Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,31

mapping of a possible future, in all its highly sophisticated barbarism. It was a utopian dream that appeared, in all its garish detail and specificity, as the nightmare vision of a world to come. Standing alone in the central chamber of the basement, peering through the glass case at the board of the Founders tabletop game, inspecting each of the various illustrated spaces, I noted a familiar image, a hexagonal concrete structure emerging out of grass. It was one of the bunkers at xPoint in South Dakota. I felt as though I were looking at the manifestation of my own anxieties about the future, anxieties that had often seemed to me bewilderingly complex and idiosyncratic, and irretrievably entangled with a revulsion at the cruelty and destructiveness of capitalism. The game represented an apocalyptic logic of progress: a movement away from the nation-state, away from democracy, and finally away from the ravaged Earth itself. It represented everything I thought about when I thought about the end of the world. It was like being confronted with a lurid diorama of my own unease as I had come to conceive of it. It was uncanny, and terrible, and strangely perfect.

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Later that week, in a bar a few blocks from the harbor, I had a post-work beer with Matt Nippert, the New Zealand Herald reporter who had broken the citizenship story earlier that year. He told me of his personal certainty that Thiel had bought his property in the South Island for apocalypse-contingency purposes. In his citizenship application, he had pledged his commitment to devote “a significant amount of time and resources to the people and businesses of New Zealand.” But none of this had amounted to much, Nippert said, and he was convinced that it had only ever been a feint to get him in the door.

I was not surprised to find that the handful of people I spoke to from the luxury property business did not see it this way. They were keen to portray New Zealand as a kind of utopian sanctuary, but to give as little oxygen as possible to the related narrative around the country as an apocalyptic bolt-hole for the international elite. Over coffee at his golf club, Terry Spice—a London-born luxury property specialist who had recently sold a large estate abutting the Thiel property on Lake Wanaka—told Anthony and me that Thiel had highlighted internationally the country’s reputation as “a safe haven, and a legacy asset.” He himself had sold land to one very wealthy American client who had called him on the night of the presidential election.

“This guy couldn’t believe what was happening,” he said. “He wanted to secure something right away.”

But on the whole, he insisted, this kind of apocalyptically motivated buyer accounted for a vanishingly small proportion of the market.

Showing me around the high-end beachfront properties he represented about an hour or so north of Auckland, another luxury property specialist named Jim Rohrstaff, a Californian transplant who specialized in selling to the international market, likewise told me that although quite a few of his major clients were Silicon Valley types—I wanted him to name names, but he politely responded that he didn’t “kiss and tell”—the end of the world tended not to be a particular factor in their purchasing decisions.

“Look,” he said, “it might be one strand in terms of what’s motivating them to buy here. But in my experience it’s never been the overriding reason. It’s much more of a positive thing. What they see when they come here is utopia.”

Thiel himself had spoken publicly of New Zealand as a “utopia,” during the period in 2011 when he was maneuvering for citizenship, investing in various local startups under a venture capital fund called Valar Ventures. (Valar, needless to say, was another Tolkien reference.) This was a man with a particular understanding of what a utopia might look like—who did not believe, after all, in the compatibility of freedom and democracy. In a Vanity Fair article about his role as adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, a friend was quoted as saying that “Thiel has said to me directly and repeatedly that he wanted to have his own country,” adding that he had even gone so far as to price up the prospect at somewhere around one hundred billion dollars.

The Kiwis I spoke with were uncomfortably aware of what Thiel’s interest in their country represented, of how it seemed to figure more generally in the frontier fantasies of American