Peter Thiel, Scourge of Silicon Valley
economist.com
economist.com
"do no evil" might have been the contrarian counterpoint in the nascent early to mid 2000's, but now Thiel, and those with similar cultural, social, and political ideals, has chosen "we have chosen sides" — Thiel wants to position himself as someone who is for and against something, anything, where most technology companies have a bland, homogenous corporate neutrality
I don't think his end goal is trying to get his favored political candidates back to office or something — Thiel is cultivating a larger story and seeding his ideas about the act of choosing sides, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that
summing his life as a Silicon Valley bad guy is a gross oversimplification — his actions and work is the product of decades of his study and thought, and has evolved in a number of ways over time if you follow his writings and interviews
it's clear that he holds the ideas he's arrived at with conviction, and has been in the process of enacting them through financial or political or intellectual means
This is not irrelevant to the conception of and market of Palantir.
He is the Erik Prince of "tech" and like Prince, is a literal merchant of death.
Where is the evidence of this?
Is he completely correct? Probably not. But then, who is?
If one person is an existential threat to humanity (which is what I assume you mean) then, frankly, we probably "deserve" it (in the evolutionary sense). Thiel is useful here to countermand this point. One of his most useful ideas is that the so called "powerful" and "elite" have much less power than we think they do and can can be easily circumvented if ignored (of course there are marginal cases).
They're not wrong that this is A source of order, but they overlook the human tendency to form community and cooperate: this vision of theirs is about how to form societies when they are by definition all against all, a brutal struggle of nihilism and despair.
That's only one way humans can be, and it's a way that competes with the more leftist tendency to make everything about the community and cooperation.
Seems like a meta-narrative is needed that incorporates both of these positions that are held by their supporters as the ONLY position that can exist.
Girard does not embrace a Hobbesian view of the world, he is trying to explain the origin of human cooperation and society. The scapegoat narrative is not a nihilistic war of all-against-all it is a narrative of all-against-one to create order. Human cooperation can exist when violence is pared-down to one person (the scapegoat).
Where Girard admits that nihilism can come into play is when the scapegoat narrative becomes openly acknowledged. Which is what he argues Christianity effectively did (opened up the scapegoat mechanism for all to see, thus rendering it ineffective). Girard predicts that our lack of a scapegoat mechanism will likely lead to apocalyptic violence.
Frankly, I think the leftist view that humans can cooperate out-of-the-head-of-Zeus is naive and needs no account, because it has never happened.
I see folks cooperating all the time. Best part of the job. Granted, we are 'leaving money on the table', but this is better.
The Bourgeoise, the Jews, the QAnons, the Blacks, the Whites, the Immigrants, the Rich, the Anti-Vaxxers, the Catholics, the Muslims, the Kulaks, the <insert group here>
If humanity could unite and create order under the periodic ritual sacrifice of a single King, we'd be much better off than the way it actually happens, which is scapegoating and sacrificing millions of people at once.
In a broad context, Thiel acts like someone who has no such safeguards. The future he's pushing the world towards is the caricatural dystopia from Back To The Future (which was originally meant to lampoon Trump-like characters). Fortunately, he will probably fail.
If you don't see this at all, it's probably time to ask yourself just how similar to Thiel you actually are.
a lot of his writing involving Girard and other political philosophers reads as studying mimetic desire as a means of avoiding absolute total war in society and maintaining the hegemony of what he believes to be "enlightenment values" — destruction and unnecessary suffering is generally the antithesis of those beliefs
again, I don't even personally have to agree with all his ideas and writings to want to have a discussion about it
That's the moment when reality-based folks stop listening to what you're saying.
I do find it odd lately that we are experiencing a weird anti-cult of personality writings lately ( anti-Musk, anti-Thiel, anti-Zuckerberg ). Odd because I would normally expect articles and other propaganda glorifying their achievements ala Gates. I am not sure what to attribute this to.
Absolutely nothing.
The fact that Dolly Parton actually threw money around is part of the spotlight that demonstrates that these are not good people in spite of their positive PR.
People are just finally realizing that emperor has no clothes.
On Gates, I suppose the jury will be out until well after his death? Personally, I'm totally split on him: Yes, he seems to be doing a real lot of actual good shit with his billions nowadays. But he did amass them by being perhaps the biggest robber baron of the 20th century. (And certainly the biggest -- so far! -- in the IT / "tech" [whatever that means] industry; I guess we'll have to wait until Thiel, Musk, Zuck & al are gone too, before we can assess if any of them surpassed him.)
The common thread is a concept of overpeople and UNDERpeople, and an ethos that's completely fine with ruling or even consuming/destroying the underpeople, without guilt or any reservations.
This is an ethos, it's just not western civilization anymore :)
My complaint about Thiel is that I found it difficult to find much charitable giving on his part. He funds Thiel College, but what else? It is his right to do what he wants, if it is legal, but who wouldn’t feed hundreds of thousands of starving people or many more, etc. if they had lots of surplus cash. Besides being the only political “peace party” of any size in the US, my take on Libertarianism is to respect personal freedom, respect all people who work to support themselves and their families, and to have a strong social consciousness to support making the world as good a place to live in as possible.
So I say that because while I somewhat understand and respect Thiel's idea's. His vision of America is not one I care to live in at this time. And I wonder if in 100 years will we look back and say, "Thiel was a net positive influence on the human condition and society?" At this rate I'd say no.
There are downsides to donating food. One of them is that it damages local farming; another is that it brings more dependent people into the world, duplicating the problem.
A friend and his wife used to (my friend died in a traffic accident) collect money and once a year make a huge buy of practical farming tools, appropriate types of seeds, etc., charter a cargo flight, and deliver to somewhere where their research showed a need and where they were able to make local contacts.
So, I totally understand your point but there are options.
How do you guarantee such systems don't fall into disuse?
It's not impossible to donate foodstuffs that the donor buys from local farmers, is it?
Huh? I've never heard of this. Searching doesn't give any good results. Could you direct me to somewhere to read more about this?
(“Will to Power” got a bad rap. It was published posthumously by Nietzsche’s sister who had ties with the Nazis. But Nietzsche’s concept of “power” has little to do with power over others. What he’s talking about is the power of the maker. Of the one who’s capable not of stealing value from others, but of creating value where none existed before.)
Your definition of a good writer: Someone who gets his point across to a majority of his readers. Well. Isn’t that what we’re seeing today? Clickbait and all of that. It’s all designed to get the point across to the majority of people. If that is your goal, you have to compromise.
Antibiotics, steam engines, cars, airplanes... none of those things would have been understood by the majority of people. The majority of people declared them absurd. In those cases, the ideas succeeded in pulling up the people. In the case of marketing and politics, it’s the majority that succeeds in pulling down the ideas.
So... all those "someone else’s" whose interpretations everyone else reads got it wrong? And that's because, while Nietzsche was great at writing clearly, they're all just too stupid to get it? William of Ockham disagrees.
> Your definition of a good writer: Someone who gets his point across to a majority of his readers.
Thank you for teaching me what I think, but no: That's certainly not my whole definition of a good writer. But, are you saying it's not a pretty big part of it?
> Well. Isn’t that what we’re seeing today? Clickbait and all of that. It’s all designed to get the point across to the majority of people. If that is your goal, you have to compromise.
What on Earth are you talking about? As in, A) WTF does "clickbait and all of that" have to do with anything?; and B) No, there is no evidence that clickbait is "designed to get the point across to the majority" -- are you claiming clickbait even has a point to get across?
> Antibiotics, steam engines, cars, airplanes... none of those things would have been understood by the majority of people. The majority of people declared them absurd. In those cases, the ideas succeeded in pulling up the people. In the case of marketing and politics, it’s the majority that succeeds in pulling down the ideas.
I can only assume you were rather tired and quite emotional when you wrote this, because it makes no sense and has nothing to do with anything we were talking about.
I can see why they're projecting it though, people are catching on. A head full of jargon and thought terminating cliches, and an utter lack of durable convictions is what nihilism is. Theil and other billionaires need no defense from me or anyone, but journalistic integrity needs every ally it can find.
I'm asking this as a question by the way, I found your take really interesting.
I've read Zero to One and listened to multiple talks from him on YouTube. My impression is that he thinks we need to create new things and that innovation is slowing, partly due to regulation and partly due to people not believing they can create innovations that society needs to progress.
Thiel tells a story about how he got a job at a law firm and soon decided to leave and a colleague says "Wow, I didn't know anyone could leave Alcatraz". The point, to me, comes across as something like "Society tells you what the track to success is, e.g. become a lawyer at a fancy law firm, and because you believe this you are trapped in a prison of other people's expectations, but you are always completely free to walk out the door and follow your own path, you just have to be willing to do it.
On YouTube he has a talk called "You are not a lottery ticket" that covers his world view a bit. He also has a debate with Eric Schmidt from a few years back where he argues that Google isn't a tech company and investing in Google is a bet against innovation in search. In the debate he also talks about his ideas relating to innovation.
Is the most libertarian act to fund as many unique thus potentially innovative teams, people, or companies as possible? What do you do when one of those people or companies stagnate in their research or become another established entity?
I read Zero to One upon its release. It was short after the start of my career in tech. I think now as I did then, there is always room for improvement and the need for critical inquiry (critique) applied evenly to all things. I didn’t fully grasp the momentum of life. That includes governing bodies, corporations, markets, relationships, your own body. The concept of disruption and innovation to improve oneself or the world or a job or a tool is addicting. Where I get stuck is thinking through the consequences from innovation or large scale disruption. Back in 2014, FB was a good societal thing and now in 2021 not so much. Was it worth it? I lost my train of thought here.
In this sense, Google isn't innovating, they are just cashing in on their search/ads monopoly. This is why Thiel says investing in Google is a bet against search innovation. True search innovation would come from some startup that destroys Google. If you invest in Google you think that's not going to happen, hence you're being against it so you can keep extracting your rent.
I think Thiel is a very interesting guy and is maligned unfairly, although I haven't read the book this article is about.
Regarding Facebook, to me it seems pretty similar to how it's been for a while. It has pros and cons but I don't think the balance has changed in the last five or ten years.
https://perell.com/essay/peter-thiel/
I remember I needed a few hours to read it, as he is quite a deep thinker and there are references to philosophy and religion.
A wrong way to summarize it would be to build heaven on earth through capitalism.
But not sure what the author meant, just guessing here.
doesn't seem to be a incorrect description of thiel. he's single-mindedly self-serving, trying to lay claim to often mundane ideas, in search of personal esteem, wealth and power. had he not been so lucky with paypal, he'd probably be as obscure as the rest of us.
nihilism isn't about there not being truth, it's about there not being meaning, or more specifically long-term relevance. XXX may be true, but to a nihilist that's OK we're all going to die anyway and the universe will wind down to its heat death. In that sense the truth isn't relevant long term.
So what? So does he. To anyone who is neither Peter Thiel nor the Chinese state, it doesn't much matter if too much power is concentrated in the hands of the Chinese state or the hands of Peter Thiel. The problem is the same.
> As he once told a friend: “I’d rather be seen as evil than incompetent.”
Not to worry, Mr Thiel, you're at least halfway there.
Typically Count Dracula posts get the hammer rather quickly.
See this review: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/peter-t...
So while this guy may or ay not be getting his sources from unreliable third party places, he has enough of a personal credibility to at least consider the stores in the book. At least thats what I learned after seeing how quickly the Tesla community turned against the Higgins book.
TIL: "blitzscaling".
> the other party is coming up with creative ways to show that it doesn't.
Chief among them, making it so that it doesn't. In a way, just a variation of their age-old way of justifying their "Governement is the problem, it never works!" stance by fucking up government whenever they're in power.
It seems obvious to me that he has calculated the best way to get this hard tech and science development: from government investment. Much of the actual scientific and technological advancement circa 1940-1980 came out of military investment.
Thus he has continually tried to involve himself in government spaces where he has an opportunity to make an impact. Sometimes that works (Palantir) sometimes it doesn’t (his involvement with Trump.)
Journalism really is dead now.
They seem to fail upwards like most of mainstream media acting as mouthpieces of the DC/London establishement, stenagrophers of the national security establishment and PR agency of many VC funded tech bros.
1) all companies are on a spectrum between being a complete monopoly and having intense competition
2) their goal is always to be as far to the monopoly side as possible
3) and regardless of where they are on the spectrum, they have to do everything in their power to convince everyone that they are on the other end
(Slightly complicated by the fact that you can hold a monopoly in one market, but have lots of competition in a closely related market. On the one hand you have competition, on the other hand it may just be a facade to help sell your case for #3)
So I don't know the extent of why "leftists hate him", but IMO this is the best logical argument for why late stage capitalism is as unsustainable as leftists say it is.
A lot of people in the startup world still value “first mover advantage” as something that gives them an edge, when evidence says it’s hardly the case. “It’s not about being the first X, is about being the last one” is a brilliant way to put it.
He accuses it of being a monopoly but AFAIK he's not for anti-trust and he views these monopolies somewhat positively.
Even more ironically, his book was a major success in communist China. It seems the chinese took it seriously, learned to instrumentalize capitalism to build their own monopolies, but then disenfranchised the capitalists.
If they can kill you, to them that counts as an existence proof of their ethic… and a failure-to-exist-proof of both you and whatever competing ethic you had.
I'm reminded of Prisoner's Dilemma tournaments, and times when TitForTat tended to win out over much more hostile and ruthless strategies. In situations like this I like to look to modeling and experimentation for axioms: like the easily demonstrated proof that discontinuities in simple exchange produce inequities that are not in any way representative of merit: the natural state is not for things to average out, given some simple and natural conditions the natural state is for some unfit competitors to become vastly over-rewarded relative to their merit. Thus disproving certain assumptions that wealth in any way signals merit in any sense.
Typo in the first sentence. s/for ever/forever/
I guess no one has editors any longer...