Huffman has been a frequent attendee at Burning Man, the annual, clothing-optional festival in the Nevada desert, where artists mingle with moguls. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”
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It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.” You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia.
“All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. Last spring, as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition.
But in recent years survivalism has expanded to more affluent quarters, taking root in Silicon Valley and New York City, among technology executives, hedge-fund managers, and others in their economic cohort. Survivalism, the practice of preparing for a crackup of civilization, tends to evoke a certain picture: the woodsman in the tinfoil hat, the hysteric with the hoard of beans, the religious doomsayer. I figure that, with that, I can hole up in my house for some amount of time.”
He is less focussed on a specific threat-a quake on the San Andreas, a pandemic, a dirty bomb-than he is on the aftermath, “the temporary collapse of our government and structures,” as he puts it. Huffman, who lives in San Francisco, has large blue eyes, thick, sandy hair, and an air of restless curiosity at the University of Virginia, he was a competitive ballroom dancer, who hacked his roommate’s Web site as a prank. “If the world ends-and not even if the world ends, but if we have trouble-getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass,” he told me recently. He underwent the procedure not for the sake of convenience or appearance but, rather, for a reason he doesn’t usually talk much about: he hopes that it will improve his odds of surviving a disaster, whether natural or man-made. of Reddit, which is valued at six hundred million dollars, was nearsighted until November, 2015, when he arranged to have laser eye surgery. Steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O.
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