitable for a long period of time. But this is not how these folks are thinking about their place in the world in the event of a large scale societal collapse.
Never before have our society’s most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unliveable for everyone else. Nor have they ever before had the technologies through which to programme their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society. The landscape is alive with algorithms and intelligences actively encouraging these selfish and isolationist outlooks. Those sociopathic enough to embrace them are rewarded with cash and control over the rest of us. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop. This is new.
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