A bunker of one’s own: The super-rich and the mansions for the end of the world

I’m not a republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I’d explain my masterstroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome?

Ozymandias (Watchmen, 1987: 375)

Six years ago, in Down to Earth, Bruno Latour posited the (quite strong) hypothesis that the reluctance or the flat denial with which the world’s economic elites are addressing the anthropogenic deterioration of the biosphere could be explained by the cynical consciousness that the resources they keep hoarding will allow them to shelter and escape from the harmful consequences of climate change. In other words, not only the lifestyle they lead and promote among the people that would like to emulate them – in terms of mobility, residential, and consumption habits – presents a particularly high carbon footprint (UN Environment Program, 2020; Chancel, 2020; Gössling and Humpe, 2020; Salle, 2021; Coulangeon et al., 2023), not only many of them own or work for companies that have funded nefarious climate-related disinformation (Mitchell, 2011; Correia, 2022; Morena, 2023) and are the main actors of the ongoing metabolic rift (O’Connor, 1998; Foster, 1999 and 2000; Saito, 2023), but they might also be planning and in fact already preparing for the very same global adversity they refuse to address with a minimum of universal fairness.

In this perspective, the most common ways to anticipate the end of the world as we know it are of course the risk reassessments, new local predictive models, insurance policies and asset redeployments on which capitalists rely to avoid the financial effects of climate disruption and its string of submersions, droughts, megafires and category 5 hurricanes (Keucheyan, 2016; Poupeau et al., 2019; Elliott, 2021; Colgan et al., 2021; Petryna, 2022). However, specific residential and multi-residential strategies are also increasingly part of the repertoire of action of rich and super-rich ‘preppers’, who want to protect themselves not only from economic risks but also – in a more direct physical way – from the harmful ecological changes and the correlated social collapses they see coming. Mirroring (from the very top of the social ladder) the forced displacement of climate refugees, actively promoting an anti-humanitarian moral economy in which lives have unequal values (Fassin, 2018), and planning their own opportunistic alienation by disentangling themselves from the majority of both humans and nonhumans (Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2015), they exacerbate their current segregative tendencies and obsidional feelings through the elaboration of dystopian scenarios as violent as they are hyper-individualistic. Radically rejecting Donna Haraway’s (2016) advice to ‘stay with the trouble’, they organize to flee, shelter and defend themselves from the masses, and secure the best (or last?) human habitat in a decaying biosphere and a post-apocalyptic Hobbesian ‘state of nature’.

Indeed, even if climate change will bring us an increasing number of ‘natural’ disasters and except, of course, in the unlikely case of nuclear escalation, the current global landscape will not disappear in a big blast (like in Adam McKay’s celebrated movie Don’t look up). Things will happen gradually (Kemp et al., 2022) and, if the super-rich might very well keep pursuing long-term and often over-simplistic dreams of interplanetary escapism built upon the stirrings of space colonization (Schultz, 2020; O’Callaghan, 2021), in the meantime they will probably stick to one of their most proven and common approaches to perpetuate inequalities, confiscate rarefying resources and avoid unwanted interactions with other groups: self-segregation and/or seclusion (Paugam et al., 2017; Cousin and Chauvin, 2021). In fact, such particular ecological behavior and strategy – in both the naturalist sense and the one of the Chicago School’s human ecology – could soon become one of the defining characteristics of part of the wealthiest as a privileged geo-social (and not a merely ‘social’) class (Latour and Schultz, forthcoming). And people like Peter Thiel, the libertarian and market-fundamentalist entrepreneur who co-founded Palantir Technologies and many other ICT ventures, who funds research about seasteading, and who purchased New Zealand citizenship in 2011 (Surak, 2023) to be able to build a vast end-of-the-world bolthole in a remote area of the South Island (O’Connell, 2018), should probably be considered its avant-garde.

According to multibillionaire Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and now a venture capitalist, something like ‘fifty-plus percent’ of Silicon Valley billionaires (Osnos, 2017: np) have acquired luxurious and often fortified getaways in some remote area of the US or abroad – especially in New Zealand – not only as vacation homes (Farrell, 2020) but also as shelters in case of natural catastrophes and/or political unrest. Additionally, many stock them with weapons and, like Steve Huffman, co-founder and CEO of Reddit and outspoken survivalist, somehow believe they are the ones who will be able to take advantage of a surge of Mad Max-style chaos and violence: ‘I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I’m a pretty good leader. I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove’ (Osnos, 2017: np). They do not seem fully aware that – historically, because of their professional skills, loyalists and connections – military commanders have been much more successful than web developers or financiers at becoming warlords. Moreover, such an optimistic approach to societal collapse is quite paradoxical considering that they also frequently fear its revolutionary and redistributive potential.

Part of the explanation of this paradox lies in the libertarian and individualistic roots of the survivalist movement, whose distinctions between dystopia and utopia can be blurry (Mitchell, 2001), as they also often are among left-wing eschatological ‘collapsologists’ (Charbonnier, 2019). But to understand further how the global hub for high technology and innovation fostered a group of elites that have abandoned the promises of progress for all and now actively prepare a world of fortresses and hideaways for the wealthiest, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg’s (1997) techno-libertarian manifesto The sovereign individual offers several ideological keys.[1] Revered and cited by many tech billionaires as their primary political inspiration, this futuristic essay quickly rose to fame in Silicon Valley, has for years been widely read and spread among its business elite, and provides significant insight into the escapism of the few and about how ‘technology development became less a story of collective flourishing than personal survival’ (Rushkoff, 2018: np). A sort of updated mashup of Ayn Rand’s (1957) Atlas shrugged and Paul-Émile de Puydt’s (1860) political philosophy of panarchism, Davidson and Rees-Mogg’s book describes a near coming apocalyptic future where technological change – especially crypto-currencies and cyber-economies – will make the greedy nation state face economic, moral, political and legal bankruptcy. In the coming ‘Information Age’, they argue, democracies will die away and an ‘information aristocracy’ will arise. This ‘cognitive elite’ will be liberated from the constraints and oppression of state governments, with their assets safely guarded in the cloud (i.e. in supposedly impregnable data centers): ‘much of the world’s commerce will migrate into the new realm of cyberspace, a region where governments will have no more dominion than they exercise over the bottom of the sea or the outer planets. [...] Cyberspace is the ultimate offshore jurisdiction. An economy with no taxes. Bermuda in the sky with diamonds’ (ibid: 23-24). Meanwhile, obviously – even if transhumanist intellectuals like Ray Kurzweil or Nick Bostrom speculate and fantasize about a time when some people would be able to upload their mind and consciousness online and to reach ‘technological immortality’ (cf. also O’Connell, 2017) – humans, no matter how wealthy and powerful, will still need to exist physically, breathe and live somewhere. But in the case of the ‘Sovereign Individuals’ announced by Davidson and Rees-Mogg (1997: 18), who ‘will compete and interact on terms that echo the relations among the gods in Greek myth’, it would have to be at a certain distance from the apocalypse they will be themselves causing: ‘Thinly populated regions with temperate climates, and a large endowment of arable land per head, like New Zealand and Argentina, will also enjoy a comparative advantage’ (ibid: 247). The two co-authors themselves bought land on New Zealand’s North Island as early as the mid-1990s.

Beside prophecies, manifestos and anecdotal evidence, we thus now need proper empirical investigations to accurately assess the actual numbers and real-estate practices of rich and super-rich preppers. It is a task largely beyond the scope of this note and the goal of future research. But we can already stress that, according to all accounts, the market of residential bunkers seems to have been constantly expanding during the past years, driven by wealthy buyers (especially Americans) and by ‘dread-merchant’ companies repurposing decommissioned military complexes, building new collective or individual structures, or simply suggesting to their clients around the world to install in their mansions panic rooms big enough to be equipped and used as doomsday shelters (Garrett, 2020). In a way, it is fueled by some of the same social fears and separatism that contributed to the rising number of gated communities, in the US and elsewhere, during the past four decades (Blakely and Snyder, 1997). In his recent book, Survival of the richest, cultural theorist Douglas Rushkoff (2022) details how he met with several billionaires who were looking for advice on where to build their refuges from the climate crisis (they did not seem aware of how heavily the latter was already impacting Alaska), on how to organize them (on a purely nuclear-family basis or as small communities?), on how to maintain their authority over their service class and the Navy SEALs they had already pre-hired as security guards, on how to logistically and emotionally deal with the ethical issue of letting everybody else behind while they would be optimizing their own life chances and the ones of their families, etc. Moreover, and this is probably the most significant part of his account, Rushkoff highlights how his conversation partners see the deadly futures they are preparing for as contingencies totally independent from their prior actions, because potentially resulting from the sole inexorable march of technology and capitalism driven by impersonal (and therefore unimputable) market forces. The collapse might however also be avoided through technological solutions and freed markets. Or not. In which case, escaping would be the only ‘logical’ solution for the ones able to pull it off: from laissez-faire economics straightforward to run for your life.

The COVID-19 pandemic emphasized some of these tendencies. As argued elsewhere, the pandemic not only transformed societies around the globe, but it also furthermore illuminated some of their axiomatic social processes, organizational principles, and lines of conflict (Schultz, 2022). One of the phenomena that seem to have both intensified and been put on kaleidoscopic display during the pandemic was precisely the territorial escape strategies of the super-rich. Of course, the pandemic did not make the nation state break down to pieces. In fact, some argue it instead experienced a sort of renaissance moment while facing the planetary health crisis, with one salient example being how many states closed their borders for non-citizens and non-residents. And, quite ironically for the ones that had seen New Zealand as the ultimate safe haven in case of global catastrophe, the Oceanian country was one of the most successful in swiftly adopting an isolation strategy and shutting down almost all incoming travel. Nevertheless, the pandemic still offered certain clues about the escape patterns of the rich: what was put on show was not simply the survivalist ‘planning’ or ‘prepping’ of a future run-away, but also the very escape itself. Little time passed after the break-out of the COVID-19 pandemic before public outcries were leveled against billionaires and multimillionaires sailing away on luxury yachts, far from the danger of contamination and lockdown restrictions, or hoarding medical supplies in their country houses while their fortunes often reached unprecedented levels (Neate, 2020a; Farrell, 2020b). And, as many journalists reported, super-rich from different places around the globe began following the escape routes described above, fleeing to secluded bunkers and other catastrophe-secured estates. Indeed, pandemics are one of the contexts of upheaval that wealthy preppers had previously reported as reasons for anticipating the need of territorial escape and end-of-the-world shelters. Before the closing of the country’s borders, several of them were even able to sneak into their New Zealand’s fortified retreats (Carville, 2020; Neate, 2020b; Woodward, 2020).

Thus, while large parts of the European and American middle-classes were temporarily moving to nearby countrysides or seaside residences (Schultz, 2022), trying to secure themselves more hospitable dwellings during a time when the fabric of societies was made less habitable by the virus, some of the richest simply took off to safer lands, as far away as possible. Moreover, these strategies and the infrastructures that make them possible seem to have become increasingly common among the wealthiest during and after the pandemic. Superyacht sales surged and reached records (Espiner, 2021). Key actors in the survival bunker industry, such as Atlas Survival Shelters, Rising S. Bunkers, Survival Condo Projects, Hardened Structures, and Vivos, all reported how COVID-19 made their business expand greatly, with booming sales and inquiries in the midst of the pandemic (Dobson, 2020; Flemming, 2020; Kennedy, 2020), and this market expansion does not seem to have stopped since. Instead, according to several of the same companies, the demand has been steadily high, fueled by the war in Ukraine and the scare of a global conflict with Russia and its nuclear arsenal (Goh, 2022). A wider pool of people, more and more often from the middle class and with loose or no ties to the survivalist movement, are now among the purchasers of underground shelters and escape properties (Ptacin, 2020). They participate to the current widening in the demography of the population ‘prepping’ individually for a self-sufficient life ‘in catastrophic times’ (Stengers, 2015).

This trickling down of survivalist strategies and orientations leads to another question, which we would like to address with a few conclusive reflections. What are the relations between living in times of ecological collapses and the social class struggles? While we started by referring to Bruno Latour’s hypothesis that the world’s economic elites are ecologically negligent because they simply plan to flee and shelter themselves from the consequences of global climate change, we here wish to connect it to another hypothesis, which Latour first introduced in the same book and developed further during the following years with one of the authors of this paper (Latour and Schultz, 2022; Latour and Schultz, forthcoming). According to this second hypothesis, the whole class landscape is fundamentally changing shape in the current climate-damaged world, where the loss of territory has become a new ‘wicked universality’ (Latour, 2018). When the earthly ‘ground is giving way beneath everyone’s feet at once’ and we all feel ‘attacked everywhere, in our habits and in our possessions’ (ibid: 8), social classes are in the process of being transformed into geosocial classes; meaning that the relative hierarchies, collective interests, inter-class struggles and narratives of hope or doom (Bryant and Knight, 2019; Folke et al., 2021) are becoming more inextricably linked with the issue of the habitable territories and territorial means of subsistence that allow the prosperity of (some) social groups and/or will in the future.

In this perspective, we are not simply to understand the ‘prepping’ and ‘survivalism’ of the super-rich as an isolated set of subcultural practices and/or collective strategies. Instead, we ought to analyze them as part of a broader series of transformations in the relations between social classes, where their conflicts and struggles are no longer simply ‘economic’ or ‘cultural’. They are instead being rematerialized as they revolve more and more around the earthly conditions of habitability, which are increasingly destabilized and scarce in our ‘New Climatic Regime’ (Latour, 2017; Latour, 2018). Thus, it is heuristic to approach the escape plans of the super-rich as an ‘extreme case’ (Flyvbjerg, 2006) of new-set earthly class interests, practices, strategies and geosocial inequalities. Some social groups all around the planet are struggling to secure themselves a livable habitat, others are privileged in the sense that they have access to livable territories, while global climate change is affecting the latter to different degrees and in several cases make them disappear altogether (Chancel, 2020; Martin, 2016). Bunker acquisitions and end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it mansions do not only testify to a few elites organizing and often coordinating to ‘quit the world’. They are also part of a new kind of social, planetary conflict, based on stratified and competitive relations to the earthly means of subsistence, at a time when the Earth system is threatening to throw us all off: a conflict they contribute to explicit (with fatalism if not with cynicism), to brutalize and to frame as an issue of self-preservation rather than freedom (Carleheden and Schultz, 2022). And, of course, all the imagination, affects and efforts put into individual or class-based climate separatism are not put into collectively preserving Earth’s critical zone, and that is part of the problem.
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[1] Part of this paragraph draws closely on Schultz (2020).