Tech Oligarchs Fear Only Death, Taxes, And Greta Thunberg

Peter Thiel may be a crackpot, but he’s one of the crackpots who rule the world. Founder of PayPal and Palantir, philosopher, doctor of law, disciple of the French philosopher René Girard, and a key supporter of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, he is one of the most powerful figures in the United States and the world. He’s not entirely sure he wants the human species to survive through transhumanism. He envisions a human-machine alliance, a technical extension of the human mind through artificial intelligence, an augmented, technically and virtually immortal human being — a new species, in short.

One of the great challenges Thiel faces is overcoming mortality. He’s not entirely satisfied with being immortal in a digital replica. “I would prefer to preserve my body as well,” he has stated. When he dies, he has stipulated that he should be cryogenically frozen, primarily, he tells us, for ideological reasons, to highlight the potential for future technology. In other words, death is no longer seen as a mysterious existential condition, but as a deficiency or an inconvenient malfunction destined to be overcome technically. It’s understandable that someone who views immortality as a biotechnological challenge within reach would consider the transcendence of humanity as a possibility, and even have doubts about whether it would be desirable. The Nietzschean Übermensch thus appears, for the first time, just around the corner.

However, for Thiel, although it may be shocking to hear, we have been technically stagnant for 50 years. It was around the 1970s that a major shift occurred in the Western world, and things began to slow down and stall. Essentially, people started worrying about the limits and costs of growth. And environmentalism brought everything to a standstill. “We landed on the moon in July of 1969, Woodstock started three weeks later and, with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress stopped and the hippies won,” he opined.

The hippies won! Woodstock was the great battle of the 20th century, and the hippies won. “Of course, not everyone became Charles Manson. But in my telling of the history, everyone became as deranged as Charles Manson and the hippies took over.” Historians must be breathless listening to this. Taking a cursory look at 20th-century history, one wonders if seeing things this way requires something strange in the head. Perhaps it’s the nature of anarcho-capitalism, because Thiel is an anarcho-capitalist by vocation; that is, he is in favor of the complete privatization of power, the replacement of all public power (including military power) with private power. For this very reason, his greatest fear is the arrival of the Antichrist, whom he identifies with a global state dictatorship most likely presided over by Greta Thunberg. “I’m not sure it’d be North Korea, but it would be super oppressive,” he says of this society.

Naturally, this becomes clearer when considering what Thiel sees as signs of totalitarian governance: “The FDA, which not only regulates drugs in the United States, but, de facto, throughout the world, because other countries abide by its decisions,” or “the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which effectively regulates nuclear power plants worldwide.” All this regulation, apparently imposed by the hippies, has us technically stagnating. The Antichrist intends to establish a “universal stagnation” under the banner of “peace and security,” something that, it seems, was already foreseen in the Bible, in the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, 5:3. […]

So we’re going too slowly. We need to accelerate. As Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto states: “We believe in accelerationism.” He, too, considers the regulation of nuclear energy to be the worst crime perpetrated against humanity, because it has made us renounce “the miraculous solution of virtually unlimited, emission-free energy: nuclear fission.” […] While we wait for science to conquer nuclear fusion, the first step would be to fill the world with thousands of fission power plants. And, of course, to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence: “We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives,” the Manifesto tells us. Slowing it down would be devastating for the development of medicine (and for the project of merging man and machine, of course). […]

According to Thiel, we are standing before Armageddon or the Antichrist: either the dystopia of chaos and the end of the species, or a totalitarian world dictatorship. Fortunately, according to him, there is a third way: for an aristocratic global elite to prudently take control of technological development. The problem, however, lies in what these people call “prudence.” We are hearing reports of what this crony-driven ultra-capitalism might look like — or what Francisco José Fernández-Cruz Sequera has aptly described as “a political regression to the most primitive form of local tyranny imaginable, all wrapped up in the most advanced technology ever created.” […]

According to Thiel, “the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk.” The situation in Silicon Valley is extremely serious because the risk factor has been eliminated, rendering science ineffective. To combat this decline, we must accept taking many risks. Welcome a war, a crisis, a volcano, or an earthquake! What matters is the Nietzschean impulse that allows us to escape this decline. The rubble of chaos will not fall on the heads of these cronies — Thiel, Bezos, Andreessen, Musk, etc. — as has always been the case throughout history: it will fall on us, for our own good. “While they, in shelters, will watch us on television,” as Spanish punk band La Polla Records sang.

We can glimpse other conversations among the prudent elite who will save us from the dictatorship Greta Thunberg intends to impose. Commenting on a meeting in support of Donald Trump, Thiel tells us: “It was a meeting with Elon and the CEO of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, that we brokered. And the rough conversation was Demis telling Elon: I’m working on the most important project in the world. I’m building a superhuman AI. And Elon responds to Demis: Well, I’m working on the most important project in the world. I am turning us into interplanetary species.”

Although we are “stagnated,” it is hard to keep up with Musk’s imagination; he believes, for example, that by 2040, there will be 10 billion humanoid robots in the United States. Apparently, Musk was very worried, even disillusioned. He feared that artificial intelligence would allow Thunberg to chase him to Mars with her soporific sermons, although it is also AI that will design the rockets with which humans will install ourselves there. Apparently, it’s no joke, although it’s hard to believe that one can reason like that unless under the influence of some drug. In other words, these tech buddies destined to save us from Armageddon and the Antichrist are on drugs. And they’re heavily drugged. Although their real project, as we’ve seen, is immortality. They think they have the means to transcend ordinary human conditions. So, in the end, we will be governed by an immortal elite as prudent as the one we are witnessing. We have already seen that Putin and Xi Jinping, for now, are determined to live to 150. That’s what awaits us in the transhumanist future that lies ahead. Incipit Zarathustra.

Thiel, it seems, thinks it is more practical to conquer the sea for purposes of anarcho-capitalism through “seasteading” — floating “libertarian countries” in international waters.

I believe Evgeny Morozov has best described this elite of “intellectual oligarchic legislators,” “endowed with investment portfolios that function as philosophical arguments.” […] This new class of philosophers has access to resources that philosophy has never before possessed. To begin with, as Morozov points out, they wield “fortunes so enormous that they distort the basic physics of reality.” This must be taken very seriously. It is as if they were black holes in a society vainly attempting to govern itself by Newton’s laws. […] Furthermore, they are literally the owners of the networks that sustain societal discourse: “They have colonized both the medium and the message, the system and the lifeworld.”

Plato’s philosopher king merged with the Oracle of Delphi. They are not intellectuals merely probing the future, because they have the power to create it. Their theories are being tested on the world’s population “in the most extensive unregulated experiment in history”: “This, then, is the final tactic: oligarchic intellectuals reshaping legislation, institutions, and cultural expectations until prophecy and reality merge into a single hallucination (courtesy of ChatGPT, of course).”

These men are not like Rothschild, Rockefeller, or George Soros. They are not simply billionaires. They have a radical program for transforming the world. They are revolutionaries and philosophers, and they have a new vision of humanity in mind. Trying to realize it is like a game to them. And they have the means to play, and to keep playing big, for a long time. They are willing to risk the very essence of humanity.

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