Harare Review of Books

224 pages.

First published in September 2022.

Genre: Non-Fiction.

This first appeared in The Sunday Long Read, Nov. 13, 2022 — Issue #365

Here’s a topical book, while we’re all thinking and talking about Elon Musk: on billionaires, and how, to quote from the book:

“[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.”

Survival of The Richest is short, but dense with suggestions for new ways of thinking about this phase of the Anthropocene in which we find ourselves. The book came about after Rushkoff was invited to speak to a group of very rich men who wanted to discuss their escape plans for when everything falls apart. An article Rushkoff wrote after that encounter generated a lot of interest, and led him down an investigatory path. 
 
Although this sometimes reads like an extended opinion piece, Rushkoff is fluent on his subject, and he introduces many references, if you’re keen on following his arguments (somewhat ironically, Google was very helpful for me here). There are no sacred cows: TED Talks, seasteading, the Burning Man scene, Deepak Chopra, banking executives, Davos, AOL, Amazon, and the Gates and Clinton foundations are among the many things and people that he skewers.
 
He also offers interesting views on co-operative economics (he references Black Americans, but I saw this growing up in southern Africa, too), and on degrowth, which is growing in influence as a possible solution for the excesses of capitalism. It’s interesting that one billionaire proposes to take us back to the way indigenous cultures lived before colonialism, while planning to recreate many of the problems that have brought us to this point. I was pleased, too, to find that Rushkoff and I are on the same page on climate solutions offered by the billionaire class (see: the futility in Bill Gates’s How to Avoid a Climate Disaster).
 
Thanks to Rushkoff, I now know that, contrary to the cliche, I am not “the product,” but merely a laborer for social media companies and Big Data. How and why some real-world things are “converted” to data, and what can’t be, is fascinating. 
 
My only criticism is Rushkoff’s use of the shorthand The Mindset for the worldview that he argues drives billionaires; while I appreciate the argument, I found the framing tiresome (and I began to read that as The Mindset™). Nonetheless, this is truly an excellent book—mind-expanding, and written in a very accessible way.