Vance went full fash with the speed of a Peter Thiel cash transfer. https://t.co/BBMsJrx5VM
— Roy Edroso (@edroso) December 7, 2023
It’s long past the time that Yale Law should have been burned to the ground https://t.co/vmRInqUZ8R
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) December 7, 2023
Peter Thiel can easily afford to pick up the odd young authoritarian-in-training, the way lesser men might buy Funko Pop figures from their preferred franchises. But, like those Funko Pops, the J.D. Vances and Blake Masters are just cheap plastic gimcracks — even kept mint-in-box, they’ll never rise to the level where their value stands as a sign of their former owner’s historical importance, like Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s Terracotta Army or even J. Pierpont Morgan’s library. Our degraded age!…
At no other moment in human history could this guy be living this life. Yet he somehow sees it as a failure that must be demolished. https://t.co/RsEvcuPxER pic.twitter.com/zCp8ujPHo5
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) November 9, 2023
Barton Gellman, at the Atlantic, “Peter Thiel Is Taking a Break From Democracy”:
… For years, Thiel had been saying that he generally favored the more pessimistic candidate in any presidential race because “if you’re too optimistic, it just shows you’re out of touch.” He scorned the rote optimism of politicians who, echoing Ronald Reagan, portrayed America as a shining city on a hill. Trump’s America, by contrast, was a broken landscape, under siege.
Thiel is not against government in principle, his friend Auren Hoffman (who is no relation to Reid) says. “The ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s—which had massive, crazy amounts of power—he admires because it was effective. We built the Hoover Dam. We did the Manhattan Project,” Hoffman told me. “We started the space program.”
But the days when great men could achieve great things in government are gone, Thiel believes. He disdains what the federal apparatus has become: rule-bound, stifling of innovation, a “senile, central-left regime.” His libertarian critique of American government has curdled into an almost nihilistic impulse to demolish it…
Reid Hoffman, who has known Thiel since college, long ago noticed a pattern in his old friend’s way of thinking. Time after time, Thiel would espouse grandiose, utopian hopes that failed to materialize, leaving him “kind of furious or angry” about the world’s unwillingness to bend to whatever vision was possessing him at the moment. “Peter tends to be not ‘glass is half empty’ but ‘glass is fully empty,’” Hoffman told me.
Disillusionment was a recurring theme in my conversations with Thiel. He is worth between $4 billion and $9 billion. He lives with his husband and two children in a glass palace in Bel Air that has nine bedrooms and a 90-foot infinity pool. He is a titan of Silicon Valley and a conservative kingmaker. Yet he tells the story of his life as a series of disheartening setbacks…
He longs for a world in which great men are free to work their will on society, unconstrained by government or regulation or “redistributionist economics” that would impinge on their wealth and power—or any obligation, really, to the rest of humanity. He longs for radical new technologies and scientific advances on a scale most of us can hardly imagine. He takes for granted that this kind of progress will redound to the benefit of society at large.
More than anything, he longs to live forever…
Over and over, Thiel has voiced his discontent with what’s become of the grand dreams of science fiction in the mid-20th century. “We’d have colonies on the moon, you’d have robots, you’d have flying cars, you’d have cities in the ocean, under the ocean,” he said in his Seasteading Institute keynote. “You’d have eco farming. You’d turn the deserts into arable land. There were sort of all these incredible things that people thought would happen in the ’50s and ’60s and they would sort of transform the world.”
None of that came to pass. Even science fiction turned hopeless—nowadays, you get nothing but dystopias. The tech boom brought us the iPhone and Uber and social media, none of them a fundamental improvement to the human condition. He hungered for advances in the world of atoms, not the world of bits…
In Thiel’s Los Angeles office, he has a sculpture that resembles a three-dimensional game board. Ascent: Above the Nation State Board Game Display Prototype is the New Zealander artist Simon Denny’s attempt to map Thiel’s ideological universe. The board features a landscape in the aesthetic of Dungeons & Dragons, thick with monsters and knights and castles. The monsters include an ogre labeled “Monetary Policy.” Near the center is a hero figure, recognizable as Thiel. He tilts against a lion and a dragon, holding a shield and longbow. The lion is labeled “Fair Elections.” The dragon is labeled “Democracy.” The Thiel figure is trying to kill them.
Thiel saw the sculpture at a gallery in Auckland in December 2017. He loved the piece, perceiving it, he told me, as “sympathetic to roughly my side” of the political spectrum. (In fact, the artist intended it as a critique.) At the same show, he bought a portrait of his friend Curtis Yarvin, an explicitly antidemocratic writer who calls for a strong-armed leader to govern the United States as a monarch. Thiel gave the painting to Yarvin as a gift…
One night in 1999, or possibly 2000, Thiel went to a party in Palo Alto with Max Levchin, where they heard a pitch for an organization called the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
Alcor was trying to pioneer a practical method of biostasis, a way to freeze the freshly dead in hope of revivification one day. Don’t picture the reanimation of an old, enfeebled corpse, enthusiasts at the party told Levchin. “The idea, of course, is that long before we know how to revive dead people, we would learn how to repair your cellular membranes and make you young and virile and beautiful and muscular, and then we’ll revive you,” Levchin recalled.
Levchin found the whole thing morbid and couldn’t wait to get out of there. But Thiel signed up as an Alcor client.
Should Thiel happen to die one day, best efforts notwithstanding, his arrangements with Alcor provide that a cryonics team will be standing by. The moment he is declared legally dead, medical technicians will connect him to a machine that will restore respiration and blood flow to his corpse. This step is temporary, meant to protect his brain and slow “the dying process.”
All that will be left for Thiel to do, entombed in this vault, is await the emergence of some future society that has the wherewithal and inclination to revive him. And then make his way in a world in which his skills and education and fabulous wealth may be worth nothing at all.
Thiel knows that cryonics “is still not working that well.” When flesh freezes, he said, neurons and cellular structures get damaged. But he figures cryonics is “better than the alternative”—meaning the regular kind of death that nobody comes back from.
Of course, if he had the choice, Thiel would prefer not to die in the first place. In the 2000s, he became enamored with the work of Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist from England who predicted that science would soon enable someone to live for a thousand years. By the end of that span, future scientists would have devised a way to extend life still further, and so on to immortality.
A charismatic figure with a prodigious beard and a doctorate from Cambridge, de Grey resembled an Orthodox priest in mufti. He preached to Thiel for hours at a time about the science of regeneration. De Grey called his research program SENS, short for “strategies for engineered negligible senescence.”
Thiel gave several million dollars to de Grey’s Methuselah Foundation and the SENS Research Foundation, helping fund a lucrative prize for any scientist who could stretch the life span of mice to unnatural lengths. Four such prizes were awarded, but no human applications have yet emerged…
In the HBO series Silicon Valley, one of the characters (though not the one widely thought to be modeled on Thiel) had a “blood boy” who gave him regular transfusions of youthful serum. I thought Thiel would laugh at that reference, but he didn’t.
“I’ve looked into all these different, I don’t know, somewhat heterodox things,” he said, noting that parabiosis, as the procedure is called, seems to slow aging in mice. He wishes the science were more advanced. No matter how fervent his desire, Thiel’s extraordinary resources still can’t buy him the kind of “super-duper medical treatments” that would let him slip the grasp of death. It is, perhaps, his ultimate disappointment.
“There are all these things I can’t do with my money,” Thiel said.
It’s worth reading the whole article, for a comprehensive biography of our modern Ozymandias. For in one man, encapsulated like a malignant cyst, is the tragedy of extraordinary privilege, enabled by democracy and capitalism, attempting to destroy the whole world because it is larger than his own mean little existence.
Peter Thiel wants to be cryogenically frozen so someday he can wake up and argue with Jean-Luc Picard about space socialism. pic.twitter.com/2YZ9H8zM5w
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) November 12, 2023
J. Arthur Crank
Christ, what an asshole!
That guest character from the first season of Star Trek the Next Generation (shown on that last tweet) was also an asshole.
TriassicSands
I wouldn’t go so far as to say it is inevitable, because that depends on his being elected in 2024. It is inevitable only if Trump is guaranteed a win next November and he isn’t. However, he certainly could win, and if he does, once again proving that tens of millions of Americans can’t really be trusted to vote responsibly. So, why would there be any justification for investigating someone who has perhaps overstated the probability of a Trump dictatorship? I have no idea other than J.D. Vance is a complete fascist idiot.
As close as I can figure, Thiel may have between $4 and $9 billion, but he isn’t worth anything at all. He’s just one more entitled rich guy with a massively inflated sense of his own importance and our society, drunk on celebrity and wealth, mindlessly awards people like Thiel power and influence far out of proportion to their actual value.
caphilldcne
Pitchforks and torches aren’t enough for this guy. We need flamethrowers and broadswords.
Captain C
Peter Thiel seems like the kind of person who reads Neuromancer and decides that the Tessier-Ashpools are a good role model/example for him to aspire to.
TriassicSands
@J. Arthur Crank:
Hey, it’s not like there was, is, or will be a shortage of assholes. To its credit, Star Trek didn’t deny that fact.
Hoppie
P. Theil knows almost nothing about contemporary SF. Nuff said.
Ivan X
I would have been more impressed if J.D. Vance had asked the DOJ to investigate why that WaPo piece had to be 7,500 words or however the fuck long it was. It’s been a while since I’ve read (well, after about a third of the way through, skimmed) an essay in a major publication that was begging for an editor as badly, like a work of prose’s cry for help. (And I read the New Yorker, so I don’t have any problem with long pieces when they’re merited.)
Robmassing
So he’s just another mark for grifters and charlatans but he also happens to be a billionaire
TriassicSands
That should have continued:
…and if he does, once again proving that tens of millions of Americans can’t really be trusted to vote responsibly, then a Trump dictatatorship is quite likely, since our Constitution makes us powerless to protect democracy when one of two major parties is thoroughly corrupt and scared to death of a fascist POS.
The only hope at that point (in the short term, but possibly the long term, as well) would be assassination (no way to run a democracy), a coup (but by whom, from where, and with what result?), or my fondest wish of all the explosion of Trump’s head on national television. (OK, his head doesn’t have to explode, nor does his demise have to take place on national TV, but, although it would help the country,* there would still be endless conspiracy theories about how HRC, Nancy Pelosi, or Joe Biden had orchestrated the ‘sploding head.)
Hangö Kex
Open thread, some nice dresses and such: https://yle.fi/a/74-20063863
TriassicSands
@Captain C:
And here I thought Thiel read “Atlas Shrugged” and pictured himself as an even “better” John Galt.
wjca
Always good to end the evening on a high note.
Jay
So, interesting stat,
If you took the current crop of the worlds entire billionaires, and starting at the bottom of the Marianas trench, stood them one at a time on top of each other………
that would be a good start.
Thor Heyerdahl
Peter Thiel – so fearful of death because he knows he will be just another rich narcissistic asshole whose name will decompose into the detritus of history.
TriassicSands
@Jay: …that would be a good start.
Assuming that the Bloated Orange Clown is a billionaire, I would strongly recommend position number one for him in order to provide a good large base for the stack above. Put him in place first, and within a few minutes he would be so immersed in his own bullshit that he could never fall over. A skyscraper of assholes is only as stable as the “stable genius” who anchors it.
A good start indeed.
HumboldtBlue
One of the reasons this blog is so useful is reminding my dumbass that there are a lot of other dumbasses even more willing to be a dumbass and point it out to everyone.
Redshift
To reiterate, Christ, what an asshole!
Yet another small-minded, selfish conservative (but I repeat myself), lamenting how “we” don’t to “great things” any more, while totally ignoring that government did those things, funded in part by considerably higher tax rates, and yet they’re sure that the reason we stopped (we didn’t) is because government has become more “left”, rather than that their cabal from Reagan on promoted the idea that government is bad and all the money should go to make billionaires instead.
Baud
And that’s how the Picard facepalm meme was invented.
trollhattan
Similar to how I’m taking a break from dating Penelope Cruz? Or how I’m taking a break from hunting bigfoot?
TriassicSands
@Redshift:
Landing rovers on Mars and building and launching the James Webb telescope are far more impressive and difficult than building the Hoover Dam. And it’s not like the long term ramifications of nuclear weapons or damming the Colorado River have been without minor (ahem) problems.
If we want to do possibly the most important positive thing humanity has ever done, we could pull our heads out of rectums and get serious about addressing climate change and trying to prevent the catastrophe we have brought not only upon ourselves, but countless other species that about to be “canceled” by Homo sapiens.
TriassicSands
How did a double post happen?
Somehow, when I went to edit slightly, a corrected copy appeared alongside the original.
Edited sentence fragment: , we could pull our heads out of our planetary rectum and get serious…
TriassicSands
@trollhattan:
I’ll bet Penelope is heartbroken, while Bigfoot is probably relieved.
You could date Bigfoot and hunt Penelope Cruz… no, wait, that doesn’t sound like a good idea.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
While I was reading this post, I couldn’t help but be reminded of that TNG episode and low and behold, too.
A lot of Star Trek fans don’t care for that episode (The Neutral Zone), mainly because it’s too preachy. Roddenberry sure did like his Perfect 24th Century Humans and their moneyless, post-scarcity socialist utopia. Didn’t make for great drama on it’s own so the writers had to come up with work-arounds. The main characters are pretty harsh on the 20th century humans, especially Picard. The arrogant vulture capitalist guy I can understand because he’s annoying and does interfere with ship operations during a critical time, but the housewife character who didn’t even want to be frozen in the first place didn’t really deserve the ire imo, or the country musician
Citizen Alan
@Thor Heyerdahl: It is possible that the only thing that keeps me nominally a Christian is that I cling to the belief that creatures like Thiel will spend an eternity in hell. I genuinely don’t think it’s possible to become a billionaire without turning evil, crazy, or both. Despite all the good things he’s done, I still cannot bring myself to trust J.B. Pritzger because he’s a billionaire, so he’s got to have something awful in his closet.
Jay
@trollhattan:
Leave Bigfoot alone, it’s a gentle forest creature,…..
Sure, it know’s where D.B. Cooper’s money is, but it’s not interested in money,……..
Tony Jay
@Redshift:
Let’s be honest here. When Hoffman talks to his good friend Peter about the “massive, crazy amounts of power” wielded in the 30s, 40s & 50s, he’s emphatically not talking about the Government funded successes of the USA.
He’s talking about how one man with a vision transformed a corrupt, centre-left failed state into a global superpower and built millions of miles of autobahns, crushed all internal threats to his power, unleashed the unconstrained power of allied corporations and yet still found time for playing around with all kinds of mad sorcery-science that totally would have won him a global war if it hadn’t been for those pesky statists and their jealousy.
What the betting Thiel has a Statue Garden of his own where Austrian house painters stand proudly next to Ming the Merciless and MorningLightMountain?
Rose Weiss
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Yes, but the repentance has to be sincere, which isn’t possible for someone like Thiel.
Jay
@Tony Jay:
Whom exactly was that? /
Baud
@Jay:
Are you trying to kill off the pedants?
prostratedragon
Rich young man having trouble handling the truth?
Geoduck
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): The Trek series Lower Decks includes a gag in one episode where it’s mentioned the musician has restarted his career and is performing at concerts.
Baud
The interesting thing to me about Thiel’s lament about America’s so-called glory days is that it reminds me of the type of talk I see in online liberal/left forums. Different interpretation, obviously, but same attitude.
prostratedragon
@TriassicSands: “A skyscraper of assholes is only as stable as the “stable genius” who anchors it.”
Rotating tag?
Brachiator
I don’t get it. He lives with his husband and two children and yet yearns for the past when he would have been in the closet or involved in a lavender marriage to disguise his sexuality.
TriassicSands
I am definitely in favor of cryogenically freezing Peter Thiel. Ideally, that should be done in Texas next week, so no later than next summer a power failure will…Oops!
Baud
@Brachiator:
He thinks he can pick and choose among the benefits of liberalism. Society, of course, doesn’t work that way.
Martin
I stick by my idea that law school ranking should solely be an inverse relationship to the number and severity of felonies that the law school’s graduates commit.
TriassicSands
@prostratedragon: Rotating tag?
That’s not up to me. However, there is a rotating tag about the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and something like the Joe Biden Big Deal, but that leaves out Trump…the Misdeal. I think that oversight should be corrected.
Tony Jay
@Jay:
Adenoid Hynkel, obviously. Tomania never gets the respect it deserves.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Tony Jay: As world leaders go, he’s right up there with Rufus T. Firefly.
♪ Hail, hail, Freedonia, land of the brave and free! ♫
Hob
@TriassicSands: The Vance letter is basically a troll post. The super impressive rhetorical zinger is supposed to be that if you think threatening political persecution of a reporter is scary, then you must admit prosecuting Trump for inciting a riot is also an abuse of power, because Trump was just using his free speech! Checkmate, libs! It really is as stupid as that.
Of course nothing is ever purely ironic with right-wing trolls; I’m sure Vance also got a little thrill out of the idea of really threatening a reporter, because he’s a massive douchebag. But since he also thinks he’s clever, he’s given it this spin of “if this scares you, it’s really your own liberal tyranny scaring you!”
lowtechcyclist
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
If you think your country’s bad off now, just wait ’til I get through with it!
Here’s what I don’t understand about guys like Thiel, who have multibillion dollar fortunes but yearn for a libertarian paradise where they could innovate, free from all government shackles:
There has to be some impoverished Third World nation that would, for a few billion, sell them a decent chunk of land and (this is key) relinquish all claims of sovereignty to it, thus providing them their libertarian paradise. They could do this. It would take a lot of work (especially to provide for defense, as sovereign nations must) but it would be possible.
Actually, I do understand this: they want to have their cake and eat it too – they want to live in that Bel Air mansion, in the safety of the U.S. of A., and miraculously have their libertarian paradise right here.
So instead, they whine a lot. Excuse me while I dig out the world’s smallest violin.
NotMax
@trollhattan
In Russia Bigfoot hunt you.
;)
Tony Jay
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
Makes your eagle soar, doesn’t it?
Splitting Image
@Hoppie:
He doesn’t know much about the classics, either. Humans attempting to obtain eternal life is precisely what sunders humans from the elves and the Valar in The Silmarillion.
For reference, Thiel named his company after the palantirs, which were brought to Middle-Earth by the refugees from the destruction of Numenor after Ar-Pharazon declared war on the gods to get the secret of eternal life.
He’s really good at missing the point.
Matt McIrvin
@trollhattan: More like how Lee Harvey Oswald took a break from JFK.
ColoradoGuy
I went to college in California in the late Sixties, and my major was psychology (in Claremont, California). Yes, that Claremont.
That was the year California finally banned frontal lobotomies, greatly restricted electroshock, and started to get rid of involuntary psychiatric holds.
In the 1950’s, all of these barbarities could be applied to gay men … in “liberal” California. It was called “Mental Hygiene” back then.
Is that what he wants? Or is the glorious past for the “other people” who don’t live in glass houses overlooking the city?
satby
Just wanted to read this brilliant summation again Anne Laurie! Describes not just Theil, but Musk, the Kochs, Trump… hell, almost all of the rich (mostly men) bitter that they can’t just ignore everyone else on the planet and control everything to suit themselves only.
Debbie(Aussie)
Why do these, supposedly intelligent, people think that SF is some kind of predictive text. Surely they don’t think the same of fantasy, yet the two are almost always paired off as the same genre.
i’ll add my WHAT AN ARSEHOLE (for the pedants). :)
Tony Jay
@Splitting Image:
And, let’s not forget, the Palantirs are most famous in the LOTR for being a wonderful invention designed for communication and fellowship perverted and corrupted by the Dark Lord into tools for spying, misinformation and the crushing of human souls.
So maybe he did get the point in this instance, just very much the wrong point.
Tony Jay
@satby:
It is a lovely bit of writing, isn’t it? Well jealous.
Matt McIrvin
How much of that classic science-fiction furniture would be a fundamental improvement to the human condition? Would flying cars really improve my life? Moon colonies? Undersea cities? It might be cool if they existed. I suspect most people would get less actual value out of them than they do from cell phones. We have a continuously crewed space station and all these probes exploring the Solar System and few people seem to care.
(I also recently learned that in the 1950s and 1960s, science fiction fans constantly complained that the science fiction of the time was too pessimistic. A lot of the stories were, after all, post-apocalyptic tales or dystopias of some sort.)
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator:
Peter Thiel thinks all that would be for the little people, not for giants of society like him.
p.a.
Which were btw created by one of the most arrogant, controlling (and eventually destructive of himself and those closest to him) characters in the mythos
satby
@Citizen Alan: He’s a billionaire who inherited most of his wealth in a family where all the kids were expected to work at real jobs anyway; virtually the entire family is engaged in philanthropy and are Democrats; has a transgender family member who served in the IL national guard; and is descended from a Ukrainian Jew who fled the Russian pogroms. Context is important, family history and upbringing matters. Blanket statements about any group are just lazy thinking.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: The mid-20th century was, for all its many, many faults, a period when people like Peter Thiel controlled a much smaller fraction of the wealth of the country, and there was some idea that the government was supposed to do constructive things for the collective good. That situation enraged the Peter Thiels of the day and they did everything they could to kill that consensus, with amazing success.
Tony Jay
@Debbie(Aussie):
How much would you like to bet that Thiel is a firm believer in Clarke’s Third Law? The one that goes “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic“. A lot of hardcore Tolkien fans would be only too happy to wax lyrical on how most of the ‘magic’ described in the great man’s works was a thinly-veiled analogy for Massively Advanced Crystal Spires & Togas Science, including the biological warfare, weather manipulation, horror gengineering and psionic manipulation used by the bad guys.
He did name his data-hoarding company after magical crystal balls made by a mad Elf inventor, after all.
NotMax
@Citizen Alan
Time was the ultra-wealthy were content spending their time on things like naming their yachts.
:)
Matt McIrvin
@Splitting Image: The bit about how he saw a sculpture attempting to satirize him as an approving summation of his noble ideology is remarkable.
Matt McIrvin
@Tony Jay:
And J. R. R. Tolkien would laugh at them.
I mean, I think he did intend the character of Saruman specifically as a crack at rationalist-reductionist scientific modernity. There’s that exchange of shade between him and Gandalf where Saruman talks about splitting white light into colors (a metaphor that couldn’t have existed before Isaac Newton) and Gandalf says that to destroy a thing to find out how it works is not the path of wisdom. And when Saruman takes over places he turns them into this sort of 19th-century industrialized horror. But that’s basically one character.
Most of the time, Tolkien is talking more generally about what seeking power over the whole world does to you. He’s not for it.
Shalimar
Thiel sees himself as nobility, risen to his natural place in society. What he doesn’t grasp is that actual nobility in any monarchy in history would have seen him as a peasant and crushed him.
lowtechcyclist
@satby:
If they just wanted to enjoy their accumulated wealth, they pretty much could ignore everyone else on the planet. They could have vast estates where only they, their family and friends, and their servants (of course) had access to. They could travel where they wanted to, buy practically anything they wanted, and let their accountants deal with the tax man. After all, we’re talking about people who literally have more money than they could possibly spend on themselves.
The problem is, they don’t want to ignore everyone else on the planet. They think their success and their money means they ought to be able to redefine our world to suit them.
The sooner we bring back 90% tax brackets for billionaires, the better. We need to limit the power that vast sums of money gives these people.
Tony Jay
@Matt McIrvin:
He might laugh and he might not. Sure, Saruman’s fall into error was pretty much a straightforward punch in the nose for industrialisation, both in civilian settings and for what it did out on the battlefield, but there are bits and bobs throughout his writings that suggest everything we see the Elves construct is just the shiny fruit of a science so advanced that only the Valar could teach it to (some of) them.
Come on. They’ve got tanks attacking Gondolin and actual spaceships fighting dragons in the skies over Beleriand. Sauron releases genetically engineered plagues and practices weather control. Very few of even the Valar just wave their hands and make stuff happen, and the vast majority of the ‘magic’ comes in the form of objects that are made using certain esoteric skills most everyone but the Valar themselves originally learnt from Aüle’s advanced courses in getting the most out of your materials.
It’s superscience, man, just being described in fantasy terms. 8-)
Matt McIrvin
@Tony Jay: I suspect Tolkien would say that in his legendarium there’s not really a hard line between science and magic–I think somewhere he says that Men talk about a distinction but the elves don’t see it; it’s all “art” to them.
But I also don’t think the elves got there through systematic scientific investigation. Their knowledge seems to work along mythical lines, maybe acquired from the Valar and Maiar, and the world is in a state of decay from a Golden Age; there’s no sense of progress.
Gvg
Theil is depressed. I think I mean clinically. It’s bad for us that he has so much money. He is just really seeing the world all wrong and apparently always has.
Science Fiction is not all bleak, and I think science is making some great progress. Theil is keeping some projects from happening of course but is too screwy to know that. Really he needs treatment. I guess he couldn’t actually commit suicide unless having himself frozen early would count, but I would watch out for his family.
only good thing is he has terrible judgement on what appeals to an electorate and his candidates have usually flopped.
Princess
Imagine reading LotR and thinking Saruman was the hero.
Anyway, one day Thiel is going to die and given the healthcare he has available to him, it won’t be sudden and he’ll know it’s coming. He knows it’s coming now. I love this for him. Someone go hang a sword over his place at the table.
Tony Jay
@Matt McIrvin:
Agreed. There’s bound to be a different viewpoint when you’ve got forever to learn something and live in an eternal realm of unchanging heavenly bliss.
Which is another thing that Thiel, for all his weird science boosterism, will never understand.
p.a.
You TolkHeads might enjoy GirlNextGondor on youtube.
SFAW
@Tony Jay:
Had to look that one up. Is it a good series? Always looking for a new book/series. That I will, of course, buy and then not make time to read.
Eyeroller
@Matt McIrvin: The big projects he cites were also responses to real or perceived crises. Boulder/Hoover Dam was built during the Depression as an intentional “we can do it”/make-jobs project. The Manhattan Project was a desperate race against what we thought the Germans were going to do during the most destructive war in human history. Even the Space Race was largely driven by the Cold War. The underlying motives were not noble. And as has been noted, those big projects do not always have positive long-term consequences.
SFAW
@Baud:
Fixed
Marmot
@Matt McIrvin: That stuck out to me too.
There was this Archie Bunker Effect that Norman Lear and all other satirists should pay (or have paid) more attention to.
Smallish survey, ~350. Same thing observed with Colbert Report, if I’m remembering correctly.
Fixed link, etc.
kalakal
@SFAW: Yes,worth reading. I like Peter F Hamilton’s is stuff. If I remember correctly the first book in that set is Pandora’s Star. There’s a continuation series (the Void set) which is set much later but has some of the characters in it
Matt McIrvin
@Eyeroller: A pet peeve of mine is when people describe Project Apollo as this vast unifying cause that brought the public together. The culminating moment of Armstrong stepping onto the Moon had the world watching. But it really wasn’t unifying–it was deeply, deeply controversial, at a time when it seemed like the whole world was spinning apart regardless, and everyone knew these vast sums were being spent on what amounted to psychological cold warfare.
AM in NC
@Redshift: I SO SO wish some interviewer would ask Hoffman and thief that exact question.
Make it crystal clear to them that their ideology destroyed what they loved and see if they can grok that in any way.
Matt McIrvin
@Gvg: A lot of the modern science fiction that isn’t bleak is about imagining futures not controlled by the white American steely-eyed missile men who were the central heroic figures of so much of the old stuff. Which to someone like Thiel makes them depressing.
Matt McIrvin
…One of my favorite science-fiction critics, the prolific blogger James Nicoll, likes to complain that futuristic science-fiction governments still seem to be autocratic or monarchical most of the time. But Thiel would probably find that encouraging.
Matt McIrvin
@Marmot: I’ve heard about that phenomenon for a long time and it depresses me: seems to say that art with any kind of social message basically needs to be boringly, thuddingly didactic or it’s probably going to do harm.
WaterGirl
@TriassicSands: Are you on a mobile device? i think it occasionally happens when someone edits on a mobile device, and the original stays and the edited version gets published, so you end up with 2.
Matt
100% guaranteed he’s got a Nazi flag pinned up in his bedroom and he jerks off to photos of Holocaust victims.
Personally, I think we should recapture that effectiveness by taking decisive action to expel from the United States foreigners that are deliberately trying to overthrow the government and impose a fascist dictatorship. Start by interning Thiel and the rest at Gitmo until “the conclusion of the conflict” with Russia.
chris
@Tony Jay: Oooo PF Hamilton reference!
Marmot
@Matt McIrvin:
Can you give me some examples? I hear this assertion a lot, but of what I’ve read, only Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, and Ray Bradbury come closest.
From what I see, 50s-60s(?) sci-if mostly failed to tackle race and ethnicity. 70s, well, I have other concerns.
Edit for clarity.
TS
@Hangö Kex:
Interesting link – thank you – the mayor & his wife were a unique pair.
Marmot
@Matt McIrvin: No need to be pessimistic. There are more than two ways to present social issues!
All in the Family, which I never could stand, failed because it strove too hard to make Archie relatable or normal. And it was real dumb. I doubt Don’t Look Up has conservatives siding with the idiots.
Ken
Thiel may indeed get frozen, but what makes him think that the people of the future, looking at his record, will want to thaw him out?
Similarly we may eventually be able to “upload” people to computer programs, but what’s the future world’s motivation to run them?
(Greg Egan’s Permutation City had a reasonable answer: You set up a trust fund to pay for it in perpetuity. And if your investments don’t do well, your program just runs slower, or is shut down for a while. It’s not like you’ll notice, except that the outside world seems to be moving faster.)
Matt McIrvin
@Ken: And Permutation City (building on Egan’s short story “Dust”) adds the bizarre wrinkle that, if that’s so, maybe it doesn’t matter whether the server is running at all.
Ken
There’s already a sizable chunk that no one claims, Bir Tawil. Buying it would be a legal mess, since neither Egypt or Sudan want to say they own it in the first place; but some of those billions could undoubtedly smooth the process.
Ian R
I’m always a little confused by people who assert that smartphones weren’t hugely transformative. Look at the number of older movies whose entire plot would be negated in current times by sending a text, the increasing awareness of police brutality because there are always cameras, or the constant availability of all human knowledge, and tell me that it hasn’t changed the world more than flying cars would.
Matt McIrvin
@Marmot: I was definitely thinking of the whole John Campbell Analog/Astounding stable, of whom Heinlein and Asimov and Niven were regular members. Bova, Pournelle, Poul Anderson, H. Beam Piper, Gordon Dickson etc. The heroes weren’t necessarily macho but if they weren’t, they were big nerds who valued right answers over feelings.
Asimov even had a recurring hero who was a woman… but, naturally, there had to be something kind of wrong with her to make her behave in an unwomanly manner.
While Bradbury had a very conservative-guy outlook, he wrote in a different vein. There were competing outlets like Galaxy and F&SF that were kind of reacting against the Campbell orthodoxy and printed different kinds of stuff. But when you see old SF fans today bellyaching about the wokeness, it’s Campbell’s editorship they pine for.
Matt McIrvin
@Captain C: I do remember being a teenager and reading these kinds of cyberpunk dystopian stories and thinking, yeah, I know this world is awful, but there’s also a lot of cool in it. I could probably get by and have cool adventures in that kind of world.
It’s a very young-guy kind of thought to have. When you’re older and you’ve lived through a bunch of “Let’s Build the Torment Nexus” (as the meme says), the bloom is off the rose.
Matt McIrvin
@Ian R: I think the assertion is not so much that smartphones weren’t transformative and more that they’re bad.
But they’re also not IN SPAAAAAACE, which is the preoccupation of so many of these guys because mid-C20 science fiction was written during a transportation explosion and assumed so much about speed, flight and space.
The funny thing is that some of that happened too. When I was a kid, I imagined that when I grew up, you’d be able to just buy a ticket to space. Well, you can. Sort of. I could book a 15-minute suborbital flight right now for the cost of a big chunk of my retirement savings. It wouldn’t be a good idea, mind you.
Timill
@Ken: But where would they get the bears from? Any libertarian paradise needs bears…
Matt McIrvin
I think a lot of people blame “old science fiction/futurist trope didn’t happen” on politics (there’s a left-wing version of it too), when actually it turned out there were fundamental physical or social obstacles to the thing. Flying cars are just a dumb idea, for instance, for several obvious reasons. The absence of them is NOT for lack of trying.
The Apollo program gave a lot of people the idea that sending astronauts to Mars would just be the next step, when really it’s monstrously harder.
RAM
Peter Thiel, obviously mentally unbalanced, is an excellent example of why no one should be allowed to accumulate that much wealth. He’s a real life version of Billy Mumy in the “Twilight Zone” episode, “It’s a Good Life.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_a_Good_Life_(The_Twilight_Zone)
sdhays
@TriassicSands: “but that leaves out Trump…the Misdeal”
The Trump “Can’t Deal”. Works two ways.
Eyeroller
@Matt McIrvin:
I don’t really get the obsession with flying cars. General aviation is an extremely dangerous mode of transportation, and that is with much more stringent training and licensing requirements than we have for drivers. (Airline travel, on the other hand, is very safe.) Three-dimensional travel adds all sorts of complications and opportunities for accidents.
As to thinking that going to Mars is just an extension of going to the Moon (which is tough enough for humans), very few people understand the energetics IMHO, since very few people understand even elementary physics.
Matt McIrvin
@satby: Maybe a lot of the super-rich are actually OK people, but given the amount of mischief just one of them can do, we could still argue that nobody should be allowed that level of power.
It’s a basically autocratic idea that it’s better for some individual to decide how to throw that kind of money around than for a society to do it collectively.
Matt McIrvin
@Eyeroller: I think flying cars and jetpacks get used as a kind of metonym for “all the cool future stuff”. (Working jetpacks exist and have for decades, but, again, they suck for fundamental physical reasons.)
They’re useful for this purpose precisely because they’re implausible, so the flying-cars-and-jetpacks future keeps receding.
Subsole
Two things:
1. That tweet about these clowns having it better than anyone in history? Yeah. It’s worse than that. With climate change and the world that looms before us, these assholes may in fact be the only people who ever live like this in the entire span of our species’ existence.
And they’re sad.
Huh.
2. These folks don’t know how to be human, because they don’t know how to die. They have this desperate need to be something that no one is: eternal. They don’t know how to live with the fact that one day their body and their memory and all their works shall crumble and the world will go ticking on without them, just fine.
Existence is, to borrow a phrase, a brief crack of light between two darknesses. Functioning human beings make their peace with that, and live.
What I’m trying to say is, if Pete wants to make a mark on the world, he should just go build a pyramid. And, ideally, leave the rest of us out of it.
Tony Jay
@SFAW:
It is. I like Hamilton, he’s not afraid to go big and his aliens in this are properly alien.
Also his Nights Dawn trilogy has Satanic Possession/Zombie Apocalypse… in Space!
Kosh III
MorningLightMountain
One of my favorite aliens. Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained.
SFAW
@Hob:
Well, as Jonah DF Goldberg proved with geometric logic, Liberals are the REAL Fascists.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
When aristocrats of old thought they didn’t have enough power they would seize the power of others. Suddenly, what happened on Jan 6 and Thiel’s support for Trump make a lot more sense.
RaflW
Dunno why I didn’t know that Thiel is married to a man. I won’t call him gay, because gay-as-coming out, same-sex loving, proud & open still has some connotation of being happy for god’s sake. What a miserable p.o.s.
And that he is assisting in ushering in a new era of repression for queer folks, including the frontal assault on our trans and gender expansive communities, yeah he can (metaphorically) go DIAF.
Glidwrith
@TriassicSands: Not to mention the enormous strides we’ve made in treating cancers and infectious diseases, engineering organisms, etc.
Anyway
@Matt McIrvin:
Samrtphones are bad?! sez who? That’s a new one to me.
In the broader context of this post – I don’t get the desire/preoccupation among the uber-rich to “cheat” death. Isn’t that something you learn/accept fairly early in life?
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
@Anyway: Smartphones aren’t bad. There are good and bad application for them. Like pron, good; financial services, bad.
StringOnAStick
@SFAW: But and not read, because I spend too much time here.
A neighbor gave me over a hundred books as she gets rid of a lot in order to move; I look at them and just feel overwhelmed. Our book club chose a nearly 800 page book and I’m not even attempting to read it, it’s just too much and I’m noting on fiction anyway. Nonfiction is my deal but the lone libertoonian asshole in the group made a blanket proclamation that there will be no more nonfiction selections so maybe I need to bail out.
Ken
Is that energetics in the sense of energy needed to transport a few humans* to Mars, or in the sense of sieverts of radiation absorbed during the trip?
* And more than a few tons of food, water, air, and all the other stuff so they get there alive. Well, alive-ish, see the radiation.
kindness
I thought Theil’s mail squeeze was the guy who killed himself last spring. That was just a side boyfriend? Damn. I do not pay attention to the lives of the rich and abnoxious.
Citizen Alan
@Princess: That insight will just make him lash out more. I’m convinced that at least 75% of the pathologies endemic to billionaires is that they’re so egomaniacal they cannot bear the thought of the world continuing on after them. So they are willing to destroy the human race for even the tiniest bit of self-advancement on the theory that, if they are the most powerful members of the last generation of humans, they win.
SFAW
@StringOnAStick:
Or, you could try this alternative: tell him (or her) to FOAD, it is NOT his/her book club to dictate, and if others want nonfiction, asshole can join a club in Somalia.
Gravyboat
“Rosebud”
Matt McIrvin
@Ken: All of them, Katie
Subsole
@kindness:
I think that was Glem Greemwald.
Sloegin
Money fails to buy happiness for techbro Voldemort. Maybe he’ll discover that doing good will help with that.
Ha! I kid.
Eyeroller
@Ken: Energetics of getting humans to Mars. There are plenty of potential hazards in addition to radiation, but the basic requirements of launching the amount of fuel, water, and food that would be required are daunting. People vastly underestimate the quantity of energy (and water) we must consume to stay alive.
Matt McIrvin
@Anyway: I guess you haven’t seen all the memes that go “Look at this picture–nobody on their phones. We used to have a society…”
People send and view them on their phones.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Debbie(Aussie): I often look at SF as fantasy because a lot of it hand waves actual, biological limitations with “we ll find a tech solution by then”.
Jinchi
@Sloegin: The funny thing is that if these guys just paid their taxes instead of trying to build their own manned space programs from scratch, we’d probably be a long way closer to reaching their dreams.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Matt McIrvin: I figure those people extolling lack of technology don’t have a lot of physical limitations. My former boss was a quadriplegic and also a computer programmer. I wish he had lived long enough to enjoy being able to automate to voice command a lot of things in his house.
Matt McIrvin
@Eyeroller: A thing that makes it seem easier than it is is that people have already stayed in space for the amount of time required for a Mars trip. But they’re in low earth orbit, within easy resupply by cargo rocket and if something goes wrong, they can bail out and get back to Earth at any time. They’re also inside of the Earth’s magnetosphere, which helps a lot with the radiation situation. All that goes away on an actual interplanetary flight.
Matt McIrvin
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: There was a viral one that showed a bunch of kids touring an art gallery and they were all looking at their phones–much pearl-clutching and bellowing, until it came out they were looking at the gallery’s educational app that provided extended exhibit labels and context about the pieces on display.
Matt McIrvin
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: Fans often categorize science fiction by level of “hardness”, with “hard SF” classified as the stories with meticulously researched science… except that often it isn’t; it’s just the stuff that most glorifies the power of engineering.
Maybe sometimes they work out the orbital mechanics and a few other details, and avoid some of the most egregiously fantastical tropes (but some of the authors classed as “hard SF” tended to include things like “psionics”, which Campbell insisted was a real science). But it’s often more a matter of vibes than actual plausibility.
wjca
Reminds me of a kid I grew up with. (Not sure if they were billionaires in current dollars; maybe just a few hundred million. Interestingly, tech billionaires at that.) The kids attended public schools here. (He was also in my Cub Scout den.) They spent the summers up at a big ranch that the family owned in northern California, and the kids damn well worked, and worked hard, while they were there.
Wealth doesn’t have to corrupt. It just makes any corruption much more damaging.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
We’ll remember him, not well.
Realworldrj
“Time after time, Thiel would espouse grandiose, utopian hopes that failed to materialize, leaving him “kind of furious or angry” about the world’s unwillingness to bend to whatever vision was possessing him at the moment”
Shorter: my billions are my monkey paws, and yet…
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Matt McIrvin: Exactly. I don’t read much SF anymore but for all its, weird “magic” alien lifeform storyline, The Expanse series did at least confront some of the problems that less than Earth gravity would cause to humans raised in it, and what growing up on Mars in underground habitats might do to humans psychologically (agoraphobia) and what less gravity might do physically (visiting to Earth with its higher gravity would be extremely hard on their heart, lungs and muscles). They even mentioned that acceleration couches and drugs would be needed to deal with some aspects of space travel, and people had to have magnets in their footwear on spaceships to not float around when working inside the ship. They still left out a lot of possible problems but at least they addressed some things. Elon Musk and his colonization fantasies make me laugh.
Citizen Alan
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: Not just biological. Literally every sci-fi property I’m aware of that incorporates interstellar travel in any capacity assumes the existence of some form of FTL travel, most of which might as well be witchcraft. (Dune, for example, required the existence of a magic spice which, when consumed to excess, mutated humans into giant worm-things that had the power to “fold space” through will alone.
Citizen Alan
@satby: None of that changes the fact that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And in a hyper-capitalist society like ours, being a billionaire is as close to absolute power as you can get. The fact that Pritzger has (as far as we know) used his enormous wealth productively and beneficially does not change the fact that he could wake up tomorrow with some insane belief that he would have the power to force on us all in a way that 99.9% of human beings would not.
Citizen_X
Unfortunately, he’ll just get blown up by the Vorlons, and Khosh will tell us “You are not ready for immortality.”
Dan B
@Brachiator: I came out ( finally found other gay people) in Chicago in 1968. There were guys in “lavender martiages” whose wives were clueless. Approximately half the gay guys were neurotic. Your job and career could be ended at any moment. Having a fake marriage was no guarantee if your name and photo were in the paper from a t-room or bar bust. Lots of guys wouldn’t kiss because that would make them fags. There were millions of psychic casualties. It was amazing that many LGBTQ people were well adjusted.
Dan B
@RaflW: Thiel was outed. He was furious about it. His husband is very handsome and the kids are beautiful. It may only be skin deep.
The America he wants will see his children removed and his husband sent to conversion camp.
NobodySpecial
This guy may be rich, but he’s sure dumb. Why would any society even loosely based around capitalism wake up a guy who’s legally dead? Can you imagine trying to untangle what they own 100 years in the future?
Nah, about five years after he’s put in the machine, someone will make an “unfortunate error” and he’ll be as dead as a doornail with no chance to come back.
The Moar You Know
Thiel has herpes. That’s why he is so angry.