Huh. Very illuminating.

Well, I certainly care not whether I “help” Thiel to be richer. Or poorer. So, I'm wondering a bit about something. I have some general assumptions about Amir and Cody, whom I *think* I align with ideologically; and, I'm forming somewhat of an idea of the landscape of this place, but I'm having trouble reconciling the two. I guess my curiosity could best be sated by asking a question:

Kind fellow denizens of this unSystem mailing list: What is the general feeling in here about The Counterforce?

> On May 31, 2014, at 2:31, Jaromil <jaromil@???> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>
> --
> http://jaromil.dyne.org
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