Preparing for anything and everything

while i wish i were delivering this talk

to you from a stage in tuscany for tedx

crusetto like many people around the

world

i’ve been grounded i’ve been stuck in

california where the difficulties of the

pandemic

have been compounded by wildfires and

social unrest

in fact just a few weeks ago a wildfire

raged close to here

that sent people looking to this dry

wash that i’m standing in is safe harbor

it was one of the only places that

wouldn’t burn

and i’m not unique in having to deal

with disaster people all over the world

are dealing with their own disaster

social political environmental

disasters are unfolding all around us

what’s unique

about my situation is that i expected

all of this

because for the past three years i’ve

been doing ethnographic research with

doomsday preppers

these are individuals and communities

who are preparing for a range of future

calamities

and many of the the preppers that i’ve

been spending time with

have told me that the future of humanity

is not in the stars

it’s not even in the oceans it’s in the

underground

the reason for this is simple human

beings are unique

in our ability to speculate on the

future and plan for disaster

anticipating the unexpected is a

hallmark

of what makes us human for thousands of

years people have been digging into the

underground

in order to bolster their defenses

against the unknown

take cappadocia for instance it’s the uh

in central anatolia in what is now

turkey

the hittites began carving out the soft

soft volcanic

tough there as their empire was

fragmenting

around 1200 bce they hauled out spaces

for

22 cities some of these cities are 60

meters below the earth’s surface

and here they carved out space for

living for storage and industry

inside subterranean systems that were

only accessible

through small entrances sealed in with

with these uh

three foot tall millstones that could be

rolled over the entrances

this design allowed for the stones to be

rolled open and closed

only from inside the bunker so very much

a a defensible space that was built

built with

intention there are 22 known

large-scale ancient subterranean cities

in this region and many of these places

still exist

we can visit them today or we could

before the pandemic

hopefully we will be able to soon again

during q the deepest of these 22 cities

is one of these that stretches to 60

meters below the surface

and it sheltered as many as 20 000

people

along with their livestock and food

storage

and they had 18 floors of bedrooms halls

churches armories storage chambers wells

and toilets

but it wasn’t until the victorians that

we began

seriously excavating the underground

it’s been

less than 250 years since human beings

began

seriously coring into into the earth’s

surface

and to date the deepest hole that was

ever dug

into the into the earth was the 22

centimeter wide cola borehole in the

russian arctic

which only made it point two percent of

the way to the earth’s mantle

in other words there’s a lot of room to

expand underground

as humans continue to burrow deeper into

the earth

now reaching hundreds of meters deep

over many layers

it’s become clear that the extensive

large-scale

disruption of underground rock fabric

has no analog

in earth’s 4.6 billion year history and

it’s only set to cons

to continue in the future so my argument

here tonight

is simple our future is underground and

the reasons for this are threefold

first the densification necessary for

the size of the earth’s population means

utilizing not just skyscrapers

that stack people into smaller and

smaller spaces but also subterranean

environments

second the implementation of

increasingly granular atmospheric

surveillance systems means that the

underground

is literally the last place to hide

secrets

and finally a collapsing climate

is going to drive us into subterranean

space where we can most easily control

the parameters of our own survival

so let’s work through each of these in

kind

first the densification of sustainable

cities

the united nations estimates that by

2050

68 of the world’s population will live

in urban areas

this would not be possible without

significant

vertical densification of critical

infrastructure

singapore is a great example of this

singapore has got a master plan for the

city which includes

a subterranean master plan so it’s a

it’s a volumetric imagination of how the

city is going to expand

singapore is now burying infrastructure

retail shops pedestrian walkways highway

storage

homes and offices the underground

city is one that will be planned

rational

calculable and subject to constant

surveillance

of course it’s a new kind of underground

space

because anything that’s built you can

control the environment underground but

you can also control

how that environment is uh surveilled

how it’s how it’s um how the people can

interact within that environment

just as a skyscraper might be considered

the architectural form that defined

the 20th century its foil the geoscraper

a resilient structure built for density

and control

might come to define the coming age of

turmoil

second defense and security many of you

will recall

that during the recent black lives

matter protests u.s president donald

trump hid in a bunker

in addition to the bunkers that come

with the job as pr of president

he’s bragged about having bunkers under

his estate in westchester new york

and under his international golf club in

suburban west palm beach

according to department of defense

estimates there are approximately

10 000 underground military

installations

in the world just over a decade ago

many of these are not visible from the

earth’s surface

at the same time civilian advancements

in technology

coupled with an increasingly intrusive

government systems

of surveillance means that we’re losing

our our personal privacy at a rapid clip

we’ve entered a new stage of capitalism

techno-liberalism perhaps

a form of governance in which

politicians across the spectrum are

willing to erode

civil liberties the environment and the

social safety net in exchange

for campaign financing and cozy

relationships

with the wealthy technology companies

that are turning

all of our movements purchases and

relationships into usable and sellable

data

the widespread acceptance of

surveillance culture is the catalyst for

a new dark

age a paranoid feedback loop

in which the failure to comprehend the

world leads to more demand

for more information which only further

clouds our understanding

of what is actually going on more

information here does not provide more

clarity but rather more confusion

as can be seen from the the recent

adoption

of conspiracy theories like the q anon

theory

all of this has created a permanent

pathology in the populace

where um we can never know any longer

that we’re not being surveilled we’re

always living our lives

as if we’re being watched and that

changes our behaviors to a great extent

so the third point i want to make here

is about climate change

in 2012 the a un

uh intergovernmental panel on climate

change the ipb

ipcc suggested the next 20 years

the temperature increase will almost

certainly cause

widespread widespread global flooding

wildfires

infrastructural collapse crop failures

species extinction

and mass migration at the end of 2019

and the beginning of 2020 many of you

will remember

bush fire fires raged around australia

coding sydney and then melbourne

followed by the capital

canberra and almost the entire country

with the thick toxic ochre haze that

required people to mask up

air pollution levels rose to 22 times

the accepted level

over millions of acres as an area the

size of south korea burned hot

and fast at the beginning of the fires

many people started building fire

bunkers

in their backyard after these fires

these are these are bunkers that people

can hide in underground

as the fires rage over them places of

safe harbor

again just like this wash

just as black saturday in australia

was a wake-up call for many to start

prepping the 2019-2020 bushfires were

the first time many australians

understood the drought

ravaging the inland in visceral terms

and it didn’t take long for the rest of

the world to understand

what those bushfires pretended

soon i started seeing bunkers everywhere

in europe in canada the korea peninsula

thailand and australia today like many

of the technologies we use the bunker

has achieved

escape velocity from its origins it is

no longer something that

only governments build it’s no longer an

architecture that’s connected just to

the cold war

people are building bunkers for

environmental collapse they’re building

bunkers to

escape the surveillance state people are

building bunkers as

spaces of secrecy and people are

building bunkers

as spaces of defense against the

improbable

and the impossible

you