Pluralistic: Boss preppers (22 Nov 2025)

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Originally published at: Pluralistic: Boss preppers (22 Nov 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow



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A forest bunker, set into the hillside; it has been covered with a gold texture. Before it, crouched in the leaf-litter, is a figure in fatigues aiming a gigantic rifle. The figure the head of a millionaire from a Gilded Age editorial cartoon, wearing Oakley tactical glasses. The gun has also been gilded.

Boss preppers (permalink)

Sometimes, you learn a fact that makes everything else make sense – one of those keystone insights that puts a whole phenomenon into perspective. For example, the fact that preppers are engaged in a very specific type of wish-fulfillment.

I learned this during the first part of the pandemic lockdowns, when preppers were very much in our collective consciousness. On the Media featured an interview between Micah Loewinger and Richard Mitchell, author of Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times which features ethnographic studies of preppers:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/22/preppers-are-larpers/#preppers-unprepared

Mitchell described how preppers make ready for specific forms of societal collapse, based not on the likelihood of the event itself, but rather, based on how useful they would be in that situation. For example, a water chemist has made extensive preparations for an event in which terrorists poison the water-supply. When pressed, he couldn't explain why terrorists would choose his town to target with an attack like this, but basically thought it would be really cool if the only person who could save his town was him.

This is the "disaster fantasy" that propels the prepper movement, in which a functional, high-tech world of wicked, systemic problems is replaced with a fallen, low-tech society where the problems are all simple. A world of simple problems is a world of individual actors, where every struggle is just about what one person can make someone else do, or offer to someone else. It's a perfect world if you've been raised on Thatcher's neoliberal doctrine that "there is no such thing as society," only to find yourself in a society in which you can only make real change by participating in collective efforts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/24/mall-ninja-prophecy/#mano-a-mano

All this raises the question of what rich preppers are prepping for. If your contribution to society consists of "allocating capital" and/or giving people orders, what, exactly, is the disaster that fulfills your fantasy of a world where your unique skills are the only thing that can save us all? What kind of disaster needs a boss?

In Douglas Rushkoff's 2022 book Survival of the Richest, he describes a surreal "futurism" consulting gig in which a bunch of wealthy investor types asked him to help them figure out how to keep their mercenaries in line after "The Event" (the end of the world):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

These guys had the idea that what a fallen civilization needed was bosses, you see, but they were self-aware enough to recognize that the people who survived the apocalypse might not recognize their unique genius and simply fall into line. In order to assert their natural role as leaders after the shit hit the fan, these guys would need an army of heavily armed mercenaries. But again, these guys were self-aware enough to recognize that the mercenaries might also fail to recognize their unique fitness to rule and opt instead to slaughter them and raid their hoarded food, ammo and medical supplies.

So they wanted Rushkoff's advice – should they fit the mercs with bomb-collars that were on a dead-man's switch that would go off if the boss croaked? This was such a weird and revealing moment that Rushkoff got a whole book out of exploring the desire of the wealthy to both secede from the rest of us, and keep us all in line.

I was inspired by this and other experiences with people fantasizing about the world's end to take a run at rewriting Edgar Allan Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" as a story about investor/ubermenschen in a luxury bunker at the end of the world (spoiler: it doesn't go well for them):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/masque-of-the-red-death/#masque

All of this has been very much on my mind lately because I've been reading Quinn Slobodian's amazing Hayek's Bastards, a closely researched history of the merger of the neoliberal wing of the conservative movement with its white nationalist faction, producing a conservativism obsessed with "hard borders, hard-wired human difference, and hard money":

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/472194/hayeks-bastards-by-slobodian-quinn/9780241774984

It's a revelatory history, one that argues convincingly that the brooding, violent racism of MAGA isn't so much a break with "Romney conservativism" of the "respectable" Republican Party as it is the attainment of the goals of the party's longstanding dominant tendency.

"Hard-wired human differences" refers to the "scientific racism" that the likes of Elon Musk pushes, the junk science that insists that there is such a thing as a "race," and that IQ measures something important and immutable, and that different "races" have different IQs, which is why some "races" do well, while others do poorly:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#race-realism

"Hard-wired human difference" militate for "hard borders," since the teeming billions of racially inferior people in other countries would – given half a chance – come to the "good" countries and turn them into "shithole countries." This is the nonsense that Musk is peddling when he compares Britons to "hobbits" and warns that they about to be overrun by people who will "start raping the kids":

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/elon-musk-compares-brits-to-hobbits-amid-shock-immigration-claim_uk_69089785e4b0c4a0f509d6f5?origin=home-latest-unit

But because the soft-headed, soft-hearted hobbits keep electing leaders who don't understand this, they'll get "overrun" by the bad "races," who demand welfare handouts, which the state can't afford, triggering "money printing" and Musk's other obsession, national debts:

https://fortune.com/2025/07/01/trump-spending-bill-pain-points-critics-elon-musk-medicaid-national-debt-clean-energy/

(Which is to say, Musk's understanding of money is just as wrongheaded as his understanding of genomics):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/10/compton-cowboys/#the-deficit-myth

In the disaster fantasy, the failure of hard borders leads to the inevitable consequences of hard-wired human differences, which means that we need "hard money" – gold. The modern right is a linear descendant of the goldbug movement, composed of grifters who made fortunes terrifying racists into buying gold as a hedge against the day when the collapse of the welfare state leads to race war and the dollar's vaporization:

https://mises.org/library/book/gold-peace-and-prosperity?d7_alias_migrate=1

For goldbugs, the coming collapse seems to be one that will demand coin collectors. In Hayek's Bastards, Slobodian quotes all these goldbug preppers furiously dreaming of a day when a single gold coin will let them buy a whole city block in Manhattan. Somehow, they've conceived of disaster scenario where the most needful of all things is a ductile metal with a few marginal uses in electronics.

It's a very weird kind of disaster fantasy. One can only assume that the guys figuring out how to assemble an army of bomb-collared mercs will just stroll over to these goldbugs' lesser bunkers and take their precious coins.

The modern goldbug is, of course, a crypto weirdo, and man is that a weird thing to be a prepper about. It will be a very odd apocalypse indeed that takes down all of modern civilization except for blockchains.

(Image: Morten Jensen, CC BY 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Sony insider: DRM is discredited at Sony https://memex.craphound.com/2005/11/20/sony-insider-drm-is-discredited-at-sony/

#20yrsago Microsoft: Trusted Computing sucks! https://web.archive.org/web/20060821002450/http://news.com.com/Who+has+the+right+to+control+your+PC/2100-1029_3-5961609.html

#20yrsago EFF brings class-action against Sony! https://web.archive.org/web/20051125183030/https://www.eff.org/news/archives/2005_11.php#004192

#20yrsago Texas sues Sony over rootkits — YEE-HAW! https://web.archive.org/web/20060204212201/https://www.oag.state.tx.us/oagNews/release.php?id=1266

#20yrsago 1,000 sqft secret chamber discovered in Indian National Library https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/secret-chamber-in-national-library/articleshow/6957358.cms

#15yrsago Who owns your mortgage, the mind-croggling flowchart edition https://web.archive.org/web/20101118032158/https://www.zerohedge.com/article/just-when-you-thought-you-knew-something-about-mortgage-securitizations

#15yrsago When did you choose to be straight? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJtjqLUHYoY

#15yrsago Dear airlines: goodbye https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/11/dear-airline-im-leaving-you/66750/

#15yrsago How TSA screeners feel about junk-touching https://web.archive.org/web/20140928131617/https://flyingwithfish.boardingarea.com/2010/11/18/tsa-enhanced-pat-downs-the-screeners-point-of-view/

#10yrsago Yahoo blocks some users from accessing email until they turn off ad-blocking https://web.archive.org/web/20151121172408/https://consumerist.com/2015/11/20/use-adblock-and-yahoo-may-block-you-from-reading-your-e-mail/

#10yrsago Alan Moore’s brilliantly bonkers lost 1980s Star Wars comics https://web.archive.org/web/20151122232854/https://www.techtimes.com/tags/alan-moores-star-wars

#10yrsago The secret history of the Haunted Mansion’s hall of changing paintings https://longforgottenhauntedmansion.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-changing-portrait-hall-that-never.html

#10yrsago England: You have four days to reply to the secret consultation on the NHS’s future https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/19/nhs-mandate-england-consulation-deadline

#10yrsago Southwest Airlines surrenders to racists, refuses boarding to Arab-American passengers https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/national-international/philly-pizza-shop-owner-profiled-southwest-airlines/89976/

#5yrsago Nintendo vs Nintendees https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/21/wrecking-ball/#ssbm

#5yrsago Google's monopoly rigged the ad market https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#adtech

#5yrsago Facebook bullies watchdog https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#adobserver

#5yrsago We're already (badly) forgiving student debt https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#student-debt

#5yrsago Little Revolutions https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#asl

#1yrago Expert agencies and elected legislatures https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/21/policy-based-evidence/#decisions-decisions

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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