๐๏ธ Peter Thiel is the Antichrist Minus Charm and Wit
The Incoherent Techno-Utopian Agenda. Plus: GPT Madness.
Welcome back to Dark Markets, Iโm David Z. Morris, a longtime tech and finance journalist and PhD sociologist/historian. My book โStealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopiaโ 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, thereโs a second essay, sometimes paywalled for premium supporters. Please consider subscribing.
โChatGPT Is Becoming a Religionโ
Taylor Lorenz, like so many of us, has finally pivoted from โjournalistโ to โcontent creator,โ 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.
โThe reality,โ as Lorenz puts it, โis 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 โฆ It seems to operate beyond our comprehension. And the more complex the tool, the more likely we are to spiritualize it.โ 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.
Iโm not sure whether the existence of historical precedent means โweโll be just fineโ or โthis has been getting worse for 100 years and we might be near the breaking point for the human mind.โ 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.
Australiaโs Quiet Collapse
This is a video from How Money Works, a YouTube channel Iโm 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 itโs 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.
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 Thielโs attempts to weld Christianity onto tech-worship, which Douthat at one point characterizes as โheretical.โ
From this stance, Douthat delivers a fairly deadly blow to Thielโs continuing attempts to tie transhumanist techno-utopianism to existing religious doctrines: โThe promise of Christianity in the end,โ Douthat reminds the billionaire heretic, โIs you get the perfected body and the perfected soul through Godโs 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.โ
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 thereโs 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 interviewโs two big โviralโ moments, when Douthat asks Thiel: โYou would prefer the human race to endure, right?โ
There follow a series of awkward pauses (which Douthat calls out), a sheepish, dutiful declaration that โuh, yes,โ 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 doesnโt mean that, even superficially, in the way that you or I would.
Thiel is Skeptical of AI/IQ
I want to give credit where itโs 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 โ90s, 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 โpeople are really fixated on I.Q. in Silicon Valley, and that itโs all about smart people. And if you have more smart people, theyโll 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.โ
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!
Thesis: (Capitalist) Society Requires Growth
Thiel is worried most of all about technological innovation slowing down. Heโs 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, thatโs because he only has one vision of how a society can work.
โI think if we donโt find a way back to the future, I do think the society unravels, it doesnโt 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 thereโs some way in which you can have a feudal society, in which case things are always static and stuck โฆ All of our institutions are predicated on growth.โ
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 โour budgets are certainly predicated on growth.โ Which really gets to the nut here. Because Peter Thielโs 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 โtaking more risks,โ and as an example of our current over-caution, excoriates Alzheimerโs research, which he scorns as โsome kind of racket.โ
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 doesnโt 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.
โIf you have some fatal disease,โ he muses, โthere probably are a lot more risks you can take.โ 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.
โCulturally, 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.โ
Whatโs 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, thatโs because his libertarian ethos canโt 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 (โMake American Healthy Againโ), 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 โcould live forever.โ So what he admires and endorses in this case is not grounded ambition, but moonbat delusion.
What Peter Thiel really cares about isnโt progress, itโs an attitude of intellectual credulity and blind optimism. Because thatโs 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 - itโs the entire premise of his โZero to Oneโ 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.
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 weโve 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 โwhether or not weโve made progress on physics unless youโve devoted half your life to studying string theoryโ and that we have to โgive weightingsโ 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 didnโt show up in the real 2015. This is of course Thielโs 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. โtakeoff,โ and Thiel has absolutely no numbers. In fact, he vaguely handwaves โliving standardsโ, 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.
Very nice analysis of the Thiel I/V w Douhart. By far the best I've read. You probably already know of Eric Davis book "Techgnosis" which dealt beautifully with techno-utopianism. You may also like to see my book "The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace" - which specially dealt with cyber-religiosity - written in 1997. Everything i said then about Web 2.0 is even more so now with Web 3.0. Also germaine is Mary Midgely's great book "Science as Salvation" - which Thiel and all the tech-bros should be forced to read.
So, starting with the Peter Thiel interview. I kind of puke a little reading stuff like this, but I'm gonna give it a shot.
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It wasnโt zero, but 1750 to 1970 โ 200-plus years โ were periods of accelerating change. We were relentlessly moving faster: The ships were faster, the railroads were faster, the cars were faster, the planes were faster. It culminates in the Concorde and the Apollo missions. But then, in all sorts of dimensions, things had slowed.
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Oh you mean it sped up when wealth and power were less concentrated with the elites a la serfdom. And then slowed down around when Reaganites took over and all the wealth and power was concentrated with the elites. And the solution isโฆ Checks notesโฆ More wealth and power concentrated with the elites.
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Sure, the economic number would be: What are your living standards compared to your parents? If youโre a 30-year-old millennial, how are you doing versus when your boomer parents were 30 years old? How were they doing at the time?
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Absolutely right question. Most of are doing worse. We see that weโre being exploited more than our parents were because our wages have stagnated while costs have not. Now, let's seeโฆ Thiel's parents would have been in South Africa, probably with black servants who were probably being exploited to his family's benefit. He allegedly told classmates that apartheid was โa sound economic system.โ And now he funds Eugenics-adjacent causes which no doubt would help keep that class exploitable. So, to recap, weโre doing worse than our parents and are getting more exploited. Thiel does better than his parents and is quite possibly doing more exploiting. Almost seems like the one directly impacts the other. Does Thiel think that when we look at our situation versus our parents, we might not decide that maybe itโs people like him that are directly responsible?
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nobody would be mad at me for supporting Trump if he lost
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How about sexual assault victims? Are they nobodies to Peter Thiel? It's not like this stuff was unknown in 2016. It would absolutely be something he would come across prior to supporting Trump and it came out widely before he was elected. He didn't say that it was an unsavory thing but that one could spin and manipulate the narrative enough that a sufficient number would overlook itโas that is apparently what happened. Twice. He didn't say too few would be mad. That their voices would be drowned out by the selfish or misled. No, he thought /no one/ cared enough about that issue that they would be upset with supporting a perpetrator of it. The fact he said โnobodyโ is probably the most deeply disturbing thing I've read in this interview. I can't even read any more of this. Okay back to DZM.
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Because Peter Thielโs 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.
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Yup. That sounds about right. Honestly, it feels even worse than that. It feels more like for the last ten years people have been going around poking other people with a stick. And someone says โlook, we gotta figure out why none of us were getting stick poked before the last ten years. What was different ten years ago? The answer? There was no streaming television! We need to figure out how to go back to something like broadcast or cable television. On demand programming is to blame! Itโs clearly made us very stick-pokable.โ Uh what? There also were no people /poking us with a stick/. How about we go back to not having people poke us with a stick? That **** knows exactly that at the same time he says โStreaminโ is the Demonโ that he is funding Sticks4PokinRUs /and/ trying to outlaw all regulations against stick poking simultaneously. Of course, Sticks4PokinRUs MegaCorpConglomorateShellCompaniesToo also seems to strangely have a symposium once a year on the glories of Must See TV Thursdays. But that, of course, is when they ainโt stick pokinโ. But, yeah, letโs just put up with more stick poking and then maybe there will be less stick poking, through the magic of coaxial cables and the TV Guide. Seriously, it feels that stupid.
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they are unable to stomach the idea that declining innovation is a product of wealth expropriation by elites who have captured democracy.
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Orโฆ They can stomach it just fine. They are just saying BS they don't really believe. I just went down a rabbit hole a few minutes ago on a book called โWhy Does He Do That?โ about male domestic abusers. The thesis is these men aren't crazy/insane, they want to seem like enigmas, that thereโs some puzzle to solve. But itโs not complicated at all. They really just have extremely flawed values that tell them they are right in being abusive, that they are /entitled/ to be abusive. And I suspect some people just feel entitled to exploit others. I get strong โplaying by the rules is for suckers and if you don't break rules, you're just going to lose to someone who doesโ vibes from Thiel. How can he be so crazy and blind to how elites have been so powerful during the exact times he's lamenting as bad? Is he insane? Or is it maybe, just maybe, he knows he's talking absolute BS and itโs all so he can just go on exploiting others.