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Sep 9, 2022
Seems Like A Good Idea
From the time I was a little kid taking my first steps in the Colorado mountains, I can remember being admonished to "watch out for the mine shafts". And when my own son moved out there a few years ago, that was one of the first things I told him.
That shit's dangerous, and there're at least 23,000 of them - that they know of - and possibly twice that number.
How do you keep Colorado hikers from falling 300 feet down a mine shaft? Foam.
Since 1980, the Colorado division of mining and the Forest Service have gated and plugged more than 13,000 inactive mines, often using expanding foam
ARAPAHO PASS — The bent and broken tent frame draped with an old tarp is wedged about 10 feet down the mine shaft.
“That will work,” says Brady Kutscher, clipping his harness into a rope wrapped around old machinery at the entrance shaft to the Fourth of July Mine. He leans over the hole and shakes a bag about the size of a carry-on. Inside the bag, chemicals mix with resin, creating an exothermic reaction. Soon the bag is spewing foam into the shaft.
The foam keeps getting thicker as it falls on the tarp. After a few hours of Kutscher’s shake-and-dribble routine, the belching bags of falling foam form a plug that will harden into a permanent cap for the mine shaft.
“Pretty high-tech isn’t it?” contractor Shane Stratton says as he directs his fellow worker’s foamy cascade from the other side of the mine shaft.
The Forest Service and the Colorado Division of Reclamation Mining and Safety do not like that mine shaft. They guess it falls about 300 feet down to the mile-long horizontal tunnel below — or adit — of the long abandoned Fourth of July Mine in the Indian Peaks Wilderness.
Trez Skillern, the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests’ abandoned mines program manager, says this shaft, with its wide entrance, long drop and proximity to a very popular hiking trail close to the Front Range ranks the Fourth of July Mine as “one of the scariest around.”
Hence the project last week that involved more than a dozen volunteers, officials, workers and nine horses taking three round-trips up the Forest Service’s Arapaho Pass Trail, hauling 150 bags of polyurethane foam 2 miles and 1,000 vertical feet into the wilderness.
After pouring the bags of the quick-hardening foam everyone calls “PUF” into the mine shaft — enough to fill about 50 cubic feet — and covering that foam with a layer of old mining debris, no hiker or animal can fall into the shaft.
“Think of it like a cork in a wine bottle, but we have to build the cork,” says Erica Crosby, senior project manager for the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety.
The whole project is all about keeping people from falling into the old mine. (And then trying to sue the Forest Service or state for not properly closing the mines.) It’s part of a mine-shuttering public-safety mission that began in the 1980s and has seen the state and Forest Service close about 13,000 abandoned shafts and tunnels.
The state and Forest Service closed the Fourth of July Mine tunnel in 2018. That involved placing a metal gate on the main adit below the mine shaft and shoveling debris into the shaft. Last summer, a volunteer with the Indian Peaks Trails Alliance notified the agencies that the plug to the mine shaft had collapsed.
An added challenge for the closure project at the mine shaft involves its location in the Indian Peaks Wilderness.
If the mine was not inside federal wilderness, the division of mining and the Forest Service would be using helicopters to deliver the foam and maybe even welding a steel gate over the opening to keep people and animals from falling in. But wilderness designation prevents machines, hence the horses.
“We would have been done already if this was with a chopper,” says Cindy McCullom, the Eldora-born owner of McCollum Excavating who started plugging mines for the state and Forest Service decades ago after a career working with helicopters in the Navy.
The “new challenge” for land managers and mine guardians, Skillern says, are the many social media sites and accounts that post about abandoned mines and structures in Colorado.
Those social media posts help the Forest Service and state officials more easily identify and find mines that should be closed. But they also draw more visitors to those sites.
A few years ago, Crosby’s team at the division saw online videos of spelunkers exploring an abandoned mine and were able to identify where the mine was located. They went to the mine to close it and found several more adventurers preparing to explore the mine tunnel. The explorers were very angry at the closure, Crosby said.
“We do some stalking online and they show us some places we need to go in and close,” she says, noting how the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety will soon roll out its own mine safety social media education campaign. “We don’t always like what we see, but we are using it to our advantage.”
BTW - Biden's Infrastructure package includes money for coal mine reclamation, which in turn frees up a good bit of money that can be used to get more of these hazards dealt with.
How do you keep Colorado hikers from falling 300 feet down a mine shaft? Foam.
Since 1980, the Colorado division of mining and the Forest Service have gated and plugged more than 13,000 inactive mines, often using expanding foam
ARAPAHO PASS — The bent and broken tent frame draped with an old tarp is wedged about 10 feet down the mine shaft.
“That will work,” says Brady Kutscher, clipping his harness into a rope wrapped around old machinery at the entrance shaft to the Fourth of July Mine. He leans over the hole and shakes a bag about the size of a carry-on. Inside the bag, chemicals mix with resin, creating an exothermic reaction. Soon the bag is spewing foam into the shaft.
The foam keeps getting thicker as it falls on the tarp. After a few hours of Kutscher’s shake-and-dribble routine, the belching bags of falling foam form a plug that will harden into a permanent cap for the mine shaft.
“Pretty high-tech isn’t it?” contractor Shane Stratton says as he directs his fellow worker’s foamy cascade from the other side of the mine shaft.
To keep people and animals from falling down the 300-foot-deep hole,
Brady Kutscher pours polyurethane foam into the main shaft Tuesday - Indian Peaks Wilderness.
(Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)
The Forest Service and the Colorado Division of Reclamation Mining and Safety do not like that mine shaft. They guess it falls about 300 feet down to the mile-long horizontal tunnel below — or adit — of the long abandoned Fourth of July Mine in the Indian Peaks Wilderness.
Trez Skillern, the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests’ abandoned mines program manager, says this shaft, with its wide entrance, long drop and proximity to a very popular hiking trail close to the Front Range ranks the Fourth of July Mine as “one of the scariest around.”
Hence the project last week that involved more than a dozen volunteers, officials, workers and nine horses taking three round-trips up the Forest Service’s Arapaho Pass Trail, hauling 150 bags of polyurethane foam 2 miles and 1,000 vertical feet into the wilderness.
After pouring the bags of the quick-hardening foam everyone calls “PUF” into the mine shaft — enough to fill about 50 cubic feet — and covering that foam with a layer of old mining debris, no hiker or animal can fall into the shaft.
“Think of it like a cork in a wine bottle, but we have to build the cork,” says Erica Crosby, senior project manager for the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety.
The whole project is all about keeping people from falling into the old mine. (And then trying to sue the Forest Service or state for not properly closing the mines.) It’s part of a mine-shuttering public-safety mission that began in the 1980s and has seen the state and Forest Service close about 13,000 abandoned shafts and tunnels.
The state and Forest Service closed the Fourth of July Mine tunnel in 2018. That involved placing a metal gate on the main adit below the mine shaft and shoveling debris into the shaft. Last summer, a volunteer with the Indian Peaks Trails Alliance notified the agencies that the plug to the mine shaft had collapsed.
An added challenge for the closure project at the mine shaft involves its location in the Indian Peaks Wilderness.
If the mine was not inside federal wilderness, the division of mining and the Forest Service would be using helicopters to deliver the foam and maybe even welding a steel gate over the opening to keep people and animals from falling in. But wilderness designation prevents machines, hence the horses.
“We would have been done already if this was with a chopper,” says Cindy McCullom, the Eldora-born owner of McCollum Excavating who started plugging mines for the state and Forest Service decades ago after a career working with helicopters in the Navy.
Miners dug silver ore from the Fourth of July Mine in the late 1800s. In the early 1900s, they switched over to searching for copper. Over the 300-foot mine shaft once stood a timber head frame, where miners and equipment were lowered into the main tunnel. The state has documented about 23,000 abandoned mine shafts and tunnels in Colorado.
“But there’s probably double that,” says Crosby, noting that her division’s Inactive Mine Reclamation Program has safeguarded about 13,000 abandoned mines and structures in Colorado since the inception of the program in 1980, including more than 3,500 in Boulder County.
This wilderness shaft-sealing project price tag is about $42,000, with the Forest Service paying $30,000 of that and the state’s division of mining covering the rest. The new federal infrastructure bill includes funding for coal mine remediation, which could free up money for the state’s effort to close more abandoned hard-rock mines across Colorado, Crosby says.
It usually takes close to three years to identify a mine that should be closed and go through analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act, known as NEPA, to close it. Since the Forest Service went through NEPA to close the Fourth of July Mine in 2018, the shaft-capping project was approved in only one year. It helps that there were no signs of bats in the mine shaft and bats can still come and go through the mine’s main tunnel down below, which is blocked by the steel-barred gate.
Bats also prefer caves to mines. There are no caves on the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests.
The polyurethane foam does not harbor any so-called “forever chemicals,” found in polyfluorinated compounds — or PFAS — that are contaminating water supplies across the world. So the mine-capping foam does not shed dangerous chemicals like, say, PFAS-laden fire-fighting foam. The mine cap is backfilled with four feet of rock and dirt and includes a six-inch pipe to drain standing water into the mine, so surface water “has minimal to no contact” with the foam, Crosby says.
The cap atop the Fourth of July mine shaft is about public safety more than anything else. The Forest Service and state are hyper vigilant to reduce the chance a hiker or pet can fall into an abandoned mine shaft or injure themselves in old mining structures.
Last year a 19-year-old college student was injured after falling 45 feet down an abandoned mine shaft while walking on private land near the Forest Service’s Switzerland Trail in Boulder County on a Saturday night.
In 2016, two teenagers were killed when the truck they were in crashed into an Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests mine shaft in Boulder County around 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning. The family of one of the teenagers killed sued the federal government, arguing the Forest Service was negligent in closing the mine shaft.
That lawsuit was dismissed and the dismissal upheld by a federal appeals panel in 2020.
The Forest Service and state mining division were able to secure an emergency closure of the mine near Switzerland Trail last year following the several-hour rescue of the student. When the agencies showed up to install a gate on the mine shaft, they turned back people who had seen the news reports about the rescue and showed up with ropes and spelunking gear, Skillern says.
“But there’s probably double that,” says Crosby, noting that her division’s Inactive Mine Reclamation Program has safeguarded about 13,000 abandoned mines and structures in Colorado since the inception of the program in 1980, including more than 3,500 in Boulder County.
This wilderness shaft-sealing project price tag is about $42,000, with the Forest Service paying $30,000 of that and the state’s division of mining covering the rest. The new federal infrastructure bill includes funding for coal mine remediation, which could free up money for the state’s effort to close more abandoned hard-rock mines across Colorado, Crosby says.
It usually takes close to three years to identify a mine that should be closed and go through analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act, known as NEPA, to close it. Since the Forest Service went through NEPA to close the Fourth of July Mine in 2018, the shaft-capping project was approved in only one year. It helps that there were no signs of bats in the mine shaft and bats can still come and go through the mine’s main tunnel down below, which is blocked by the steel-barred gate.
Bats also prefer caves to mines. There are no caves on the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests.
The polyurethane foam does not harbor any so-called “forever chemicals,” found in polyfluorinated compounds — or PFAS — that are contaminating water supplies across the world. So the mine-capping foam does not shed dangerous chemicals like, say, PFAS-laden fire-fighting foam. The mine cap is backfilled with four feet of rock and dirt and includes a six-inch pipe to drain standing water into the mine, so surface water “has minimal to no contact” with the foam, Crosby says.
The cap atop the Fourth of July mine shaft is about public safety more than anything else. The Forest Service and state are hyper vigilant to reduce the chance a hiker or pet can fall into an abandoned mine shaft or injure themselves in old mining structures.
Last year a 19-year-old college student was injured after falling 45 feet down an abandoned mine shaft while walking on private land near the Forest Service’s Switzerland Trail in Boulder County on a Saturday night.
In 2016, two teenagers were killed when the truck they were in crashed into an Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests mine shaft in Boulder County around 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning. The family of one of the teenagers killed sued the federal government, arguing the Forest Service was negligent in closing the mine shaft.
That lawsuit was dismissed and the dismissal upheld by a federal appeals panel in 2020.
The Forest Service and state mining division were able to secure an emergency closure of the mine near Switzerland Trail last year following the several-hour rescue of the student. When the agencies showed up to install a gate on the mine shaft, they turned back people who had seen the news reports about the rescue and showed up with ropes and spelunking gear, Skillern says.
The “new challenge” for land managers and mine guardians, Skillern says, are the many social media sites and accounts that post about abandoned mines and structures in Colorado.
Those social media posts help the Forest Service and state officials more easily identify and find mines that should be closed. But they also draw more visitors to those sites.
A few years ago, Crosby’s team at the division saw online videos of spelunkers exploring an abandoned mine and were able to identify where the mine was located. They went to the mine to close it and found several more adventurers preparing to explore the mine tunnel. The explorers were very angry at the closure, Crosby said.
“We do some stalking online and they show us some places we need to go in and close,” she says, noting how the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety will soon roll out its own mine safety social media education campaign. “We don’t always like what we see, but we are using it to our advantage.”
These Plutocrats
Somehow, rich people get the idea in their heads that they can do whatever they want and no matter the consequences for everybody else, they'll always be insulated to a point where the world of shit they create won't have a negative impact on them.
And there can be no better illustration of that than their apparent assumption that when things get too shitty on this planet, their money can either provide a safe and cozy little cocoon, or whisk them away to the next paradise.
The super-rich ‘preppers’ are planning to save themselves from the apocalypse
Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse they helped create, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequences
As a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist. The people most interested in hiring me for my opinions about technology are usually less concerned with building tools that help people live better lives in the present than they are in identifying the Next Big Thing through which to dominate them in the future. I don’t usually respond to their inquiries. Why help these guys ruin what’s left of the internet, much less civilisation?
Still, sometimes a combination of morbid curiosity and cold hard cash is enough to get me on a stage in front of the tech elite, where I try to talk some sense into them about how their businesses are affecting our lives out here in the real world. That’s how I found myself accepting an invitation to address a group mysteriously described as “ultra-wealthy stakeholders”, out in the middle of the desert.
A limo was waiting for me at the airport. As the sun began to dip over the horizon, I realised I had been in the car for three hours. What sort of wealthy hedge-fund types would drive this far from the airport for a conference? Then I saw it. On a parallel path next to the highway, as if racing against us, a small jet was coming in for a landing on a private airfield. Of course.
The next morning, two men in matching Patagonia fleeces came for me in a golf cart and conveyed me through rocks and underbrush to a meeting hall. They left me to drink coffee and prepare in what I figured was serving as my green room. But instead of me being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, my audience was brought in to me. They sat around the table and introduced themselves: five super-wealthy guys – yes, all men – from the upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge-fund world. At least two of them were billionaires. After a bit of small talk, I realised they had no interest in the speech I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come to ask questions.
They started out innocuously and predictably enough. Bitcoin or ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality? Who will get quantum computing first, China or Google? Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?
The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”.
It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its ow
I tried to reason with them. I made pro-social arguments for partnership and solidarity as the best approaches to our collective, long-term challenges. The way to get your guards to exhibit loyalty in the future was to treat them like friends right now, I explained. Don’t just invest in ammo and electric fences, invest in people and relationships. They rolled their eyes at what must have sounded to them like hippy philosophy.
This was probably the wealthiest, most powerful group I had ever encountered. Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology.
Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonising Mars, Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.
These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch. Will it be Jeff Bezos migrating to space, Thiel to his New Zealand compound, or Mark Zuckerberg to his virtual metaverse? And these catastrophising billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy – the supposed champions of the survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fuelling most of this speculation to begin with.
What I came to realise was that these men are actually the losers. The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.
Yet this Silicon Valley escapism – let’s call it The Mindset – encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind.
Never before have our society’s most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unliveable for everyone else. Nor have they ever before had the technologies through which to programme their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society. The landscape is alive with algorithms and intelligences actively encouraging these selfish and isolationist outlooks. Those sociopathic enough to embrace them are rewarded with cash and control over the rest of us. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop. This is new.
Amplified by digital technologies and the unprecedented wealth disparity they afford, The Mindset allows for the easy externalisation of harm to others, and inspires a corresponding longing for transcendence and separation from the people and places that have been abused.
Instead of just lording over us for ever, however, the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame. In fact, like the plot of a Marvel blockbuster, the very structure of The Mindset requires an endgame. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned. Actual, imminent catastrophes from the climate emergency to mass migrations support the mythology, offering these would-be superheroes the opportunity to play out the finale in their own lifetimes. For The Mindset also includes a faith-based Silicon Valley certainty that they can develop a technology that will somehow break the laws of physics, economics and morality to offer them something even better than a way of saving the world: a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making.
By the time I boarded my return flight to New York, my mind was reeling with the implications of The Mindset. What were its main tenets? Who were its true believers? What, if anything, could we do to resist it? Before I had even landed, I posted an article about my strange encounter – to surprising effect.
Almost immediately, I began receiving inquiries from businesses catering to the billionaire prepper, all hoping I would make some introductions on their behalf to the five men I had written about. I heard from a real estate agent who specialises in disaster-proof listings, a company taking reservations for its third underground dwellings project, and a security firm offering various forms of “risk management”.
But the message that got my attention came from a former president of the American chamber of commerce in Latvia. JC Cole had witnessed the fall of the Soviet empire, as well as what it took to rebuild a working society almost from scratch. He had also served as landlord for the American and European Union embassies, and learned a whole lot about security systems and evacuation plans. “You certainly stirred up a bees’ nest,” he began his first email to me. “It’s quite accurate – the wealthy hiding in their bunkers will have a problem with their security teams… I believe you are correct with your advice to ‘treat those people really well, right now’, but also the concept may be expanded and I believe there is a better system that would give much better results.”
He felt certain that the “event” – a grey swan, or predictable catastrophe triggered by our enemies, Mother Nature, or just by accident –was inevitable. He had done a Swot analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats – and concluded that preparing for calamity required us to take the very same measures as trying to prevent one. “By coincidence,” he explained, “I am setting up a series of safe haven farms in the NYC area. These are designed to best handle an ‘event’ and also benefit society as semi-organic farms. Both within three hours’ drive from the city – close enough to get there when it happens.”
Here was a prepper with security clearance, field experience and food sustainability expertise. He believed the best way to cope with the impending disaster was to change the way we treat one another, the economy, and the planet right now – while also developing a network of secret, totally self-sufficient residential farm communities for millionaires, guarded by Navy Seals armed to the teeth.
JC is currently developing two farms as part of his safe haven project. Farm one, outside Princeton, is his show model and “works well as long as the thin blue line is working”. The second one, somewhere in the Poconos, has to remain a secret. “The fewer people who know the locations, the better,” he explained, along with a link to the Twilight Zone episode in which panicked neighbours break into a family’s bomb shelter during a nuclear scare. “The primary value of safe haven is operational security, nicknamed OpSec by the military. If/when the supply chain breaks, the people will have no food delivered. Covid-19 gave us the wake-up call as people started fighting over toilet paper. When it comes to a shortage of food it will be vicious. That is why those intelligent enough to invest have to be stealthy.”
JC invited me down to New Jersey to see the real thing. “Wear boots,” he said. “The ground is still wet.” Then he asked: “Do you shoot?”
The farm itself was serving as an equestrian centre and tactical training facility in addition to raising goats and chickens. JC showed me how to hold and shoot a Glock at a series of outdoor targets shaped like bad guys, while he grumbled about the way Senator Dianne Feinstein had limited the number of rounds one could legally fit in a magazine for the handgun. JC knew his stuff. I asked him about various combat scenarios. “The only way to protect your family is with a group,” he said. That was really the whole point of his project – to gather a team capable of sheltering in place for a year or more, while also defending itself from those who hadn’t prepared. JC was also hoping to train young farmers in sustainable agriculture, and to secure at least one doctor and dentist for each location.
On the way back to the main building, JC showed me the “layered security” protocols he had learned designing embassy properties: a fence, “no trespassing” signs, guard dogs, surveillance cameras … all meant to discourage violent confrontation. He paused for a minute as he stared down the drive. “Honestly, I am less concerned about gangs with guns than the woman at the end of the driveway holding a baby and asking for food.” He paused, and sighed, “I don’t want to be in that moral dilemma.”
That’s why JC’s real passion wasn’t just to build a few isolated, militarised retreat facilities for millionaires, but to prototype locally owned sustainable farms that can be modelled by others and ultimately help restore regional food security in America. The “just-in-time” delivery system preferred by agricultural conglomerates renders most of the nation vulnerable to a crisis as minor as a power outage or transportation shutdown. Meanwhile, the centralisation of the agricultural industry has left most farms utterly dependent on the same long supply chains as urban consumers. “Most egg farmers can’t even raise chickens,” JC explained as he showed me his henhouses. “They buy chicks. I’ve got roosters.”
JC is no hippy environmentalist but his business model is based in the same communitarian spirit I tried to convey to the billionaires: the way to keep the hungry hordes from storming the gates is by getting them food security now. So for $3m, investors not only get a maximum security compound in which to ride out the coming plague, solar storm, or electric grid collapse. They also get a stake in a potentially profitable network of local farm franchises that could reduce the probability of a catastrophic event in the first place. His business would do its best to ensure there are as few hungry children at the gate as possible when the time comes to lock down.
So far, JC Cole has been unable to convince anyone to invest in American Heritage Farms. That doesn’t mean no one is investing in such schemes. It’s just that the ones that attract more attention and cash don’t generally have these cooperative components. They’re more for people who want to go it alone. Most billionaire preppers don’t want to have to learn to get along with a community of farmers or, worse, spend their winnings funding a national food resilience programme. The mindset that requires safe havens is less concerned with preventing moral dilemmas than simply keeping them out of sight.
Many of those seriously seeking a safe haven simply hire one of several prepper construction companies to bury a prefab steel-lined bunker somewhere on one of their existing properties. Rising S Company in Texas builds and installs bunkers and tornado shelters for as little as $40,000 for an 8ft by 12ft emergency hideout all the way up to the $8.3m luxury series “Aristocrat”, complete with pool and bowling lane. The enterprise originally catered to families seeking temporary storm shelters, before it went into the long-term apocalypse business. The company logo, complete with three crucifixes, suggests their services are geared more toward Christian evangelist preppers in red-state America than billionaire tech bros playing out sci-fi scenarios.
There’s something much more whimsical about the facilities in which most of the billionaires – or, more accurately, aspiring billionaires – actually invest. A company called Vivos is selling luxury underground apartments in converted cold war munitions storage facilities, missile silos, and other fortified locations around the world. Like miniature Club Med resorts, they offer private suites for individuals or families, and larger common areas with pools, games, movies and dining. Ultra-elite shelters such as the Oppidum in the Czech Republic claim to cater to the billionaire class, and pay more attention to the long-term psychological health of residents. They provide imitation of natural light, such as a pool with a simulated sunlit garden area, a wine vault, and other amenities to make the wealthy feel at home.
On closer analysis, however, the probability of a fortified bunker actually protecting its occupants from the reality of, well, reality, is very slim. For one, the closed ecosystems of underground facilities are preposterously brittle. For example, an indoor, sealed hydroponic garden is vulnerable to contamination. Vertical farms with moisture sensors and computer-controlled irrigation systems look great in business plans and on the rooftops of Bay Area startups; when a palette of topsoil or a row of crops goes wrong, it can simply be pulled and replaced. The hermetically sealed apocalypse “grow room” doesn’t allow for such do-overs.
Just the known unknowns are enough to dash any reasonable hope of survival. But this doesn’t seem to stop wealthy preppers from trying. The New York Times reported that real estate agents specialising in private islands were overwhelmed with inquiries during the Covid-19 pandemic. Prospective clients were even asking about whether there was enough land to do some agriculture in addition to installing a helicopter landing pad. But while a private island may be a good place to wait out a temporary plague, turning it into a self-sufficient, defensible ocean fortress is harder than it sounds. Small islands are utterly dependent on air and sea deliveries for basic staples. Solar panels and water filtration equipment need to be replaced and serviced at regular intervals. The billionaires who reside in such locales are more, not less, dependent on complex supply chains than those of us embedded in industrial civilisation.
Surely the billionaires who brought me out for advice on their exit strategies were aware of these limitations. Could it have all been some sort of game? Five men sitting around a poker table, each wagering his escape plan was best?
But if they were in it just for fun, they wouldn’t have called for me. They would have flown out the author of a zombie apocalypse comic book. If they wanted to test their bunker plans, they’d have hired a security expert from Blackwater or the Pentagon. They seemed to want something more. Their language went far beyond questions of disaster preparedness and verged on politics and philosophy: words such as individuality, sovereignty, governance and autonomy.
That’s because it wasn’t their actual bunker strategies I had been brought out to evaluate so much as the philosophy and mathematics they were using to justify their commitment to escape. They were working out what I’ve come to call the insulation equation: could they earn enough money to insulate themselves from the reality they were creating by earning money in this way? Was there any valid justification for striving to be so successful that they could simply leave the rest of us behind –apocalypse or not?
Or was this really their intention all along? Maybe the apocalypse is less something they’re trying to escape than an excuse to realise The Mindset’s true goal: to rise above mere mortals and execute the ultimate exit strategy.
Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse they helped create, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequences
As a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist. The people most interested in hiring me for my opinions about technology are usually less concerned with building tools that help people live better lives in the present than they are in identifying the Next Big Thing through which to dominate them in the future. I don’t usually respond to their inquiries. Why help these guys ruin what’s left of the internet, much less civilisation?
Still, sometimes a combination of morbid curiosity and cold hard cash is enough to get me on a stage in front of the tech elite, where I try to talk some sense into them about how their businesses are affecting our lives out here in the real world. That’s how I found myself accepting an invitation to address a group mysteriously described as “ultra-wealthy stakeholders”, out in the middle of the desert.
A limo was waiting for me at the airport. As the sun began to dip over the horizon, I realised I had been in the car for three hours. What sort of wealthy hedge-fund types would drive this far from the airport for a conference? Then I saw it. On a parallel path next to the highway, as if racing against us, a small jet was coming in for a landing on a private airfield. Of course.
The next morning, two men in matching Patagonia fleeces came for me in a golf cart and conveyed me through rocks and underbrush to a meeting hall. They left me to drink coffee and prepare in what I figured was serving as my green room. But instead of me being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, my audience was brought in to me. They sat around the table and introduced themselves: five super-wealthy guys – yes, all men – from the upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge-fund world. At least two of them were billionaires. After a bit of small talk, I realised they had no interest in the speech I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come to ask questions.
They started out innocuously and predictably enough. Bitcoin or ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality? Who will get quantum computing first, China or Google? Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?
The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”.
It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its ow
I tried to reason with them. I made pro-social arguments for partnership and solidarity as the best approaches to our collective, long-term challenges. The way to get your guards to exhibit loyalty in the future was to treat them like friends right now, I explained. Don’t just invest in ammo and electric fences, invest in people and relationships. They rolled their eyes at what must have sounded to them like hippy philosophy.
This was probably the wealthiest, most powerful group I had ever encountered. Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology.
Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonising Mars, Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.
These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch. Will it be Jeff Bezos migrating to space, Thiel to his New Zealand compound, or Mark Zuckerberg to his virtual metaverse? And these catastrophising billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy – the supposed champions of the survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fuelling most of this speculation to begin with.
What I came to realise was that these men are actually the losers. The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.
Yet this Silicon Valley escapism – let’s call it The Mindset – encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind.
Never before have our society’s most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unliveable for everyone else. Nor have they ever before had the technologies through which to programme their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society. The landscape is alive with algorithms and intelligences actively encouraging these selfish and isolationist outlooks. Those sociopathic enough to embrace them are rewarded with cash and control over the rest of us. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop. This is new.
Amplified by digital technologies and the unprecedented wealth disparity they afford, The Mindset allows for the easy externalisation of harm to others, and inspires a corresponding longing for transcendence and separation from the people and places that have been abused.
Instead of just lording over us for ever, however, the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame. In fact, like the plot of a Marvel blockbuster, the very structure of The Mindset requires an endgame. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned. Actual, imminent catastrophes from the climate emergency to mass migrations support the mythology, offering these would-be superheroes the opportunity to play out the finale in their own lifetimes. For The Mindset also includes a faith-based Silicon Valley certainty that they can develop a technology that will somehow break the laws of physics, economics and morality to offer them something even better than a way of saving the world: a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making.
By the time I boarded my return flight to New York, my mind was reeling with the implications of The Mindset. What were its main tenets? Who were its true believers? What, if anything, could we do to resist it? Before I had even landed, I posted an article about my strange encounter – to surprising effect.
Almost immediately, I began receiving inquiries from businesses catering to the billionaire prepper, all hoping I would make some introductions on their behalf to the five men I had written about. I heard from a real estate agent who specialises in disaster-proof listings, a company taking reservations for its third underground dwellings project, and a security firm offering various forms of “risk management”.
But the message that got my attention came from a former president of the American chamber of commerce in Latvia. JC Cole had witnessed the fall of the Soviet empire, as well as what it took to rebuild a working society almost from scratch. He had also served as landlord for the American and European Union embassies, and learned a whole lot about security systems and evacuation plans. “You certainly stirred up a bees’ nest,” he began his first email to me. “It’s quite accurate – the wealthy hiding in their bunkers will have a problem with their security teams… I believe you are correct with your advice to ‘treat those people really well, right now’, but also the concept may be expanded and I believe there is a better system that would give much better results.”
He felt certain that the “event” – a grey swan, or predictable catastrophe triggered by our enemies, Mother Nature, or just by accident –was inevitable. He had done a Swot analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats – and concluded that preparing for calamity required us to take the very same measures as trying to prevent one. “By coincidence,” he explained, “I am setting up a series of safe haven farms in the NYC area. These are designed to best handle an ‘event’ and also benefit society as semi-organic farms. Both within three hours’ drive from the city – close enough to get there when it happens.”
Here was a prepper with security clearance, field experience and food sustainability expertise. He believed the best way to cope with the impending disaster was to change the way we treat one another, the economy, and the planet right now – while also developing a network of secret, totally self-sufficient residential farm communities for millionaires, guarded by Navy Seals armed to the teeth.
JC is currently developing two farms as part of his safe haven project. Farm one, outside Princeton, is his show model and “works well as long as the thin blue line is working”. The second one, somewhere in the Poconos, has to remain a secret. “The fewer people who know the locations, the better,” he explained, along with a link to the Twilight Zone episode in which panicked neighbours break into a family’s bomb shelter during a nuclear scare. “The primary value of safe haven is operational security, nicknamed OpSec by the military. If/when the supply chain breaks, the people will have no food delivered. Covid-19 gave us the wake-up call as people started fighting over toilet paper. When it comes to a shortage of food it will be vicious. That is why those intelligent enough to invest have to be stealthy.”
JC invited me down to New Jersey to see the real thing. “Wear boots,” he said. “The ground is still wet.” Then he asked: “Do you shoot?”
The farm itself was serving as an equestrian centre and tactical training facility in addition to raising goats and chickens. JC showed me how to hold and shoot a Glock at a series of outdoor targets shaped like bad guys, while he grumbled about the way Senator Dianne Feinstein had limited the number of rounds one could legally fit in a magazine for the handgun. JC knew his stuff. I asked him about various combat scenarios. “The only way to protect your family is with a group,” he said. That was really the whole point of his project – to gather a team capable of sheltering in place for a year or more, while also defending itself from those who hadn’t prepared. JC was also hoping to train young farmers in sustainable agriculture, and to secure at least one doctor and dentist for each location.
On the way back to the main building, JC showed me the “layered security” protocols he had learned designing embassy properties: a fence, “no trespassing” signs, guard dogs, surveillance cameras … all meant to discourage violent confrontation. He paused for a minute as he stared down the drive. “Honestly, I am less concerned about gangs with guns than the woman at the end of the driveway holding a baby and asking for food.” He paused, and sighed, “I don’t want to be in that moral dilemma.”
That’s why JC’s real passion wasn’t just to build a few isolated, militarised retreat facilities for millionaires, but to prototype locally owned sustainable farms that can be modelled by others and ultimately help restore regional food security in America. The “just-in-time” delivery system preferred by agricultural conglomerates renders most of the nation vulnerable to a crisis as minor as a power outage or transportation shutdown. Meanwhile, the centralisation of the agricultural industry has left most farms utterly dependent on the same long supply chains as urban consumers. “Most egg farmers can’t even raise chickens,” JC explained as he showed me his henhouses. “They buy chicks. I’ve got roosters.”
JC is no hippy environmentalist but his business model is based in the same communitarian spirit I tried to convey to the billionaires: the way to keep the hungry hordes from storming the gates is by getting them food security now. So for $3m, investors not only get a maximum security compound in which to ride out the coming plague, solar storm, or electric grid collapse. They also get a stake in a potentially profitable network of local farm franchises that could reduce the probability of a catastrophic event in the first place. His business would do its best to ensure there are as few hungry children at the gate as possible when the time comes to lock down.
So far, JC Cole has been unable to convince anyone to invest in American Heritage Farms. That doesn’t mean no one is investing in such schemes. It’s just that the ones that attract more attention and cash don’t generally have these cooperative components. They’re more for people who want to go it alone. Most billionaire preppers don’t want to have to learn to get along with a community of farmers or, worse, spend their winnings funding a national food resilience programme. The mindset that requires safe havens is less concerned with preventing moral dilemmas than simply keeping them out of sight.
Many of those seriously seeking a safe haven simply hire one of several prepper construction companies to bury a prefab steel-lined bunker somewhere on one of their existing properties. Rising S Company in Texas builds and installs bunkers and tornado shelters for as little as $40,000 for an 8ft by 12ft emergency hideout all the way up to the $8.3m luxury series “Aristocrat”, complete with pool and bowling lane. The enterprise originally catered to families seeking temporary storm shelters, before it went into the long-term apocalypse business. The company logo, complete with three crucifixes, suggests their services are geared more toward Christian evangelist preppers in red-state America than billionaire tech bros playing out sci-fi scenarios.
There’s something much more whimsical about the facilities in which most of the billionaires – or, more accurately, aspiring billionaires – actually invest. A company called Vivos is selling luxury underground apartments in converted cold war munitions storage facilities, missile silos, and other fortified locations around the world. Like miniature Club Med resorts, they offer private suites for individuals or families, and larger common areas with pools, games, movies and dining. Ultra-elite shelters such as the Oppidum in the Czech Republic claim to cater to the billionaire class, and pay more attention to the long-term psychological health of residents. They provide imitation of natural light, such as a pool with a simulated sunlit garden area, a wine vault, and other amenities to make the wealthy feel at home.
On closer analysis, however, the probability of a fortified bunker actually protecting its occupants from the reality of, well, reality, is very slim. For one, the closed ecosystems of underground facilities are preposterously brittle. For example, an indoor, sealed hydroponic garden is vulnerable to contamination. Vertical farms with moisture sensors and computer-controlled irrigation systems look great in business plans and on the rooftops of Bay Area startups; when a palette of topsoil or a row of crops goes wrong, it can simply be pulled and replaced. The hermetically sealed apocalypse “grow room” doesn’t allow for such do-overs.
Just the known unknowns are enough to dash any reasonable hope of survival. But this doesn’t seem to stop wealthy preppers from trying. The New York Times reported that real estate agents specialising in private islands were overwhelmed with inquiries during the Covid-19 pandemic. Prospective clients were even asking about whether there was enough land to do some agriculture in addition to installing a helicopter landing pad. But while a private island may be a good place to wait out a temporary plague, turning it into a self-sufficient, defensible ocean fortress is harder than it sounds. Small islands are utterly dependent on air and sea deliveries for basic staples. Solar panels and water filtration equipment need to be replaced and serviced at regular intervals. The billionaires who reside in such locales are more, not less, dependent on complex supply chains than those of us embedded in industrial civilisation.
Surely the billionaires who brought me out for advice on their exit strategies were aware of these limitations. Could it have all been some sort of game? Five men sitting around a poker table, each wagering his escape plan was best?
But if they were in it just for fun, they wouldn’t have called for me. They would have flown out the author of a zombie apocalypse comic book. If they wanted to test their bunker plans, they’d have hired a security expert from Blackwater or the Pentagon. They seemed to want something more. Their language went far beyond questions of disaster preparedness and verged on politics and philosophy: words such as individuality, sovereignty, governance and autonomy.
That’s because it wasn’t their actual bunker strategies I had been brought out to evaluate so much as the philosophy and mathematics they were using to justify their commitment to escape. They were working out what I’ve come to call the insulation equation: could they earn enough money to insulate themselves from the reality they were creating by earning money in this way? Was there any valid justification for striving to be so successful that they could simply leave the rest of us behind –apocalypse or not?
Or was this really their intention all along? Maybe the apocalypse is less something they’re trying to escape than an excuse to realise The Mindset’s true goal: to rise above mere mortals and execute the ultimate exit strategy.
This is an edited extract from Survival of the Richest by Douglas Rushkoff, published by Scribe (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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