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