Bunking with billionaires
Issue 68 - 7 September 2021 (8-min read)
Someone asked me once what I’d pick if I had to choose between mountains and oceans. It was a hard choice so I asked if there’s a place where I could have both? "New Zealand. You’re thinking of New Zealand," they replied.
So the next time someone asked me what I would do if I had a billion dollars, I said I would build a house in Aotearoa (New Zealand’s original Maōri name). Little did I know that people who actually have billions of dollars are doing exactly that. But unsurprisingly, not always with the best intentions.
This week in The Global Tiller, we take a look at what makes New Zealand the premier choice for post-apocalyptic survival, who’s building their billionaire bunkers in Middle Earth and Hobbiton, and why this is not sitting well with many people in Aotearoa.
According to a new Global Sustainability Institute study, New Zealand has ranked first among the locations best suited to survive a global societal collapse. This study is based on a country index prepared by the University of Notre Dame’s Global Adaptation Initiative that measures a country's vulnerability to climate change and other global challenges in combination with its readiness to improve resilience. It aims to help governments, businesses and communities better prioritise investments for a more efficient response to the immediate global challenges ahead.
In simpler words, they rank countries so that those who find themselves at the bottom rung can learn from the good-ranking countries what are some good policies to undertake. It is not necessarily a brochure for billionaires to pick their favourite postal code for their doomsday bunker. Nevertheless, money can’t buy you happiness but it can surely buy you survival.
What makes New Zealand an ideal choice is that it checks a lot of boxes for survivalists: it’s a remote island with vast, largely untouched landscapes. Now if you’re a billionaire reading that, you know untouched landscape to mean untapped resources.
Which is why billionaires have long been eyeing these islands as a place they would jet off to when the society around them collapses. Peter Thiel, billionaire venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal — or as The Guardian describes him: "less a person than a shell company for a diversified portfolio of anxieties about the future’ — was one of the first of Silicon Valley tech giants to make New Zealand his fallback. As early as 2011, Thiel claimed he’d found “no other country that aligns more with my view of the future than New Zealand”.
This view of the future that Thiel and several of his Silicon Valley billionaires subscribe to comes from an obscure libertarian manifesto, called 'The Sovereign Individual', which predicts the collapse of democratic nation-states, only to be replaced by a 'cognitive elite' with power and influence but no longer bound by states and who make their own rules to suit their ends.
If this sounds self-centred to you, you’re not wrong. And if it sounds familiar, you probably grew up in a post-colonial society, like me. For many Maōris in Aotearoa, it is unsettling to observe the rich folks thinking of their country as a blank canvas to splash ideas on, especially since they heard the same rhetoric from British companies that preceded the colonisers.
Nevertheless, this self-proclaimed cognitive elite is getting ready for the apocalypse. Several Silicon Valley bigwigs already scurried to their doomsday shelters in New Zealand during the Covid-19 pandemic and, those who are unable to buy Kiwi citizenship, are building them within their estates or other parts of the world. An American company that builds high-end underground bunkers said their 2016 sales grew 700% from the year before, with overall sales growing 300% since Donald Trump came into power.
For the rest of us mere mortals (or the hobbits of the Shire, if you would), this paints a very grim picture. Is money the only way out of this mess? That seems to be the case if you look at other countries sharing the spotlight with New Zealand: Tasmania, Ireland, Iceland, Britain, United States and Canada. Some researchers criticise the research behind this, saying it is unfairly tied to income per capita. But their critique focuses more on how even these top performers are bound for doom, rather than showing how the worst performers can find a way out.
For as long as we find ourselves on this side of a climate-induced societal collapse, how can we try to save more than just the rich (and frankly, the most self-centred) among us? Do we need to think about doomsday bunkers that holds all of us, or can we take action now that prevents the collapse in the first place?
Stay tuned for our upcoming coverage on COP26 climate summit in October. We hope to find some answers to our questions from our live guests.
Until next week, take care and stay safe!
Hira - Editor - The Global Tiller
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…and now what?
A few years ago, Tahiti welcomed very warmly a group of people coming straight from the Silicon Valley. They were planning to start the first world active seasteading ever built. It was a promise of jobs, new technologies and wonderful news coverage for the island.
The local government was thrilled. They had a chance, thanks to those Silicon guy’s networks, to meet famous people from Tesla and Google. Once they had the government happy, they started to explain the project in more detail. They needed a piece of land for their logistic base. They needed a space in the lagoon for their prototype. They also needed a tax-free system on this floating island. They wanted to have this island opened mostly to billionaires and the likes. They also wanted to bring in their guns. They wanted to hire people but won’t allow any unionisation on site. And if they could access the local hospital, that would be great too.
For a few months, I was in touch with them as they asked me to advise them on the best strategy to address the authorities, to go through the legal system and implant their idea in the community. For weeks I told them that, as it was currently designed, the project would fail. Why? Because it was not in line with the values of the community. They were trying to re-instate the system they were coming from in a new place that had different rules, different traditions, different values stemming from a different environment and a different history.
They never listened. They were sure that they had it right. After all, isn’t Silicon Valley the most successful place on Earth? So why wouldn’t people want to have them here? Why would they have to adjust to different values and ways of living, if theirs were already so successful?
But the population opposed the project quite quickly after it became obvious it would block access to the lagoon for the fishermen, that local people wouldn’t be allowed to live there, and when people realised they would use our infrastructures without paying the right share for it. Eventually, they left. They tried their luck in Thailand without much success, some of them even ending up in jail there.
I’ve been debriefing the case at length but, looking at today’s theme, it came back to me again. Because the Thiels of the Earth are the same who came to Tahiti in 2017. In fact, Peter Thiel was one of the first investors in Seasteading. His libertarian ideal is being pursued in many ways: from floating islands to Kiwi shelters, all the way to a 'crypto-cruise ship' or a 'utopian paradise' in Chile. None of them work.
And it probably won’t. In all likelihood, the world will soon experience quasi-apocalyptic situations. But it won’t be the first. What made the difference back then (during other plagues, during major wars, during colonisation even) is that eventually people stuck together to adapt, to resist, to fight back. The solidarity, the collaborative nature of our species helped us survive.
Because that’s what we’re wired for. And thinking that you can isolate yourself or live off the grid freely without worrying about the downsides of democratic life, it’s probably because you’ve benefited for long from the work of others. You may have great ideas but if you don’t create a space for collaboration for people to help you achieve your vision, you will not become a rich billionaire. It’s not about being the smartest or having the best business acumen. It’s being able to gather enough people to share and achieve your vision.
But let’s be kind to those members of the 'cognitive elite' because they see every challenge through the lens of their individuality. We can definitely understand that they’re scared. Existential threats and challenges are scary seen from the point-of-view of a single individual. The individual’s life time is short, its resources limited. That’s why they rush into hiding because they’re afraid.
So I would advise them to start considering themselves as part of the species, made of very diverse individuals all being useful to each other in one way or another. A species whose lifespan has gone through ages, and during which we overcame immense challenges.
Billionaires of the world, don’t hide. We see you! We’re ready to welcome you back from your bunkers, and “build back better” to face the challenges of tomorrow together. But while you do, don’t forget to pay your share of the load please.
Philippe - Founder - Pacific Ventury