Earth Escapists: Douglas Rushkoff’s “The Privileged Have Entered Their Escape Pods”

Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist, author, and professor whose works center on media, society, and economics, aspects of our modern world that are at the heart of the Anthropocene. In addition to teaching Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens, he’s written several books about technology and culture, including Program or be Programmed and Team Human, a book with an accompanying podcast, which he also hosts. His article “The Privileged Have Entered Their Escape Pods” appeared in Medium’s “OneZero” publication on September 1, 2020, and discusses how, in many ways, the COVID-19 pandemic has served to encourage the escape fantasies of the rich. 

Rushkoff’s central argument in this piece is that billionaires are not the only ones at fault for perpetuating the idea of a “hermetically sealed, Covid-19-inspired techno-paradise.” He focuses on the “privileged,” a class of people largely made up of those who have jobs that can be done entirely remotely. These people, Rushkoff specifies, are “not millionaires, but writers and marketers and consultants and web developers-- who are resettling in Canada or Europe on the logic that their kids shouldn’t be sacrificed to their progressive parents’ sense of shame about escaping.” When the “ethics of bailing” are questioned, these people are quick to point out that by removing themselves and their children from the equation, space is freed up for others-- in a literal sense, in this case, given the six-foot-apart spacing we are meant to maintain in order to decrease chances of infection. What Rushkoff makes clear, however, is that the threat of infection found in our current pandemic is not the reason for this “embrace of virtual insulation” but rather an excuse, one that comes at the expense of the safety and lives of other human beings who are exploited for labor in order for the construction of privileged people’s pandemic bunkers to be completed. 

Rushkoff is honest in his article in a way many writers might choose not to be: he acknowledges his own privilege when he admits to buying a 500 dollar inflatable pool for his daughter to use as a base for a “makeshift private summer camp,” even though he makes clear that he donated his government relief check and is sharing his CUNY income with friends who can no longer make ends meet. This honestly allows him to acknowledge the exploitation of others in a way many privileged people do not. “The pool for my daughter wouldn’t have gotten here were it not for legions of Amazon workers behind the scenes, getting infected in warehouses or risking their health driving delivery trucks all summer. As with FreshDirect or Instacart, the externalized harm to people and places is kept out of sight.” Now more than ever, our circumstances encourage us to dehumanize one another. Those who swore off companies like Amazon and Facebook are now reluctantly reactivating their accounts for two-day Prime delivery and in order to connect with distant loved ones, creating a cycle in which we are “rewarded the more we accept the logic of the fully wired home, cut off from the rest of the world.” But not everyone has access to the luxury of this complete insulation, nor should we consider it a good thing: by curating our space and our lives in this way, down to the streams of media we choose to interact with on a daily basis, many of us risk becoming desensitized to the world around us. There’s a real danger to accepting our current circumstances as a new normal, and yet many of us are already well past that point, or worse, like the privileged Rushkoff writes about, making excuses to try and spin this pandemic-- the deaths of over 250,000 people in the United States alone-- as ultimately a good thing, something we can learn from. 

Reading this article, it’s hard not to view this digital isolation, which Rushkoff himself refers to as a sort of retreating from the world, as the modern replacement for some of humanity’s other vivid, longstanding apocalypse fantasies. Rushkoff refers to these as well in his article, discussing the “escape fantasies for billionaires who aren’t quite rich enough to build space programs like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.” This is an entire class of people with enough money to change the world, but they have resigned themselves to the idea of “the Event” that will wipe out life on earth for so long that rather than use their funds to prevent it, they build companies that continue to abuse the Earth, exacerbating the problem while simultaneously funding their own potential escape from it. But the mention of Bezos and Musk is not something that can be glossed over either: especially not with the progress SpaceX has made this year with its rocket launches. 

The desire for this kind of elaborate escape, often partnered with the idea that science is the true solution to the “problem” of the Anthropocene, is not an invention of modern day entrepreneurship. One of the topics our class returns to most often is the religion of Earthseed from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and despite all of the comfort some of us have found in the idea of “God is Change,” we have frequently expressed a discomfort with one of the religion’s core tenants, this being the idea of humanity’s “destiny among the stars.” This construction makes sense in the context of Earthseed, as all religions require a sense of something more as a driving force, and to this end, Butler draws parallels between space exploration and Heaven several times throughout the text. It’s worth considering how in 1993, the year of Parable of the Sower’s publication, the idea of a broader human destiny could be seen as perhaps working to inspire change on Earth. However, in our modern day, space exploration often carries connotations of colonialism: the idea that the rich will claim other planets as belonging to us and re-enact the same capitalistic policies that destroyed the Earth. For every amount that digital isolation seems like the only internal solution society can come up with, private space exploration often seems like the only external solution. Both, however, resign themselves to the idea that our planet Earth is a lost cause, and in doing so, rely on methodologies that require the reinforcement of the class divide. “For there’s the real rub with digital isolation,” Rushkoff writes, “the problem those billionaires identified when we were gaming out their bunker strategies. The people and things we’d be leaving behind are still out there. And the more we ask them to service our bubbles, the more oppressed and angry they’re going to get.” 

(AL)

Picture Credit: https://www.citynews1130.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/sites/9/2020/11/15/SpaceX-Launch-Nov-2020.jpeg