Preppers Are Quite Prepared to Enjoy Some Vindication

For years, one of the most smirked-at subspecies in the technology ecosystem was that of the Silicon Valley Prepper. You were always hearing about them, these men with soft jobs and hardened paranoia. The $0.99 game developer with a bug-out bag; the venture capitalist with a bunker in New Zealand; the cloud administrator learning to bowhunt for a survivalist future. The preppers were living in flush times in a beautiful region, but it seemed like the first thing they did with money was steel for the apocalypse.

Now, with Covid-19, they feel vindicated. Because they are. The coders and founders long snickered at for stockpiling flour and toilet paper were absolutely right.

Properly masked and drenched in Purell, they are railing against a tech press that they feel mocked them as late as February for reducing travel and not shaking hands. They are — of course they are — making a slew of Covid-related start-up investments. And a coolheaded blog called The Prepared, with features like “Prepping Checklist for Beginners” and “Rational Reasons You Should Prepare,” is emerging as the voice of a movement.

John Ramey, a longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur, started the site in 2018. “People are realizing the last few stable decades have been a fluke,” he told me by phone, from somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. “It’s the coronavirus now, but people have been watching climate change, inequality, late-stage capitalism, post-World War II systems falling apart. Our institutions have dropped the ball.”

Observing all of this is one thing. Acting on it is another. The moment when you first started prepping for coronavirus has become perhaps the hottest new credential in Silicon Valley. Noticing it early signaled that you were someone who kept a close eye on China, ignored official channels of information, brushed off snark and knew how to parse data.

Why, in the techno-futurist worldview, is disaster always near? Surely it’s relevant that the industry is built atop an earthquake zone. But there may also be something about making money in a heartbeat that predisposes you to imagine it disappearing in one.

It could be that if you spend all day thinking of ways to break a system, you realize how easily everything can be broken.

But perhaps most of all, it could be that in Silicon Valley, the best people train themselves to be happy to be surprised. There is a sense among them that the East Coast is the old world, conservative, backward-looking. But in the start-up world, discovering that you’re wrong or that an assumption is flawed is great. It probably means there’s an opportunity to make money.

Goofball hobbyists vs. cutthroat survivors

Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, a group studying artificial intelligence, became a figurehead of the Bay Area prepper movement after a 2016 New Yorker article appeared in which he acknowledged amassing “guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”

He’s not in Big Sur today — not yet, at least. When I called him recently, he was still in San Francisco, where he has been working with his brother, Max Altman, to organize a bulk order of one billion single-use masks from China.

To Mr. Altman, the early days of the coronavirus captured a long-running tension between tech leaders and a press they view as dismissive and overly negative. “The interesting question isn’t ‘Why did Silicon Valley get it right?’ It’s ‘How did everyone else get it so wrong?’” Mr. Altman said. “One theory is that because initially it was mostly the tech industry saying this was bad, and the media seem to like to say whatever the tech industry thinks is wrong, particularly if it will get some clicks, they mocked the people raising the alarm.”

In January and February, he watched as prominent Silicon Valley investors — notably Balaji S. Srinivasan, Paul Graham, and Geoff Lewis — began tweeting prolifically about the coronavirus.

On Feb. 13, when Vox published an article headlined “‘No handshakes, please’: The tech industry is terrified of the coronavirus,” many tech preppers became incensed, convinced they were being mocked — and that the public was not listening. Much of the mainstream news coverage at the time relied on the World Health Organization and government messaging that discouraged mask-wearing and downplayed the virus’s risks.

But the tech prepper ranks grew. One convert is Ari Paul, the chief investment officer of BlockTower Capital, a cryptocurrency investment firm, who saw Mr. Srinivasan’s tweets and began stocking up in February. “I bought some nitrile gloves, a month of food, a month of water, and a few months of cash,” Mr. Paul told me, from an undisclosed rural location. He has started keeping a machete by the door, just in case.

A second is Julie Fredrickson, who recently sold Stowaway, a venture-backed makeup brand. She had become “a China watcher” out of necessity: It was where she sourced cosmetics. Because she was in the habit of reading supply chain reports, she perked up at early, disturbing reports from Wuhan. “China doesn’t shut down cities,” she said. Ms. Fredrickson was raised in the Bay Area but now lives in Manhattan, where “we enjoy showing off our water bricks in our one-bedroom and the go-bags in the couch.”