Daub (Stanford professional commentator) has analyzed his mindset. He explains Thiel's attraction to esotericism:
>Girard’s ideas are another flyby between tech and the academy. The
Girardians may lament the marginal status of his theories within the academy;
even Thiel may lament it. But secretly, or not so secretly, that marginality is what
draws a man like Thiel to Girard. For in Girard you get your own intuitions
repackaged as esoteric knowledge. You get a feeling of oppositionality while
remaining at the center of things. You get to feel like a victim while having all the
power. And this, as we’ll see, may be the most secret of Silicon Valley’s secret
desires.
Does it really take an entire article to explain how Thiel, like so many before him, has simply been corrupted by wealth? His choice of topics to obsess over seems pretty arbitrary to me.
Read some actual scholars like Charles Taylor (instead of the under developed/work in progress theories of Peter Thiel) who shows why Technocracy is not capable of generating Meaning/Shared Story/Transcendence the way religious systems once did. And how its going to try to cope with that limitation.
Why is all that required? The microbes, plants and frogs don't require all that to survive and flourish.
Chimps do. Cuz the 3 inch brain of the chimp, for whatever reason, hates randomness/unpredictability/lack of control. It exposes the limitations of rationality/logic/thinking/intelligence. So how does the chimp (and tech tools it produces) cope?
As technocracy/scaling/optimization/efficiency etc grapples with its own limitations, more and more people will start looking at how other systems produced Meaning/Shared Story/Hope/Faith/Transcendence in the face of limitations without collapse.
People like JFK and Obama (if you read their speeches) tap into those learnings to give the chimp troupe a secular version of it.
That generates hope but hope is not enough. What all religious systems do is also produce an army of pastors who will be present with people who suffer (not just give speeches, podcasts, ted talks and apps).
Pastoral Care is a missing feature of the Technocracy. The more it denies that its a required feature the more lost and confused everyone gets.
This is a rather meandering article, but it makes a cogent point: the concept of the "end times" has been a driving force for many of not most social movement history, and across most cultures. It has always been a useful tool for people with ulterior motives, be they political or economical, or both. And it does not come in an exclusively religious form either; even Marx with his telosity taps into this as well as the article points out. Recently one need not look further than the furor around the expected effects of climate change to get a sense of a "secular" end-of-times mentality.
But as this last point illuminates, just because the end of times prophecies have been crying wolf for thousands of years doesn't mean we can discard it. We may yet be obliterated, be it by galopping climate change, a meteor shattering our planet, have a lethal pandemic, or have nuclear war lay most of earth inhabitable. These are realistic threats, and people have probably always been aware that our exitence is fragile. All we can (and should) do is do our best to mitigate them.
What we definately should *not* do, is to try and make these things happen, just so that we may (or may not) live forever in a blissful afterlife. Or (and this is the main problem) suspend mitigating efforts because they are inconvenient in the short perspective. Just sayin.
We should see technology's threshold here as an end point for communication.
> Words/symbols/metaphors have reached the limit of usability and functionality, their arbitrariness fully unmasked.
> Narratives/mythological thought-causality/mythistory/religion are as well way past the threshold of arbitrariness, all above's paradoxes far beyond resolving.
> Binary which counts into prediction the above as "intelligence" has reached its limit, ML/AI is largely a dud and requires both expert supervision and slave labor review.
So the tech idea of an arbitrary apocalypse and stand-in antichrist (which is laughable both from a mythological POV and a modern day puppet) is simply the most recent magic trick of media, when in reality there are real things: specifics, actions, syntax, behavior, ecology. These are fully beyond the reach of the binary/arbitrary, so tech billionaires are posing and throwing fits of rage.
8 comments
[ 21.6 ms ] story [ 438 ms ] thread>Girard’s ideas are another flyby between tech and the academy. The Girardians may lament the marginal status of his theories within the academy; even Thiel may lament it. But secretly, or not so secretly, that marginality is what draws a man like Thiel to Girard. For in Girard you get your own intuitions repackaged as esoteric knowledge. You get a feeling of oppositionality while remaining at the center of things. You get to feel like a victim while having all the power. And this, as we’ll see, may be the most secret of Silicon Valley’s secret desires.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://fabricat...
Edit: allegedly.
Why is all that required? The microbes, plants and frogs don't require all that to survive and flourish.
Chimps do. Cuz the 3 inch brain of the chimp, for whatever reason, hates randomness/unpredictability/lack of control. It exposes the limitations of rationality/logic/thinking/intelligence. So how does the chimp (and tech tools it produces) cope?
As technocracy/scaling/optimization/efficiency etc grapples with its own limitations, more and more people will start looking at how other systems produced Meaning/Shared Story/Hope/Faith/Transcendence in the face of limitations without collapse.
People like JFK and Obama (if you read their speeches) tap into those learnings to give the chimp troupe a secular version of it.
That generates hope but hope is not enough. What all religious systems do is also produce an army of pastors who will be present with people who suffer (not just give speeches, podcasts, ted talks and apps).
Pastoral Care is a missing feature of the Technocracy. The more it denies that its a required feature the more lost and confused everyone gets.
But as this last point illuminates, just because the end of times prophecies have been crying wolf for thousands of years doesn't mean we can discard it. We may yet be obliterated, be it by galopping climate change, a meteor shattering our planet, have a lethal pandemic, or have nuclear war lay most of earth inhabitable. These are realistic threats, and people have probably always been aware that our exitence is fragile. All we can (and should) do is do our best to mitigate them.
What we definately should *not* do, is to try and make these things happen, just so that we may (or may not) live forever in a blissful afterlife. Or (and this is the main problem) suspend mitigating efforts because they are inconvenient in the short perspective. Just sayin.
> Words/symbols/metaphors have reached the limit of usability and functionality, their arbitrariness fully unmasked.
> Narratives/mythological thought-causality/mythistory/religion are as well way past the threshold of arbitrariness, all above's paradoxes far beyond resolving.
> Binary which counts into prediction the above as "intelligence" has reached its limit, ML/AI is largely a dud and requires both expert supervision and slave labor review.
So the tech idea of an arbitrary apocalypse and stand-in antichrist (which is laughable both from a mythological POV and a modern day puppet) is simply the most recent magic trick of media, when in reality there are real things: specifics, actions, syntax, behavior, ecology. These are fully beyond the reach of the binary/arbitrary, so tech billionaires are posing and throwing fits of rage.