Dear Billionaires,
I’ve done my best to join you, but so far – I haven’t even gotten close. The reason I’ve tried wasn’t because I want to be a rich guy with a big swimming pool and a fancy car collection. Nor is it that I want any of the other trappings of wealth and power that I’ve seen you exercise. I’m not interested in buying the presidency or colonizing other planets. I’m not interested in eating exotic lizards or putting my name on hotels. No, the reason I’ve been playing and failing at your capitalist game is because I can see how glorious our species and our world could be – I can see how desperately we are failing at creating a utopia and frankly, I’m surprised you don’t see it. If you do see it, I’m surprised you haven’t done anything about it. The attempts that I see you guys engaging in – largely seem focused on just creating your own personal gilded utopias – and frankly, I just don’t get it. Don’t you guys see that if you improved the condition of everyone – it would improve your own condition that much more? Hey, let go of your wallet’s money bags, you don’t need to worry, I’m not talking about redistributing wealth. You know and I know that a wealth redistribution scheme wouldn’t work out that well for most people – it would just be a refiltering of wealth to the top again.
No, I’m talking about actually building fucking utopias. You are the first humans in history to have the resources, the power, the technology, and the opportunity to actually build utopian civilizations. Why are you fucking around with politics at all? You have the ability to go around all of that. You have the ability to hire the best talent, the greatest minds, the most visionary thinkers. You can take the best ideas the world has ever known and build upon them, expand them, and implement them.
The utopian communities and communes of the 19th century, the cooperatives and communes of the 1960s, even the Raj Neeshi city in the 1980s in Oregon – all of these were built with less than any of you earn in a month. There are people willing to volunteer, there are people willing to work, there are people willing and desirous of living in a different type of society.
You have the power to create the way human civilization will function for the next ten thousand years. You have the ability to buy towns, cities, states, islands, countries and to create new forms of human civilization. Forms that actually work – or forms that fail and pave the way for the forms that will eventually work.
Why have none of you bought a town and found the people who are willing to live in it and build the future? I can’t understand why you focus on golf courses and eating steaks and just building your bank accounts bigger when you could be creating ten thousand years of the future? Nobody will remember most of what you are doing in two hundred years, if anything at all.
I appreciate some of what Elon Musk and Bill Gates and some others are doing – but by working within the framework of governments they can only fail. Why not start at the smallest level and build the next level of governments? Why not start with the municipality, build the coalitions of them, and then move forward?
Why not create ‘Dream Spaces’ where visionaries and artists can expend their energy doing what they do best instead of finding the time to follow their purpose between 50 hour weeks of drudgery? Why not use your wealth, your power, your achievements – to truly change the future. Build a town, select the residents, establish a new system – not capitalism, democracy, communism, or dictatorship – something new, something truly revolutionary. Why not create a viral form of human existence that defeats all the known -isms? Why not build a garden of eden and fill it with people who share your values?
Maybe you guys are doing this and keeping it all secret – seems like that would be a hard secret to keep. Maybe you just don’t care and want to fill your time living with more steaks, more rounds of golf, more pussy or dick, more yachts and jets – but you have the opportunity right now to do so much more. I think you should take it.
Also, I think you know this, but, you should probably not waste any time. It sure feels like your time is running out quickly. You may have 99.9% of the wealth, but there are still nearly 8 billion of us and life isn’t getting any easier for most of us – in fact – most are steps away from desperation. Everything has failed the rest of us – and unless you can find a way to appease us, win us to your side, or kill us all – we are probably going to be coming for you very soon.
I hope you decide to change the world and the future.
I’m going to keep trying to make my way to where you are – because in our system – I can’t see any other way of doing what I’ve mentioned above. If I get there, I’m going to show you what I mean – if not, I hope you show me.