On Fri, 30 May 2014, Julia Tourianski wrote:

>    What is your candid opinion on Peter Thiel and bitcoin?  He's
>    attending Bilderberg currently. And they are definitely discussing
>    bitcoin there.

Thiel is the person incarnating the closer point between capitalism and
fascism. There you are, standing in front of you: founder of student
magazine "Fiat Lux" at Stanford univ. already in its early days showed
admiration for an iconography previously used by Mussolini.

To say the least, he is definitely a misanthropist.

This Guardian article in 2008 debunks a bit the character:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook

some excerpts:

But Thiel is more than just a clever and avaricious capitalist. He is a
futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A philosophy graduate from Stanford,
in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which is a detailed
attack on liberalism and the multiculturalist ideology that dominated Stanford.
He claimed that the "multiculture" led to a lessening of individual freedoms.
While a student at Stanford, Thiel founded a rightwing journal, still up and
running, called The Stanford Review - motto: Fiat Lux ("Let there be light").
Thiel is a member of TheVanguard.Org, an internet-based neoconservative
pressure group that was set up to attack MoveOn.org, a liberal pressure group
that works on the web. Thiel calls himself "way libertarian".

[...]

This little taster from their website will give you an idea of their vision for
the world: "TheVanguard.Org is an online community of Americans who believe in
conservative values, the free market and limited government as the best means
to bring hope and ever-increasing opportunity to everyone, especially the
poorest among us." Their aim is to promote policies that will "reshape America
and the globe". TheVanguard describes its politics as "Reaganite/Thatcherite".
The chairman's message says: "Today we'll teach MoveOn [the liberal website],
Hillary and the leftwing media some lessons they never imagined."


So, Thiel's politics are not in doubt. What about his philosophy? I listened to
a podcast of an address Thiel gave about his ideas for the future. His
philosophy, briefly, is this: since the 17th century, certain enlightened
thinkers have been taking the world away from the old-fashioned nature-bound
life, and here he quotes Thomas Hobbes' famous characterisation of life as
"nasty, brutish and short", and towards a new virtual world where we have
conquered nature. Value now exists in imaginary things. Thiel says that PayPal
was motivated by this belief: that you can find value not in real manufactured
objects, but in the relations between human beings. PayPal was a way of moving
money around the world with no restriction. Bloomberg Markets puts it like
this: "For Thiel, PayPal was all about freedom: it would enable people to skirt
currency controls and move money around the globe."

[...]

Thiel's philosophical mentor is one René Girard of Stanford University,
proponent of a theory of human behaviour called mimetic desire. Girard reckons
that people are essentially sheep-like and will copy one another without much
reflection. The theory would also seem to be proved correct in the case of
Thiel's virtual worlds: the desired object is irrelevant; all you need to know
is that human beings will tend to move in flocks. Hence financial bubbles.
Hence the enormous popularity of Facebook. Girard is a regular at Thiel's
intellectual soirees. What you don't hear about in Thiel's philosophy, by the
way, are old-fashioned real-world concepts such as art, beauty, love, pleasure
and truth.

The internet is immensely appealing to neocons such as Thiel because it
promises a certain sort of freedom in human relations and in business, freedom
from pesky national laws, national boundaries and suchlike. The internet opens
up a world of free trade and laissez-faire expansion. Thiel also seems to
approve of offshore tax havens, and claims that 40% of the world's wealth
resides in places such as Vanuatu, the Cayman Islands, Monaco and Barbados. I
think it's fair to say that Thiel, like Rupert Murdoch, is against tax. He also
likes the globalisation of digital culture because it makes the banking
overlords hard to attack: "You can't have a workers' revolution to take over a
bank if the bank is in Vanuatu," he says.

If life in the past was nasty, brutish and short, then in the future Thiel
wants to make it much longer, and to this end he has also invested in a firm
that is exploring life-extension technologies. He has pledged £3.5m to a
Cambridge-based gerontologist called Aubrey de Grey, who is searching for the
key to immortality. Thiel is also on the board of advisers of something called
the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. From its fantastical
website, the following: "The Singularity is the technological creation of
smarter-than-human intelligence. There are several technologies ... heading in
this direction ... Artificial Intelligence ... direct brain-computer interfaces
... genetic engineering ... different technologies which, if they reached a
threshold level of sophistication, would enable the creation of
smarter-than-human intelligence."

So by his own admission, Thiel is trying to destroy the real world, which he
also calls "nature", and install a virtual world in its place, and it is in
this context that we must view the rise of Facebook. Facebook is a deliberate
experiment in global manipulation, and Thiel is a bright young thing in the
neoconservative pantheon, with a penchant for far-out techno-utopian fantasies.
Not someone I want to help get any richer.


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