All I can say about this Peter Thiel op-ed in the Financial Times is that it reads like something he actually wrote. No comms team or AI chatbot is capable of producing this strange paranoid string of sentences www.ft.com/content/a46c…
— Micah Loewinger (@micahloewinger.bsky.social) January 10, 2025 at 8:21 AM
Back on Friday, the Financial Times published an op-ed by Peter Thiel which has attracted a certain amount of internet scorn attention, even over the weekend. Some people say that Thiel, after spending lavishly of his own money & effort to install J.D. Vance on the incoming maladministration undercard, is just annoyed that his old running buddy Musk has side-stepped the official rules and moved into the top slot through the sheer leverage of money. Others point out that Thiel, like Elon, is a known (‘but of course he has a prescription’) ketamine user, and ketamine may assuage depression but it has concerning side effects.
Or then again, comes the rejoinder, maybe these Very Important Tech Dudes all got lucky — just happened to be standing outside with buckets when it started raining soup — and this is what the insides of their sweaty little brains have always looked like. In any case, here’s (ex South African) Thiel on A time for truth and reconciliation…
In 2016, President Barack Obama told his staff that Donald Trump’s election victory was “not the apocalypse”. By any definition, he was correct. But understood in the original sense of the Greek word apokálypsis, meaning “unveiling”, Obama could not give the same reassurance in 2025. Trump’s return to the White House augurs the apokálypsis of the ancien regime’s secrets. The new administration’s revelations need not justify vengeance — reconstruction can go hand in hand with reconciliation. But for reconciliation to take place, there must first be truth.
The apokálypsis is the most peaceful means of resolving the old guard’s war on the internet, a war the internet won. My friend and colleague Eric Weinstein calls the pre-internet custodians of secrets the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) — the media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation. In hindsight, the internet had already begun our liberation from the DISC prison upon the prison death of financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. Almost half of Americans polled that year mistrusted the official story that he died by suicide, suggesting that DISC had lost total control of the narrative…
We cannot wait six decades, however, to end the lockdown on a free discussion about Covid-19. In subpoenaed emails from Anthony Fauci’s senior adviser David Morens, we learnt that National Institutes of Health apparatchiks hid their correspondence from Freedom of Information Act scrutiny. “Nothing,” wrote Boccaccio in his medieval plague epic The Decameron, “is so indecent that it cannot be said to another person if the proper words are used to convey it.” …
Late Night Open Thread: Peter Thiel Wants to Speak to *All* the ManagersPost + Comments (83)