#future billionaire

[briithadoll]

wishlist pt. 2

[wonyoungismn1glowup]

ੈ✩‧₊˚༺☆༻ੈ✩‧₊˚

*𝐪𝐮𝐨𝐭𝐞 𝐛𝐲 𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐚 𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐞<𝟑*

"𝑾𝒉𝒐𝒆��𝒆𝒓 𝒔𝒂𝒊𝒅 𝒎𝒐𝒏𝒆𝒚 𝒄𝒂𝒏'𝒕 𝒔𝒐𝒍𝒗𝒆 𝒚𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒑𝒓𝒐𝒃𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒔?, 𝑴𝒖𝒔𝒕𝒏'𝒕 𝒉𝒂𝒅 𝒆𝒏𝒐𝒖𝒈𝒉 𝒎𝒐𝒏𝒆𝒚 𝒕𝒐 𝒔𝒐𝒍𝒗𝒆 𝒆𝒎"

░（ヘ雨ぢギく　たー凹ヽす憶益え往）

★彡𝟕 𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬彡★

▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။||||။‌‌‌‌‌၊|• 0:10

[chloeworships]

God told me to say that Drake is going to be a billionaire. He’s already told us this via the Scotiabank message I recorded just a few months ago.

[pocketramblr]

Read a fic where Bruce went undercover as Matches Malone to join Two Face's gang and Two Face was like ????? Bruce I've known you for over 20 years. It's going to take more than cheap cologne and a bad outfit to fool me into thinking you're someone else.

Genuinely I need Harvey, actual mob boss, to take one look at Bruce's mafiasona, which is just him in sunglasses and a drawn on mustache, to say "dude what the hell are you wearing" because it doesn't matter if his kids drag him that doesn't even register. But his friend of many years and homoerotic experiences? Yeah that's gonna hurt

[savage-rhi]

Heya. It's Kreestmass Eve. You're probably feeling a lot right now. Good and bad. I want you to sit with those feelings. Sit with them for a good 20 minutes or an hour if you need it. Comb through them, address their concerns, break bread with them, etc.

When your time is up, look them in the eye and say "this was a pleasant time. We addressed a lot, and now it's time for me to go. If y'all are still feeling worried, we can book another hour later today or tomorrow, but not right now."

Then I want you to practice some self care. Whatever that looks like for you. Get to your good. Nothing else matters. Not your obligations to a holiday or whatever preconceived expectations others have for you. You matter.

I love you.

It's going to be okay.

We're gonna be okay.

I'm going to give myself a chocolate mustache with my hot cocoa and pretend I'm a dignified gentleman of great importance and speak in a terrible English Cockney accent. I hope you join me because you're also a dignified gentleman of great importance (with a better Cockney accent to boot...). Even when your feelings tell you otherwise.

Remember, there is no obligation. You don't owe anyone anything (...but I do think you'd look rather dashing with a chocolate mustache. Just sayin'. *cough*).

*kisses your forehead*

Merry Chrysler, honey. I'm overjoyed because you're still here 💙🫂

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Naomi Alderman’s ‘The Future’

Naomi Alderman burst onto the scene in 2016 with The Power, an explosive and brilliant feminist apocalyptic parable. Now, seven years later, she's back with a chunky, propulsive second novel about a very different sort of apocalypse: The Future:

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Future/Naomi-Alderman/9781668025680

The Power was a thriller about a mysterious force that gives women the power to administer violent electric shocks – even lethal ones – from the palms of their hands. As this power races around the world, the status quo is abruptly shattered. Abusers get nasty surprises. The Saudi government topples. Parents of teenaged boys demand sex-segregated classes to protect their sons from vicious girls:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/10/10/naomi-aldermans-the-power-in-which-fierce-power-of-women-is-awoken/

In The Future, we get a very different kind of apocalypse: the imagined apocalypse of the prepper. At the core of prepperism is a fantasy: that the world will experience a cataclysm that requires the special skills and supplies of the prepper themselves. Water chemists who turn prepper fantasize about attacks on the water-supply – not because there's any special reason to expect one, but because if terrorists attack the water supply, then water chemists become civilization-rescuing heroes:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/22/preppers-are-larpers/#preppers-unprepared

(And of course, if the world ends in such a way that marauding bandits rove the wasteland, eating their former neighbors, then macho, AR-15-obsessed musketfuckers get to reinvent themselves as warlords who defend the sheeple from "bad guys.")

This is what makes billionaire prepper fantasies just so weird – for most of us, it's hard to imagine how the skills of a billionaire are the one thing we'll need to see us through a crisis. But for billionaires themselves, the necessity of billionaires in rebooting civilization is so self-evident as to be unquestionable.

What's more, billionaires are convinced – more than any of us – that the world is about to end. As Douglas @Rushkoff puts it, these guys want to earn enough money to outrun the consequences of how they're making all that money. This is #TheMindset, the idea that your own position has jeopardized civilization itself, but that also, you must survive the cataclysm, because only you can survive it.

Rushkoff chronicles the real-world fantasies of luxury bunkers patrolled by mercenaries locked into explosive discipline collars in his book Survival of the Richest:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

But billionaires don't just suck at running civilization, they also suck at making up stories about its collapse. One thing that's striking about Rushkoff's ethnography of rich people preparing to outlive the end of the human race is how banal their eschatological fantasies are.

It's not that there aren't any exciting stories to tell about billionaire survival fantasies. The granddaddy of these is, of course, Edgar Allan Poe's 1842 "#MasqueOfTheRedDeath":

https://www.poemuseum.org/the-masque-of-the-red-death

I published an updated version with the same title in 2019 in my novella collection #Radicalized:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/masque-of-the-red-death/#masque

In The Future, we get a cracking, multi-point-of-view adventure novel about billionaires prepping for the end of the world. Three billionaires, the lords of thinly veiled analogs to Facebook, Google and Amazon, each getting ready in their own way. Stumbling into their midst comes Lai Zhen, a prepper influencer vlogger with millions of followers.

When Zhen becomes romantically entangled with Martha Einkorn, the top aide and chief-of-prepping for one of these billionaires, she finds herself in possession of an AI chatbot that is devoted to protecting a very small number of people from incipient danger. This chatbot determines that Zhen is being stalked by an assassin at a mall in Singapore, and guides her to safety.

The chatbot is a closely held secret among the tech billionaire cabal. It is designed to monitor world events and predict when The Event is imminent, be it disease, war, or other cataclysmic disaster. With the chatbot's predictive powers and its superhuman guidance, the billionaires, their families, and their closest confidantes will be able to slip away before the shit hits the fan, fly by different private jets to one or another luxury bunker, and wait out the apocalypse. Once the fires raging without have died down to embers, the chatbot's billionaire charges will emerge to assume their places as wise and all-powerful leaders of the next human civilization.

As you might imagine, not everyone who finds out about this plan – including various members of the billionaires' families who are fully aware of these rich, powerful people's fallibility – is enthusiastic about it. As we build toward a looming crisis, we cycle between these family members, Zhen and her hacker buddies, and members of an online prepper community where Einkorn is a kind of provocateuse and eminence grise.

Alderman skillfully maneuvers all these power players and blocs into position before detonating the crisis that sets off the book's second act, where we get into some damned fine Masque of the Red Death territory, but clad in Tony Stark mecha survival suits and against a backdrop of total disaster.

I won't give away any spoilers here, except to say that there are lots of twists (that won't surprise readers of The Power, which had its own excellent surprises). But without delving too deeply into the fake-outs, crosses, and turns that Alderman lays, I will say that this is a fantastic and incredibly satisfying comeuppance novel that gets very deep into the ideology of wishing the world would end, and dreaming that when it does, you will finally matter.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/07/preppers-of-the-red-death/#the-event

[cubikzoa]

Feeling like someone should run a similar sort of spambot generator that we get on Tumblr on Twitter. But it’s all Elon Musk bots with bootleg Elon profile pics and their posts and comments still sound like Elon, because let’s be fair, that’s easy bc he’s stupid and predictable.

Just, like, a billion different fake Elons and one real Elon like one giant game of spambot Among Us. Absolute chaos and desolation. The final squeaky rubber nail in the Twitter Clown Coffin.

I think he would be so absolutely infuriated he’d turn red and explode like a Looney Tunes character

[runawaymarbles]

at this point i am simply uninterested in any opinion on a hot-button political topic that treats human beings as a mass of meaningless hypotheticals

[novella-november]

Well, I now know what original story I'll be writing for Freedom February ...

👀🤖⛓️‍💥

Can't wait for people who use l33tspeak or are greek mythology nerds to immediately realize what is happening with the lore and are excited to see how it plays out.

[viejospellejos]

Mercedes Benz Vision AVTR

[shinmothra13returns]

Corporations don't care

Government always lies

Rat Race will destroy you

Getting a job is a waste of time

Billionaires are the death of us

The school system is rigged and outdated

Democrats and Republicans are wolves in sheep's clothing

We are nothing more than expendable slaves to the rich and powerful

There is no middle class

War is a waste of time and life

But in the end, is there any hope of changing any of this at all for a better future than this worthless excuse of nations on earth or is it too late.

We can change this world without the endless lies and false promises.

[briithadoll]

[protoslacker]

The future of technological progress, Rushkoff argues, is now an experimental endgame in which the wealthiest and most powerful race to find the escape hatch; it is less about raising up humanity than rising above the rest of us.

Jared Marcel Pollen in The Nation. Why Billionaires Are Obsessed With the Apocalypse

In Survival of the Richest, Douglas Rushkoff gets to the bottom of the tech oligarchy’s fixation on protecting themselves from the end times.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

In his review Pollen cited Neil Postman in explaing what Rushkoff refers to as "The Mindset." That mention got me reading an article by Postman from 1974. Postman asks what it would take to move schooling in a more humae and sensible direction? I would like to see that sort of question asked quite broadly.

[erotica1star]

[marcy-magnolia]

Why isn’t there hrt that turns you into a robot. i don’t even really care about bottom surgery anymore just. replace my body with mechanical parts

[reinarandraw]

When your boyfriend is a billionaire CEO of a multinational company who travels around the world so often so your main communication with him is through chat and video calls.

A dumb thing I made for my coffee shop - billionaire AU Bellhands. Please check Coffee Philosophy tag for more

the one who took the picture is Paul