You Are Not Crazy

Reality has become absurd. Those of us who see it for what it is, who know its origins, and who know that it is constructed? We are the sane ones here.

Substack AI’s depiction of “the absurdness of reality”

Sometimes, I feel like I don’t get out much. I mean, I get outside—I’m with friends or students or meetings or podcasts or dinners and stuff all the time. I’m super lucky right now, and cherish that. But I’m not sure how much I wander beyond the community of people who basically get what’s going on here. I’m not suggesting we all agree over what to do about it. I just mean that most of folks I interact with are people who, whether they want to dwell on it or investigate it or resist it, nevertheless see the basic fucked-up-ness of our collective predicament.

But every once in a while, when I’m out in the real world (or more often, in the fake world of podcast or TV interviews) I’ll find myself feeling regarded as absolutely crazy. And the more I explain or justify or contextualize or recount the actual history of my claims, the more crazy I sound. I come off like a conspiracy theorist revealing an organized plot—just for suggesting that elites throughout time have been creating and enforcing systems of control and embedding them so far into the fabric of our constructed world that they have become invisible. Just…the way things are. It’s as if by revealing the hidden or lesser-known reasons by which this all came to be, I’m just revealing myself as paranoid.

And I’m not talking about left vs right here. I can go to South Dakota or Alabama or Tennessee and find plenty of MAGA people who recognize the systemic effects of choices made long ago. They may have different solutions, like eliminating vaccines or deporting Mexicans instead of modulating our engagement with them, but even Steven Bannon’s narrative for late stage hyper-capitalism under the technocratic elite—and presumably that of his millions of listeners—is consonant with my own suspicions about the tech billionaires’ true intentions for the future of government, humanity, and life on earth. I’m actually more comfortable debating someone who draws different conclusions from the same observations, or who makes completely different observations but is at least looking.

Let me tell you what happened.

I was a guest on the companion vodcast for one of those high budget post-apocalyptic streaming TV series. There’s a bunch of them out there these days, and a good number of them are based on, or at least inspired by my book Survival of the Richest. And while it turns out you don’t have to get rights to a non-fiction book in order to use its stories or ideas, it’s nice that the creators of some of them do a little call-out when they’re giving an interview or invite me to a panel at a festival. Paid or not, I’m still seeing my ideas on the screen, which is totally cool.

These days, it’s almost always the same genre: billionaires going underground or into a bunker or onto an island retreat in order to survive or celebrate the end of the world. The Billionaire Bunker genre.

So last month, I got invited to be on the vodcast companion show for a Hulu series called Paradise. It’s one of the kind like Silo, Fallout, The Ark: a billionaire or corporation with tremendous foresight develops an impossibly gargantuan fallout shelter for some subset of people to perpetuate the human project. And it’s a whole society in there, a whole world, with artificial light and stores and farms and corrupted leaders and an underclass.

This one, Paradise, is about an underground city of 25,000 people with a fake sky and roads and buildings and a college and everything. The ultimate next-level perfect eco-city tech bro wet dream utopian American society, with a fake president who just takes his orders from the tech billionaire who owns the place (a woman in this show) and—responding to the questions I raise in my book—her main challenge is to maintain the allegiance of the security force. But unlike the other shows in this genre, the bunker they’ve made doesn’t look like a giant missile silo or an artificial shopping mall. It’s an impossibly giant town with LED sunlight, roads, cars, and wide open spaces. Storywise, it’s pretty much the same premise as the others—like, what happened to the outside world? Is everyone dead? Is it safe to check? And who is actually in charge down here, who really made this place, and was there an ulterior motive…?

I’ve done these kinds of interviews since Survival of the Richest came out. Everyone wants to know about what the billionaires are really planning, as if the things they tell us they are planning aren’t already crazy enough. And this interview with the lovely wife of the series’ star, starts like any other. She announces me as this important professor who studies billionaires and bunkers and wrote a book on the phenomenon. Then she starts by asking me, is the show real? Do billionaires really have plans for bunkers in case of a disaster?

I’ve only got 15 minutes, so I figure I’ll get right to the point: Yes, I explained, they have plans. But the power of this show is not its ability as science fiction to predict the future. It’s about right now. We are already living in a world where the ultra rich are insulating themselves from the rest of us. The show is really just a metaphor for what is actually happening.

She thought I meant billionaires are building bunkers, and maybe hanging out in them for fun.

Yes yes, I told her, most wealthy people are outfitting their existing homes with modifications to make them sustainable and somewhat defensible in the event of a catastrophe of some kind. Yes, Peter Thiel has a compound in New Zealand, and Mark Zuckerberg has a giant estate that also serves as a defensible fortress in Maui. Why not? If you have the money, and understand you’re not going to be able to hold out there forever, it’s not so unreasonable to have a place to try to protect yourself and your loved ones against the next pandemic, water crisis, or civil war. Good luck with that, but go for it.

The show, nor my book, are really about that, I tried to explain. This is much bigger. Realer. Current.

I went on, and explained how right now some tech billionaires — including Marc Andreesen (Netscape) and Reid Hoffman(Linked In) — are part of an investing group attempting to buy a large amount of land in Solano County to build a utopian city for themselves and their friends called California Forever: a utopian, sustainable eco-city, totally walkable to the tech headquarters. Instead of fixing San Francisco or Oakland, just retreat as if to a bunker and build your own gated community.

“California Forever?” Her eyes were widening. Taking me in, but also something else going on in her face. Like, incredulity?

No, she had never heard of Solano or California Forever.

That’s real? She asked. As if she didn’t know or, more likely I was thinking, wanted to make sure the audience didn’t think this was presumed knowledge.

So of course I dug myself in deeper. It’s not the only project of its kind, I told her. There’s Neom, the zillion-dollar megacity they’re trying to build in Saudi Arabia? A 100-mile long strip of mirrored city for 9 million people. Built from nothing and totally sustainable, except for having to displace the Bedouins who had been living there sustainably for the past few thousand years. It is as expensive and improbable as a Mars dome. Or the city in Paradise. Or have you heard of Próspera, the autonomous island “nation” tech-bros created in Honduras to experiment with technology illegal anywhere else?

She tried to get it back on track. “But billionaires have plans for bunkers. What have you seen?”

I’ve seen a couple of plans for bunkers, I said. But the story here is that the real world is becoming a bunker. At least for the wealthy. They don’t believe there are enough resources for everyone. Their scenarios all point to imminent disaster. So they are busy accumulating as much money and as many resources as possible now in preparation for the coming collapse.

She was getting quiet now. As if this was all new. She was nice. She looked almost worried for me.

I knew I only had five, maybe ten minutes left. How far back do I go to explain this story?

“Right. Well, think of it this way: you’ve heard of disaster capitalism?” Blank.

”Okay, well, when a disaster happens somewhere, very wealthy people and companies are often able to capitalize on that. Buy distressed properties, take over collapsing businesses. The disaster turns out to be a good thing, at least for investors from hedge funds, or sovereign wealth funds who can afford to buy up public assets.”

“Sovereign wealth funds?” she asked. Like those of us without PhDs need some orientation here. Right. Fair enough.

“Sovereign wealth funds. You know resource rich nations who sell something like oil and don’t want to share the profits with their people? They create these big investment funds with the money, and then look for assets to buy. Apartments in New York, soccer teams, Trump crypto…whatever. They need ways for their capital to grow. Stuff to invest in. Problem is, there’s more money than there is stuff to buy.”

“Sovereign wealth funds and super rich investors get more opportunities to buy up assets when bad things happen and people need to sell them. So why not create those conditions right now? Like, disaster capitalism but enacted intentionally. That’s why they’d raise tariffs, put farms or ports out of business, and then buy up the land or ports or schools or highways. Take these public places and turn them into private assets. Places they own and control, like the private utopian city in your show, in Paradise.”

“Really?” I saw it in her eyes. She was thinking, is he one of those….crazy people? I could hear it just listening to myself. There was just too much to pack into 15 minutes. Summarizing it or, worse, assuming any knowledge just made me sound crazier.

“All I’m saying is that your show about a tech billionaire building a private city to hide from the rest of the world while it decays into Mad Max or The Road? That’s not science fiction. It’s what we’re seeing right now. It’s how they experience the world.”

“But why?” She asked. Or something like that. I knew I had lost her. Or that she felt this was just too much for her audience to swallow. Or maybe she was simply drawing me out for entertainment value? I knew there was no easy way to make this make sense. I kept thinking I would touch bottom. That I’d reach ground with her, and the rest of it would cohere.

I tried to explain how the wealthy were trapped in a system that required exponential growth (because of the interest-bearing currency we use). And they’re getting nervous because they can’t find ways to get further up the pyramid. That’s why they’re so intent on growing the AI industry at any cost, getting all regulation out of the way by undermining states’ rights or even the European Union.

She just looked at me. Worried. And the more I tried to explain, the further I strained what credibility I had left.

I lost her way back at “sovereign wealth fund.” I shouldn’t have used the term. It sounds like something out of a James Bond movie. Are there really such things? Or is that 9-11 conspiracy theory? The whole premise of a sovereign wealth fund sounds like a conspiracy. In fact, all finance sounds like conspiracy if you try to explain it out loud: Remember the mortgage crisis? Goldman Sachs sold baskets of mortgages to investors, while simultaneously betting against their solvency. They were selling investments they hoped would tank. That’s how they would cash in.

Sovereign wealth funds. Privatizing public assets. Billionaires working in collusion with government to deregulate AI and build Project Stargate, a global genomic surveillance apparatus.

I heard the words coming out of my mouth. and I could tell I sounded crazy to this woman. PhD or not. I mean, I could have gone back to the Knights Templar, the invention of central currency, City of London… The historical proof points sound even worse.

I tried to make it plainer. The billionaires are not imagining underground cities after a nuclear war, but creating private cities deep within our real ones right now. Think Sao Paolo, or a gated and highly militarized mini-city inside a big one. Like the walled palace in a medieval city, surrounded by guards. Or South Africa before apartheid. Most of the Middle East. That’s not a science fiction future, it’s what’s happening right now. What they’re building right now. The ultra wealthy are creating walled gardens, while draining what’s left of the common wealth, and getting us accustomed to seeing the military being used against civilians today because they’ll be using these troops to protect their enclaves from the rest of us tomorrow.

I could almost read her mind now. Who booked this guy? How do we wrap this segment? I pivoted back to get to a nice ending.

“At least in the show,” I explained, “we find out the real world may have not been fully destroyed. People got along okay up on the surface, even after the disaster. So maybe the billionaires are vastly underestimating us human beings. Taking themselves off the playing field by retreating into bunkers may be the best thing they could do for us.”

So I managed to get into stuff that made me sound more Team Human and a bit less Survival of the Richest. But the experience was agitating me. Making me…concerned. Initially, for myself. Have I gone off the deep end? Just describing the function of a sovereign wealth fund sounds like conspiracy theory. Or where corporations come from. Or wage labor. Or how capitalism works.

And that’s when it hit me: we are that far down this road. I was still talking to her about her show and the apocalyptic billionaires, while also, inwardly, trying to reassure myself that just because I obviously sound crazy to her doesn’t mean I am crazy. It’s the world that’s crazy. The series of steps that those in power have taken over the past five-hundred-or-so years to maintain their hold over the economy, the law, the culture and—by extension—the real things of this world, have grown so convoluted that to describe it is to recount the history of the way a sociopathic civilization gets constructed.

And in that moment, God’s honest truth, I thought about you. And how I could use the same logic I was using to console myself, to reassure myself, to console and reassure you, too.

You are not crazy.

We are being gaslit by the constructed world. It’s the same way we grow accustomed to the necessity of owning an automobile, simply because our jobs and homes were placed at distances where we need an automobile to get back and forth—forgetting that these places were zoned by automobile industry lobbyists so that we would need to buy cars. The landscape is crazy. Those of us who see it for what it is, who know its origins, who know that it is constructed? We are the sane ones here.

Only in this case, it’s our convoluted money system that has convinced billionaires and the investor class that the only way for them to survive is for them to privatize the world, hoard the remaining resources, and lock the rest of us out. Peter Thiel believes that those of us who point this out are, literally, satanic beings, pulling wealthy winners like himself back into the mud, and preventing his ascension to the next level. He says this out loud. This isn’t conjecture.

So no, you’re not crazy. Neither am I. This is actually happening. And these events, these schemes, are indeed crazier than a sci-fi series. At least on TV they have some reason for going underground or up into space. We are doing this to ourselves, in a completely unnecessary and avoidable way.

I’ve been researching this history for the past thirty years. Mainly, in an effort to document the fact that this is a created reality, based on both a few false premises about human nature, as well as a few unnecessarily aggressive, dominating styles of control. These choices eventually turn into assumptions and these inventions eventually turn into institutions. To see them this way, to denature them, to point to their origins and inventedness and the intentions behind them is to look crazy.

The reason they think we are crazy is because we are coming to see how the choices that led us here were arbitrary. We could be doing things differently. We’re blowing up children, poisoning the water, and killing the planet for no good reason.

We are not the crazy ones here. The situation’s not unclear, it’s just absurd. We are living in a constructed world—a built environment so convoluted that accepting its premises means gaslighting ourselves.