Do Not Welcome Our New Misfit Overlords
"Oligarch" is too cryptic; "tech bro" conveys too much affability; these people are misanthropes, and we can't allow them to dictate the future to us.
“[Donald] Trump’s return to the White House augurs the apokálypsis of the ancien regime’s secrets,” the reactionary tech billionaire Peter Thiel argued in the Financial Times last week, mistaking high-dudgeon and italicized Greek and unitalicized French for profundity. “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.”
Thiel does not appear to have crafted his op-ed the way most rich people do, by rattling off ideas to a communications aide and trusting that person to turn them into a comprehensible text. An essay like this couldn’t exist in a world where Thiel had professional assistance.
As a fellow rubbernecking human, I hope the excerpt inspires you to read the whole column. It’s the clearest window into the mind of the stunted but criminally wealthy people who are about to take over the country. Apart from the special favors they expect from the government they just bought, they mean to cement the internet’s dominance over people’s lives, trapping us in a system that obliterates communities and social trust, because they happen to control it.
If you can’t access the article, the short version is this: The internet “won” because it helped people convince each other that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself. Because the public now suspects that Epstein didn’t kill himself, it must follow that all manner of official government claims are false. By fueling further doubt and paranoia and hallucination, the internet will force the truth about many of these things out into the open. And if these official stories turn out to be mostly accurate—that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, and Anthony Fauci didn’t develop COVID-19—well, facts will either have to be rewritten to assuage people with internet-poisoned minds, or kernels of inconsistency will have to be seized upon to purge public servants, or the online masses will simply move along to the next conspiracy theory.
This is his logic, I swear to god. We used to say “the internet isn’t real life” to reinforce the primacy of real life. Thiel and his peers want it to be the other way around. They also want to make it impossible to go back.
FILTHY, RICH
As a rubric: Thiel owns JD Vance. Elon Musk owns Donald Trump. They paid up front in part because they radicalized themselves and are restless to explode things. That’s why they speak like school shooters menacing their victims—they think they’re finally in charge. On the outside, clamoring for relevance and influence and protection, are Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. They paid tribute in their own ways only after Trump won, and will thus have to keep the spigot of humiliation open or face penalties for bandwagoning. Zuckerberg has flipped the switch that will turn Facebook into X—another enormous haven for bigots and bigot recruitment. Bezos, through Amazon, funneled $40 million into Trump’s personal account to license what will surely be one of the worst documentaries of all time: the Melania Trump story.
It’s worth trying to understand the interior lives of these men, because their ideals or lack thereof tell us a great deal about how they will try to manipulate government, and to what ends. It also helps explain why Big Tech and the MAGA leadership believe they can sustain a fruitful symbiosis.