Nauru and the Billionaires' Landscapes of Despair
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Above: an image of Nauru at night. Author Mojjjo1.
Watching the collapse of a billionaire and his empire is like a fireworks display: there’s the spectacle you expect, the colorful burning blooms that light up the night– and then, there’s the ones you don’t. Whether it’s a roman candle that ignites at an odd angle, or a piece of burning debris that heads for the neighbors’ roof, the real excitement is often in the surprising (and sometimes scary) details.
So it is with today’s headlines about the Sam Bankman-Fried lawsuit, which report that Bankman-Fried’s brother Gabe planned to use their considerable wealth to purchase the island nation of Nauru, and use it to build an apocalypse bunker so that the world’s “effective altruists” would survive any future apocalyptic event.
Wait… what?
OK, let’s back up a minute, because there’s a lot packed into that sentence. If you haven’t been following the conflagration of Sam Bankman-Fried, the very short version is that he was the chief executive of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange and crypto hedge fund that used to be one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world. FTX went bankrupt late last year after it surfaced that Bankman-Fried had carried out a massive amount of fraud (you can read the gory details here, but suffice it to say that it’s up there with debacles like Enron in terms of massive finance mess). The charges continue to pile up, and Bankman-Fried is currently awaiting trial at his parents’ home in Stanford CA.
The headline caught my eye, not because of the idea that a bunch of tech bros want to build themselves an island bunker (seriously, what else is new?) but because of the island in question: Nauru. Nauru is the world’s smallest island nation, located in Micronesia in the Central Pacific– the island is just over 8 square miles, with a bit over 10,000 residents, and no fresh water sources. Most of the articles covering this detail of the Bankman-Fried case focused on the eccentricity of buying an entire nation (even if a small one) to ensure the lives of a wealthy chosen few, and understandably so– but Nauru isn’t just any island nation.
The colonial landscape of Nauru
Nauru’s history is gnarled and winding, entwined by the vise of colonial extraction. My guess is that most readers of the words “island nation in the Pacific” picture a scenic place, all turquoise seas, undisturbed beaches, and swaying palms. The narrow ring of shoreline on Nauru does still resemble that imaginary, in places– but the vast majority of the island has long been a plundered skeleton, ripped apart by over a century of phosphate mining. The late 1800s saw a boom in demand for phosphate for the production of fertilizer, and around 1900, colonists learned that Nauru’s inland region was composed of 80% phosphate of lime. Germany (who at the time occupied Nauru) struck a deal with the Pacific Islands Company to mine the deposits, and the little island’s fate was sealed. Where once there was topsoil, abundant bird populations, and plant life, soon there would be ghostly fields of bony rock, gouged and scraped down to the coral and limestone below. Today, nearly all food (and occasionally fresh water) is imported into Nauru.
With only a finite amount of phosphate to sustain the economy, and a landscape now devoid of what natural resources it had had, Nauru branched out into a renewable resource: banks. By the 1990s, hundreds of banks had been established “on” Nauru, with “on” in quotes because one did not even have to set foot on Nauru to establish a bank there. Rather, these banks became tax havens and a nexus for money laundering operations. You can read more about Nauru’s fascinating history– including its use as an immigration detention location for asylum seekers– in this excellent article by Peter Dauvergne.
I first learned about Nauru from the work of artist and musician Paul Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky, who created a multimedia performance called the Nauru Elegies, which I got to see a performance of at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2013. Miller used open source data of wind and ocean currents in combination with visualizations of financial transactions to juxtapose these flows in and around Nauru, alongside images of the phosphate mining ruins that litter the island’s interior. Though in looking up sources for this essay I found that Nauru Elegies received some truly abysmal reviews, it made a clear and lasting impression on me– enough to prick up my ears when I saw that Nauru was where Gabe Bankman-Fried intended to wait out the apocalypse.
Above: a ship loads phosphate mined from Nauru, 1905.
TESCREAL Spells Brain Worms
On the face of it, it makes sense that someone adjacent to/entangled in a massive financial fraud would be interested in Nauru– it’s not really on a lot of people’s radars, unless of course they are seeking a convenient banking location for some shady shit. From the perspective of the Bankman-Fried brothers, I can see why they’d want to own not just an island, but specifically Nauru.
What really caught my attention, however, was the reported motivation of having Nauru be the home for a future bunker in which “effective altruists” could survive any future apocalypse. If you’ve been lucky enough to escape the world of Effective Altruists, or EA, it’s part of a bundle of closely related philosophies known as TESCREAL. TESCREAL is a terrible acronym for an even more terrible rat king of bad ideas: it stands for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. Rather than individually explaining each one of these, I’ll refer you to the excellent explanations in the recent episode of Kelly Hayes’ Movement Memos podcast. Kelly’s interview with philosopher Émile P. Torres is well worth a listen, because TESCREAL is hugely influential in shaping our world right now. Elements of TESCREAL have been around for a fairly long time, but in particular, many aspects of these philosophies have taken hold within tech culture, particularly amongst the wealthy white men who dominate leadership roles within technology spaces.
My introduction to these philosophies came around 2010, around the time I moved to the Bay Area, and received the TED Fellowship. Attending TED for the first time was like stepping into a parallel universe populated almost entirely by wealthy white techno-optimists, where Rich Men with Bad Ideas like Peter Diamandis and Elon Musk walked like gods, and everyone seemed to revere technology as an inherent good, with little to no engagement in history. Certain aspects of TESCREAL are so enmeshed with the culture that has grown out of Silicon Valley (and permeates spaces like TED) that many people who spend time in or adjacent to that culture don’t realize that the beliefs they take for granted are actually part of a much larger movement (similar to the way that Puritanism underpins many ideas about good and evil in US culture, even for people who are not expressly religious).
As Torres discusses on Movement Memos, Transhumanism, or the idea that human beings will be able to augment or engineer aspects of their existence to become immortal, is truly the spine of the TESCREAL bundle. You might have encountered some light transhumanist-flavored ideas in places like research into halting the aging process, “biohacking” approaches like extreme diets, and science fiction tropes of being able to replicate and download the human consciousness (see, for example, the Futurama episode “I Dated A Robot”). However, Transhumanists take the possibility of human immortality with profound seriousness (even if one of them very prominently campaigned for the US presidency in a coffin-shaped bus). They envision a future in which humans are able to alter or even transcend their bodies through cybernetics, to augment the mind with computers, and ultimately to achieve a kind of unlimited potential in which the universe is populated by immortal super beings. You’ll notice that I specifically said that the universe would be populated by these future humans– along with Transhumanism’s immediate immortality goals, certain billionaires’ obsession with people living in space is also fueled by TESCREAL.
Of course, you can’t really get too close to the phrase “super beings” before you see eugenics lurking close nearby– and indeed, the Bankman-Fried lawsuit purportedly also mentions that they hoped to do some “genetic enhancement” work in the Nauru bunker. It also doesn’t take too much further examination to see that Transhumanist thought has also seemingly never encountered disability studies, or literally any other branch of thought that might challenge the priorities of wealthy, white, able-bodied cis men.
The “EA” in TESCREAL, Effective Altruism, extends the Transhumanist spine out into the far future. EA supposes that, if Transhumanist goals for human immortality can be realized, then in the future the universe will be populated by untold multitudes of human beings, even if those human beings are actually digital entities that don’t have recognizable human bodies the way we do today. In the kind of rotten brain worm thinking that can only be brought to you by dudes in tech, the EA philosophy then supposes that most human beings will actually exist in the far, far future– and thus, to be maximally “effective”, EAists should only do things that will have the most benefit for the most people in the far future. EA adherents think that helping people who are suffering now would be nice and all, it’s just not… “effective”.
Baked into the EA philosophy is the notion that becoming as wealthy as possible is, therefore, a way of being maximally “effective”. EA adherents tell themselves that they aren’t in it for personal gain– of course not! No, they are in it so that they can save a googleplex of future digital entities living in the Andromeda galaxy. Sure.
Building a Bunker in the Post-Apocalypse
This wild voyage brings us back to the intended Nauru outpost of Gabe Bankman-Fried, where he hoped to shelter some number of the world’s Effective Altruists from any future apocalyptic event. Human extinction, and a far-flung future apocalypse, looms large for people drawn in by TESCREAL, again because these philosophies are a product of intellectual hypoxia brought on by thinking in a vacuum chamber. The descendents and beneficiaries of European colonization live with a kind of sublimated fear of being colonized themselves, conjuring a distant cataclysm or alien invasion. By contrast, Black and Indigenous thinkers throughout time, such as Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips of Black Quantum Futurism, exist within histories shaped by the apocalypses of racial capitalism, chattel slavery, and settler colonialism. To quote Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, speaking about Ayewa’s work at the Becoming Interplanetary event I organized a few years back at the Library of Congress:
“One of the things [Ayewa] says is [...] the end of the world has already happened that we are in the post apocalypse– post-apocalyptic times. And I think it's a really interesting way to think about our existence because on the one hand, you know, you could sort of frame it through this sort of perspective where it's gloom and doom but I think in other ways that invites us to do the stuff that we would do in the post-apocalyptic time, right, to kind of come together to figure out new possibilities, to repurpose and to really see this as an opportunity to reshape some of the existence of power that existed before the apocalypse happened. So, I think I always love coming back to this idea that the world has already ended.”
(You can watch the full panel discussion, as well as the entire event, here)
It’s particularly poignant that this week, prior to the Bankman-Fried headlines that now dominate its search results, Nauru declared a state of disaster: a live, 500 lb bomb leftover from World War II was unearthed there last month, and all schools and businesses had to be shut down for safety concerns while the bomb was defused.
I’ve always considered the TESCREAL umbrella to be so absolutely filled with some of the worst ideas, ideas so ludicrously removed from reality and unprobed by even a milimeter’s depth of thought, that I try to keep my distance (except for occasionally rubbernecking when something like this lawsuit or the coffin bus thing happens). However, it’s much to my dismay that these ideas have only seemed to coalesce (not coincidentally at the same time as other fascist ideologies are on the rise and finding footholds on social media platforms owned by people who ascribe to TESCREAL worldviews).
I think what gets me most is the assumed disposability of us all: somewhere, a man looks out a window in Stanford, and imagines an island paradise away from the vast majority of us, we who have conveniently been obliterated in a mystery apocalypse. Far from the Stanford window, across an ocean full of plastic, people live amidst the explosive litter of men who came there before, as invisible transactions flit by instead of birds.
Above: an image of the excavation site of a WWII era bomb on Naura, Australian Department of Defence