Survival of the Richest

Douglas Rushkoff's book is billed as a look at the "escape fantasies" of billionaires, but it's more helpfully a dissection of how the mindset of "move fast and break things" is ruining the planet. Like Sarah Kendzior's book They Knew, Survival demonstrates how all of the grand plans that billionaires have to save the planet leave 99 percent of the population behind. In both books, the great unwashed are shown to be little more than a nuisance to these men. Rushkoff explains that rather than fixing things incrementally and with a sense of modesty, hyper-libertarian tech bros must all start from zero (throw everything out) and go exponentially beyond any rational solution to the problem. Rushkoff leaves the reader with an ominous warning: "We've never seen a society avoid fascism when it gets to this stage of economic inequality, or civilization avoid collapse when it has taxed its physical environment to this extent."