I'll modify the quote off in a attributed to Mark Twain to say that the death of social media may be greatly exaggerated. But something's happening. Facebook and Twitter usages declining. The platforms are charged with contributing to a host of societal ills. But maybe fixing things is not a matter of just tweaking an algorithm. Is there an evolutionary reason why humans can't thrive on social media? This is Big Picture Science from the SETI Institute and I'm Seth Chostang.

I'm Molly Bentley. In this episode, cultural anthropologists weigh in on the extreme behavior they're seeing on social media, how financial drivers play into shaping it, and whether this evolutionary mismatch will put a final nail or any nail in the coffin of social media. If so, what comes next? This episode is post

social

media. Social media is not working for many, perhaps not for most of us. Scientists and doctors have linked it to several detrimental outcomes, anxiety, depression, loneliness. Then there's also the general rending of the social fabric. But it's sure working out for some to illustrate how lucrative the platforms can be. Here's a story about going to extremes.

I'm Douglas Rushkoff. I'm a professor of media theory and digital economics at City University of New York. Since the early 90s, I've been writing and thinking and talking about digital technology usually from the perspective of a fund radical cyberpunk person. After the internet happened, I started to get called to do talks about the digital economy and the future of this or the future of that. I got this offer to go out to this resort in the desert to talk about the digital future for a bunch of business folks and hedge fund people and tech investors. I was kind of sworn off them, but it was such a big amount of money that I was like, all right, I'll do it.

The group cryptically described themselves as ultra wealthy stakeholders.

They flew me out to the desert business class and brought me in a limo like two hours away from the airport where I landed.

He was taken to a fancy desert resort, wind and dined and all that. Then came the morning of his scheduled

talk. They brought me out and put me in this little green room and I'm getting ready to go on and do a good talk about the future and my usual thing on how we should be building technology that serves people instead of serving up people to technology. One of those. I'm sort of practicing my stuff and instead of bringing me onto the stage to do a talk, they bring these five men into the dressing room, into this green room. They just sit around the table and they say, okay, let's go.

He wasn't there to go on stage to talk about the future of technology. Instead an audience of five were brought to him. All men from the upper echelons of tech investing, at least two were billionaires.

And the guys start peppering me with these questions about kind of what they should bet on, augmented reality or virtual reality, a Bitcoin or Ethereum, you know, very, you know, binary selections. And then they eventually get to Alaska or New Zealand. And I thought it was a joke, but they really wanted to know where did I think was better to buy land for the apocalypse, to put a bunker or a resort of some

kind. That's when Doug Rushkoff realized this was not an ordinary consultation gig. The men wanted advice on how to protect themselves from the social catastrophe they believed is coming down the pike. They were calling the event. One they can't fully describe, but in one way or another, one that would seriously disrupt society. Mr. Rushkoff wrote about this weekend and its implications in a

book. Survival of the richest escaped fantasies of the tech billionaires. That was the whole hour. Really, we spent talking about their bunkers, right? And the event was right, the biological warfare or virus that came out or economic inequality or climate catastrophe or electromagnetic pulse or nuclear war or terrorist event or AI or nano, something that makes the real world unlivable, the event, the seemingly inevitable outcome of their work.

He said it was the wealthiest group of people he had ever encountered. A couple of them were venture capitalists who had built their fortunes, investing in companies and technologies that were often disruptive. Mr. Rushkoff said that then it hit him. This was a discussion about the future of technology after

all. These are guys who are asking me for advice on how they can insulate themselves from the reality they're creating by earning money and building technology.

There escaped facilities range from bunkers to islands. Could you give us a description of just how outfitted these places are? This is real. These are being built. This isn't just in the blueprint stage or the blue sky stage. No,

there's real. I mean, they're at all different levels of development and levels of extravagance. The really simple ones are kind of deluxe versions of the fallout shelters that people use in tornado regions. They'll take something like a shipping container and put it under the ground and create generators and things and fake daylight so that you can live in a shipping container for as long as you need to after a disaster. To the very big ones. Things like Jeff Bezos is building under the launching pads where his rockets go or what Peter Thiel's building in New Zealand, which are giant guarded estates. There's a fellow I spoke with and walked around with on one of his farms. There's a guy named JC Cole. He was like, oh, I've got the solution. He's got these farms he's building where the ideas, the millionaires, pay, invest now. And then when the disaster happens, they get on their helicopter or hop on their motorcycles or do whatever and get to one of these farms outside major cities. So he's building them all within a couple of hours of where billionaires tend to live. And his farms are meant to be more kind of long term sustainable agriculture where he'll have biodiesel and some solar power and they're preparing. They're preparing for something. They're preparing. These guys are preppers of a different order. If you're prepping with $200 million, it's a different kind of prep. So the kind of prep that they do is, well, let's contract 10 Navy seals to fly in at a moment's notice to protect our facility. Some people want to prepare on the sea. They either get an island that they think is defensible or some kind of a solar powered ship that they can go and then go on the ocean and then dock wherever it's

safe later. Douglas, I know that you have written about extraordinary events and ideas and seen things. Did this astonish you? I mean, it is astonishing to listen to the lengths to which these people are going. And also that for most of us, we don't see it. We don't know about it. I had no idea that this was going on. Had you lost your capacity to be astonished by the time you finished reporting the story

Well, I mean, initially I was so astonished or disbelieving that I thought these guys were faking each other out that maybe none of them really had this, but they were playing a weird game of like, you know, what if I had this? Well, then I would have that, you know, that maybe they were playing something, but they're really, they're really doing it. And in some sense, a lot of people, I mean, we've always known that these guys are living in a way that is destroying the planet and that they, of course, they would leave us behind. They've always had this mindset, you know, Stuart Brand even said it in the early computer era, you know, we are as gods and we may as well start acting like them that they think of themselves as one level above humanity as as Mark Zuckerberg would put it meta, right? What is meta? Meta is a word that you use when Facebook is no longer growing exponentially, you go meta on Facebook. You go one level above Facebook and say, Oh, we're not web 2.0. We're web 3.0. Their mindset is one of being sort of masters of everyone else's destiny.

To get back to those escape plans, Douglas, what kind of time scales are involved? How long are they planning to live in one of these bunkers? And are they imagining that they would go into the bunker and then not peek their heads out for a century decades? What are we talking about? Yeah, I mean, when they were

talking about their plans, I was trying to explain what I could see that may be working for a year or two. You know, particularly when they've got, you know, one of them was talking about the swimming pool and I'm like, Oh, so it's a heated swimming pool with filters. Where do you get where you're going to get your replacement filter parts? You know, and then they're thinking, well, I, you know, I guess we could 3D print them or something. You know, I was, I was thinking that they could make it a year or two, but they were thinking, no, that we go from here to there, that it's permanent, that that's it, that the majority of the world becomes uninhabitable for the rest of their lifetime. So they do something else. They tear it all down and start again and then do what they call game B, you know, which is we're living game A now. Just let it go, get to game B and then rebuild it better with all of our great new technological knowledge. And it doesn't work like that. What they weren't really taking into account and when I met with these guys, it was before COVID was germs spread, you know, eventually something's going to get there. Where's your water coming from? How are you protecting yourself from pathogens and mold? And you know, they want to do, you know, vertical farming and rooftop agriculture and this. It's like eventually some kind of mold gets in there and you've got to throw out. You always do. You throw out the top and start again. But how do you start again? Where do you get the additional soil from? You know, they, they've got this almost virtual reality understanding of the world as a kind of a SimCity enterprise that you just, you know, reboot the computer or defrag the hard drive and start again. Okay.

This is kind of a wild story. They want to be prepared to escape a massive disruption to society in whatever form it comes. One that Mr. Rushkoff says that they had a hand in creating and interestingly, according to him, these tech billionaires and venture capitalists seem quite certain this catastrophe is inevitable. Which raises the questions of why since they have the resources to stop it, they don't try and do that. But just how involved are investors in creating this future really? Well,

I mean, for these guys, even if these aren't, and I did find the ones who are, even if these aren't the ones who are figuring out the technology, right? These are not the five gentlemen I spoke to were not really devising and building and coding. They were chiefly responsible for getting technology developers to pivot away from whatever their original designs were toward more extractive ones. So these were the people who got, say, Google to be unsatisfied with the several billion dollars in profit they were making and really forced them to find a way to 10x on that by taking the data that people were leaving behind them and then using that data against people. And the billions of dollars they were making were not enough. We needed, you know, at least these investors needed hockey stick returns. They needed exponential growth. They needed to go as Peter Thiel would say from zero to one and then one to 10 and then 10 to 100. And how do you do that? Where now you take the data that searchers are leaving behind and use that to try to manipulate their future behavior. And that's where there was even more money. So I would say that while technologists were vulnerable to this kind of thinking, it really wasn't necessarily their technology designs that brought this about. You know, what would happen if you steer your technologies towards the needs of venture capitalists rather than the needs of your users. That's where these gentlemen could be considered culpable.

Douglas Rushkoff is a professor of

media theory and digital economics at City University of New York and the author of Survival of the Richest Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.

Okay, the venture capitalists installing his heated pool in a survivalist bunker somewhere might seem a long way from an ordinary civilian plopped on the couch with a laptop. But those investors in social media need users from whom they can mine data and whose behavior they can manipulate to encourage more engagement.

How do platforms like Facebook and Twitter do that? Journalists Max Fisher has written a book about it and gives us an example.

So when you open up your feed on Twitter or on Facebook, you think that what you're saying are the thoughts and the sentiments and the ideas from people in your community, from just regular people who you might follow in the network, and that's false. What you are actually seeing is a very carefully curated experience that has been pulled from a much larger universe of social media content that's presented to you in a very specific way to elicit very specific reactions from you that are meant to change your behavior in ways that serve those company's bottom lines. Well looking at it from the Darwinian point of view, you could

say, look, this is going to happen no matter how you start out. You can read what Mark Zuckerberg thought he was doing when Facebook was initiated. This was going to be good for humankind. You spend some time talking in your book about the bros in the Silicon Valley, which is right where I am actually, that here in the Silicon Valley, that these people are not evil monsters. They're trying to do some societal good. It turned out there was a monster in the machine.