The making of a Tech Authoritarian. From Plato to Trumpism.
Peter Thiel practices a peculiar brand of Libertarianism. Actually its not libertarianism at all; its Philosopher-King meets Silicon Valley.
Who is Peter Thiel and why should we care what he thinks? Besides being a fantastically wealthy Silicon Valley billionaire Thiel has always fancied himself as a political and philosophical leader with a lot of opinions and a slightly self righteous insistence that governments should follow his lead. Thiel is probably one of the top 2 or 3 most influential tech investors in the world. And he is using that business influence and the money and power it confers to make his governing philosophy a reality. As a pioneer of the hard right ideas popularised by Donald Trump and JD Vance he is a seed investor in Trumpism. But as the man with money behind Maga and Trump he is also planning for a future without Trump in it.
His high point and high visibility mark was probably singlehandedly picking the 2024 Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance. Although that's just politics... He was also a co-founder of PayPal (was anyone not a co-founder of PayPal?) and seed investor of Facebook. In fact it might be said that without his initial $500K investment in Facebook we might still be on MySpace... But we won't hold that against him.
Thiel studied philosophy at Stanford University in the 80’s. It was a time when debates on identity politics and political correctness were growing. As a student he complained loudly about the leftward drift of elite institutions. And in reaction he started a right wing magazine, The Stanford Review. Its articles were extreme and provocative. Many were classic bits of trolling before trolling was even a thing with lots of jokes about race and gender. The network of writers he collected around his magazine became the core of his tech network. Many of them were early founders or employees of Pay Pal and are hugely influential in the tech space even now.
His very earliest years - that formative time up until 12 he was schooled in Africa. Moving around schools as his father was posted to different mining towns. He often spoke about the fact that corporate punishment was still invoked in South Africa and Namibia and some of his earliest and hardest memories are from that time. He claims that it was that experience that led to his affinity for libertarianism and his hatred of uniformity. This experience is apparently just a day at the office in British boarding schools. So where's all the British Thiels? Maybe Boris? But without the money....
Whatever the rapping of his knuckles with a ruler invoked in his psyche by his 20’s he was at the centre of the late 80’s movement of the "colleges are too woke backlash" and the late 80’s Stanford centric circle of early tech people who came into the .com boom. Those relationships become his superpower.
For a short time in the 90’s he was a corporate lawyer. Then in 1995 he publishes his first book. "The Diversity Myth" is a memoir and confessional written by Thiel and David Sachs who had been a student with him at Stanford. The book is an attack on affirmative action and political correctness. It claims Stanford had become a left wing place full of minorities, black people and women. It has cringey lines like describing date rape as ’seductions later regretted’ and states that diversity is bad.
If you look past the more awful date rape comments some of the things he was saying in the book weren’t completely foreign to Silicon Valley. John Doerr, a celebrated early investor in Google and Youtube was often quoted as saying VC’s should practice what he called 'pattern recognition’ claiming the best founders were young white men who dropped out of college in the tradition of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. I guess it's sorry to literally anyone else.
The book got a bit of notoriety and he wrote a few essays for the Wall Street Journal but it wasn’t very successful and he goes quiet for awhile. He returns to San Francisco and builds out his career as Silicon Valley entrepreneur and venture capitalist. The Diversity Myth was so full of reprehensible ideas that when years later Thiel supported Trump in 2016 he issued mea culpas around some of the more insensitive bits and there were a lot! of insensitive bits. Although one wonders if he would be so quick to apologise for them now.
Through his Stanford connections he plugs into the tech boom of the late 90’s. As his success explodes he becomes adept at recognising and championing young talent - they are almost all young white men and ideologically conservatives. Apparently he is good at spotting the conservative bomb throwing types that appeal to him and that shows up in both the young techies he is drawn to like Musk and Zuckerberg and more and more the political types he supports.
In 2012 he wrote the business book "Zero to One". As the successful founder and CEO of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook this book became a start up bible of sorts and required reading of young entrepreneurs. It was full of reactionary business advice that he professed at the time. It argues that you should build companies where all employees think alike (and who look like you?) and you want ultra powerful chief executives. He told young entrepreneurs to develop products for markets that don’t yet exist arguing that if you invent a service to that market you control 100% of that market. It says you don't have to be the first mover but you have to be the last mover. In other words its a pro-monopoly book. Monopolies make money!
Thiel writes successful people only succeed because they break rules. Whether the rules are just a cultural norm or an actual law. His idea is that it isn’t just acceptable and necessary for a start up to not comply with all the laws and regulations like a large company would but Thiel argues it is a moral imperative. He writes that only acting as society has already agreed is proper only leads to stagnation. In other words move fast and break things. Here's looking at you Mr. Zuckerberg. Worry about the rules later when you can remake them in your favour. Hello Uber and Airbnb.
It's in " Zero to One" that Thiel's business theories become political dialectic. And it's clear that these business ideas when read by the young men Thiel targets contribute in a broader sense to the angry politicisation of ambitious young men. In fact even more they can easily be taken up by less talented but equally angry and frustrated young men. And might even be the first building blocks to our modern young bro culture - the classic angry frustrated male youth.
In "Zero to One" Thiel goes on to say that If you are successful you are inherently better and so your ideas are inherently better. And you have more right then others to make up the rules. It is social darwinism in practice. Might makes right. Its one thing when applied to business i.e. your food delivery app works better then another food delivery app so its right that it becomes the only food delivery app but its another thing when you apply that philosophy as he does to politics. Thiel believes that its OK to suppress the will of demographics that you don’t like at the polling place if you are smarter and more successful. Smarter and more successful people should rule unilaterally.
He claims that technologists are superior in every way and the world would be a better place if we got out of their way. Its a convenient world view for a SIlicon Valley capitalist. Many read the book as a self help book. It said that you, young person can become rich and famous by not following the rules. You too can have total autonomy and freedom and become like Peter Thiel.
His start ups Pay Pal, Facebook and Palantir work and he becomes very rich along with many other of the SiIicon Valley VC’s and founders of the early 2000’s but what sets him apart from other founders and VC’s to become a sort of ideological lodestar in the Valley is the way he combines ideology with his ventures. His money and many of the start ups he invests in promote an ideology. Thiel has always combined those two things. Pay Pal was framed as a libertarian technology in much the same way that crypto bros talk about bitcoin. Its a way for people to avoid controls of government. Later Palantir as well had a political bent. It's a data mining software but its very founding is a reaction to 9/11. To many people at the time 9/11 was the result of an intelligence failure that a proper data mining outfit would have prevented. Hence, bingo - Palantir.
In a 2009 essay he wrote that: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. Society should not be trusted to an unthinking demos'. He wrote further, "Since 1920 the vast increase of welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the voting franchise to women have rendered the notion of the capitalist democracy an oxymoron.” Yikes! He wrote a further clarification to answer the backlash to his essay. Explaining that he wasn’t "against women voting in particular but voting in general". If you want, as Thiel does, that the future happens as quickly as possible this makes a kind of sense. The messiness of democracy gets in the way of quicker drug discovery, space travel, and new technologies. After all those things are slowed down by regulation and rule following. Democracy is an unwanted constraint. Silicon Valley is inventing the future and is smarter and better able than the rest of the world so it shouldn’t be led by those less smart or capable - in other words - anyone else.
Even before Trump appeared on the political scene Thiel was a big follower of Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin, a former developer became a prolific blogger who wrote political ideas called Formalism. Yarvin believes that life would be better if we replaced our current democracy with a corporate dictatorship run by a CEO. He wants to replace American democracy with a techno-monarchism. Many of Yarvin's ideas were written into Thiel’s book "Zero to One". Ideas like: Founders are gods. The best companies are dictatorships. His writing is also rife with hard line immigration diatribes, anti-semitism and racism. Thiel is very drawn to Yarvin and becomes his patron of sorts introducing him to other successful VC’s who also believe their success gives them more say in how our world should function and be governed.
Thiel is ambitious and he has shifted his ambitions according to the politics of the time. For instance Palantir was founded in the Bush years and he would have sounded like a Bushie. But at the same time he donated to lots of hard right groups. In 2016 Thiel donated to Ron Paul during the primaries. He saw Ron Paul as someone who was interested in breaking up the status quo. But when Trump wins the nomination in 2016 he quickly endorses him. Trump is the ultimate bomb thrower willing to blow up the whole system. Many people couldn’t understand how Thiel - a gay immigrant who invested in companies that relied on free trade in order to succeed all over the world - could support Trump?
But Trumpism is the antithesis of the status quo and Thiel's old foe stagnation can only be played by destroying that status quo. He believes that someone needs to push the rules out of the way so that the technologists can fix it. Take an old industry, completely destroy it and replace it with your new start up. That view is a compatible idea to Trump's governing philosophy as much as it is. This is why defenders of democracy should learn about Theil and his governing philosophy. A society ruled by dictators loses its legitimacy and moral authority. It becomes inherently unstable but Thiel doesn't agree with this maxim. A benevolent dictator? Or tech-authoritarian? He's pushing own ethos onto the US. And looking to go beyond Trump himself when Trump is no longer around.
When in 2020 Thiel supported Chris Kobach for Senate and backed away from supporting Trump’s presidential bid people thought he backed away because Trump was too hard line etc. It was actually for the opposite reason. Trump wouldn’t do what Thiel wanted. Trump was ineffective and hadn’t acted on Thiel’s ideas. But when even Steve Bannon said Thiel's ideas were just too crazy. You know that you’re talking about some seriously out there stuff.
Kobach was a new rising hard right star with a platform more extreme than even Trump's worldview but not tied to Trump's cult of personality. Thiel agreed with his desire to break norms, his hard line nationalism, his authoritarian impulses, and attacking the vote. Kobach wanted to start a Muslim registry, was a big election denier and wanted to build the wall. Kobach lost.
Undeterred in 2022 Thiel spent $32 million on candidates who were advocates of the Trump world view but not tied up in a cult of personality. He picked 16 candidates to support in the republican primaries. They were all culturally conservative, anti-political correctness, had a hard line on immigration and were young. They all lost those primaries except for Blake Masters and JD Vance. After 2022 it became clear that there was no pushing the ideology of Trump without Trump. The big story back in 2022 wasn’t Republicans vs. Democrats but Trump vs McConnell. And McConnell lost. It became clear that without Trump’s support no candidates could make it through a Republican primary. It returned Trump's influence in the Republican party after the debacle of Jan. 6th. Thiel took note and got Trump’s endorsement for his two remaining candidates. Vance and Masters. Masters lost but Trump’s endorsement gave Vance the needed push to win his Senate seat.
In 2022 Thiel left Facebook's board saying: 'I would rather have Qanon and Pizzagate then a Ministry of Truth.’ And in 2024 he got his protege and candidate JD Vance, nominated as Trump’s VP. Whether they win or not Thiel has found his path to become the tech authoritarian king he believes is his right. So long as there isn’t a young entrepreneur out there looking to unseat him.
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