"Douglas Rushkoff’s keen eye as a seasoned media analyst, combined with his flair and wit as a writer and a performer, shine in this book. Rushkoff confronts the reader with a ridiculous conundrum: how is it possible that people who have powerfully shaped our society and economy and have reaped enormous financial rewards in the process are doing everything possible to escape the world they’ve created?"
"Beyond eye-opening, this book is eye-popping. A master storyteller, Rushkoff brings to life perhaps the greatest challenge of our time. A must-read."
"[Rushkoff’s] report is both fierce and amazed in the face of capitalism’s delusions; I for one am sharpening my pitchfork."
"A scary, true and unsettling look at what happens when money causes people to lose their humanity."— Seth Godin
"Why are the world’s richest people obsessed with preparing for the apocalypse? Because they’re edging us all toward it. It’s as if, Rushkoff writes, they’re trying to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust."— Malcolm Harris Wired
"Dark and revealing…Rushkoff provides a powerful critique of the attitudes and technologies that enable these deceptions."— Nick Romeo Washington Post
"Survival of the Richest reveals fascinating tidbits about the elite tech crowd’s postapocalyptic survival strategies and the niche solutions being marketed to them."— Carolyn Wong Simpkins Science
"Rushkoff’s knowledge of digital technology shines…horrifying us with the capacities of the machines we’ve built and the ways they have been used against us. This is an important book."— Adam Frank NPR
"[H]arrowing and illuminating."— Chris Barsanti PopMatters
"Rushkoff is well worth reading [and] uncannily right."— Michele Pridmore-Brown Times Literary Supplement (UK)
"Intriguing…[Survival of the Richest] shows the degree to which serious money is fretting about a looming disaster [and how] this scramble to organise the logistics of bunker life may make the underlying problems worse."— Gillian Tett Financial Times (UK)
"Survival of the Richest is more than a primer on a soulless worldview pervading all aspects of life.…Rushkoff offers something at once more realistic and more imaginative: mutual regard, responsibility, and flourishing. In so doing, he mounts an impassioned defense of everything and everyone marked expendable in the fanatical pursuit of a blank slate."— Jenny Odell, author of How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
"There are plenty of books decrying the horrors of twenty-first-century monopoly capitalism, but none quite like Survival of the Richest. Rushkoff is essential—not just a passionate visionary on the side of the angels, but the rare one who can write."— Kurt Anderson, author of Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
"[Rushkoff’s] report is both fierce and amazed in the face of capitalism’s delusions; I for one am sharpening my pitchfork."— Jonathan Lethem, author of The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
"A sober, scathing oddsmaking on the recursive wager of the ultra-rich: that they can insulate themselves from the world they’re creating in their rush to insulate themselves from the world they’re creating."— Cory Doctorow, cofounder of BoingBoing
"A hilarious and lacerating look at the elite sociopathy wrecking the world, and a call to arms for how the rest of us can fight it."— Molly Crabapple, author of Drawing Blood
"Beyond eye-opening, this book is eye-popping. A master storyteller, Rushkoff brings to life perhaps the greatest challenge of our time. A must-read."— Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet
"Douglas Rushkoff’s keen eye as a seasoned media analyst, combined with his flair and wit as a writer and a performer, shine in this book. Rushkoff confronts the reader with a ridiculous conundrum: how is it possible that people who have powerfully shaped our society and economy and have reaped enormous financial rewards in the process are doing everything possible to escape the world they’ve created?"— Marina Gorbis, executive director of Institute for the Future
"With razor-sharp insight, Rushkoff unwraps the dazzling facade of the technological dream, revealing the alarming Mindset that underlies promises of planetary salvation…Ultimately, Rushkoff demonstrates, the growth-based techno-solutionism inspired by the Mindset will drive our civilization toward collapse unless we begin to recognize capitalism as the underlying issue that needs to be addressed."— Jeremy Lent, author of The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning
"[A] thorough and authoritative condemnation of tech worship."— Kirkus Reviews
2022-06-21
A media theorist dismantles the tech-centric fantasies of the wealthiest people in the world.
In this scathing book, Rushkoff opens with an account of a meeting he attended with five of the world’s richest men, who sought his opinions on their strategies to survive an “Event” that would render the world as we know it unlivable. These men and the rest of their technocrat counterparts suffer from what Rushkoff calls “The Mindset,” a worldview marked by a staunch bias toward quantifiable data and “a faith in technology to solve problems,” especially the problems that those billionaires’ own technologies have wrought. While digital technologies initially offered opportunities for more meaningfully connected and innovative ways of life, Rushkoff argues that the hopes were corrupted by market goals. As a result, new technologies were designed less for consumer satisfaction and more for investor profit. Another major detriment is the winner-take-all attitude among tech “innovators,” who aren’t interested in incremental progress as much as creating a singular invention for which they can take all the credit. However, notes the author, “these totalizing solutions perpetuate the myth that only a technocratic elite can possibly fix our problems.” Rushkoff describes an interesting connection between tech billionaires and the prominence of psychedelics in tech culture, further illustrating the need of the tech elite to believe that they are singularly capable of providing the solutions humankind needs—while getting rich in the process. The idea that technology can remedy the ills that technology created is founded on a faulty belief that only what’s quantifiable has value, but the “squishier” subjects and ways of thinking that explore our dignity and humanity are still important, and it is imperative we don’t leave them behind. Though Rushkoff occasionally displays too evident a disdain for his subjects, he writes with knowledge and authority. The text conveys an appropriately urgent and serious message, while the closing section offers sound reason for hope and reasonable steps to take for a better future.
A dense but thorough and authoritative condemnation of tech worship.
