TechXGeopolitics #18: Technology as an Alternative to Politics? Or, Who is Peter Thiel?
Also featured: Recent interviews on Trip the Beltway Fantastic, Unlimited Hangout, and Press TV
Welcome to my newsletter, where I set out to highlight significant, yet un- or underreported recent news and trends at the intersection of geopolitics and tech.
Why the intersection of technology and geopolitics? The future of geopolitics will be shaped by today’s tech advances, yet the two topics are often isolated from one another in journalism and geopolitical analysis. This newsletter strives to bridge the gap while also spotlighting relevant work by emerging and veteran writers in independent media.
Feedback on this newsletter’s format and content is more than welcome — please feel free to comment on this page, or write to me at stavroula.pabst@proton.me. Thank you for reading!
Trip the Beltway Fantastic Podcast Appearance: Silicon Valley’s Lust for the AI Battlefield
On June 11, I appeared on Kelley Vlahos’ Trip the Beltway Fantastic podcast with William Hartung, where we discussed the creeping militarization of AI technology and the growing influence of venture capital in the weapons sector. Watch the episode on YouTube here, or listen on Spotify.
Press TV Appearance
On June 23, I appeared on Press TV to discuss Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States amidst both ongoing genocide in Palestine and election-related turmoil in the United States after Joe Biden’s exit from the presidential race. Netanyahu’s visit has been prompted by a need to reassert his leadership and reverse his growing unpopularity amongst Israelis, 70 percent of whom want him to resign.
Netanyahu’s D.C. arrival has been met with major protests and, despite growing anger amongst Americans with Israel’s actions in the Gaza strip, high-level U.S. politicians have continued to pledge support for Israel.
Notably, J.D. Vance, U.S. Senator and recently announced Trump VP pick, is staunchly pro-Israel. And although a number of lawmakers boycotted or protested Netanyahu’s speech to Congress (which took place after the Press TV interview), the speech received multiple rounds of standing ovations from those in attendance.
Unlimited Hangout Podcast Appearance: The Thiel-Verse
I joined Whitney Webb on the Unlimited Hangout podcast on June 23 to discuss the career and political goals of venture capitalist and tech billionaire Peter Thiel, the man behind the career of Trump's VP pick J.D. Vance and an intelligence-linked architect of key aspects of an emerging technocratic surveillance state in the United States and beyond.
The episode is currently available for paying Unlimited Hangout subscribers, but will be made publicly available in a few days. When public, I will post the podcast link to the comments of this newsletter. Otherwise, you can check the Unlimited Hangout website for the public episode release here.
Further reading: How Peter Thiel-Linked Tech is Fueling the Ukraine War
“As war in Ukraine continues, controversial defense contractors and adjacent companies like Palantir, Anduril, and Clearview AI are taking advantage to develop and level-up controversial AI-driven weapons systems and surveillance technologies. These organizations’ common link? The support of the controversial, yet ever-more powerful Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel.”
Technology as an Alternative to Politics? Or, Who is Peter Thiel?
“We could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority, but maybe you could unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who are never going to agree with you through technological means, and this is where I think technology is this incredible alternative to politics.”
Prominent tech billionaire and ever-more powerful venture capitalist Peter Thiel says he’s a libertarian. In his words, the ideology means “stand[ing] against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual.”*
But beyond this libertarian veneer lies… something else. In fact, Thiel’s alluded to his true political goals openly, and on a repeated basis. Namely, instead of convincing people to agree with his vision of the world through politics, Thiel’s decided to make the societal changes he wants via the route of technology.
In Thiel's own words: “I think technology is this incredible alternative to politics.” (Emphasis my own.)
Thiel’s written publicly and explicitly on the matter, writing back in a 2009 article that “we are in a deadly race between politics and technology.” Thiel then wrote that “unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount,” even going on to say that “The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.”
Perhaps Thiel does believe in freedom; it’s not “freedom” as many understand the term. Namely, to him, freedom and libertarian outcomes can only be obtained by “escaping” politics, rather than engaging with them. Putting matters bluntly, Thiel infamously also wrote in the same 2009 article that “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Apparently to manifest his vision of “freedom,” Thiel has indeed taken on technology as a driver of change. Through his venture capital firm Founders Fund, Peter Thiel has helped give rise to a slew of household names in tech, including Spotify, Stripe, SpaceX, Anduril, Palantir, Meta, AirBnB, OpenAI and others.
Critically, some of Thiel’s projects suggest not only sheer ambition, but apparently also a desire to hone power, perhaps and especially in ways disruptive to the existing social order. For example, many may think of PayPal, a digital payment service Thiel founded early in his career, as an easy way to pay back friends for drinks or taxi rides.
In fact, PayPal was created to much larger political ends (before it went public in 2002), including apparently “replacing the U.S. Dollar” and even “the erosion of the nation state” through the development of digital financial infrastructure slated for widespread and even crossborder use.
Namely, as per Thiel’s own words about PayPal, “our goal was nothing less than to replace the U.S. dollar by creating a new digital currency.” (Emphasis my own.) As More Perfect Union highlighted: “Thiel told the full [PayPal] staff “the ability to move money fluidly and the erosion of the nation-state are closely related”... as they were building a system to move money fluidly.”
Zooming out, Thiel’s debatably applied the lessons of venture capital to politics at large. Whereas many VCs are in the high risk, high reward game of venture capital for the coveted high rates of returns successful companies grown through VC can provide investors, Thiel’s apparently also in it for influence and direction over the often very powerful companies he helps grow.
Namely, as I noted in previous Unlimited Hangout reporting, Thiel’s prioritized helping jumpstart careers and companies through investments and even fellowships — in ways that could ultimately secure him vital influence over the tech space:
Frequent investments made by Thiel’s venture capital firm Founders Fund, which describes itself as a “venture capital firm investing in companies building revolutionary technologies,” and even the Thiel Fellowship, which gives $100,000 to elite university students to drop out of school and create tech start-ups, elucidate Thiel’s affinity for fiscal dominance of, and functional influence over, the tech start-up space now and in the future.
And although Thiel may not hold formal political office, he’s amassed tangible power through such means. Thiel biographer Max Chafkin supposes that Thiel may be the most powerful person on earth; Newsweek previously called former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Thiel the most influential figures at the secretive annual Bilderberg meetings.
Hey, at least Thiel’s put money towards man-made tornadoes?
The Vance Appointment: What’s in it for Thiel?
Although Thiel reluctantly said he would vote for Trump “if you hold a gun to [his] head” just a few weeks ago, he’s now seriously considering supporting the Trump campaign in light of the recently announced J.D. Vance VP nomination; Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale already is. Elon Musk, likewise, is now slated to give the Trump campaign up to 180 million USD by election day.
Why are tech billionaires excited about Vance? In short, it’s because they’ve brought him to prominence.
Namely, securing Vance a post-Yale law school career in venture capital and subsequently providing an unprecedented 15 million USD to Vance’s recent and successful U.S. Senate campaign, Thiel arguably built Vance’s career. Meanwhile, Thiel, along with prominent venture capitalists Marc Andreessen (of Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z), and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt had helped Vance fund his own venture capital firm, Narya Capital, upon his return to Ohio in 2019.
As John Herrman posits in Intelligencer, “[Vance’s nomination is], among other things, an invitation from the Republican party to America’s tech elite — one that an increasing number are eager to accept.”
(That’s not to say that tech elites are sticking with the Republicans per se. Close Thiel associate Eric Schmidt, for example, has a long track record of funding Democrats.)
All things considered, the Vance appointment appears slated to make the Trump ticket a ticket for Silicon Valley. And, as Whitney Webb wrote in a recent Unlimited Hangout article on Thiel: “it seems almost inevitable that Palantir and the other Thiel-linked military contractors will have even more influence in a second Trump administration than it did during [Trump’s] first term” if the Republicans win in November.
(*Perhaps to escape the “inevitability of death,” Peter Thiel and other billionaires are pouring millions into startups and other organizations working towards extending lifespans, reversing aging, and perhaps thwarting death itself. In Thiel’s own words, it will be possible to “reverse all human ailments in the same way that we can fix the bugs of a computer program. Death will eventually be reduced from a mystery to a solvable problem.” Read more.)
Further reading:
Peter Thiel: “I Defer to Israel” by Kelley Vlahos at Responsible Statecraft
With Trump VP pick J.D. Vance, Silicon Valley conservatives land a 'tech bro' on the ticket by Alexandra Ulmer and Dawn Chmielewski at Reuters
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https://barn0346.substack.com/p/life-is-not-a-battle
https://posthumousstyle.substack.com/p/neuralink-does-not-read-minds-and
These people are so disconnected from nature and reality that they can't even cure the common cold. How do they expect that any of this tech will help when it's all pumped up by corrupt industries? Maybe that's why they still believe in the fairy tale of mRNA and crispr, both of which failed and keep failing?
(*Perhaps to escape the “inevitability of death,” Peter Thiel and other billionaires are pouring millions into startups and other organizations working towards extending lifespans, reversing aging, and perhaps thwarting death itself. In Thiel’s own words, it will be possible to “reverse all human ailments in the same way that we can fix the bugs of a computer program. Death will eventually be reduced from a mystery to a solvable problem.”)
I wouldn't trust Webb one iota for what it's worth.