People have cheered when orcas sank yachts belonging to the upper echelon, and watched with glee as Russian oligarchs\u2019 yachts were tracked and seized after the invasion of Ukraine. Billionaire moguls, once something to aspire to, are now seen as money-grubbers by large swathes of the population who believe that no one individual should hold such vast wealth.<\/p>\n
But if they know about an impending apocalypse a few hours in advance, McDonald figures, the rest of us could use publicly available data to know it, too.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s true that some billionaires have become apocalypse preppers, as detailed by author and documentarian Douglas Rushkoff in his 2022 book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. Most are not building literal sci-fi style doomsday bunkers, though some are, but creating guarded and well-stocked apocalypse additions within already existing structures, he said. Rushkoff, who studies human autonomy in a digital age, has questioned this bunker trend and supports calling more attention to it to emphasise the preposterousness.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs I asked the billionaires, \u2018How are you going to pay your Navy SEALs to protect your compound once your Bitcoin\u2019s worthless?\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The real-time tracker on Kyle McDonald\u2019s Apocalypse Early Warning System site. Photo \/ Apocalypse Early Warning System, The Washington Post<\/p>\n
He sees the apocalypse tracker as more of an indicator of billionaire panic rather than an actual world-ending, destructive event. Rushkoff has tried to persuade some billionaires to use their funds in a different way, such as by taking some of their wealth and trying to prevent a catastrophe.<\/p>\n
For McDonald, the idea for the end-of-an-era warning system occurred to him as the war in Iran expanded and the risk of a nuclear event seemed like a possibility not to be discounted. The tool is a response to his own anxiety, as well as the broader nervousness that appeared to be building in society as global and political unrest dominate headlines.<\/p>\n
Several of McDonald\u2019s past projects have centred around the issue of surveillance, including an app he made that uses facial recognition to identify ICE agents. Another app led the Secret Service to raid his home nearly 15 years ago, after he installed a program on computers at a New York City Apple store to capture pictures of people staring at screens. His latest project before the tracker, called MyEpstein, shows which of your contacts appear in the Epstein files.<\/p>\n
McDonald said he likes to flip surveillance around to use it to peer into the actions of the powerful.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am interested in creating this culture of accountability, and instilling a general sense of you can\u2019t just do whatever you want because you have power,\u201d he said. \u201cI also want to encourage everybody else to feel like, \u2018maybe there are some things we can do.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
McDonald\u2019s warning system does not identify the owners or passengers of individual jets, and he said he has no interest in doxing anyone. Jet tracking uses public data, and billionaires hate it, including Musk. The X owner suspended the account in 2022 of a then-college student who built a bot to follow his jet\u2019s location.<\/p>\n
The system has not risen above a level 4 since McDonald published it, and he has programmed it to take into account dates like major holidays and control for those likely vacation times.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy general goal here is to give people that kind of hacker mentality to be able to look at what\u2019s happening around us and not just see noise, but to actually see some of those patterns,\u201d McDonald said.<\/p>\n
If his warning system does trigger an apocalypse alert, McDonald said he joked to a billionaire he knows, \u201cI\u2019m staying with you\u201d.<\/p>\n
And if the ultrarich do flee cities in droves, it could give people a limited amount of time to make emergency plans of their own. The very wealthy will already be several steps ahead to safety.<\/p>\n
Where does that leave the rest of us?<\/p>\n
\u201cBehind,\u201d Rushkoff said.<\/p>\n
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor\u2019s Picks<\/a>, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week\u2019s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"People have cheered when orcas sank yachts belonging to the upper echelon, and watched with glee as Russian…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":422070,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[21230,23602,79752,11346,133824,138,79166,9189,305,33843,6036,5978,300,111,139,603,69,216705,5270,1136,183164,223,32333,8229,61,22974,4524,8222,377],"class_list":["post-422069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-advance","tag-amounts","tag-apocalypse","tag-billionaires","tag-bunkers","tag-business","tag-endless","tag-follow","tag-have","tag-jets","tag-know","tag-might","tag-money","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nuclear","tag-nz","tag-oligarchs","tag-one","tag-private","tag-sophisticated","tag-the","tag-theory","tag-they","tag-to","tag-track","tag-want","tag-warned","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=422069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422069\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/422070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=422069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=422069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=422069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}