TechBro Apocalyptic Fantasy Hour
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My disdain for fantasy lit is well-known and at least some of it has to do with the authoritarianism inherent to way too much of it. That has such an outsized impact on our politics because of the popularity of the genre, especially with the computer geek world, a few of whom have become Titans of the New Gilded Age. So you end up with shit like this:
Large corporations are shopping for underground bunkers that can survive a nuclear blast to protect their data centers and C-suite employees as geopolitical tensions rise. The first adopters are primarily cryptocurrency firms, companies that build the facilities told Semafor.
Larry Hall, owner of Kansas-based Survival Condo, said he recently priced an underground data center and executive suite space to a crypto company for $64 million. Survival Condo counts eight companies in the planning stages of building bunkers, three of which are competing to purchase an existing 150,000-square-foot facility in Kansas serving the same purpose — a project started by a Big Oil billionaire who died before it was completed.
The pitch is the apocalypse. “The nuclear clock is moving closer to midnight,” Hall intoned in a telephone interview from the company’s Kansas bunker facility, a 54,000-square-foot residential space outfitted with a rock wall and hydroponics farm. “The more worries there are in the headline news, the more people look for solutions.”
Part of the heightened appeal for bunkers is the ever-growing value of data. The company Iron Mountain, which now describes itself as an information management firm, got its start offering secure storage in a depleted iron ore mine to banks amid the first wave of nuclear fears in the 1950s. (The television show Mr. Robot includes an anarchist attack on its fictional doppelgänger in the hopes of wiping the global financial slate clean.) Iron Mountain now rents out 330,000 square feet of data center space in a former Pennsylvania limestone mine, serving finance, government, and healthcare industries, according to its website. It also stores government employee retirement papers — a practice recently targeted by Elon Musk’s DOGE as outdated.
Safeguarding the physical aspects of data — server racks, power systems, cooling equipment — can help prevent economic disruptions. The market got a taste of what a major crypto crash looks like when FTX filed for bankruptcy and its executives faced fraud charges in 2022. Other crypto firms took a hit, but the financial losses and reputational harm spilled over into banks, venture capital, and fintech as well.
Companies are hard-pressed to protect their data on domestic land. Though nuclear threats have long existed, the increasingly frayed relationships between Western countries and adversaries like Russia and North Korea have renewed bunker interest. European customers fear the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East may soon hit closer to home. Natural disasters have also taken their toll in the US in recent years, exacerbated by the effects of climate change.
Got to keep that C-suite alive when the zombies come!