Doomsday Prep for the Super- Rich. Steve Huffman, the thirty- three- year- old co- founder and C. E. O. He underwent the procedure not for the sake of convenience or appearance but, rather, for a reason he doesn’t usually talk much about: he hopes that it will improve his odds of surviving a disaster, whether natural or man- made. He is less focussed on a specific threat—a quake on the San Andreas, a pandemic, a dirty bomb—than he is on the aftermath, “the temporary collapse of our government and structures,” as he puts it. I have a bunch of guns and ammo. I figure that, with that, I can hole up in my house for some amount of time.”Survivalism, the practice of preparing for a crackup of civilization, tends to evoke a certain picture: the woodsman in the tinfoil hat, the hysteric with the hoard of beans, the religious doomsayer. But in recent years survivalism has expanded to more affluent quarters, taking root in Silicon Valley and New York City, among technology executives, hedge- fund managers, and others in their economic cohort.
Last spring, as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio Garc. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, Garc. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air- filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”Tim Chang, a forty- four- year- old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture- capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial- hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing.
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It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four- year- old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: . To protect his wife and daughter, he said, “I don’t have guns, but I have a lot of other weaponry. I took classes in archery.”For some, it’s just “brogrammer” entertainment, a kind of real- world sci- fi, with gear; for others, like Huffman, it’s been a concern for years. The film, released in 1.
Atlantic, and a race to escape the tsunami. That scene happened to be filmed near my high school. Every time I drove through that stretch of road, I would think, I need to own a motorcycle because everybody else is screwed.”Huffman has been a frequent attendee at Burning Man, the annual, clothing- optional festival in the Nevada desert, where artists mingle with moguls. He fell in love with one of its core principles, “radical self- reliance,” which he takes to mean “happy to help others, but not wanting to require others.” (Among survivalists, or “preppers,” as some call themselves, FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, stands for “Foolishly Expecting Meaningful Aid.”) Huffman has calculated that, in the event of a disaster, he would seek out some form of community: “Being around other people is a good thing. 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.”Over the years, Huffman has become increasingly concerned about basic American political stability and the risk of large- scale unrest.
He said, “Some sort of institutional collapse, then you just lose shipping—that sort of stuff.” (Prepper blogs call such a scenario W. R. O. L., “without rule of law.”) Huffman has come to believe that contemporary life rests on a fragile consensus. While I do believe they’re quite resilient, and we’ve been through a lot, certainly we’re going to go through a lot more.”In building Reddit, a community of thousands of discussion threads, into one of the most frequently visited sites in the world, Huffman has grown aware of the way that technology alters our relations with one another, for better and for worse. He has witnessed how social media can magnify public fear. Long before the financial crisis became front- page news, early signs appeared in user comments on Reddit.
They were worried about student debt. They were worried about debt in general. There was a lot of, . This doesn’t smell right.’ ” He added, “There’s probably some false positives in there as well, but, in general, I think we’re a pretty good gauge of public sentiment. When we’re talking about a faith- based collapse, you’re going to start to see the chips in the foundation on social media first.”How did a preoccupation with the apocalypse come to flourish in Silicon Valley, a place known, to the point of clich.
Technology rewards the ability to imagine wildly different futures, Roy Bahat, the head of Bloomberg Beta, a San Francisco- based venture- capital firm, told me. It can inspire radical optimism—such as the cryonics movement, which calls for freezing bodies at death in the hope that science will one day revive them—or bleak scenarios. Tim Chang, the venture capitalist who keeps his bags packed, told me, “My current state of mind is oscillating between optimism and sheer terror.”In recent years, survivalism has been edging deeper into mainstream culture. In 2. 01. 2, National Geographic Channel launched “Doomsday Preppers,” a reality show featuring a series of Americans bracing for what they called S. Download The New Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (2017) Movie. H. T. F. A survey commissioned by National Geographic found that forty per cent of Americans believed that stocking up on supplies or building a bomb shelter was a wiser investment than a 4.
Online, the prepper discussions run from folksy (“A Mom’s Guide to Preparing for Civil Unrest”) to grim (“How to Eat a Pine Tree to Survive”). The re. Conservative devotees, who accused Obama of stoking racial tensions, restricting gun rights, and expanding the national debt, loaded up on the types of freeze- dried cottage cheese and beef stroganoff promoted by commentators like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. A network of “readiness” trade shows attracted conventioneers with classes on suturing (practiced on a pig trotter) and photo opportunities with survivalist stars from the TV show “Naked and Afraid.”The living room of an apartment at the Survival Condo Project. Photograph by Dan Winters for The New Yorker. The fears were different in Silicon Valley. Around the same time that Huffman, on Reddit, was watching the advance of the financial crisis, Justin Kan heard the first inklings of survivalism among his peers. Kan co- founded Twitch, a gaming network that was later sold to Amazon for nearly a billion dollars.
We should stockpile food,’ ” he said. But then we got a couple of bags of rice and five cans of tomatoes. We would have been dead if there was actually a real problem.” I asked Kan what his prepping friends had in common.
It’s like insurance.”Yishan Wong, an early Facebook employee, was the C. E. O. He, too, had eye surgery for survival purposes, eliminating his dependence, as he put it, “on a nonsustainable external aid for perfect vision.” In an e- mail, Wong told me, “Most people just assume improbable events don’t happen, but technical people tend to view risk very mathematically.” He continued, “The tech preppers do not necessarily think a collapse is likely. Download Movie Garbage Pail Kids Story (2017) Dvd.