Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,27

of contemporary Ararat: a place of shelter from the coming flood.

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I myself could not help taking all this personally. Reading about these billionaires and their plans to protect themselves and their money while the rest of us burned, I felt an almost visceral revulsion for these people, and for the system that afforded them such disproportionate wealth and power. Like Vicino’s bunkers, this seemed to me to represent a radical acceleration of the mechanisms by which our civilization was already driven.

Thiel, in this sense, loomed particularly large. Through his data analytics company Palantir, he was a presiding presence in the increasingly oppressive, though only fleetingly visible, environment of surveillance capitalism. He was known for his extreme libertarian views. “I no longer believe,” he had once written, “that freedom and democracy are compatible.” His conception of freedom had less to do with existential liberty, with meaningful human lives within flourishing communities, than it had to do with not having to share resources—the freedom of wealthy people from taxation, from any obligation to materially contribute to society. And he was known, too, for his apparent determination to literally live forever, through investing in various life extension therapies and technologies. (As though enthusiastically pursuing the clunkiest possible metaphor for capitalism at its most vampiric, he had publicly expressed interest in a therapy involving regular transfusions of blood from young people as a potential means of reversing the aging process.)

He was in one sense a figure of almost cartoonishly outsized villainy. But in another, deeper sense, he was pure symbol: less an actual person than a shell company for a diversified portfolio of anxieties about the future, a human emblem of the moral vortex at the center of the market. It was in this second sense that I was fascinated and horrified by Thiel, who seemed to me increasingly to represent the world my son would likely be forced to live in.

It was in the early summer of 2017, just as my interests in the topics of New Zealand and Thiel and civilizational collapse were beginning to converge into a single obsession, that I first heard from Anthony. He had read a book of mine that had been published earlier that year, an account of the transhumanists of Silicon Valley and their obsession with achieving immortality through technological means, and had recognized in my writing about Thiel something of his own personal fascination with the man.

We began a long and intricate exchange of emails, largely focused around Thiel and his attraction to New Zealand. If I wanted to understand the extreme ideology that underpinned this attraction, he told me, I needed to understand an obscure libertarian manifesto called The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State. It was published in 1997, and in recent years something of a minor cult had grown up around it in the tech world, largely as a result of Thiel’s citing it as the book he was most influenced by. Other prominent boosters included Netscape founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and Balaji Srinivasan, the entrepreneur best known for advocating Silicon Valley’s complete secession from the United States to form its own corporate city-state. The Sovereign Individual’s coauthors were James Dale Davidson, a private investor who specializes in advising the rich on how to profit from economic catastrophe, and the late William Rees-Mogg, long-serving editor of the Times and father of Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Conservative MP beloved of Britain’s reactionary pro-Brexit right.

I was intrigued by Anthony’s description of the book as a master key to the relationship between New Zealand and the techno-libertarians of Silicon Valley. Reluctant to enrich Davidson or the Rees-Mogg estate any further, I bought a used edition online, the musty pages of which were here and there smeared with the desiccated snot of whatever nose-picking libertarian had preceded me. It presented a bleak vista of a post-democratic future. Amid a thicket of analogies to the medieval collapse of feudal power structures, the book also managed, a decade before the invention of Bitcoin, to make some impressively accurate predictions about the advent of online economies and cryptocurrencies. Its four-hundred-odd pages of near-hysterical orotundity can roughly be broken down into the following sequence of propositions:

1) The democratic nation-state basically operates like a criminal cartel, forcing honest citizens to surrender large portions of their wealth to pay for stuff like roads and hospitals and schools.

2) The rise of the Internet, and the advent of cryptocurrencies,