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 :).
"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."
> Presumably the commenter read the article and is expressing his disagreement with the article’s second sentence.
The comment in question didn't make a point, it provided only this unsupported opinion that happens to be flatly wrong: "It's a very different thing to have concentrated wealth and people's attention."
In fact, good buddies Thiel and Musk came from S Africa sharing similar librarian attitudes and both worked hard at circumventing the banking regulations while being part of the "PayPal mafia". They are both very keen on remodeling the government around the libertarian idea of uncountable corporate power.
“They went from scrappy guys dodging government regulation to now they are the government, in a generation” said Steve Blank... an adjunct professor of management science [1]
That cannot be done without using concentrated wealth to conquer people's attention. Sure enough, Musk proceeded to acquire Twitter at a great cost and to proclaim his idea of corporate control of speech through control of attention reach: "Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach" [2]
This exactly. There are different kind of attention. We shouldn't pay attention to the billionaires in a submissive follower mode; or in a "let them set the agenda" mode; but in a wary, defensive mode (ready to oppose or try to get out of the way).
I think it has something to do with Silicon Valley's obsession with money. To SV-people, billionaires are like gods. They are worshipped and invited to all the events worth going to (meetups, hackathons, etc.). Everyone wants to be like them.
And it seems to me to be a geographical problem too. In NYC, billionaires are like supervillains. Nobody particularly likes them (outside of select finance bros), and people openly express disdain for them and their greed.
NYC has a long history of the wealthy screwing people over. The fuck-you-pay-me has been a thing since NYC literally traded slaves.
California is/was New Money and comes with optimism and change and progress and was able to keep up the façade until fairly recently. Now the FAANG world is richer than god and has no reasons to even try to maintain illusions
> In NYC, billionaires are like supervillains. Nobody particularly likes them (outside of select finance bros), and people openly express disdain for them and their greed.
I think you may be confusing 'power' or 'impact' with wealth in this take.
Paul Graham wrote about this in a blog post [1].
In NYC, being rich is cool, even if you just inherited it all. Having lived 12 years in NYC, I agree wholeheartedly. It's what everyone aspires to have; the Tribeca loft and the Patek watch.
In SF, PG wrote that nobody cares that you inherited a bunch of wealth unless they're a real estate agent. I think this is true — flashy wealth isn't impressive in SV/SF. Impact and power and the scope of what you've built and created is what's impressive, for better or worse. (I just moved to SF for this reason).
> I think it has something to do with Silicon Valley's obsession with money. To SV-people, billionaires are like gods.
Just look at some of the comment threads here. So many replies essentially White-Knighting for a billionaire! Why does one take time out of their day to post an impassioned defense of this guy? He doesn't need your help. Do y'all think he's going to Venmo you $100 every time you defend his honor online?
Same thing for Musk. Say one thing bad about him, and the Musk Defense League reliably crawls out of the woodwork to passionately argue for him and downvote criticism. What's the point?
This is absurd to the point of being cartoonish. No one treats billionaires like supervillains. How many billionaires are in supermax prisons right now in New York?
> Nobody particularly likes them
This is not relevant, regardless of whether it’s true. A ton of people hate Thiel and Trump. Disliking a billionaire doesn’t take away their power.
> This is absurd to the point of being cartoonish. No one treats billionaires like supervillains. How many billionaires are in supermax prisons right now in New York?
"Supervillains" are comic book entities who are rarely in prison
I dont know "billionaire realestate mogul and serial criminal gets elected president" is the quick bio of both Lex Luthor and Donald Trump. Larry Elision buying up Hawaiian islands sure looks like a Bond Villian if you squint a little.
Being a billionaire seems to be a prerequisite for being a modern supervillain but most billionaires probably don’t qualify. There are 125 billionaires living in New York City alone.
When you say “these days,” you mean the past 10,000 years, right?
Power based on consent likely existed throughout the Holocene: “Big men” with their gift-giving and elaborate feasts, chiefdoms comprised of aristocratic lineages… the gameplan has always been to collect favors by promising future returns, religious blessings, and the like. You can see the parallels to present-day VC. These pre-historic admin dudes emerged alongside the steepening wealth inequality gradients and population growths of agrarian societies.
Comforting to know their influence is limited and precarious, as the social following can always fragment. This is what anthropologists call segmentary structures.
More interesting, if severely depressing, is the theory that power based on consent is arguably the precondition for scaling social cohesion beyond kin and villages to cities and civilizations, thereby serving as the foundation for more durable power structures.
How does one buy consent for a worldview? Buying and selling require two parties - the party who is selling their viewpoint to the highest bidder isn't blameless.
> It’s naive to believe these are not connected. Wealth buys power.
Raw power > wealth (see Putin, Vladimir: he doesn't need wealth or even to "own" anything, his raw power gets him everything wealth can buy and more). But for weaker people who aren't so powerful to control the system itself, wealth can get you a lot of power within that system.
They’re roughly proxies for each other. But I think land is a much more fundamental source of power. Makes sense that a lot of these types have started to invest in defense fortresses and opine about building new cities.
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).
What I have come to realize is that, at a societal level, no amount of rational discourse will counter the fear/emotional response. If it were, the world wouldnt' be in the state it is today.
Only time, reality shock or meeting a proportionate external force are the antidote. And even these can be stretched via the constant propaganda drip.
There is a great Charles Mackay quote applicable here:
"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
Joe Rogan, now's mainstream media, humble brags about hanging with Thiel on show.
Thiel very much plays the game in your second sentence, he's just smart about it. Thiel is gaining attention because he's put in the work, for a long time. Not because of shock value. And he's leveraging his soft power/contacts/PR sources/exposing his power level/drawing on what he built pretty hard now. Why?
> incredulous that Thiel was reported to claim the Pope is now an antichrist
I don’t even think the claim has shock value anymore. I have a buddy who has thought that about the last 3 popes.
Just because Thiel is saying it doesn’t mean that it is all of a sudden gaining traction. You could throw a dart at a random spot on a map of the US and probably find 10-15 preachers within a hundred mile radius of the landing spot saying the same sort of thing to their congregation at any time over the last 75 years. Certainly in aggregate reaching far more people with far more influence than Thiel could hope to with his latest efforts.
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.
What does this even mean? Are you trying to imply that the only problem with Thiel’s apocalyptic beliefs is that people are writing articles about them?
a) that is partly bubble. There are others, in other political and social circles, that do hear from him directly.
b) regardless of who hears about Thiel's philosophy, it still has impact. He funds political candidates, companies, think tanks etc and directly affect the world.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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)
Not since AIPAC paid-off American politicians to look the other way, no. That is a grave miscarriage of justice, and will be scrutinized until the Third Temple is returned to rubble.
Alas, it's what Likud wants and we can't let their bloodlust frame America's future.
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.
My problem with Thiel is that he's actively working to make the world a horrible place for anybody who isn't in his circle, and has the wealth needed to make inroads towards that end. I am not interested in listening to someone whose philosophy leads him to such behavior.
He believes that democracy has run its course (did so in the 2008 crash as well) and believes in the ideas of Curtis Yarvin that think that tech CEOs should reign as feudal lords over small fiefdoms that he calls network states. Essentially the plan is to break the federal government and buy up its assets for pennies on the dollar. If this sounds bad for most people is up to you I guess.
Do you have any legitimate quotes or clips of him saying or writing any of these things? Not you or someone else paraphrasing, but actual, verbatim quotes. Bc as I have said, I've read and watched quite a bit of Thiel and none of this rings true.
The claims made in this thread have elements of truth, but I can't help but conclude that they're made in bad faith. Thiel has said he doubts democracy’s compatibility with freedom. But, his response is relatively non-political: escape, via internet communities, seasteading, and tech ventures. His view on democracy is that it inevitably leads to over-regulation, ever expanding welfare (requiring ever expanding deficits, taxes, or both), slowly eroding the benefits of markets, eventually resulting in a zero sum economy in which collectivism, bureaucracy, and corruption rule. In other words, freedom decays.
The claims about “tech CEOs as feudal lords,” plans to dismantle the government, or to “buy up its assets for pennies”—is not supported by any of his public remarks or writing. He's never endorsed corporate feudalism, asset seizure, or authoritarian rule.
"fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism."
"Monopolies are good"
He's said the country should be lead by a monarch or "monarch-like figure".
Again, I think you're interpreting a lot of figurative language through the least charitable lens.
> "Competition is for losers"
He didn't actually originate this. The NYT did, in a review of his book. It was so catchy he ran with it. Of course, beyond the provocative headline is the idea that startups should seek green fields, not enter hyper competitive areas where margins are competed away.
> He's said there are "Satanic" components to AI.
Metaphor.
> "fate of our world may depend..."
Keyword here is "may". Clearly a conjecture on his part. And like most things he says, part of a larger narrative he is weaving via symbolism.
> "Monopolies are good"
Bad faith interpretation. A VC/founder achieves a monopoly insofar as they invent or revolutionize a market, typically via breakthrough technology. Facebook and Google rose to dominance bc their products were 10x better than the alternatives.
> He's said the country should be lead by a monarch or "monarch-like figure".
No, he didn't. If you can find a legitimate source for this, I will eat crow.
You may not like his ideas. But I encourage you to not rely on the interpretations of others (i.e. media headlines from left leaning outlets, etc.) and to steelman his arguments when you seek to criticize them.
Wanting to “collectively figure out how to take away the microphone” from rich people you dislike isn’t a brave stance against inequality, it’s straight-up authoritarian censorship based on net worth. In a free society, people choose who gets attention. If you don’t like Thiel, out-argue him or ignore him, but don’t fantasize about silencing citizens because they’re successful.
And honestly, Thiel’s worldview has real strengths: he’s been early and right on remote work, the stagnation of atom-based industries, the broken incentives in higher education, the dangers of bureaucratic overreach, and the need for bold technological breakthroughs instead of endless regulation. PayPal, Palantir, SpaceX (as an early investor), and backing young founders through the Thiel Fellowship have created massive value and progress. Dismissing all that because he’s rich and contrarian is lazy.
> If you don’t like Thiel, out-argue him or ignore him
Kind of hard to do this when he has so much money to buy influence anywhere. An example is how the current vice president of the United States is a protege of the guy.
Yeah sure, Thiel’s money helped put his protégé Vance in the VP chair, he has real influence, no denying it.
But scroll this comment section for any critique of Thiel and you’ll see the pattern: his wealth gets attacked, his actual ideas almost never do.
Take the “Antichrist Thesis” everyone mocks. It’s Rene Girard-speak for centralized, charismatic authoritarianism that weaponizes morality and scapegoating to grab power. Think Sam Altman preaching about AGI danger while lobbying the gov for openai prioritizing and startup stifling policies. Fed government using big tech censorship for preventing hate speech. He’s been dead-on about that danger for decades.
> his wealth gets attacked, his actual ideas almost never do
This is false. His ideas get attacked plenty because it's clear that his ideas are destructive to society. But there are only so many times one can have the "holy shit his ideas are destructive to society" conversation without talking about how the only reason his destructive ideas are front and center is because of his money.
I see multiple comments regarding his actual views.
Its been pointed out multiple times that hes a believer in a dark-enlightenment, where democracy has run its course and the power should be taken from ordinary people and centralized to the aristocratic elite such as himself.
He uses alot of coded language, hence why he is often called a Crypto Fascist (Crypto as in encrypted language, not cryptocurrency)
To anyone knowledgeable enough to own a basic mental cypher, they can decode fascist and monarchist language. He's very clearly a selfish person in the business of consolidating his own power over others to fulfill his outlandish fantasies.
He's deffinately not the only person in the world holding these sorts of views, there is an overabundance of sociopathic elites in the world.
But Thiel is able to operate on an influence level beyond that of most sociopaths and thus his wealth is one of the most pressing issues regarding his person.
This particular nutjob being far less powerful and wealthy, would preserve alot of our social order.
> “collectively figure out how to take away the microphone”
Taking away the microphone is not censorship. We're not talking about taking away Thiel's right to speech, we're talking about taking away undue amplification of Thiel's speech.
You are allowed to stand on a soapbox and shout your politics.
But if you amplify your speech on that soapbox you're given a little bit of slack because of "free speech" but then are rightly arrested for public nuisance and/or noise violations.
The soapbox-vs-megaphone analogy falls apart fast.
Name me one serious, intellectually honest critic of Thiel—say, Malcolm Harris, Evgeny Morozov, Shoshana Zuboff, Mariana Mazzucato, or even random Substackers with 100k+ followers who’s struggling to be heard because Thiel bought all the megaphones.
They all have huge platforms, book deals, TED-level reach, or blue-check amplification. The “undue amplification” crowd never points to a single silenced dissident; they just dislike that Thiel’s ideas are winning in the marketplace anyway.
If every prominent counter-voice already has a bigger megaphone than 99.9 % of humanity ever will, the complaint isn’t about access it’s that voters and readers keep choosing the “wrong” rich guy.
"Thiel owns Vance" is obviously shorthand, but is there evidence that Vance is actually under Thiel's control or do they just agree on stuff? I think proving corruption would probably require that Thiel personally/materially benefit from actions that Vance takes in office, not just that he funded Vance's campaign because he agrees with Vance's politics.
Edit: I think there's a much stronger case for some kind of corruption charge against Trump, since he's been using the office to enrich himself.[1]
> not just that he funded Vance's campaign because he agrees with Vance's politics.
That should be sufficient. We need to start the process of a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and we need to do as much as we can to enforce existing laws against dark money and enact as much as we can while Citizens United is in effect.
If anything they seem to be friends, with Curtis Yarvin as well, and believes that democracy has run its course. It doesn't really matter if he's just bought by money or if he has bought into the same ideas. Thiel maneuvered Vance into this position using his money and power, and their plans extend far beyond Trump's lifetime.
Does it matter then he can just buy direct political influence and power? He's not winning on the merits of ideas on a marketplace other than getting other billionaires and SV tech people on board as they would be on top of his new hierarchy, much more so than they are today.
it's not complete garbage, it's simply the cycle repeating itself.
the resort to violence can be wielded by everybody. therein lies its limitation as an unreliable means to control people and resources. power based on consent, ie, power from below, is predicated on promises proffered by patron-brokers who trade resources for allegiance. it's a comparatively stable structure until it reaches a certain scale. to get to that point, the stakes had to have been raised through manufacturing consent in the forms of ritual, ideology, capital, bureaucracy, and all the other goodies that Girard and Thiel love discussing. throw in the compounded accumulation of resources through arbitrage and leveraged betting, and you're left with social structures characterized by skewed wealth distributions and leaders who get to wield power asymmetrically. there's a clear historical and logical sequence where power by consent leads to power by coercion embodied in hegemony. given that's the current state of affairs, (and no sense in contesting this point since Thiel grapples with this fact himself in his investments and mythologizing of the US through this antichrist/katechon dialectic), it's pretty obvious what tools are left to those who no longer have any control to surrender via the consensual framework. suboptimal as it may be, at least violence-or the threat thereof-can be wielded by both sides.
now, where we land individually on the matter is one thing, but i'm afraid yours is the genteel fantasy.
Thiel believes democracy has run its course and wants to usher in a new world of network states where tech CEOs are feudal lords. This is all to avoid the anti Christ and the rapture.
Nothing the GP said had anything to do with taking away people's voice because they are rich, they are saying just because they are rich they don't automatically deserve a microphone.
HN seems very ready to defend the rich and powerful from attacks that don't even exist and its weird to come here and say how great he is while also seeing what his efforts have actually wrought - nothing positive on education or government overreach via the Trump admin. Paypal may have been ok at one point, but is generally considered to be a terrible company to work with, Palantir is a murderer for hire, and SpaceX burns billions to get us not very much with its continued explosions in the sky with hilarious mars shot promises regardless of its other commercial successes.
Yes, the word is give, as in "we are all giving our time away listening to this dumbass" - nothing about pointing my ears in a different direction is taking away anyone's ability to speak.
Today, the super-wealthy have a megaphone for their worldview that is orders of magnitude more effective than anything anyone else has got. It's not just Thiel: Bezos, Soros, Musk, Paul Singer, and others all are or have been promulgating their worldviews at a scale formerly reserved for nation-states. If unchecked, this inequity will bring us to a world not dissimilar to Byzantine Europe, where the "word of god," as filtered through your lord of choice, utterly dominates the marketplace of ideas.
You're not wrong, but the same megaphone applies to the average Joe. In the early 1990s, unless you were a celebrity or politician, your ideas could not spread beyond the confines of the next city council meeting - at best. Now an average person has far more reach. Yes there's often a cacophony of other information that will drown you out, but it's hardly worse than the previous situation where all media was in the hands of very few, often very wealthy, individuals.
free speech absolutism sounds fair in a vacuum but neglects the power disparity that wealth provides in a connected world.
Free Speech is not the concept of anyone can say anything without rules. Its about the ability for those without power to be able to speak on an even playing field as those with power.
The Wealthy and powerful have never had to worry about the freedom of their speech in history. They determined what speech was acceptable.
Take a break from defending those actively destroying our society through their actions, intentional or not, and learn the foundations of why free speech is designed the way it is.
What's the alternative though? Regulation of speech is often used by those already in power to silence dissent[1]. And there's still plenty a rich person can do to hide themselves as the source of something unsavoury while making it appear "grassroots". Now more than ever, with LLMs and bots.
It's not that free speech absolutism is fair, it's that there's not really an alternative that's any more fair.
