'Amplified by digital technologies and the unprecedented wealth disparity they afford, The Mindset allows for the easy externalization of harm, and inspires a corresponding longing for transcendence and separation from the abused,' Douglas rushkoff writes
As the sun began to dip over the horizon, I realized 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.
Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there.
I could tell they were also a bit annoyed. I wasn’t taking them seriously enough. But how could I? 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.
No one took us very seriously. That book was actually canceled by its original publisher in 1992 because they thought the computer networking fad would be “over” before my publication date in late 1993. It wasn’t until Wired magazine launched later that year, reframing the emergence of the internet as a business opportunity, that people with power and money began to take notice. The fluorescent pages of the magazine’s first issue announced that “a tsunami was coming.
Market sensibilities overpowered much of the media and intellectual space that would have normally been filled by a consideration of the practical ethics of impoverishing the many in the name of the few.
Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor. Like members of a gnostic cult, we long to enter the next transcendent phase of our development, shedding our bodies and leaving them behind, along with our sins and troubles and – most of all – our economic inferiors.