Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand
If you’re curious about the top of the planet, you’re curious about New Seeland. If you’re curious about however our current cultural anxieties – climate catastrophe, decline of transatlantic political orders, resurgent nuclear terror – manifest themselves in apocalyptic visions, you’re curious about the place occupied by this distant ground of apparent peace and stability against the roily unease of the day.
If you’re curious about the top of the planet, you'd are interested, before long once Donald Trump’s election as United States president, to browse a brand new dynasty Times headline stating that Peter Thiel, the rich person plunger World Health Organization co-founded PayPal associated was an early capitalist in Facebook, thought-about New Seeland to be “the Future”. as a result of if you're in any serious manner involved regarding the long run, you’re conjointly involved regarding Thiel, a canary in capitalism’s coalpit World Health Organization conjointly happens to possess profited lavishly from his stake within the mining concern itself.
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Thiel is in one sense a caricature of large villainy: he was the sole major geographic area figure to place his weight behind the Trump presidential campaign; he vindictively bankrupted an internet site as a result of he didn’t like however they wrote regarding him; he's glorious for his public musings regarding the incompatibility of freedom and democracy, and for expressing interest – as if sky-high following the clunkiest doable trope for free enterprise at its most vampiric – in an exceedingly medical aid involving transfusions of blood from teenagers as a possible means that of reversing the ageing method. however in another, deeper sense, he's pure symbol: less someone than a shell company for a distributed portfolio of anxieties regarding the long run, an individual's emblem of the ethical vortex at the centre of the market.
It was in 2011 that Thiel declared he’d found “no alternative country that aligns additional with my read of the long run than New Zealand”. The claim was created as a part of associate application for citizenship; the applying was fleetly granted, tho' it remained a secret for an additional six years. In 2016, Sam Altman, one in all Si Valley’s most prestigious entrepreneurs, disclosed to the New Yorker that he had a meeting with Thiel whereby within the occurrence of some reasonably general collapse situation – artificial virus gaolbreak, rampaging AI, resource war between nuclear-armed states, thus forth – they each get on a personal jet and fly to a property Thiel owns in New Seeland. (The set up from this time, you’d got to assume, was to sit down out the collapse of civilisation before re-emerging to supply seed-funding for, say, the insect-based macromolecule sludge market.)
In the immediate wake of that Altman revelation, Matt Nippert, a newsperson for the New Seeland Herald, began wanting into the question of however specifically Thiel had get possession of this apocalypse retreat, a 477-acre former sheep station within the South Island – the larger, additional sparsely inhabited of the country’s 2 major landmasses. Foreigners wanting to buy important amounts of recent Seeland land generally got to undergo a rigorous government vetting method. In Thiel’s case, Nippert learned, no such method had been necessary, as a result of he was already a subject of recent Seeland, despite having spent no quite twelve days within the country up to it purpose, and having not been seen within the place since. He didn’t even got to trip New Seeland to possess his citizenship bestowed, it turned out: the deal was sealed in an exceedingly non-public ceremony at a diplomatic building handily set in Santa Monica.