Synopsis: Five very rich men once asked a media theorist how to keep their bunker guards obedient after the collapse. The pitilessness of that question exposes a creed now overtly steering frontier technology; it’s one that ranks people by their intelligence, plans its own departure, and mistakes speed for judgement. Meanwhile a Pacific nation is uploading its songs and family albums, learning what exit means for those who never chose it.
A few years before the pandemic, the media theorist Douglas Rushkoff was driven three hours into the high desert of the American Southwest to give what he assumed would be a talk on the future of technology. His audience turned out to be five men. All were extremely wealthy, and none was interested in his talk. After some preliminary sparring over cryptocurrencies and virtual reality they reached the question they had brought him there to answer. Alaska or New Zealand? Which would be safer when what they called “the Event” arrived? One of them had almost finished building an underground compound. His difficulty was the guards. Once money was worthless, what would keep armed men loyal? What would stop them choosing a leader of their own? The group weighed combination locks on the food stores, disciplinary collars, and robots if robots could be ready in time.
Rushkoff suggested that the surest way to secure loyalty later was to treat those people decently now. That suggestion fell flat. As he tells it, nobody asked how the Event might be prevented. Prevention wasn’t on the agenda. Just departure.
I’ve been asked one question more and more often in recent months. Why don’t they just pause? Why, when the consequences of technological acceleration are becoming so profound, do those with most influence over its direction seem so determined to go even faster? Why is there so little collective reflection on where we’re heading, what we’re becoming, and whether the destination is one anyone should want?
The answer may be more disturbing than we imagine. Speed is a symptom. Beneath it lies a worldview in which human limits are defects, collective responsibility is an inconvenience, and extraordinary technological power is an entitlement owed to those clever enough to wield it. Alexander Thomas, a British filmmaker and academic whose 2024 book on the politics and ethics of transhumanism traces that movement’s entanglement with advanced capitalism, offered a useful key in a recent conversation with Tristan Harris. He sorted the creed into three organising impulses: hierarchy, exit and scale. None of them is new. What has changed is the reach of the instruments now at their disposal.
A ladder of minds
The first impulse ranks people. Intelligence, usually shrunk to whatever a cognitive test can measure, becomes the sole credential for steering everyone else’s future. Thomas has described the transhumanist reduction of life to information processing as a kind of fetish for IQ, and the label fits. A small group of exceptionally smart people, or at least people convinced of their own exceptional intelligence, is presumed better equipped than the rest of us to decide what comes after humanity, who will be invited to make the crossing, and who will be left behind on the shore.
Every age has produced its own version. Lineage, land, scripture and the sword have each served as warrants to govern others. For some thirteen centuries China staffed its bureaucracy through competitive examinations. These were among the most demanding tests of intellect ever devised. Yet candidates were examined on the Confucian canon, a body of texts about obligation, propriety and the duties of those who govern to those they govern. Even that most meritocratic of states assumed that a trained mind without moral formation was unfit to rule. Today’s aristocracy of the clever has kept the examination and thrown away the canon.
Intelligence isn’t wisdom. It doesn’t even come close. Neither is capability judgement. The systems analysts who ran America’s war in Vietnam by body count were among the most gifted quantitative minds of their generation, and their brilliance didn’t save a single village from the consequences of their models. Superior capacity doesn’t confer superior entitlement. Human dignity can’t be rationed by intelligence, productivity, wealth or usefulness. Once a civilisation begins rationing dignity, those who lead its technology cease to be stewards and become a caste, with all the old entitlements of birth now claimed on behalf of the intellect. Talented people should of course help shape the future. Whether their gifts entitle them to decide it on behalf of everyone else is another matter entirely.
Two kinds of departure
The second impulse is exit, and here the ambition grows more revealing. Its adherents long to slip the conditions of being human: the frailty of the body, the limits of the planet, the obligations of society and the consequences of living alongside others. It takes many forms, including rockets and Martian settlement plans, fortified estates in New Zealand’s South Island and on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, private compounds stocked for collapse, and the dream of uploading a mind to outrun a failing body.
Space exploration, the extension of healthy life and research into human augmentation are all legitimate fields of discovery. The trouble begins when escape hardens into a philosophy. What happens when those with the greatest resources begin imagining a future in which they no longer share the human predicament or feel bound to the human project? Protection from ecological breakdown, technological disruption and social upheaval becomes something to purchase. Everyone else stays exposed. The planet becomes a quarry to be mined until another address is available. Society becomes an imperfect arrangement from which the privileged seek exemption.
This amounts to an ethical withdrawal from the human community, disguised as imagination. The contradiction is extraordinary. The people best placed to repair the systems on which everyone depends are increasingly drawn to the prospect of leaving them. Rather than mend the house, they price spacecraft. Rather than renew the social contract, they design arrangements in which none is required.
Exit looks very different from nine low atolls halfway between Australia and Hawaii. In 2021 Tuvalu’s foreign minister, Simon Kofe, addressed the Glasgow climate summit from a lectern set up in the sea, trousers rolled to the knee. A year later he appeared at the Egyptian summit standing in a digital replica of an islet expected to be among the first to disappear. He announced that Tuvalu would build a virtual copy of itself, its islands, its history and its culture, so that it could go on functioning as a state if the land went under. As the land disappears, he said, his country has no choice. Since then a treaty with Australia has opened a migration pathway for a few hundred Tuvaluans a year, allocated by ballot.
Tuvalu speaks the same language as Rushkoff’s hosts: upload, relocation, a self preserved in code. The difference lies in who chose it. In one case a handful of men at the summit of the global economy are rehearsing their departure from a catastrophe their industries helped accelerate. In the other, a nation that did almost nothing to cause that catastrophe is being pushed out of physical existence and is preserving family albums and traditional songs so that children not yet born can know what home was.
The enclave fantasy also fails by its own logic. Rushkoff’s hosts couldn’t plan their bunkers without first confronting the people who would guard them. Every compound depends on wells, supply chains, spare parts, power, someone to repair the air filters and someone to cook. At their moment of greatest fear, with all the intelligence money could hire, they reached for another human being to talk to. There’s no meaningful escape from interdependence. Exit is an illusion. It’s also an alibi, a licence to abandon responsibility while still drawing on everything responsibility sustains.
Faster than thought
The third impulse is scale. We’ve grown so used to celebrating acceleration that we rarely ask what is being accelerated, why, and for whose benefit. In the contemporary technological imagination, larger models, faster computation, wider networks, deeper automation and the relentless removal of friction count as self-evident progress.
Yet the capacity to do something at scale tells us nothing about whether it should be done. The larger the intervention, the larger the consequences of error, misjudgement or concentrated power. Democratic deliberation takes time. So do ethical reflection, the building of trust, cultural adaptation and the construction of institutions able to govern complex change. These are among the essential conditions of civilised life, not inefficiencies waiting to be engineered away.
When technology consistently outruns our capacity for social, political and ethical adaptation, a dangerous asymmetry opens. Our power to transform the world grows far faster than our ability to appreciate what we’ve done. The result may be little more than the industrialisation of unintended consequences. A civilisation that can move faster than it can think isn’t becoming more intelligent. It may in fact be losing the capacity to use its intelligence wisely.
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Seen as an article of faith, these impulses turn humanity from the purpose of technological progress into its raw material. Our biology is to be overcome, our social arrangements bypassed and our political institutions circumvented. Our collective wisdom, deepened by ancient knowledge traditions, is to be superseded by computation. Consciousness, identity and mortality become engineering challenges.
Mortality above all gets reclassified as a malfunction. I spent a year in paediatric oncology before music reclaimed me, and nothing in that period persuaded me that death is a defect awaiting a patch. Whatever else it is, finitude has been a source of urgency, tenderness and solidarity, the reason the frightened turn towards one another instead of away.
The ambition goes beyond improving the human condition. It aims to transcend it. Transcendence towards what? For thousands of years people have wrestled with meaning, justice, belonging and death, and with how we ought to relate to the living world. Philosophies, faiths, legal codes and customs have all been attempts to navigate these questions. None settled them, yet the struggle itself made civilisation possible. The new imagination is impatient with that struggle. It wants answers without deliberation, intelligence without wisdom, power without accountability and progress without any shared notion of what human flourishing might be. A species can become dazzlingly sophisticated in its tools while growing poorer in its understanding of itself.
Without a compass
Strip away the hardware and what remains is a crisis of responsibility, of purpose and of the values that govern power, older than any machine and far harder to fix. Technology after all arrives without a compass of its own. Its direction comes from the assumptions, incentives and appetites of those who finance, design and deploy it. Make accumulation the objective and it will concentrate wealth. Make competitive advantage the objective and it will sharpen rivalry. Make control the objective and it will multiply the instruments of control. Make escape the objective and it will build insulation for the powerful against the consequences of their own decisions. These outcomes aren’t inevitable. Neither are they accidental.
So we should be wary of treating technological development as a synonym for human progress. A society can grow richer while its social fabric frays, more connected while its citizens grow lonelier and more frustrated, more productive while leaving less time for what makes life meaningful, more computationally intelligent while losing the habit of independent thought.
There’s an alternative to this creed, and I’ve spent much of the last decade giving it shape. I call it ecority, a fusion of ecology and security, held together by integrity. It owes something to the sufficiency philosophy long practised in rural Thailand, where enough is treated as an accomplishment instead of a failure of ambition. It begins from the opposite premise to the creed I’ve been describing. Human beings are participants in an interdependent living system, not proprietors given licence to dominate it. A civilisation’s quality and durability are judged by the flourishing of life, the integrity of relationships, the fairness with which opportunity is shared and the capacity of communities to live within ecological limits. Above all else, they’re judged by whether it leaves the world better off for those not yet born.
Technology keeps an indispensable role, subordinate to that larger purpose. That means artificial intelligence that enlarges human judgement instead of hollowing out our agency, innovation that improves lives before it widens the scope for extraction, economies organised around sufficiency and regeneration, and power that is distributed and answerable. Progress, in this light, is measured less by what humanity can accomplish than by what it can sustain.
Ambition, invention and discovery all survive this. So does the future; nostalgia offers no refuge. The dividing line runs between a civilisation organised around conquering its limits and one organised around the intelligent stewardship of its interdependence. One is preparing to leave. The other has chosen to stay and answer for what happens here.
Why nobody pauses
There’s something deeply unsettling about a future imagined by people who hold immense technological power yet seem ever more detached from the ordinary conditions of human life. I have no doubt that many of them are sincere, moved by curiosity or a real wish to end suffering. Sincerity has never exempted anyone from examining the worldview built into their ambitions. Nor should the sheer magnitude of what’s technically possible intimidate the rest of us into surrendering our right to argue about its purpose. Humanity isn’t an obsolete operating system patiently awaiting an upgrade. Our vulnerability isn’t a design flaw. Our need for one another isn’t evidence of evolutionary failure. It’s the foundation on which every civilisation has been raised.
So why don’t they pause? Partly because the creed I’ve described has become dogma, one that treats hesitation as a failure of nerve. Partly, too, because the rest of us have never insisted. The demand for a pause has nearly always been sent upwards, to boardrooms and laboratories, as if the right to decide what’s worth changing were theirs to grant. That right belongs to anyone prepared to stop long enough to use it. In a culture that rewards velocity above almost everything, stopping may prove the hardest discipline we’ve ever been asked to learn, and no device has yet been built to spare us the effort.