There are some strange similarities between what’s going on in politics and what’s going on in tech right now. Perhaps that’s no coincidence.
One of the major stories of 2022 has been Peter Thiel’s emergent political and cultural participation. It’s widely known that he contributed heavily to the Blake Masters and J.D. Vance senate campaigns, in Arizona and Ohio respectively. It’s less widely known that he bankrolled a strange art festival in Manhattan, which courted a reactionary “downtown” scene and presumed to herald the dawn of a new conservative cultural movement.1
Peter Thiel has been described as a fascist – or, more generously, a passionate libertarian – because he has written over the years about his distaste for democratic governance. His most prevailing ideology seems to be a contempt for government. In this Cato Institute essay Thiel writes, “In the late 1990s, the founding vision of PayPal centered on the creation of a new world currency, free from all government control and dilution — the end of monetary sovereignty, as it were.” That should sound familiar if you’ve been following the crypto phenomenon.
This idea of freeing the individualized masses from democratic oppression is central to a certain flavor of Silicon Valley ideology. Tax-evading corporate entities and VC firms are based on the the following proposition: a select smart few are better equipped than everyone else to decide what gets resourced in our society. Governments waste money, while private interests spend it effectively. Government is slow and draining, while private endeavors are more efficient. Scale and speed are higher values than diversity and participation.
There is merit to this perspective, of course. Public works projects in the United States have been hamstrung in part by an overemphasis on inclusion and operational bloat. For those who believe in a modern, innovative government, it’s easy to see the appeal of China or Singapore’s quick execution at a massive scale. And there is a similarly compelling argument to be made in the private sector. Mature companies often suffer from bloat and stagnancy, which impairs their ability to create bold, exciting things.
Politics is different from business, though. Thiel, for his part, recognizes this distinction in the Cato essay, though he reaches a disturbing conclusion. “We are in a deadly race between politics and technology,” he warns. “Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount.” Thiel thinks individual freedom is paramount, ignoring the fact that a byproduct of one person’s individual freedom is often the freedom of many others.
Circling back to 2022, we see Thiel and Musk — two members of the so-called “PayPal Mafia” — reemerging as central cultural and political figures. Musk has become perhaps the biggest tech story of the year, with his purchase and subsequent manhandling of Twitter. It’s not clear if Thiel and Musk share a political ideology, or how explicit Musk’s has even been, but you can see the threads of Thiel’s authoritarian leanings in Musk’s treatment of Twitter. The brutal firing of employees. The singular, resonant Voice of Elon as Twitter becomes Elon Musk in the public sphere. The gestures towards populism that excite the loyalists without permitting anyone else control over anything, ultimately.
It will be interesting to see how Musk’s experiment in autocracy plays out. In a way, it’s a microcosm of the world these mafiosos see for us.
That endeavor concluded in the tragic death of the 25-year-old artist, Trevor Bazile, who organized it.