This is an English translation of an article I wrote for a German magazine. The article looks into the post apocalyptic strategies the wealthy and ultrarich are focusing on. Main point: The rich are as afraid of the collapse of society as anyone else, but their means to face the calamity are on another level.
You know it’ll be fucking hilarious if it happened. These rich assholes are building bunkers and surrounding themselves with ex-marines and survivalists and they somehow believe they’re not the weakest link.
Money ain’t mean shit post-apocalypse.
100%, those idiots will last less than a day. Meanwhile, the rest of the world may collapse, but a society will survive and rebuild. Those rich morons will be some of the first casualties, and they are setting their own doom traps themselves.
The fun thing about bunkers is they have to be ventilated.
Imagine if there was a guilt-free hole in the ground. You can toss whatever in there and its OK. Dirt. Rocks. Used oil. Toxins. Trash. Bodies.
That’s what would happen. And you can’t guard it that effectively, because you need guards around yourself. I think you’re right, and a day is all it would take. A week at most.
You’re forgetting the killbots again aren’t you.
I’m glad you mentioned robots, because robots and automation are something I deal with often. I can respond with a question: You’re forgetting how useless a billionaire is, aren’t you?
Robots don’t spring from whole cloth, ready to go. Someone, usually several people, have to make them. And once they are made, someone has to maintain them, charge them, and repair them. Amd it will be left in the hands of someone that Bob the Billionaire doesn’t respect: a mechanic. Someone who isn’t useless, and can disable those robots in minutes, probably in ways you can’t easily trace.
I totally agree but something like perimeter Phalanx CIWS with decent ammo stores would put all but the bravest off for a while surely you agree with that? I’m also expecting one of the first purposes of decent Automatons would be a certain amount of self maintainance/basic repair.
Therein lies the problem. No matter what they come up with, it will not work forever.
Yeah, true. You can spend money on resources/people but once you’re there if you don’t have an Economic system there’s no reason to keep working for someone who’s money doesn’t exist anymore.
i think there are multiple ways to ensure that people will still work for you in such a senario, i doubt they are that stupid that they will rely on cash in the apocalypse. If we can think that wouldn’t work out so can they. There are other commodities that you can secure and make sure you are the only one that knows how to get access to them combined with having a few trusted guards that are given a lot of power when working under you which they wish to keep, you can get a lot of people to stay in line with limiting their resources and having a small core of loyal armed men. Before inventing money we still had people rich in other ways that had a bunch of people working under them, it’s not going to be very different after the collapse. Although i do agree with the statement that a bunker unless it’s to protect yourself from a nuke or whatever or long term radiation is not a good idea especially when shared with strangers.
This sounds like an excellent way to spend the last minutes of your life having your fingernails pulled off.
By that logic people would be pulling their fingernails now in order to get money out of them, what’s the difference?
No, they are aware of that fact. See here: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff
They wanted a way to ensure loyality of their mercenaries post-money.