Not a huge diary, but I think important to keep in mind as we collectively (please? pretty please??) work our asses off to elect sane and good people to positions of great power. Please note that I am in the midst of some crazy chaos in my life on a daily/hourly basis and may not be able to engage as I should and normally would.
And, btw, hello to all of you. It’s been a long time, I’ve missed you, I’ve been lurking and reading, and I hope you’re all well.
Peter Thiel really goes "there"
In the short clip above, Peter Thiel waxes poetic about parallels between the US in the 2020’s and Germany during the Weimar Republic. He talks about “exhaustion of Liberalism” and “Democracy, whatever that means...” in terms that make it clear that when he states we should “push the Overton Window” he is explicitly supporting and promoting something similar to the rise of a strongman to rule in place of an elected, accountable set of responsive managers and executives that will implement policies that reflect the will of the people as a whole.
He is very clearly calling for a form of fascism to replace democratic governance.
His words and his history are ridiculous, and his ideas are shallow, naive, and stupid.
And none of that matters because he and his little circle of shitbirds are enormously wealthy and positioned in ways that allow control of the flow and use and ownership of information: that information includes the way we gossip, the way that rumors flow through our social fabric, the words we adopt to describe events… all the way to incredibly granular data on our habits and preferences coupled with literal ownership of our personal data.
Via companies like Palantir, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, these cleverstupid meddlers (in German the best I can come up with is fachidioten), these sorcerer’s apprentices bid fair to bend the arc of our society (local, national, global) in extremely dangerous directions.
Reading up on Thiel and his coterie, I become extremely agitated… they were born in places like Germany and S. Africa in the earliest years of the “Gen X” time span to parents with technical skill in extractive, medical, or industrial fields (mining, chemical engineering, endocrinology, etc). Those parents were of the mid-Boomer to late WWII generation and from backgrounds that (as a humanist, liberal, lefty Jew and student of history) make my hackles rise.
All of this little cabal (a.k.a. the “Paypal Mafia”) had extensive but narrow educations that fostered and polished their mathematical, technical, engineering talents. All of them had itinerant childhoods, bouncing between the US, their home territory, and Southern Africa. They switched schools often, their parents (especially their fathers) were by all available accounts, driven, often absent, very domineering, and sacrificed any shred of stability in favor of “success” and “winning”…
All of them are very into science fiction of a particular thread: Heinlein, Tolkein, Asimov are mentioned a lot. All of them are noted to have read and greatly identified with Ayn Rand’s work in their teen years. All of them are very much into “Biohacking” and deeply involved in Cryptocurrency. All of them self-describe as “futurists” and are very much interested in robotic control of basic activities. All of them are interested in life extension, cloning, and population scale phylogenetics: the appearance of new branches on a taxonomic tree. Basically they have a very weird view of speciation and evolution, and want to force it in directions that they feel are best for them (and by extension, everyone else).
Finally, I know these people. I went to school at a small, weird semi-private school after being hounded out of public school in 7th grade. The school I went to had an approximately 50/50 split between local rural kids (hippies and rednecks from the area) and boarding students. A bunch of the boarding students were from very distant parts of the US and Canada as well as from Japan, Germany, Taiwan, S. Africa. A lot of them were: very smart, very troubled, very insecure, very much abandoned by their parents… and were essentially being warehoused at my school in hopes that they could make it to age 18 with a HS degree without overdosing, going to jail, or becoming so unbelievably alienated that they wound up in an asylum.
A lot of them were reminiscent of the Thiel/Musk/Sacks crew. Deeply into fantasies that put them and “their type of people” at the pinnacle of society, fit to rule by nature of their superior intellect, superior genes, superior training. I am talking about starting in middle school with Heinlein’s nasty libertarian garbage along with a heavy dose of “The Gor Chronicles”… they got into Tolkein and Dungeons and Dragons, and the characters they created always exhibited extreme versions of the ugly parts of that universe. Think Boromir at his worst, or Denethor in his madness. These guys (yes, all guys) thought they were Aragorn or Gandalf… they were actually Saruman (Palantir? Hello?)… and often devolved into Wormtongue. Add in an obsessive devouring of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead” at age 15 to 17, combine it with the rise of the personal computer… take the math and programming skill and combine it with insecure, unhappy, math/engineering directed intellectual focus…
And what you have is a group of angry incels with the ability and cleverness to mask their paranoia and insecurity behind techno-babble and attractive-sounding ego-boosting fantasies.
The problem is that these are not just harmless nerds. They are insanely wealthy. The control communication and information gathering/dissemination networks over the globe. They are “successful” and so are very much desired by media figures as interview and commentary subjects. They all have followings dominated by similarly twisted personality types.
I think they are very much engaged in a building project that involves creating a cult (think L. Ron Hubbard and the Scientologists) that will propel them further into positions of extreme influence.
I think we (humanists, liberals, globally aware) will not be happy with the results.
Trump and MAGA are important. They are the immediate problem we must face and defeat.
Thiel and his crowd are more powerful and must be faced down over the next decade, at least. They are connected to the Mercers and other nasty actors with money and power.
Trump/MAGA are symptoms.
Thiel et al are root causes.
Let’s not forget them as we gird our loins for the next several months worth of effort.
