Having written a fair amount over the years about the culture and politics of Silicon Valley, I have long been of the opinion that to understand the ongoing rightward tendency of the tech elite, you have to look at what the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel is doing and saying. My first book explored transhumanism, at that point a fringe techno-utopian movement centred on radical life extension, expanding physical and cognitive capacity through technology, and the ultimate transcendence of the human condition through a final merger with AI. In writing it, I encountered many technologists who had been given funding from Thiel to pursue these kinds of Promethean projects. In my second book, I wrote about the conviction among certain sections of the Silicon Valley elite that a civilisational collapse was imminent; I travelled to New Zealand to visit a former sheep station, recently purchased by Thiel with the intention of turning it into a compound where he could weather the coming apocalypse.
Thiel is a famously mercurial presence: a cofounder with Elon Musk of PayPal and one of the first significant Silicon Valley figures to back the political ascendancy of Donald Trump, he is known for his anti-democratic political views, and his interest in cultivating extreme libertarian alternatives to the nation-state. (See, for instance, seasteading, whereby private investors build corporate micro-states in international waters to evade the taxation and regulation of governments). Having long been one of the most influential investors in Silicon Valley, Thiel – a former employer and mentor of the soon-to-be US vice-president JD Vance – is now in even closer proximity to the centre of power of the incoming regime. If you’re talking about the long decline of the liberal order, and the post-democratic drift of capitalism, you’re inevitably talking, on some level, about Peter Thiel.
Last week, in a relatively rare public intervention, he published an op-ed in the Financial Times under the intriguingly ominous title “A time for truth and reconciliation”. In many ways, the op-ed is classic Thiel: intellectually slippery, continually feinting at unnervingly extreme positions, and so filled with high-flown jargon and hazily delineated abstractions as to be damn near impenetrable. (More sceptical frequenters of this column might find themselves wondering why I’ve taken so strongly against a man with whom I clearly have so much in common. I would advise these readers to have a crack at Thiel’s FT piece and get back to me.)
[ Silicon Valley seeks an audience at the court of TrumpOpens in new window ]
The piece starts from the fairly unsurprising, though eminently questionable, position that the current moment in US electoral politics is a revolutionary one. We are witnessing the passing of what he calls – somewhat bombastically invoking pre-revolutionary France – the ancien regime. And the moment is an apocalyptic one, he claims, at least in the ancient Greek sense of the term apokálypsis, which refers to a revelation, or an uncovering, because Trump’s return to the White House will mean a revealing of the ancien regime’s secrets. “The new administration’s revelations,” he writes, “need not justify vengeance – reconstruction can go hand in hand with reconciliation. But for reconciliation to take place, there must be truth.”
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The old regime, he argues, stood in the way of the freedom and possibility represented by technology, and the internet in particular; it kept the public from full knowledge of what was going on with, for instance, Covid-19, the death of Jeffrey Epstein and the assassination of JFK. “My friend and colleague Eric Weinstein,” he writes, “calls the pre-internet custodians of secrets the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) – the media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation. In hindsight, the internet had already begun our liberation from the DISC prison upon the prison death of financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. Almost half of Americans polled that year mistrusted the official story that he died by suicide, suggesting that DISC had lost total control of the narrative.”
This seems, to put it mildly, eccentric – not least because it overlooks the fact that Epstein’s death happened while Trump was president, as well as the fact, as reported by the New York Times, that Thiel himself appears to have met Epstein on several occasions. (To be fair, if I’d hung out with Epstein, I’d probably avoid mentioning it too.)
Even more peculiar, though, is the founder, chairperson, and major shareholder of Palantir Technologies taking issue with the secretiveness and suppressiveness of the US government. Palantir – which the Tolkien-obsessed Thiel named after the palantiri: the all-seeing stones used by the evil wizard Sauron in The Lord of the Rings – was founded as a defence contractor, and received crucial early venture capital funding from the CIA, which remains among its most lucrative clients. Palantir is perhaps most notorious as the data-mining infrastructure for the NSA’s mass surveillance of private citizens and, more recently, its “strategic partnership” with the IDF in its war on Gaza.
If anyone is a custodian of secrets, it’s the man who founded the company that provides technological solutions for the so-called deep state. But as with almost all conspiracy-minded right-wingers, Thiel has little to say about well-documented actual conspiracies, such as the violent suppression of left-wing democratic movements in Latin America and southeast Asia throughout the cold war period, overseen and orchestrated by the CIA, in order to keep those regions open for exploitation by American business.
Historically, Thiel’s reputation has been not just as a canny and transformative tech investor but as something like the most influential intellectual of the Silicon Valley libertarian right. I have always taken him seriously as a thinker, not for his originality or rigour or clarity of thought, but for what he reveals about the future direction of the tech elite, and therefore global politics. It’s tempting to dismiss this FT oped as the half-lucid raving of a conspiratorial crank; it certainly reads that way. But there is a pungent irony at its centre that we would do well to consider. This self-proclaimed libertarian, who speaks of revelation and of how the internet has defeated the information-hoarding power of the state, has himself benefited greatly from his proximity to that state power, and has provided it with the technological means to extract and process private information. There is, in the end – to invoke Thiel’s beloved Tolkien – one conspiracy to rule them all: the very real conspiracy that aligns the power of the State with the interests of wealthy elites. And at the very centre of it is Thiel himself.