The money is easy to trace. Scroll back through tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel’s political donations and you’ll soon hit US$15 million worth of transfers sent to Protect Ohio Values, JD Vance’s campaign fund. The donations, made in 2022, are a staggering contribution to an individual senate race, and helped put Vance (Thiel’s former employee at tech fund Mithril Capital) on a winning trajectory.
But if money matters, so do ideas. Scroll back through Vance’s speeches, and you’ll hear echoes of Thiel’s voice. The decline of US elites (and by extension, the nation) is supposedly a result of technological stagnation: declining innovation, trivial distractions, broken infrastructure. To make the nation great again, Thiel believes, tech should come first, corporates should be unshackled, and the state should resemble the startup. For Vance, who has now risen to the office of US vice-president, a Thiel talk on these topics at Yale Law was “the most significant moment” of his time there.
Thiel’s influence on politics is at once financial, technical and ideological. In the New York Times, he was recently described as the “most influential right-wing intellectual of the last 20 years”. And his potent cocktail of networks, money, strategy and support exerts a rightward force on the political landscape. It establishes a powerful pattern for up-and-coming figures to follow.
To “hedge fund investor” and “tech entrepreneur”, Thiel has recently added a new label: Republican kingmaker.
Well you’re going to need CEOs to manage your individual earthly monarchs for you until you can upload your consciousness and head to outer space 🚀
Motherfucker wants to live in Night City so bad he’s more than welcome to go get chromed up and start a war with California, no need to drag the rest of us into his delusions.
The thing is, he’s already experiencing cyberpsychosis without even being chromed up yet…
Oh no, it’s all the AI shit! We don’t even have cyberware yet and we legitimately need to start worrying about AI helping people talk themselves into psychosis.
In their own ways, each of these developments is a response to Thiel’s thesis that the world is stuck. In his 2011 essay The End of the Future, he decries the “soft totalitarianism of political correctness in media and academia” and the “sordid world” of entertainment. The result is “50 years of stagnation” that has transformed humanity “into this more docile kind of a species”.
This is a long rant, but just my opinion:
His argument and views on “progress” vs “stuck” or stagnation are the things that make me really just shake my head at the fact that anyone buys into his BS. Like it’s just the money that gets people to listen to him right? Wtf are you even talking about? The last 50 years have been “stagnation?”
Especially in terms of science and technology, like have you been paying attention to anything? Or are you just throwing another hissy fit bc they haven’t figured out how to upload you fast enough, and you’re so scared that one day you’re going to have to accept your own mortality just like everyone else?
Look at how we even got to this point. Look at how educational, economic, and social changes after WWII led to an explosion of innovation and ideas. Changes to society following WWII opened up opportunities for people to offer a new perspective in so many areas that had become homogenous and stagnant.
Does he think it was the war itself that just did that? Like he believes if he can play god, the recipe for greatness just calls for him to make a “big bang” and the only possible result that can follow is a boom of progress and of innovation???
If that’s what this is, it actually make so much sense. At his core, he is somebody who desperately seeks power and control, but never actually learned to build or create anything of his own. Like he wants the things, and is quite successful at getting them. But he gets them through the only strategy he knows. Throwing money at them, joining something that already exists (like a company or organization), and strategizing a takedown of the internal structure, so that by default it becomes his.
But, he has no idea how to create something from scratch. This would be his attempt to model himself after greatness, but make it his own. He studied the history lesson, but either completely misunderstood it, or, he is arrogant enough to believe repeating it like an experiment, but with his own selfish spin, will lead to the same or better outcome. Almost like he’s banking on technology being able to achieve everything human innovation did after WWII.
A propos of nothing, I hear the rich taste like pork.
So is he like Elon if he was more competent?
I mean he keeps using Elon as tool and it’s like Elon keeps letting him? Not like Elon doesn’t benefit from it, but he made him the hated face of DOGE after planning all of that shit during Trump’s first administration. Now that Elon got everything set up for him, he’s still there reaping the benefits. He got the media narrative of “Elon has gone crazy, he’s not sleeping, he’s lost his mind, he’s a man child,” going strong and then within weeks Elon was stepping down.
When they both owned PayPal, he ousted Elon in a very similar coup while he was on his honeymoon. Coups are like his thing. He just does that over and over again to gain control. He’s doing it to Trump right now, and if/when he finishes crumbling democracy and we no longer have elections, he’s very likely going to do it to JD Vance’s dumbass too.
