The escape plan economy: Elites, collapse and control

As Kim Stanley Robinson writes in The Ministry for the Future:

“Early in the twenty-first century it became clear that the planet was incapable of sustaining everyone alive at Western levels, and at that point the richest pulled away into their fortress mansions, bought the governments or disabled them from action against them, and bolted their doors to wait it out until some poorly theorised better time.”

Today, as the post-war multilateral architecture crumbles under the blows of a new global realpolitik, we are witnessing a dual historical movement. The regression from collective governance to the law of the strongest on the international stage finds its precise counterpart in the domestic sphere of the nation-state.

This Hobbesian paradigm, which transforms international relations into a head-on clash between powers, produces profound morphological effects within advanced societies, particularly in the United States where theories of state dissolution – understood not as mere retreat but as the active dismantling of public structures – gain consensus among technocratic elites. The most radical versions of neoliberalism are gaining ground to escape the constraints and restrictions of democratic governments, which are deemed incompatible, according to the ultra-capitalists of Silicon Valley, with the expansion of individual dominion.

What emerges is a perverse symmetry: just as the "winner-takes-all" logic asserts itself internationally in the race for strategic resources, so too at the national level a project of institutional deconstruction is being consolidated. This aims to emancipate the hyper-capitalised individual from all communal bonds. The libertarian fantasy of a man completely freed from the shackles of society – the absolute individual as sole sovereign of the self – reaches its most extreme and dangerous formulation here, especially when set against a backdrop of already surpassed planetary ecological limits.

This dual dynamic – the unilateral hoarding of global resources and the deconstruction of the social state – represents not only a political aberration but a systemic folly of historic proportions. It is the acting out of the maxim après moi, le déluge”, elevated to an organising principle of civilisation at the moment of its environmental collapse.

The escape plan economy

One of the most disturbing aspects of this evolution is the advent of what we can define as an Escape Plan Economy. While financial giants buy up the planet's vital resources, the technological elite gathers in secret societies to discuss not only how to avoid climate collapse, but also how to provoke it and profit from it. The idea labs are not just corporate boards, but the 21st century's secret societies.

This economy, operating in the shadowy zones of global communication, is not measured by GDP – abstract monetary flows and financial assets detached from material reality – but by two concrete and brutal variables: control of essential physical resources (water, rare earths, agricultural land, energy sources) and the technological and logistical capacity to isolate oneself from the rest of the world.

In the Escape Plan Economy, mega-investment funds and billionaire elites do not merely predict a future of climate crisis and social instability; they are actively building and financing it, with the dual objective of profiting from it and securing an exclusive exit from a collapse of which they are the main architects.

Let's start with the financial colossi. BlackRock, with over $10 trillion in assets under management, is not just a wealth manager: it is an entity that shapes the real world. Under the guise of "sustainable investment," BlackRock is acquiring water rights in arid zones like Australia and farms across the United States. This is not mere land speculation, but the systematic control of access to food and water, the most valuable commodities in an ecological crisis scenario. Along with Vanguard and State Street, they are defined as the "Big Three" of the world's stock exchanges. They hold controlling shares in almost all the multinationals that control our food, energy, and medicines. Through this cross-ownership, they dictate policies that rarely make front-page news, but which decide who will have access to resources and who will not. It is an opaque and profoundly anti-democratic form of power.

If the funds are buying, strategy merchants like McKinsey operate on both sides of the conflict: advising governments on how to manage the climate emergency and energy transition while working for Exxon, Aramco, ENI, and for the funds speculating on the crisis. They advised on the privatisation of water in Chile, designed plans for "climate austerity" that offload costs onto the public, and pushed for carbon markets that allow polluters to pay to pollute.

While the financial system prepares, its main beneficiaries are putting personal evacuation plans into practice. This is not science fiction; it is current affairs. Peter Thiel, a major sponsor of US Vice President Vance, funds "seasteading" projects – libertarian city-states on artificial islands – and has acquired property and citizenship in New Zealand, the elite bunker par excellence. His company, Palantir, develops artificial intelligence for mass surveillance, perfect for controlling dissent in times of scarcity. Larry Ellison (Oracle) owns the entire Hawaiian island of Lanai. Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) has built a $100 million complex in Hawaii with underground bunkers. Elon Musk promotes the Martian dream. Their ethos is that of the "lifeboat ethic": save themselves, leaving others to their fate.

The allure of the apocalypse: Accelerationism and high-tech neo-feudalism

Where are these global strategies forged? If the annual Bilderberg meeting – that reserved conclave of 130-150 of the most powerful CEOs, bankers, heads of state and intelligence – represents the vision of the traditional establishment, a new generation of more nihilistic and technophile networks thrives alongside it.

These clubs, often funded by the omnipresent Peter Thiel, elevate selection to a Darwinian criterion. At one of his most emblematic creations, the Apocalypse Ball, the imminent global collapse is transformed into a decadent spectacle where the tech-elite, posing as underdogs and victims of the system, openly discuss accelerating the disintegration of nation-states. For these apostles of disruption, only the dismantling of existing structures could release the compressed forces of the creative individual. In this framework, avoiding or causing the apocalypse become ethically neutral alternatives, mere variables in an equation whose true objective is to demonstrate the elite's superiority in survival. In this vision, as Elon Musk has said, empathy becomes an evolutionary obstacle to be overcome.

Meanwhile, in the rooms of Bilderberg, the architectures of future governance are hypothesised. In press-proofed rooms, habitués like BlackRock's Larry Fink, McKinsey executives, former CIA directors, and EU commissioners outline the contours of a "climate adaptation" (the Lisbon session in 2023 coincided with, if not signalled, a new phase in the governance of the European Green Deal) which coincides with a "managed decline" – an elegant formula that could construct an asymmetrical austerity for the benefit of the already powerful. This is not a shadow government, but one of the sites of global capital's realpolitik where visions can convert into political agendas. The theme of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), for instance, circulated here as a proposal before appearing in the public dialogue of states.

The endgame is a high-tech neo-feudalism: a class of ultra-rich protected in self-sufficient enclaves, controlling vital resources through financial instruments, while the rest of humanity faces climate chaos and famine.

The resistance

Resistance to this pre-ordained future requires equally radical strategies: the reclamation of state power, the creation of public banks to subtract power from BlackRock and Vanguard, the expropriation of hoarded common goods, the defence of water and land as collective assets rather than financial ones, and constant pressure to expose and disrupt the networks of power that meet behind closed doors. In this context, the role of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund is one that warrants close attention.

With the elite at work building the dystopia, the variable is the collective reaction. The escape plan is in an advanced stage of realisation. The countdown has begun.

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