👁️ Peter Thiel is the Antichrist Minus Charm and Wit

The Incoherent Techno-Utopian Agenda. Plus: GPT Madness.

Welcome back to Dark Markets, I’m David Z. Morris, a longtime tech and finance journalist and PhD sociologist/historian. My book “Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia” is coming in October from Repeater Books.

Dark Markets is a newsletter focused on technology, financial fraud, and their intersections. Every week, subscribers get a weekly news commentary/roundup like this one. Most weeks, there’s a second essay, sometimes paywalled for premium supporters. Please consider subscribing.

“ChatGPT Is Becoming a Religion”

Taylor Lorenz, like so many of us, has finally pivoted from “journalist” to “content creator,” and may God bless her. Lorenz is better at big-picture analysis, particularly the context of technological history, than I expected. Specifically, this video on GPT Madness focuses on the fact that technology has always triggered religious delusions.

“The reality,” as Lorenz puts it, “is that good technology always feels magical. It performs tasks in ways that we as users don't often understand. It creates results that we didn't expect or couldn't replicate ourselves … It seems to operate beyond our comprehension. And the more complex the tool, the more likely we are to spiritualize it.” Lorenz specifically cites Scientology.

But the most infamous historical examples of technological delusion revolve around radio, which circa the turn of the 1900s became a huge boon for various spiritualist types, who claimed it was a way to communicate with dead relatives. One notable scholarly book on the topic is Haunted Media by Jeffrey Sconce. Katherine Dee (The Default Friend) cites Sconce in her similar essay on GPT-induced Religious Psychosis, a kind of more-erudite supplement to Lorenz.

I’m not sure whether the existence of historical precedent means “we’ll be just fine” or “this has been getting worse for 100 years and we might be near the breaking point for the human mind.” But frankly, I may lean slightly towards the latter - specifically, today as throughout history, because the psychological risks of innovation are largely borne by those with the least resources.

Australia’s Quiet Collapse

This is a video from How Money Works, a YouTube channel I’m only just discovering but which could see myself becoming a big fan of. The analysis of economic flows here is meticulous, which is great because the one it’s describing in Australia is a maze. The essay describes how some very specific skewed incentives around real estate and income tax is setting up a future Australian Death Spiral. *Currently increasing* dependence on resource extraction, underinvestment in technological commercialization, and bizarrely levered home prices have set up a ticking time bomb:

As soon as the coal stops flowing to China, Australia collapses.

What is TESCREALism? Mapping the Cult of the Techno-Utopia.

Peter Thiel, Extinctionist

So Peter Thiel sat down for another interview, this one with Ross Douthat of the Times, largely about the prospect of utopia on Earth created entirely by technological innovation. Douthat is a perfect choice here - a conservative, but not exactly a right-winger. Douthat is also an actual thoughtful religious person, equipped to push back against Thiel’s attempts to weld Christianity onto tech-worship, which Douthat at one point characterizes as “heretical.”

From this stance, Douthat delivers a fairly deadly blow to Thiel’s continuing attempts to tie transhumanist techno-utopianism to existing religious doctrines: “The promise of Christianity in the end,” Douthat reminds the billionaire heretic, “Is you get the perfected body and the perfected soul through God’s grace. And the person who tries to do it on their own with a bunch of machines is likely to end up as a dystopian character.”

The interview video is here and a transcript of the interview here at the Times.

A relevant fact here is that Thiel is such an obviously, preternaturally unhappy, and maybe just as important, a constantly uncomfortable person. Everyone has remarked the sweating, the twitching, the halting, juddering speech, like there’s another person in there wearing a Peter Thiel skin-suit. He may not hate being alive in the abstract, but he hates every actual moment he has to experience.

This informs one of the interview’s two big ‘viral’ moments, when Douthat asks Thiel: “You would prefer the human race to endure, right?”

There follow a series of awkward pauses (which Douthat calls out), a sheepish, dutiful declaration that “uh, yes,” Thiel would like humans to survive, quickly followed by a halting transition to discussion of Transhumanism. Which of course is a vision of the continuation of humankind in a radically different form, including in some versions as merely simulations on a computer.

In other words, even when Peter Thiel bows to conformity and signals that he cares about human life, he doesn’t mean that, even superficially, in the way that you or I would.

“Doomers” vs. “Hyper-Racists”: The Contest of Terrible Ideas that Got Sam Altman Fired From OpenAI

Thiel is Skeptical of AI/IQ

I want to give credit where it’s due: Peter Thiel has restrained and even nuanced views about the role of Artificial Intelligence in human progress. He ranks it on about par with the potential impact of the internet in the late ‘90s, which feels about right to me, and is certainly far short of the full techno-utopian package.

More specifically, Thiel thinks that Silicon Valley has an inflated view of the impact of AI because “people are really fixated on I.Q. in Silicon Valley, and that it’s all about smart people. And if you have more smart people, they’ll do great things. And then the economics anti-I.Q. argument is that people actually do worse. The smarter they are, the worse they do.”

This is slightly but not terribly different than the argument that I.Q. is a meaningless, made-up metric. Because ultimately, how can you argue that a non-instrumentalizable intelligence is of anything other than purely academic interest?

So, big ups for Thiel becoming an IQ debunker!

Racist IQ Theories are Inextricable from the FTX Story – and the AI Bubble.

Thesis: (Capitalist) Society Requires Growth

Thiel is worried most of all about technological innovation slowing down. He’s partly worried because he wants to have a cool future society with flying cars. But he seems just as worried that slowing innovation will collapse society. Of course, that’s because he only has one vision of how a society can work.

“I think if we don’t find a way back to the future, I do think the society unravels, it doesn’t work. I would define the middle class as people who expect their kids to do better than themselves. And when that collapses, we no longer have a middle class society. Maybe there’s some way in which you can have a feudal society, in which case things are always static and stuck … All of our institutions are predicated on growth.”

Peter Thiel is lying here. First, because he does not care about the middle class as such. But even more comically, he has quite literally advocated for feudalism through his massive support for Curtis Yarvin. Authoritarianism, he seems to himself acknowledge in this strange Freudian/Stupid slip, is the most anti-innovation regime of all.

Douthat, to his stratospheric credit, responds by clarifying that “our budgets are certainly predicated on growth.” Which really gets to the nut here. Because Peter Thiel’s case for techno-utopianism is a description of a Ponzi scheme, in which we need to sacrifice the comfort and protections of responsible government now, in favor of a chance for something even cooler than clean water and a living wage, some time down the line.

More Risk (To Vulnerable Individuals)

Thiel frames his accelerationism in terms of “taking more risks,” and as an example of our current over-caution, excoriates Alzheimer’s research, which he scorns as “some kind of racket.”

This is the basic sentiment that underpins the anti-expertise, anti-education agenda that Peter Thiel has sponsored with his millions while simultaneously crying about the lack of innovation. Which of course shows you where his priorities really lie: he doesn’t want more innovation in society at large, he wants less regulation and taxes for himself and his friends.

Because his alternative model for a more adventurous, risky innovation regime is simultaneously laughable and evil. In medicine specifically, he imagines, essentially, an 18th century regime of unregulated human experimentation in basements and garages across this great land.

“If you have some fatal disease,” he muses, “there probably are a lot more risks you can take.” By, that is, injecting yourself with experimental drugs. This should be aggressively contrasted with a vision of society in which people, you know, work together to help each other.

“Culturally, what I imagine [a more innovative society] looks like is early modernity, where people thought we would cure diseases. They thought we would have radical life extension. Immortality was part of the project of early modernity. It was Francis Bacon, Condorcet. Maybe it was anti-Christian, maybe it was downstream of Christianity. It was competitive. If Christianity promised you a physical resurrection, science was not going to succeed unless it promised you the exact same thing.”

What’s most incredible here is that Thiel simply regards the huge strides in health care and medicine over the last few decades, which includes immense progress in curing many different cancers, as somehow not counting. Quite simply, that’s because his libertarian ethos can’t swallow the overwhelming, even critical role of government funding and centralized organization in solving these big problems.

This is the fundamental economic incoherence of all right-wing ideologies: the refusal to acknowledge the power of returns to scale - a refusal ultimately driven by antipathy to other human beings.

This exact view of health research has of course manifested now, as the MAHA Movement (“Make American Healthy Again”), which amounts to Making Homeopathy Great Again. This is what would actually happen if Thiel got his Free Experimentation wish: An entire health care market full of supplement-aisle bullshit.

And in fact, Thiel himself in the interview even waxes nostalgic about cryonics, itself a deregulated health care scam of a sort. Thiel here cites cryonics approvingly - the brain-freezing, eternal-life fantasy was one of the core projects of the Extropians, the movement that helped introduce Thiel to techno-utopian thinking in the late 1990s.

He seems to genuinely waver as to whether he thinks of cryonics as a good example of actual experimentation, or more as an index of adventurous attitudes and public faith that people “could live forever.” So what he admires and endorses in this case is not grounded ambition, but moonbat delusion.

What Peter Thiel really cares about isn’t progress, it’s an attitude of intellectual credulity and blind optimism. Because that’s good, not for humanity, but for the technology and biosciences investment environment.

This also informs the deepest incoherency of Thiel and the techno-utopians: they are unable to stomach the idea that declining innovation is a product of wealth expropriation by elites who have captured democracy.

We already know Thiel loves a monopoly - it’s the entire premise of his “Zero to One” business and investing success, supposedly. He also, along with the rest of the tech elite, has no theory of democratic rhetoric and critical thinking as the path to a better world - he believes, with people like Marc Andreessen, that any criticism of the tech industry is aimed at making society worse. He is unable to truly internalize the possibility that these companies can do anything harmful, or that they have any blind spots, much less anything short of pure intentions.

That includes, of course, portfolio companies like the drone-warfare and hyper-surveillance operation Palantir, which to anyone with open eyes is itself a clear harbinger of the End Times.

The Future is a Trap: Venture Capital on Arrakis (Part 1)

Effective Altruism and Innovation Under Austerity

The most immediately infurating part of the interview (and I do mean immediately, at about four minutes in) is that Thiel gets to do his routine about how we’ve stopped technologically progressing as a society - while he is currently, near-singlehandedly responsible for the ongoing gutting of basic research in the United States.

Thiel reflects his fundamental confusion in this opening monologue, in which he declares that the specialization inherent in modern societies makes it hard to judge “whether or not we’ve made progress on physics unless you’ve devoted half your life to studying string theory” and that we have to “give weightings” to the decision whether to focus on basic physics or advancing cancer research or quantum computing.

This is not the language of accelerating into a brighter future - it is the language of Malthusian Austerity. More specifically, it is the language of Malthusian Austerity translated through Effective Altruism.

Thiel also repeats his dumb-smart guy thing where he complains that the flying cars from Back to the Future 2 didn’t show up in the real 2015. This is of course Thiel’s mantra - We wanted flying cars. Instead we got 140 characters. This Negative Zone Movie Mindset is again such an uncanny analogue for the sense of the future found in the Rationalist and EA communities, whose greatest fears are seemingly shaped by The Terminator and Black Mirror.

Douthat also (respectably, professionally) asks Thiel if there are any numbers associated with his sense of stagnation vs. “takeoff,” and Thiel has absolutely no numbers. In fact, he vaguely handwaves “living standards”, but those have actually gone up steadily in the U.S., even since the 1970s, once you correct for income inequality.

So the real data behind the point he was trying to make actually proves the opposite of what Thiel is trying to argue. If living standards are what he actually cared about, he would be promoting more society-scale, democratically organized megaprojects, not comically dysgenic neo-monarchist cosplayers.