OF ALL of the Silicon Valley Tech Bros, Peter Thiel perhaps most personifies the credo of ‘rapid tech change over gradual reforms’ that Patrick Wood describes in his book The Final Betrayal, which argues that America has been treacherously betrayed by technocrats who have taken over Washington, DC.
Thiel, a chess Grandmaster, heads the group of individuals who are rapidly reaching the point of being the self-appointed visionaries of our world. They have ascended to this position not only through their ingenuity, but also through assiduous elimination of the competition and infiltration into key political and institutional positions. Significantly, they are the undisputed apex problem-solving network for the billionaire elite class and the challenges which stand in the way of the ongoing post-2020 transformational agenda. This, the repurposing of capitalism around environmental goals, sustainable development and social justice, has been the clinching deal for Thiel and his colleagues to usurp politics in favour of a world defined increasingly by the key performance indicators of the Fourth Industrial Revolution – efficiency, measurement control and surveillance.
Max Chafkin argues in his 2022 book The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power that ‘more than any other Silicon Valley investor or entrepreneur – more so even than Jeff Bezos, or Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, or Zuckerberg himself – Thiel has been responsible for creating both an ideology and associated practices that have come to define the ambitions of Silicon Valley, namely: that technological progress should be pursued relentlessly – with little or any regard for potential dangers or costs to society’.
Thiel himself has never hidden this view, arguing on numerous occasions that democracy is inherently incompatible with true progress, freedom and enlightened thinking. As he stated in 2009: ‘Over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible’.
This ethos arguably underlies the motivations and actions behind all Thiel’s primary business creations and extensive investment portfolio, whether PayPal, Palantir, Facebook, SpaceX, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Stripe or Spotify etc. PayPal itself came about largely from Thiel cleverly circumnavigating existing regulation to ensure monopolisation.
Such ideals and practices correspond perfectly with a world that has been rendered deliberately borderless, actively shaped by environmental boundaries and ecological limits, and subjected to the gradual curtailing of liberty, freedom, and human rights. PayPal data analytics and applications transformed security and surveillance post-9/11, when this model was successfully applied to the global security challenges identified by the US Government. Thiel’s Palantir was the biggest player behind this, as it was in 2020 to track and contain the pandemic and even to help with the distribution of vaccines in the US and in the UK, as Michael Steinberger details in The Philosopher in the Valley.
Fast forward to today and this company will continue to play a central role in both widening and deepening the same agenda. The company’s Goliath programme now builds software capabilities that are gradually enabling ‘governments, military bodies, health agencies, large corporations and businesses, to integrate, structure and analyse huge volumes of data’; all of which will support the enforcement of pre-ordained behaviour, and prescriptive rights and obligations. Many are worried that this will be a future characterised by ‘governance’ which will be characterised by practices such as ‘predictive policing’, and ‘environmental and social justice profiling’. It is significant that Palantir has lucrative contracts in place worldwide (both current and planned) across a range of institutions, organisations, and interests, all of which will replicate this state-of-the-art surveillance globally.
The removal of politics from the arena of mainstream governance and the redirection of society to the leadership of a small cadre of experts was enthusiastically endorsed by another autocrat, H G Wells, in his 1938 book World Brain. The eventual establishment of a global scientific governing elite, he argued, would eventually serve as the ultimate platform by which an ‘enlightened’ group of experts would be able to competently steer the planet and its inhabitants away from an alleged propensity for conflict, self-destruction, and the elite fear of man’s ‘state of nature’.
In this increasingly systematised and tightly ordered reality, there will be no need for political parties as we conventionally understand them. While seeming to align with the populist right and a position which has appeared to support US sovereignty and anti-globalism, Chafkin warns that the unchallengeable influence and pursuit of power characterised by tech barons such as Peter Thiel means that we are now entering a phase that he calls ‘the Thielverse – a world with its own laws, its own morality and, always, a gravitational pull towards the patron’, as he argues in The Contrarian.
This would seem to be the great post-democratic reset so enthusiastically promoted by the WEF, which has called for a ‘great reset’ of capitalism, and the emerging narrative that accompanies it:
- A growing scepticism of politicians as being capable of delivering anything meaningful other than empty promises, false hope, and outright lies;
- The emergence of complex, borderless problems such as climate change, diminishing resources, rising global health issues, and other market failures;
- The above as confirmations of an interconnected world system better suited to expert-led solutions which live above the nation state and are overseen by a small cadre of dispassionate experts, scientists and technicians.
This rhetoric is beginning to build around a reduced role, or even obsolescence, for orthodox political institutions and systems as we move further into the 21st century and the rise of ‘technocracy’, which itself means rule by experts inside a framework of knowledge-based institutions. At the dawn of the Enlightenment, Auguste Comte and Henri de Saint-Simon – soon to be followed by Marx, Weber and Durkheim – were among the first to set out the principles of what became known as ‘the scientific method’. Applying the principles of logical empiricism (and the greater credibility of more established processes of cause and effect to be found in the natural sciences), these philosophers proposed that facts, objective truth, and universal laws would eventually supersede political, social, and cultural systems. These organising principles, they argued, would eradicate the inefficiencies of cognitive bias, human error and subjective interpretation. The scientific method, or social engineering as we might term it today, was obsessively pursued by Karl Marx, who was arrogant enough to claim that ‘scientific socialism’ is an inevitable outcome of human history, with communism as its inevitable conclusion.
Peter Thiel would probably agree with this logic, if not the semantics.
