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Maybe slightly off topic to the article, but I don't really care what Peter Thiel has to say. I do think we need to collectively think about how to not give these people a microphone. It's one thing to have concentrated wealth. It's a very different thing to have concentrated wealth and people's attention. I think that's a much more interesting discussion :).
This is the article's second sentence:
"Thiel’s lurid, apocalyptic view of world politics may be ludicrous or even deranged, but his wealth and power mean that we can’t afford to ignore it."
Fundamentally money can buy a microphone (including literally).
That said, buying airtime/ads does is not sufficient to create traction with your ideas. I have worked at plenty of foundations that spend a lot of money to "raise awareness" on various issues, which ultimately goes nowhere.
IMHO the zany, outlandish claims by Thiel, are gaining attention because of their inherent shock-value. I sent a text to my girlfriend last week, incredulous that Thiel was reported to claim the Pope is now an antichrist (¡). Definitely not because I agreed with that claim.
I think the root issue here is deep to human nature -- heightened awareness of danger, that adrenaline amygdala response. Social media helps these messages spread, but news publishers have been putting train wrecks on the front page since the 1800s. A growing handful of savvy operators, Thiel included, have learned how to manipulate this primal instinct to garner fame and influence.
I'm not sure how to change human nature. I do think that education about these tactics helps -- the magic trick is not as impressive when you know how it is done.
I find the premise of projects like Ground News -- trying to de-bias media -- really compelling.
That said, a de-biasing site isn't much help if people don't read it. Infamously, people's politically-melded worldviews are increasingly divorced for reality -- there's a famous example of people in surveys saying they "hated Obamacare" but "loved and relied on the Affordable Care Act" (for international readers: those are the exact same thing, which a simple google search would reveal).
I agree on the first part - I could not care any less about those insane superrich. But they use their money to influence people - this part is dangerous and must be stopped.
His power is not in his public speech, but in his money, connections and private speech. I think overall it's probably more useful to expose just how insane his views are, even if that publicizes them more broadly.
The trouble is, he isn't just a crazy uncle. He's a crazy uncle with significant political power.
Unfortunately he and people like him own the microphone, the PA system, the stadium…
Voting is the only power we have but the voting booths are at the stadium.
The issue is that having concentrated wealth and having concentrated people's attention are not separate things.
On the contrary, people should talk about these parasites more so we can get rid of them, they thrive in the shadows
> I do think we need to collectively think about how to not give these people a microphone.
I've said this about celebrities for two decades now. Most people don't care though; they love the gossip, I guess.
> It's one thing to have concentrated wealth. It's a very different thing to have concentrated wealth and people's attention.
Because of human nature, the two are inseparable, and influence over people's attention is power, especially when those people hold seats of power.
The question is about what perspective society takes towards wealth/power concentration at any given time, and that usually ends up correlated with how the non-wealthy and non-powerful are feeling.
you should care, he and his fellow nutters have siezed control of the USA and most tech-mega-corp leadership either agree with them or will go along with them.
It would be nice to be able to ignore Peter Thiel's opinions, but that's not a luxury we can afford while he's buying federal law enforcement politicians up to and including the vice president to help implement his crazy.
The name of the draft document escapes me but there's burgeoning work on this. (IETF?)
IIRC it covers things like how to maintain proper oxygen levels and sustenance while still blocking frequencies in the human audible range with the sand around one's head.
You and the article's position about not ignoring his views are both right.
One cannot ignore his views (for the reasons stated) and yet there needs to be a feedback loop to limit the spread of their views using their wealth and influence.
Buying elections, politicians, doesn't require a microphone.
I agree about handing the wrong people a microphone, but people are handing it to him and he has money so it potentally matters, even if I think it should not.
On the other hand, nothing is quite as liberating as finding out that being batshit insane doesn't automatically disqualify you from tremendous economic success.
"The notion that because one is rich one must be smart, however fallacious, is deeply embedded: People can equate piles of money - or the promise of it - with good sense, wisdom, and savoir faire," she wrote." (2000)
The writer who dared criticize Silicon Valley
What matters most is what people with extreme wealth do with that wealth because the power means those actions can affect many many people. Listening to them can help you predict what those actions may be, either because they say outright what they are planning, or because the tone of their rants can indicate a mindset that would lead to some actions being much more probable than others.
I hate having to listen to rich people. To me its as bad as having to listen to politicians, but these people affect my life (whether I like it or not) so I have to listen to know what's coming.
Having peoples’ attention strikes me as not very interesting when you can just buy a newspaper (or the opinions therein) and have it anyway.
Thiel is courting Christian nutjobs whether or not you pay attention to it. I’m personally not gonna stick my head in the sand.
Where to draw the line? Only the right-wing billionaires? What about other more left-wing like Soros.
And what about the influencers with millions of followers (recent Qatari influence campaign comes to mind)? What about Hollywood (again Qataris and their influence campaign, if you notice how some famous actors started to speak on certain topics)
Having listened to a fair amount of Thiel, he tends to be very, very mischaracterized. He relies on metaphor and allegory to describe the world, and is very philosophical and analytical–all of which opens the door to broad interpretation. For instance, his use of the phrase "Antichrist" has been wildly (and deliberately, IMO) misinterpreted by the commentariat and intelligentsia that dominate our sense making institutions. I'm not suggesting anyone should agree with everything (or anything!) he says, but I think the dismissal of him is to one's own detriment as much of it is very interesting and thoughtful.
His ramblings aren't that relevant. The problem is that the money
is used to get influence; we could see this with Musk too.
Something has to change. The superrich act as parasites and broken all inter-generational promises. The USA really messed up here - they should have put down control systems to prevent this parasitic situation.
And here I thought he was just trying to wrap his techno libertoonian worldview in the Book of Revelations in the hopes that the religious right would get behind it. Did I miss something?
While it's possible this is true, I would have preferred that the article make its own case on why Thiel is crazy and not just cite the Guardian. The article is written for someone who already agrees with the title.
> Thiel transforms US imperial power and unrestrained technological expansion ... into the final rampart against what he imagines as a catastrophic global homogenization.
Thiel warns about Antichrist, while doing the very thing that's enabling his coming. Unrestrained technological expansion is exactly what's erasing the human spirit and replacing it with a machine culture.
Hmm... If anybody meets the definition of his antichrist, it might be him.
The notion that there is an antichrist and that "international agencies, environmentalism and guardrails on technology could quicken its rise" is ludicrous.
The only reason we listen to his nonsense is because he has money, and with that comes power in this country.
I suggest he take some shrooms and chill...
It's crazy how this is trickling down. I work with someone who has recently started openly talking about the antichrist and is convinced the final revelation is going to occur. This person has always been loony but it seems to be going into hyperdrive.
Fossil fuel is the real antichrist!
"Dozens of churches withdraw investments from fossil fuels"
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/dozens-churches-withdraw...
Would that the mainstream press had treated the Gawker episode as the five-alarm free speech fire that it was.
> This is what Thiel’s apocalyptic geopolitics looks like in practice: a twisted military-industrial eschatology where an AI-powered genocide is understood to be “restraining” rather than enacting the end of the world.
I could have used some more explication on the connection between Thiel's ideology and Palantir's project portfolio. I felt like this article was structured like "Part 1: Thiel is Crazy, Part 2: Palantir is Awful, Conclusion: They are Related", without really making clear what the relationship between them was. It seems pretty contradictory that someone concerned about "The New One World Order" would create a global police technology apparatus, so deep-diving into the cognitive dissonance there (and how it is soothed by the ideology) would have been interesting (to me).
I don't think Thiel or Schmitt (whoever that really is) are good spokesmen for the Christian doctrines of the antichrist or the restrainer, concepts that go back to the first century early church. I also don't much like the implication that believing in these Christian ideas is extremely dangerous or the undertone that believing it should probably be stopped by any means.
The restrainer (2 Thessalonians 2:6&7) is a bit of an enigma, but has been variously interpreted as the Holy Spirit, the Church, human government, or the archangel Michael.
But to let Scripture speak for itself, here is an except from 2 Thessalonians 2:
1 Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to Him, we ask you, brothers, 2 not to be easily disconcerted or alarmed by any spirit or message or letter seeming to be from us, alleging that the Day of the Lord has already come. 3 Let no one deceive you in any way, for it will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness—the son of destruction—is revealed. 4 He will oppose and exalt himself above every so-called god or object of worship. So he will seat himself in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God.
5 Do you not remember that I told you these things while I was still with you? 6 And you know what is now restraining him, so that he may be revealed at the proper time. 7 For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but the one who now restrains it will continue until he is taken out of the way. 8 And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will slay with the breath of His mouth and annihilate by the majesty of His arrival.
9 The coming of the lawless one will be accompanied by the working of Satan, with every kind of power, sign, and false wonder, 10 and with every wicked deception directed against those who are perishing, because they refused the love of the truth that would have saved them. 11 For this reason God will send them a powerful delusion so that they believe the lie, 12 in order that judgment may come upon all who have disbelieved the truth and delighted in wickedness.
Seems like any time posts about Thiel and a few other billionaires gain traction it flies off the front page quickly.
Sometimes I wonder - do vast amounts of wealth and power precipitate mental illness in certain minds that are predisposed to it?
Whatever he or his political servants believe, in a few years the Democrats will reign and he will be forgotten.
Thiel's ramblings seem so unhinged, delusions of grandeur.
I am so thankful that I'm not rich enough to be surrounded by people who agree with every single half baked thought that I put out.
Like anything else with Thiel, it's a viewed formed by a socially-maladjusted twerp who was picked on and now wants to rule the world. He's found a lot of useful lieutenants in that quest, mostly because they, like him, resent the fact that no amount of power or money or yes-men surrounding them will quiet their inner insecurities.
The truly insidious calculation they all eventually got to is that in Trump you have someone that is somehow even more insecure and craven than them and can be straight bought and sold to the highest bidder. They give Trump the superficial credibility of having ostensibly smart people behind him, and Trump gives them the benefits of being adjacent to his non-stop corruption and self-dealing machine.
I would have never believed it 10 years ago. I actually think there is a high probability the world will be ended, not by war or natural disaster, but by an honest to god trillionaire super villain.
The ultra wealthy are an actual existential threat to humanity. No one can be trusted with that much money and power.
The problem that this article has is essentially this:
> Thiel by contrast is profiting from the use of AI weapons targeting systems used in the Ukraine war and the genocide in Gaza.
Thiel is IMO not doing this for profit. He is deeply ideological, which should be more worrisome.
I mean, they have a point. But considering they run a whole journal on literal communism, it’s hard to take them seriously. The message falls flat when it comes from a different flavor of dangerous fantasy.
Thiel is a creepy fuck, as are most tech bros.
I mean, he looks perfectly human; but once he opens his mouth.
Hubris.
It will end him, and his insanely stupid ideology. He is obviously a sociopath with very deep childhood trauma. Karma will get him. Probably cancer as he seems to be genially rotten soul.
For anyone wondering about the source, here is how Jacobin describes themselves:
“ Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. ”
Left wing magazine discovers metaphor; confuses it for Nazism
To me this piece just looks like someone who hates wealth and willfully misunderstands metaphors.
If you can parse the academic jargon and get past the ad hominem, the article is a basic meditation on how the state of information technology continues to support both centralization and distribution of decisions.
This ambivalence mirrors the paradox of American empire, where the United
States sees itself simultaneously as a guarantor of global order and a
bulwark against world government: the “world’s policeman” unbound by
international law.> This justifies the most extreme violence against his opponents while protecting his own views from contestation. Thiel’s world is a battlefield of moral absolutes rather than a terrain of political complexity where different interests and values are contested and negotiated.
The irony of this being on a site called jacobin is palpable.