Peter Thiel's Apocalyptic Worldview Is a Dangerous Fantasy (jacobin.com)

And here I thought he was just trying to wrap his techno libertoonian worldview in the Book of Revelations in the hopes that the religious right would get behind it. Did I miss something?

I mean, they have a point. But considering they run a whole journal on literal communism, it’s hard to take them seriously. The message falls flat when it comes from a different flavor of dangerous fantasy.

> This justifies the most extreme violence against his opponents while protecting his own views from contestation. Thiel’s world is a battlefield of moral absolutes rather than a terrain of political complexity where different interests and values are contested and negotiated.

The irony of this being on a site called jacobin is palpable.

Maybe slightly off topic to the article, but I don't really care what Peter Thiel has to say. I do think we need to collectively think about how to not give these people a microphone. It's one thing to have concentrated wealth. It's a very different thing to have concentrated wealth and people's attention. I think that's a much more interesting discussion :).

The problem that this article has is essentially this:

> Thiel by contrast is profiting from the use of AI weapons targeting systems used in the Ukraine war and the genocide in Gaza.

Thiel is IMO not doing this for profit. He is deeply ideological, which should be more worrisome.

Thiel's ramblings seem so unhinged, delusions of grandeur.

I am so thankful that I'm not rich enough to be surrounded by people who agree with every single half baked thought that I put out.

> Thiel transforms US imperial power and unrestrained technological expansion ... into the final rampart against what he imagines as a catastrophic global homogenization.

Thiel warns about Antichrist, while doing the very thing that's enabling his coming. Unrestrained technological expansion is exactly what's erasing the human spirit and replacing it with a machine culture.

Like anything else with Thiel, it's a viewed formed by a socially-maladjusted twerp who was picked on and now wants to rule the world. He's found a lot of useful lieutenants in that quest, mostly because they, like him, resent the fact that no amount of power or money or yes-men surrounding them will quiet their inner insecurities.

The truly insidious calculation they all eventually got to is that in Trump you have someone that is somehow even more insecure and craven than them and can be straight bought and sold to the highest bidder. They give Trump the superficial credibility of having ostensibly smart people behind him, and Trump gives them the benefits of being adjacent to his non-stop corruption and self-dealing machine.

Hubris.

It will end him, and his insanely stupid ideology. He is obviously a sociopath with very deep childhood trauma. Karma will get him. Probably cancer as he seems to be genially rotten soul.

His ramblings aren't that relevant. The problem is that the money is used to get influence; we could see this with Musk too.

Something has to change. The superrich act as parasites and broken all inter-generational promises. The USA really messed up here - they should have put down control systems to prevent this parasitic situation.

I would have never believed it 10 years ago. I actually think there is a high probability the world will be ended, not by war or natural disaster, but by an honest to god trillionaire super villain.

The ultra wealthy are an actual existential threat to humanity. No one can be trusted with that much money and power.

If you can parse the academic jargon and get past the ad hominem, the article is a basic meditation on how the state of information technology continues to support both centralization and distribution of decisions.

  This ambivalence mirrors the paradox of American empire, where the United 
  States sees itself simultaneously as a guarantor of global order and a 
  bulwark against world government: the “world’s policeman” unbound by 
  international law.

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While it's possible this is true, I would have preferred that the article make its own case on why Thiel is crazy and not just cite the Guardian. The article is written for someone who already agrees with the title.

Hmm... If anybody meets the definition of his antichrist, it might be him.

The notion that there is an antichrist and that "international agencies, environmentalism and guardrails on technology could quicken its rise" is ludicrous.

The only reason we listen to his nonsense is because he has money, and with that comes power in this country.

I suggest he take some shrooms and chill...

> This is what Thiel’s apocalyptic geopolitics looks like in practice: a twisted military-industrial eschatology where an AI-powered genocide is understood to be “restraining” rather than enacting the end of the world.

I could have used some more explication on the connection between Thiel's ideology and Palantir's project portfolio. I felt like this article was structured like "Part 1: Thiel is Crazy, Part 2: Palantir is Awful, Conclusion: They are Related", without really making clear what the relationship between them was. It seems pretty contradictory that someone concerned about "The New One World Order" would create a global police technology apparatus, so deep-diving into the cognitive dissonance there (and how it is soothed by the ideology) would have been interesting (to me).

Thiel is a creepy fuck, as are most tech bros.

I mean, he looks perfectly human; but once he opens his mouth.

Left wing magazine discovers metaphor; confuses it for Nazism

To me this piece just looks like someone who hates wealth and willfully misunderstands metaphors.

Seems like any time posts about Thiel and a few other billionaires gain traction it flies off the front page quickly.

It's crazy how this is trickling down. I work with someone who has recently started openly talking about the antichrist and is convinced the final revelation is going to occur. This person has always been loony but it seems to be going into hyperdrive.

Fossil fuel is the real antichrist!

"Dozens of churches withdraw investments from fossil fuels"

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/dozens-churches-withdraw...

Would that the mainstream press had treated the Gawker episode as the five-alarm free speech fire that it was.

For anyone wondering about the source, here is how Jacobin describes themselves:

“ Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. ”

Whatever he or his political servants believe, in a few years the Democrats will reign and he will be forgotten.