#peter thiel

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Silicon Valley ideology quietly admits (its) freedom is not compatible with (our) democracy.

-Maria Farrell

[bitterkarella]

Midnight Pals: $8

Stephen King: submitted for the approval of the Elon Musk: [emerging from bushes] eyyyyy stephano king! Musk: you still no paya $8 for X? King: no elon i'm King: wait King: $8 for what?

Musk: eyyyyy iss x now! Musk: cuz x itta do everything! Musk: it da everything app! King: what do you mean it'll "do everything?" Musk: eyyyy you know Musk: it do Musk: it do Musk: it do-a alla da things capiche???

Musk: now you alla post onna da x capiche? King: Musk: King: Musk: [grappling with King] gimmie da $8! King: [struggling] no! never! i'm never paying for twitter! Musk: [struggling] itsa notta twitter! IT'SA X!!!

King: criminy elon why are you so obsessed with the letter x? Musk: eyyyy itta all start 24 years ago Musk: 24 years ago dissa very night Musk: in desa very woods...

[24 years ago] Young Musk: eyyyy i maka da X dot com! I no paya da taxes! eyyy!! Peter Thiel: [rising from coffin like count orlock] once again, elon, there is nothing you can possess which i cannot take away Young Musk: mama mia!!

[odinsblog]

I was stunned to find the number of people in the tech industry who are all-in on the theory of scientific racism and eugenics. They've been out about that for years, though.

There's a sort of complex where this was the birth of, whether you want to call it the intellectual dark web, I think that was the moment there. They've sort of been radicalized gradually, as happens with these things, where they started with, like, Slate Star Codex was a really big key central point for them to gather and sort of say, well, we have to interrogate and question a lot of these (egalitarian) assumptions. They were very actively courted by the neo-reactionary movement.

So you have things like Peter Teal holding dinner parties with the founders of the movement, and sort of people who have explicitly endorsed slavery, explicitly endorsed disenfranchising women, and people of any non-male gender from being able to vote.

And I always resent it because I sound like a crazy person by just merely accurately describing what they have publicly said. I sound like a conspiracy theorist who's pinning up red strings on a cork board by literally being like, “This is a thing they said out loud, in public, multiple times.” And people are like, “There's no way.” And I'm like, I don't know what to tell you, but it's all out there. We have receipts for ten years.

They are way out there, and they have an explicit agenda of normalizing, really radical, really hateful agendas.

And for me, it's like, it's just a very simple thing.

It's like I have to care about my kid’s safety. I have to care about my friend's safety, I have to care about, you know, basic moral values that we used to agree on.

And that's the other thing too, is because I knew these people 10 and 20 years ago. Like the first blog that Marc Andreessen ever had, I set up. It was on a platform I helped build. So I know that there was a point in which, at least from the public visible face, this was once a reasonable person. And for them to embrace the sheer intellectual dishonesty, along with the hatred… the fact that they're just like, they don't care that they're lying because it's an effective tool to get what they want.

That stuff is… I don't know.

It really soured me on the traditional tech industry.

This is what their tech is for. The things they fund are meant to carry out their agenda.

Let me give you a clear example: To the people who believe in this extremist racist ideology, Elon Musk being willing to lose tens of billions of dollars in value of his own money, presumably, in Twitter, turning into “X,” is a principled person who puts his values ahead of the dollar. He is so committed to advancing this reactionary movement that he's willing to forego tens of billions of dollars of personal wealth in order to advance it.

And what rational people see as the destruction of Twitter is rather, the destruction of the ability for anybody to ever again make a Black Lives Matter hashtag, or to make a Me Too hashtag. And that is because he's not a dumb person. Like the thing that a lot of progressives and reasonable people want to just say, well, he's racist and evil, so he must be dumb.

He's not a dumb person.

Peter Thiel's not a dumb person.

So if we assume they're smart people who understand how systems work and have virtually unlimited resources, then why would they choose to do this?

Well, there must be a reason.

And there is a reason.

It's just one we don't like to confront.

Even more insidious is the fact that these tech moguls own huge companies with enormous influence, and wielding that kind of power over their employees creates a herd mentality within their workforces.

So if, for example, Facebook's board includes both Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen. They don't have to give somebody an order to say what kind of content they want to promote on the newsfeed, on Facebook.

Everybody who works there knows this is who our bosses are. This is what we got to do, because they're smart. Everybody's smart, everybody's very reasonable.

And so you don't have to imagine, like I said, I don't have to be a conspiracy theorist that's putting up some red strings on a cork board to connect the dots and whatever. You're like, “Oh, I'm a midlevel product manager at a company. I'd like to make a name for myself and make the share price go up. And I know the boss's boss has been on every podcast in the world saying we need to promote more voices that are calling for ethnic cleansing,” okay?

Message received.

That's what a person who has no moral context would do. And there are a cohort of people in the technology industry that have come up entirely consuming media owned and created by these people, because they know the programming site Hacker News, which is owned by a venture capital firm and run by Paul Graham, is one of these guys.

They read blogs written explicitly by these guys. They consume it. They were on clubhouse. They're in a Discord chat with others that are sort of buying the stuff. They have a full wraparound media bubble. If they just read substacks and listen to the blog posts or read the blog posts from these folks, you can have what feels like an entire media diet shaped solely by this dialogue.

And this is why they're trying to own the media outlets and the distribution, like Twitter, alongside owning the platforms. And the fact that they can control more parts of society, right? The leverage of owning the distribution networks, the leverage of owning media outlets, the leverage of owning the platforms is very, very different, because we do have a lot of historical precedent.

If we go back 100 years ago and we say you're reeling from coming out of a pandemic, you are reeling from economic precarity and inequality at unprecedented levels, and you see the rise of, again, a direct parallel, virulent antisemitism. And you have things like the oil barons giving way to the Henry Fords of the world, the labor crackdown of the Pinkertons, Ford's embrace of, you know, to the point where he's pen pals with Hitler, and IBM building the technology.

The first person that ever asked me to do technology work for him was a neighbor of ours, and he had a tattoo on his wrist. And I was a little kid and didn't know what it meant. And I asked him what it was. It was his concentration camp tatoo. And what people don't realize is those are database entries in an IBM database.

And IBM's stance at the time was that they were neutral.

This is what technology does to enable the rise of fascism and victimization around the world. And we have a direct precedent less than 100 years ago, of how these technologies are used.

And I don't say that lightly.

I'm not saying we're there yet, but that is how you get there. And I would be surprised if the pattern doesn't play out in some ways, in terms of if you have tycoons of industry at a moment when the world is reckoning with massive social change, cultural change, along with recovering from things like economic destruction, inequality and pandemics… And you have rising military threats around the world.

That is exactly where we were a century ago.

—ANIL DASH shares his thoughts and experiences on Richard Hanania and rampant neo-fascism in Silicon Valley

[tweetingukpolitics]

[anarchistin]

You've probably heard of the "Tragedy of the Commons," which claims to be a "realist" account of what happens when people try to share something – a park, a beach, a forest – without anyone owning it. According to the "tragedy," these commons are inevitably ruined by "rational" actors who know that if they don't overgraze, pollute or despoil, someone else will, so they might as well get there first.

The Tragedy of the Commons feels right, and we've all experienced some version of it – the messy kitchen at your office or student house-share, the litter in the park, etc. But the paper that brought us the idea of the Tragedy of the Commons, published in 1968 by Garrett Hardin in Science, was a hoax.

Hardin didn't just claim that some commons turned tragic – he claimed that the tragedy was inevitable, and, moreover, that every commons had experienced a tragedy. But Hardin made it all up. It wasn't true. What's more, Hardin – an ardent white nationalist – used his "realist's" account of the commons to justify colonization and genocide.

[mudwerks]

(via Jeffry Epstein Arranged Meetings With Peter Thiel and Thomas Barrack – Rolling Stone)

oh those billionaires

[total fucking assholes]

[tomorrowusa]

Republicans won't stop at abortion. They want to be overseers of all reproduction. They won't be happy unless they are able to monitor every bedroom and doctor's office in the US.

We recently saw how the Republican Alabama Supreme Court ruled against IVF. That ruling was peppered with copious references to Christian fundamentalist beliefs.

Now Republicans are turning attention to birth control. The unhinged MAGA crank Charlie Kirk ranted about this recently.

Charlie Kirk, the head of the MAGA propaganda behemoth Turning Point USA, recently unveiled a novel theory as to why young women tend to vote for Democrats. Unwilling to admit that women can think for themselves, Kirk floated the theory that birth control pills cause brain damage. "Birth control like really screws up female brains," he falsely claimed before a crowd at a recent church event streamed on the far-right site Rumble. Claiming the pill "increases depression, anxiety [and] suicidal ideation," he then blamed women's voting patterns on hormonal contraception. "It creates very angry and bitter young ladies and young women," Kirk argued.

I would argue that Trump and his followers are the ones with screwed up brains. There is a strong tendency of misogynistic patriarchy in the GOP. They feel a need to control women – possibly because of their own feelings of sexual inadequacy.

But of course, Kirk is not sincerely mistaken and he certainly isn't concerned about the wellbeing of women, which all reputable research shows is dramatically improved by having control over their fertility. Kirk's doctor cosplay is part of a much larger and semi-coordinated strategy among right-wing leaders to demonize birth control and train the GOP base into believing that restricting, or even banning, contraception is justified.  As the Washington Post reported last month, right-wing activists have been flooding social media with the same lies that Kirk was echoing in this video. It's a well-financed disinformation campaign, getting a major boost from MAGA billionaire Peter Thiel, who has aggressively financed teams of messengers to falsely claim that hormonal birth control "tricked our bodies into dysfunction and pain." Doctors report that the tidal wave of misinformation about birth control is creating a health care crisis, including women who "come in for abortions after believing what they see on social media about the dangers of hormonal birth control." 

Female empowerment is anathema to many on the far right. And the right to control one's body is part of that empowerment.

At heart, Republicans are anti-freedom.

Of course, the real reason MAGA leaders don't like birth control is they oppose the freedom and opportunities that it has afforded women. Kirk barely bothers to hide that this is his real agenda. In the very same talk, he also tries to threaten women who hold out for Mr. Right instead of settling for Mr. Incel: "In their early 30's they get really upset because they say the boys don't want to date me anymore because they're not at their prime," he claims, echoing the unevidenced revenge fantasy that dominates misogynist message boards. 

Roe v. Wade had been the law of the land for over 49 years until the Trump-Bush Supreme Court rescinded it in 2022.

Birth control medications have been around since 1960. Despite that 64 year precedent, don't think that Republicans won't try to find some way to ban them if given a chance.

[mitchipedia]

“The left wants a villain. The right wants a sugar daddy.”

— Peter Thiel helped build big tech. Now he wants to tear it all down. “Inside the billionaire investor’s journey from Facebook board member to an architect of the new American right.” By Elizabeth Dwoskin at The Washington Post.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Vivek Ramaswamy has described himself as an “outsider”, accusing rivals for the Republican presidential nomination of being “bought and paid for” by donors and special interests.

But the 38-year-old Ohio-based venture capitalist, whose sharp-elbowed and angry display stood out in the first Republican debate this week, has his own close ties to influential figures from both sides of the political aisle.

Prominent among such connections are Peter Thiel, the co-founder of tech giants PayPal and Palantir and a rightwing mega-donor, and Leonard Leo, the activist who has marshaled unprecedented sums in his push to stock federal courts with conservative judges.

Ramaswamy is a Yale Law School friend of JD Vance, the author of the bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy who enjoyed success in finance before entering politics. At Yale, Vance and Ramaswamy attended what the New Yorker called an “intimate lunch seminar for select students” that was hosted by Thiel. Last year, backed by Thiel and espousing hard-right Trumpist views, Vance won a US Senate seat in Ohio.

Thiel has since said he has stepped back from political donations. But he has backed Ramaswamy’s business career, supporting what the New Yorker called “a venture helping senior citizens access Medicare” and, last year, backing Strive Asset Management, a fund launched by Ramaswamy to attack environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies among corporate investors. Vance was also a backer.

Ramaswamy’s primary vehicle to success has been Roivant, an investment company focused on the pharmaceuticals industry founded in 2014.

The Roivant advisory board includes figures from both the Republican and Democratic establishments: Kathleen Sebelius, US health secretary under Barack Obama; Tom Daschle of South Dakota, formerly Democratic leader in the US Senate; and Olympia Snowe, formerly a Republican senator from Maine.

Ramaswamy’s links to Leo – recently the recipient of a $1.6BN donation from the industrialist Barre Seid, believed to be the biggest ever such gift, but now reportedly the subject an investigation by the attorney general of Washington DC – are many.

As reported by ProPublica and Documented, Ramaswamy has spoken at retreats staged by Teneo, a group Leo chairs and which aims to connect high-powered conservatives, to “crush liberal dominance” in American life.

Other Teneo speakers have reportedly included Ron DeSantis, the Florida Governor polling ahead of Ramaswamy in the Republican primary, and the former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who trails Ramaswamy and clashed with him on stage in Milwaukee.

ProPublica also linked Thiel to the genesis of the Teneo group. According to a document seen by The Guardian, Ramaswamy became a Teneo member in 2021.

Elsewhere, Ramaswamy is a board member of the Philanthropy Roundtable, a group with ties to Leo, and a member of the Federalist Society, the Leo-driven group which works to stock the courts with conservatives.

Ramaswamy has also spoken to and received an award from the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF), a group of Republican state treasurers.

In June, in South Carolina, the Post and Courier newspaper reported that last year, before launching his presidential bid, Ramaswamy attempted “to leverage his [Republican] connections to gain access [for Strive] to lucrative contracts to manage pension funds … [with] total assets of $39.6BN”.

Similar pushes were mounted in Missouri and Indiana, the paper said. Curtis Loftis, the South Carolina state treasurer, told the Post and Courier there was “nothing improper” about such approaches.

Asked about Ramaswamy’s claims to be an outsider in light of his links to rightwing donors, activists and establishment figures, a campaign spokesperson told The Guardian: “Vivek has lived the American dream and has had tremendous success in business.”

“There’s a colossal difference between someone who has friendships and business relationships with wealthy individuals and politicians who change their policies and positions to please their Super Pac donors,” they added.

In the Wisconsin debate, Ramaswamy flourished in the absence of Donald Trump, the former US president who faces 91 criminal charges but nonetheless leads Republican polling by huge margins.

Amid speculation that Ramaswamy might end up Trump’s running mate, Reed Galen, a Republican operative turned co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, called Ramaswamy “a classic 2020s America tech bro bullshit artist … Trump for the 21st century”.

Ramaswamy’s claim to be an outsider, Galen said, was part of his “fundamental understanding … that MAGA [the pro-Trump Republican base] wants him to show that the rest of these people [in the primary] are politicians. He’s willing to be the showman … the outsider. Anti-establishment. ‘If anything is there, I dislike it because it’s there.’ You know, ‘I’m going to have fun with this. I’m not going to take it seriously because you’re a bunch of hacks and goons.’”

But in another sense, regarding Ramaswamy’s ties to the likes of Leo and Thiel, Galen said: “I think that he’s an insider.”

“He walks into a room with Leonard Leo and says, ‘What do you need me to do?’ … And they’re like, ‘Here’s what we want you to do. Here’s what we need you to do.’ Right?”

“Do I think [Ramaswamy] cares about [issues like restricting] abortion? No, not particularly. I don’t think he has a firmly held belief on it. But if he thinks that it will help him, and in exchange for that Leonard Leo will throw a little chicken feed of the $1.6BN that old man gave him, to help him? Sure, what the hell?”

“He didn’t ever think he’d get this far. So now he’s just gonna push it as far as he can.”

Ramaswamy, Galen said, was closely tied to a world of donors and non-profits in which Leo is “certainly at the center. And this movement only moves in one direction, and it’s toward the darkness. It’s towards authoritarianism. And it’s because it finds people like Ramaswamy. And the more that all these other candidates will now attack him, they will drive him further and further into the arms of those people.”

[cloobert]

The Steroid Olympics

There's been some talk floating around online lately about The Enhanced Games, including an episode of the Trashfuture podcast I'd certainly recommend.

I've become fascinated--not because I'm a right-wing tech-and-immortality fetishist, but rather because of the specific and insidious way the project uses progressive language to hide its true nature. It's evil in a fascinating and specific way that leans on progressive language to do its dirty deeds.

First, I should explain the project. "What if the Olympics let every athlete do as many steroids as they want?" is the basic pitch. Going deeper, it's part of a certain subset of global capital's fascination with what's called here Human Enhancement: the search for immortality and transcendent physical power. It's also, importantly, a project trying to justify itself and in doing so get rid of the stigma around steroid use in sports (notably not the stigma around steroid use in, you know, HRT.) Also it's a for-profit project co-founded by a pharmaceutical CEO whose companies specialize in Human Enhancement fare.

Look at the tiles on the website:

Pay the athletes. Science is real. Enhanced inclusive language. We'll absolutely look deeper, but there's already a very present sense of what a good friend of mind called crypsis.

There's an almost convincing facsimile of progressive language here. But the tiger is lurking in the grass.

Let's enter some of these tiles. See how a camouflaged predator works.

This is immediately insidious. There's a rhetorical conflation between antivaxxers and anyone who opposes to doping here. And remember, this organization is selling the fantasy of "what if athletes juice so hard they were superhuman."

And then we get into the sloppy propaganda-history. It's a lineage more wrenched into place than discovered, and that makes no distinction between war, bloodsport, and sport in a more modern sense.

Bufotenin (not bufotein) is the DMT-anolouge you get from licking toads. Perhaps not the same, conceptually, as anabolic steroid use.

Moving on from the bad history, we have this:

Cherry picking science, in addition to simple lies. Remember, this is The Steroid Olympics. "When used properly" is mutually exclusive with "this is a sports body that gives prizes for every world record you set", right? No matter how much this talks about safety, the basic structure is unsafe for players. And to be clear, steroid abuse of the sort these games are about is *extremely* bad for you. Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America by Abraham Josephine Riesman, the excellent history of Vince McMahon and the Word Wrestling Federation, spends many a word on the awful ramifications of widespread steroid use in the WWF. Use of the kind that's necessary to become "superhuman" in the way this site sells is tremendously dangerous, and the site cherry picks research to hide this.

However, this part isn't the most egregious.

The crypsis, the hiding in the grass, becomes central in the Enhanced Inclusive Language portion.

This is the kind of thing that would go viral on here maybe 10 years ago. A single deprecated theory on etymology being sold as the primary one to create a specific narrative. The word "dope" does, in fact, come from the Dutch. However, per the Wall Street Journal:

Notice also the "black athletes are disproportionately accused of doping." This is, by all accounts, true. But the issue there is pretty clearly not that doping is illegal. It's racism. And racism that would not be addressed by changing the language around doping.

This will continue in the next post:

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Palantir’s NHS-stealing Big Lie

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then SAN FRANCISCO (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

Capitalism's Big Lie in four words: "There is no alternative." Looters use this lie for cover, insisting that they're hard-nosed grownups living in the reality of human nature, incentives, and facts (which don't care about your feelings).

The point of "there is no alternative" is to extinguish the innovative imagination. "There is no alternative" is really "stop trying to think of alternatives, dammit." But there are always alternatives, and the only reason to demand that they be excluded from consideration is that these alternatives are manifestly superior to the looter's supposed inevitability.

Right now, there's an attempt underway to loot the NHS, the UK's single most beloved institution. The NHS has been under sustained assault for decades – budget cuts, overt and stealth privatisation, etc. But one of its crown jewels has been stubbournly resistant to being auctioned off: patient data. Not that HMG hasn't repeatedly tried to flog patient data – it's just that the public won't stand for it:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/nov/21/nhs-data-platform-may-be-undermined-by-lack-of-public-trust-warn-campaigners

Patients – quite reasonably – do not trust the private sector to handle their sensitive medical records.

Now, this presents a real conundrum, because NHS patient data, taken as a whole, holds untold medical insights. The UK is a large and diverse country and those records in aggregate can help researchers understand the efficacy of various medicines and other interventions. Leaving that data inert and unanalysed will cost lives: in the UK, and all over the world.

For years, the stock answer to "how do we do science on NHS records without violating patient privacy?" has been "just anonymise the data." The claim is that if you replace patient names with random numbers, you can release the data to research partners without compromising patient privacy, because no one will be able to turn those numbers back into names.

It would be great if this were true, but it isn't. In theory and in practice, it is surprisingly easy to "re-identify" individuals in anonymous data-sets. To take an obvious example: we know which two dates former PM Tony Blair was given a specific treatment for a cardiac emergency, because this happened while he was in office. We also know Blair's date of birth. Check any trove of NHS data that records a person who matches those three facts and you've found Tony Blair – and all the private data contained alongside those public facts is now in the public domain, forever.

Not everyone has Tony Blair's reidentification hooks, but everyone has data in some kind of database, and those databases are continually being breached, leaked or intentionally released. A breach from a taxi service like Addison-Lee or Uber, or from Transport for London, will reveal the journeys that immediately preceded each prescription at each clinic or hospital in an "anonymous" NHS dataset, which can then be cross-referenced to databases of home addresses and workplaces. In an eyeblink, millions of Britons' records of receiving treatment for STIs or cancer can be connected with named individuals – again, forever.

Re-identification attacks are now considered inevitable; security researchers have made a sport out of seeing how little additional information they need to re-identify individuals in anonymised data-sets. A surprising number of people in any large data-set can be re-identified based on a single characteristic in the data-set.

Given all this, anonymous NHS data releases should have been ruled out years ago. Instead, NHS records are to be handed over to the US military surveillance company Palantir, a notorious human-rights abuser and supplier to the world's most disgusting authoritarian regimes. Palantir – founded by the far-right Trump bagman Peter Thiel – takes its name from the evil wizard Sauron's all-seeing orb in Lord of the Rings ("Sauron, are we the baddies?"):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/01/the-palantir-will-see-you-now/#public-private-partnership

The argument for turning over Britons' most sensitive personal data to an offshore war-crimes company is "there is no alternative." The UK needs the medical insights in those NHS records, and this is the only way to get at them.

As with every instance of "there is no alternative," this turns out to be a lie. What's more, the alternative is vastly superior to this chumocratic sell-out, was Made in Britain, and is the envy of medical researchers the world 'round. That alternative is "trusted research environments." In a new article for the Good Law Project, I describe these nigh-miraculous tools for privacy-preserving, best-of-breed medical research:

https://goodlawproject.org/cory-doctorow-health-data-it-isnt-just-palantir-or-bust/

At the outset of the covid pandemic Oxford's Ben Goldacre and his colleagues set out to perform realtime analysis of the data flooding into NHS trusts up and down the country, in order to learn more about this new disease. To do so, they created Opensafely, an open-source database that was tied into each NHS trust's own patient record systems:

https://timharford.com/2022/07/how-to-save-more-lives-and-avoid-a-privacy-apocalypse/

Opensafely has its own database query language, built on SQL, but tailored to medical research. Researchers write programs in this language to extract aggregate data from each NHS trust's servers, posing medical questions of the data without ever directly touching it. These programs are published in advance on a git server, and are preflighted on synthetic NHS data on a test server. Once the program is approved, it is sent to the main Opensafely server, which then farms out parts of the query to each NHS trust, packages up the results, and publishes them to a public repository.

This is better than "the best of both worlds." This public scientific process, with peer review and disclosure built in, allows for frequent, complex analysis of NHS data without giving a single third party access to a a single patient record, ever. Opensafely was wildly successful: in just months, Opensafely collaborators published sixty blockbuster papers in Nature – science that shaped the world's response to the pandemic.

Opensafely was so successful that the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care commissioned a review of the programme with an eye to expanding it to serve as the nation's default way of conducting research on medical data:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/better-broader-safer-using-health-data-for-research-and-analysis/better-broader-safer-using-health-data-for-research-and-analysis

This approach is cheaper, safer, and more effective than handing hundreds of millions of pounds to Palantir and hoping they will manage the impossible: anonymising data well enough that it is never re-identified. Trusted Research Environments have been endorsed by national associations of doctors and researchers as the superior alternative to giving the NHS's data to Peter Thiel or any other sharp operator seeking a public contract.

As a lifelong privacy campaigner, I find this approach nothing short of inspiring. I would love for there to be a way for publishers and researchers to glean privacy-preserving insights from public library checkouts (such a system would prove an important counter to Amazon's proprietary god's-eye view of reading habits); or BBC podcasts or streaming video viewership.

You see, there is an alternative. We don't have to choose between science and privacy, or the public interest and private gain. There's always an alternative – if there wasn't, the other side wouldn't have to continuously repeat the lie that no alternative is possible.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/08/the-fire-of-orodruin/#are-we-the-baddies

Image: Gage Skidmore (modified) https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peter_Thiel_(51876933345).jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[ravenkings]

tbh it's kind of shocking to me that more people don't talk about peter thiel on this website considering that he has like a james bond villain-level god complex and all the money and insidiously evil inclinations to match

[titleknown]

In other news, Peter Thiel is a cartoonishly supervillainous fascist who deserves to be put down like a rabid dog.

[stroebe2]

Earlier this summer, I showed up uninvited at a midtown Manhattan music venue, where a startup named the Praxis Society was holding an event as part of a weeklong series to promote its flagship product: a free-market Mediterranean city-state the company hopes to build under the leadership of a CEO who, former employees said, is interested in fascist authors and occultism and has touted a book that argues Black people are intellectually inferior to whites. 

Praxis, a for-profit corporation, was founded as Bluebook Cities in 2019 by Californian Dryden Brown and former Boston College wide receiver Charlie Callinan. They envisioned an autonomous enclave where the free-market dreams of Chicago and Austrian school economists would become reality, a place libertarians could settle without the tyranny of regulation. While the project draws inspiration from ancient Greece and Rome, Brown, the company’s CEO, said in a 2021 interview that its style would be “hero futurism” with a “neo-Gilded Age kind of aesthetic.” 

If this sounds like fantasy, it probably is. But it’s one that’s captured the minds of real—and really rich—people. In 2021, the company’s seed round raised roughly $4 million, including from Pronomos Capital, a libertarian city-building fund started in 2019 with significant financial backing from Thiel. Other participants included Thiel’s close friend Balaji Srinivasan; Joe Lonsdale, who cofounded the analytics and intelligence company Palantir Technologies with Thiel; and Bedrock Capital, a fund launched by a former partner in Thiel’s Founders Fund. Praxis followed up several months later with a Series A round that brought in $15 million, much of it from cryptocurrency investors, including Three Arrows Capital and Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research, which both later spectacularly imploded. Emergent Ventures, another Thiel-backed fund led by economist Tyler Cowen and housed in George Mason University’s Koch-supported Mercatus Center, has also invested. 

Brown and at least one other senior Praxis employee were interested in “this strange Nazi occultism,” one of those three ex-staff members said, citing the pair’s appreciation of Evola, who co-authored another book offering “instructions for developing psychic and magical powers,” according to its contemporary publisher. (Scholars have written about Nazi links to Ariosophy—an esoteric ideology blending mysticism, racism, nationalism, and antisemitism—and documented the SS’s fascination with Norse mythology and Eastern spiritual traditions. If you’ve seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, you know the Hollywood version.) Another of those former employees, also citing Evola, confirmed Brown’s interest in the occultist bent of the SS. An internal slideshow briefing staff on the company’s brand and philosophy presented Evola’s thinking on the four “functional classes” or castes, and suggested the categories should guide the company’s recruitment of new members and prospective residents, according to that former worker.

“When you’re hired,” one former employee said, “you get a welcome packet with 11 book recommendations. One of them is Bronze Age Mindset,” an openly racist and fascist book by the anonymous far-right influencer Bronze Age Pervert that warns of a coming struggle against the “enemies of Western man and the enemies of beauty.”

Part of the company’s strategy involves drawing participants in New York’s downtown scene to its events in the hope of bringing some on board. Succession actress Dasha Nekrasova, a leading light of the so–called Dimes Square set and a co-host of Red Scare—a once-socialist podcast that has taken a turn to the right—attended a June black-tie banquet at the Yale Club for current and prospective members. Thiel money has also directly funded downtown events attended by the arty set Praxis is trying to lure; in 2022, BuzzFeed News revealed the billionaire’s financial backing of the New People’s Cinema Club, which boasted of screening transgressive films without mind to political correctness. Jokes about sloshing “Thielbucks” among the anti-woke downtown set have become a meme.

In Brown’s vision, Thiel’s or his associates’ money wouldn’t just be going to film impresarios or their parties; it would go toward a city where both young neo-reactionaries and their post-left associates might have a hand in forging something tangible, something beyond a podcast or a Substack. Of course, Praxis hasn’t done anything tangible. But even if construction never starts, the company’s inroads with the scene are another vector for reactionary Silicon Valley perspectives to acquire cultural purchase.

The company has scoped a rotating set of possible sites for its city along the Mediterranean shore. Kunapuli told me they were trying to decide between Italy and Morocco. (I later heard Montenegro is in the mix.) “There’s tradeoffs,” Kunapuli acknowledged, as we looked at the renderings. Italy is more trusted by Westerners, a place where Praxis company leaders believe government and industry are more likely to come through on legal contracts, he explained, before conceding the same conditions would make it “harder to influence and change regulations and policies” than in Morocco.

A record-breaking heat wave and forest fires would end up hitting the Mediterranean a month later. As best as I could tell, Praxis didn’t have a plan to shield its new-Gilded Age city from such catastrophes. As it turns out, you can’t exit everything.

[kramlabs]

“Finding” antibodies in a human (after synthetic exosome injection) vs designing antibodies in a lab

:

*george Webb…. Not sure what to think.

[fakeoldmanfucker]

Peter Thiel's middle name is Andreas. God I hate him.