A mysterious force in Christian eschatology, the katechon should not be treated as something historical that can be pinned down, identified and controlled. Literally “the one who restrains”, it comes from Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians, in which he alludes to the fact that the community knows “what is now restraining him, so that he may be revealed when his time comes”. A force will hold back the rise of the Antichrist before the return of Christ and the final judgment. But the restraining is only temporary, as “the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but only until the one who now restrains it is removed”.

The katechon has fascinated theologians and political thinkers for centuries. This mysterious figure or power has been variously interpreted across history, often reflecting the anxieties and hopes of different epochs. Is it a single person? A government? An institution? A spiritual power acting through history? Is the battle it fights one of politics or of faith? The early Christian writer Tertullian identified the katechon with the Roman Empire, viewing its imperial authority as a bulwark against chaos and the rise of the Antichrist. Centuries later, Martin Luther suggested that it might be the institutional Church itself, paradoxically preserving social order even as he criticized its corruption. But the Catholic Church ended up condemning the attempts to identify the restrainer with a political structure.

In more recent thought, the katechon is often understood less as a concrete political institution and more as a metaphysical or cultural principle, a force that resists dissolution, chaos, and the meaninglessness of a secularizing world. The philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev interpreted the katechon as Christian culture itself, while the Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade saw the katechon in traditional structures of sacred time and myth, which he believed held back the modern world’s drift into historical relativism and existential despair.

Now Thiel is taking up the mantle. The German-born Silicon Valley-based tech entrepreneur, who was raised Evangelical but describes his religious views as “somewhat heterodox”, explored these questions in four private lectures delivered so far in Oxford, Harvard, and the University of Austin. The talks were modeled on the four sermons on the Antichrist that John Henry Newman gave in the 1830s, before he converted to Catholicism. The event was strictly invitation-only and guests were asked not to speak publicly about what was said — though Thiel has occasionally alluded to the themes in interviews. He recently discussed some of his intuitions with the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat.

Thiel’s fascination with the katechon places him in dialogue with Carl Schmitt. For the German jurist and political theorist, it could and must be identified in history. In this way, Schmitt “immanentized” the katechon — believing it had to take concrete form. His fear of the lawlessness and disorder foretold by scripture led him to a chilling conclusion: that the Nazi regime, for all its evils, might have been a bulwark against something even worse. The Third Reich, in his eyes, held back even greater threats of chaos, such as Bolshevism or the collapse of European order. He believed that the regime embodied a decisive political authority capable of resisting the disintegration of state sovereignty and the rise of a borderless, technocratic liberalism.

Thiel is attuned to this paradox. For him, the katechon and the Antichrist are not absolute opposites. The restrainer, he suggests, is always at risk of becoming what it seeks to hold back. When I ask him about this over Zoom, he says that “the katechon is purely defensive and hence somehow inadequate” to fit with the various power structures that in history claimed to have a katechontic role. He points to how Christian forces like the Holy Roman Empire saw themselves as more than just passive restraining forces, but rather as active interpreters of a salvific vision. Once it has exhausted its historical role, the protective force may mutate into something else entirely. After all, the Roman Empire was, at different times, both the persecutor and the defender of Christians. Nero, one of the great persecutors of Christians, was a Roman emperor just like Constantine, who made Christianity the state religion. Thiel’s mentor, René Girard, saw this ambiguity clearly: “Christ and Antichrist are intermingled and concomitant until apocalypsis — the moment of revelation and decision — is reached.”

This tension runs through Thiel’s worldview. In our conversation, he traced the role of the katechon in 20th-century politics. “After 1948, Carl Schmitt struggled to identify a katechon in history,” Thiel told me. To his mind, the forces keeping away communism and secular liberalism were elusive. “My placeholder answer from 1949–1989 is anti-communism, which united the Reagan coalition of priests, generals, and millionaires against the one-world ideology of communism,” Thiel continued. But after the Cold War ended, they had to make a choice: “pack up and go home, or push George Bush Sr.’s ‘New World Order’: anti-Communism in a world with no more Communists.” The anti-communist coalition had to become something new.

The power that emerged to restrain evil thus became a creative power, a temptation experienced by many forces once regarded as preventers of evil. Anti-communist forces took different paths after the Cold War. Liberal internationalists and a segment of the Reaganites have refounded the globalist project, while Christian Democracy has hollowed out from within. “Christian democracy morphed into something neither Christian nor democratic,” says Thiel. “When Angela Merkel rose to power in 2005, the CDU became like KFC — they stopped saying the full name, just the acronym. With the name change, the Christian Democrats lost their souls.” What had for a time appeared to be a katechon ultimately revealed itself to be its opposite.

And what about the Antichrist? Rarely presented as an openly devilish figure bent on destruction, the Antichrist appears as a compelling unifying presence. The Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, in his Story of Antichrist, imagined him as a magnetic 33-year-old man with a PhD in theology and a genuine concern for the environment. His goal was not to destroy Christianity, but to domesticate the churches and unify them under his guidance and his vision of good governance. Similarly in Robert Hugh Benson’s novel Lord of the World, world leader Julian Felsenburgh is a charismatic figure who unites the globe under a tolerant version of socialism, promoting peace and safety for everyone — except rebellious Catholics. After the First World War, Pope Benedict XV warned against the “advent of a universal republic” in which “there is no longer any distinction of nationality”. The rise of a socialist international republic, he said, “would lead to terrible social convulsions”.

More from this author

Jeffrey Sachs: Pope whisperer

By Mattia Ferraresi

While the international project of communism is the most obvious example, Thiel detects this pattern in many historical phenomena. The spread of the Islamic Caliphate in Europe — from the Battle of Tours in 732 to the Siege of Vienna in 1683 — was, in his view, another attempt to impose a universal government. Today’s equivalent is what he calls “woke socialism”, or what post-liberal theorists would simply call “liberalism”. In this reading, the same structures of power that once restrained evil now serve as its stewards.

“You could argue that the US deep state and intelligence apparatus historically played a katechontic role,” Thiel explained. “Their secrecy allowed them to get away with all sorts of morally dubious activities in the name of stopping Communism or Islamic terrorism. But their secrecy also obscured their decay into their opposite. The USAID disclosures revealed just how far down that path they had slid,” Thiel went on, referring to how the foreign aid machine has been captured by woke ideology, supporting almost-parody programmes like drag shows for Venezuelan migrants in Ecuador, sex-change surgeries in Guatemala, or training Sri Lankan journalists to avoid “binary-gendered language”.

The elephant in this apocalyptic room is Donald Trump. No doubt his critics see him as an Antichrist of sorts, but in Thiel’s scheme, his role is open to interpretation. Is he a katechon? A katechon that may become the Antichrist? An unnecessary immanentisation? None of the above? Thiel wouldn’t say. But the growing realization of how deeply woke-thinking has penetrated the administrative state has only increased Thiel’s confidence in Trump. He supported the President way before it was acceptable in tech circles, and many Silicon Valley converts to Trumpism now acknowledge he was ahead of his time. Plus, he’s a mentor to Vice President J.D. Vance, who began his path toward Catholicism after hearing Thiel give a speech at Yale. Trump doesn’t sound like a great candidate to turn out as the Antichrist.

The view that Trump is a katechontic figure is widespread on the religious Right. Conservative writer Rod Dreher has said he sees Trump as a katechon, even while sharply criticizing aspects of his agenda. Interpreting Trump as a restraining force against evil allows for acknowledgment of his historical necessity — without excusing his flaws. Following this logic, some Evangelicals argue that Trump’s character must be judged against the backdrop of the end times.

Suggested reading

Peter Thiel’s visions of Apocalypse

By Jacob Howland

“Before the US election, I told Elon Musk that I would leave the country in the case of a Trump defeat,” Thiel told me. “He replied, ‘There’s nowhere to go.’ He believed the US would export woke socialism across the globe.” And not just across the globe. The ideology unleashed in these apocalyptic times, Thiel warns, has interplanetary reach. “For me, 2024 will be remembered as the year Elon gave up on Mars — not as a technological project but as a political project — because he realized that this threat would follow him into outer space if he didn’t address it here on Earth.”

Whatever role Trump plays — katechon or Antichrist or both — Thiel’s main concern is in revitalizing apocalyptic thinking, something late modernity has largely rejected. But not entirely. “I think many people, including within the Catholic world, are thinking in apocalyptic terms, but admitting it remains taboo,” he said, explaining his almost mystical fascination with Benedict XVI.

“I believe Benedict XVI saw our time that way. There was an official teaching stating that the Church, confronted with rampant secularization, would become smaller and purer. But then there was the secret belief — that we are witnessing signs of the end times. In my view, one reason he wouldn’t openly discuss it is that doing so would be accelerationist, hastening the arrival of the eschaton. My rebuttal to Benedict would be that things could not possibly have accelerated faster down that path than they did.”

Thiel is battling for the return of apocalyptic thinking, a profound shift in how we understand history, power, and the limits of human agency. Modernity, with its faith in inevitable progress and institutional stability, long sought to exile the apocalyptic imagination, viewing it as irrational and disruptive. But in the age marked by technological acceleration and looming existential threats, the end-times narrative has regained its grip on the political imagination. For Thiel, politics and theology are ultimately the same thing — each grounded in a vision of ultimate salvation or catastrophe. The resurgence of the apocalyptic reveals not just a fear of collapse but a hunger for meaning, a search for the forces that restrain or unleash history’s final dramas. In this light, political discourse is no longer just about policy or governance; it is once again about destiny.

And yet US Vice President JD Vance ascribes his adult conversion to Catholicism partly to the influence of Girard, via his campaign funder, the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. The latter encountered Girard at Stanford and champions him to aspiring entrepreneurs. Now, 10 years after his death, Girard is everywhere — profiled in the Financial Times, analyzed on politics podcasts, presented in YouTube lecture series by men in tailored suits.

Would Girard be happy about this? Given his warnings about scapegoating, it’s hard to imagine him celebrating his influence upon a vice president who campaigned by accusing immigrants of eating pets. And he’d probably be greatly puzzled by the promotion of his ideas as a key to business success. What strikes me is how the popular versions of Girard leave out his most powerful idea — the one most humbling to our pride. He has been popularized as a propounder of “grand, gruesome theories” about the secret savagery behind civilization. But I see him, before this, as a theorist of identity. This element in his thought seems to have been played down by his new, high-status audience.

Girard’s name for his body of thought is “Mimetic Theory”. It is founded on a single idea: mimetic desire. This is the hypothesis that our desires, beyond our basic needs, are always mediated by a mimetic model: somebody who guides us on what to desire, and what not to. Everyone knows that online shoppers look to influencers to decide which brands to buy. But Girard shows the same dynamic at work in the sophisticated plots of great theatre and novels, not to mention the Bible. Somehow, through some unexpected twists, this hypothesis leads Girard to a theory of human culture and violence.

Suggested reading

The trouble with political Christianity

By Alex O'Connor

Some find Mimetic Theory to be a revelation, explaining everything from social media to the US-China trade war. Others are dubious. But both sides overlook a fundamental philosophical question. Why would our desires be mediated by a model? Why should we need somebody else to show us what to want?

Girard gave a direct answer to this question, one that has been largely ignored. Once we have solved the problem of satisfying our basic needs, we begin to wonder about who we are. Anyone can look back at their awkward teenage years to remind themselves of the terrible challenge of deciding who to be — sharing in Saint Augustine’s feeling: “I have become an enigma to myself.” Popular culture, with its roots reaching back to Romantic literature, bombards us with the idea that your true identity is already buried deep inside you. All you need to do is find it and draw it out. Girard’s confronting idea is that this is a lie — he calls it the “Romantic lie”. In reality, there is no true you hidden deep inside. Inside you there is only emptiness. Answers to the question of who you are can only come from outside, from the example set by others. This is why we need a model to mediate our desires and, more generally, to tell us what to be.

Girard reported that the first philosophical book he understood was Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Perhaps he took the idea of our inner emptiness from Sartre, who wrote that “man is nothing other than what he makes of himself”. Sartre believed that, lacking innate identity, we could invent ourselves in a heroic act of radical creativity. Girard found this incomprehensible. How can we invent ourselves, including even the desires that motivate us, without some model to follow? If we have no innate identity, we have no choice but to model ourselves on others.

His most profound and disturbing thought is that we copy not just our desires but our whole identity from others. His preferred term for identity was “being”, as it was for Sartre. Thus, he said: “absolute being — I don’t have in me. I don’t feel it. I feel my emptiness. But the other always seems to have more of it than I have.” As far as I’ve seen, this idea has not made it to Silicon Valley, nor the podcasts, nor YouTube, nor the White House.

Consider Thiel. He draws heavily on Mimetic Theory in a self-help book modestly subtitled: “How to Build the Future”. He is clearly influenced by Girard’s explanation of how mimetic desire escalates into rivalry. Suppose my boss is my mimetic model. I start to dress like her, talk like her, aim at rising to her position, etc. She begins to feel threatened and takes measures to ward me off as a rival. But this makes her position seem even more exclusive and alluring. I emulate her more ardently, intensifying her feelings of rivalry, and so on in an upward spiral. Thiel uses this self-reinforcing dynamic between mimesis and rivalry to argue that competition, via mimesis, has a homogenizing effect. The more competitive the marketplace, the more firms end up copying each other and producing indistinguishable products. The more competitive academia gets, the more everyone writes different versions of the same paper, over and over again.

So far, so Girardian (and, regarding academia, unfortunately true). But what is Thiel’s solution? The true innovator, he suggests, must rise above mimetic competition and do what nobody else is doing. That isn’t Girard; it’s Sartre. Girard found no sense in the idea of radical, unmodeled creation. He would ask: where are we meant to get the idea for what nobody else is doing? Clearly not from others. But not from inside ourselves either. Inside is only emptiness. This humbling thought has been quietly dropped from Thiel’s entrepreneurial version of Girardianism.

The same is true of Thiel’s political use of Girard. This appears most clearly in a paper, “The Straussian Moment”, which Thiel gave at a conference in 2004, on “Politics & Apocalypse”. He personally funded this conference and invited Girard, whose contribution was a modest philological study of some violent language in the Gospels. Thiel, meanwhile, unveiled a grand apocalyptic vision of the world after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. He presented these attacks as a wakeup call to the liberal West, which had grown complacent about violence. He ended with advice to “the Christian statesman or stateswoman”, who “would be wise, in every close case, to side with peace”. A not-so-subtle implication is that, in cases that aren’t “close”, the wise Christian should, as Hobbes put it, seek all the helps and advantages of war.

Although he cites Girard, Thiel seems to forget his thesis that conflict is bound up with mimesis. As others have noted, Thiel seems to envisage a “clash of civilizations” between ideologically differentiated enemies — the Christian West and fundamentalist Islam — rather than, as Mimetic Theory would find, mimetic rivals whose conflict stems from wanting the same things, who become more alike the more they fight.

Suggested reading

The disturbing rise of neo-eugenics

By Poppy Sowerby

Again, the most important missing idea here is that of emptiness and identity. For Girard, political organizations, like individuals, don’t come with pre-packaged innate identities. They too have to decide what to be and have nothing to guide them but the examples set by others. At the national or personal level, the dogged pursuit of identity will only lead to rivalry and conflict.

Girard holds that we can’t switch off our longing for identity. But, instead of the heroic self-creation promoted by Thiel, he proposes that we satisfy our craving with a very different sort of model: the model of Jesus. For Girard, Jesus represents not a specific identity but rather the idea of God expressed in every identity. This is the core of Girard’s Christianity, as I see it. His final book discusses Pope John Paul II’s reflections on “an identity of all people”. This “divine” identity is reached when we detach ourselves from any fixed notion of self and open up to continuously being radically transformed in our encounters with others.

The same message was given by another Pope to that other powerful but wayward Girardian, JD Vance. To justify his aggressive nationalism, Vance pointed to the Catholic teaching of ordo amoris. The late Pope Francis then wrote a letter on this subject to the bishops of the United States of America, asserting that “it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity”.

Concerning identity, the politicians and business leaders garble Girard’s message. It calls for a fluid, open, and welcoming identity, not one that seeks protection from the influence of others. The Popes get much closer to this meaning. Girard would probably be happy with that.

***

Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self by Alexander Douglas is published by Allen Lane on 19th June.

Some will find Thiel’s project very odd. How could an enormously successful, mathematically-gifted, philosophically-educated tech entrepreneur seriously entertain Bible-thumping myths from the Apocalypse of John? Here’s a better question: how could he — and we — not take them seriously? As Dorian Lynskey writes in his book, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, “apocalyptic angst has become a constant: all flow and no ebb.” Contemporary culture has long been saturated with post-apocalyptic novels, comic books, films, TV series, and video games. Zombie end-times fantasies do particularly well in all formats. The mindless, mechanical mob of the undead, who hunger insatiably for the brains of the living, has become a primary and pervasive cultural symbol — one that resonates with a widespread sense of impending catastrophe that’s been building steadily since the 2020 Covid lockdowns. And if bioweapons, climate change, nuclear bombs, or AI don’t drive the human species to extinction, drastic measures deemed necessary to forestall such dangers, such as the establishment of a single world government, might themselves bring an end to politics, morality, spiritual life, and culture. Thiel is driven to find a way between the binary alternative of No World or One World, the whirlpool of planetary destruction or the many-headed monster of global totalitarianism.

Thiel’s insight is that, unlike most contemporary imaginings of global catastrophe, the Bible’s prophecies do more than pluck our inner strings of existential dread. They help us to understand our chaotic times. Matthew 24:24 predicts that “[T]here shall arise false Christs and false prophets … [and] they shall deceive the very elect.” In other words, the Antichrist will attempt to appear more Christian than Christ himself, even as it works to accomplish the wholesale destruction of the Christian underpinnings of Western civilization. The Nazis pursued this strategy, but were hampered by the limited appeal of their antisemitic ideology. German theologians fashioned a new myth of Jesus as a spirited warrior who strove to destroy Judaism, and they elevated Hitler to the status of the second coming of Christ, who would finish the work Jesus failed to complete: the total extermination of Jews and Judaism. A more successful Antichrist would, like the French revolutionaries and the Marxists, promote values that seem more consistent with the Judeo-Christian foundations of civilization, such as universal liberty, equality, and justice.

While the past displays a seemingly endless cycle of civilizational rises and falls, Thiel believes that modern science and technology have turned history into a linear progression, as the Bible teaches, with a beginning and a final, irreversible end. From its inception, technology — a political project as much as one of engineering — has dangled before us the shimmering promise of godhood, with which the serpent tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Francis Bacon and René Descartes, the project’s 16th- and 17th-century founders, rightly understood it to be an anti-Christian endeavor that needed to be cloaked with a veil of religious orthodoxy.

Bacon’s New Atlantis, which describes a secretive, ostensibly Christian community of scientists devoted to the experimental investigation of the properties and uses of all material things, features a prototype of the modern research university called the College of Six Days’ Works. Descartes’ Discourse on Method, which advances (with a similar veneer of piety) the bold promise of making human beings “the masters and possessors of nature”, has six parts in imitation of the first six days of God’s creation. In both books, the Sabbath — the seventh day devoted to God — falls by the wayside. The frontispiece of Bacon’s Great Instauration further hints at the transgressive nature of technology. It features a ship passing beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar), a landmark the divine hero established to warn ancient sailors not to exit the Mediterranean into the unnavigable Atlantic. And the book’s epigraph, “Many shall go to and fro and knowledge shall be increased,” is from the prophecy of the End of Days in Daniel 12, as if to suggest that the expansion of technological power would bring history to its apocalyptic conclusion.

An early modern conceit that has in many respects become a late modern curse, technology underlies virtually every apocalyptic anxiety of our time. But Thiel is unsure of the role of advanced technology, and in particular AI, in the big picture of history he’s trying to work out. Is it the Antichrist? Does it prepare the way for the Antichrist? Or is it a katechon, the mysterious force mentioned at 2 Thessalonians 2:6 that forestalls the Antichrist (the Greek word katechein means “to hold down”)? The katechon plays a major part in Thiel’s analysis, because things capable of opposing the Antichrist can also advance its aims, and vice-versa. In the absence of the existential threat of Communism, for example, Western countries like the US and UK, aided by advanced digital technology, have turned psychological operations and disinformation tactics developed to fight foreign adversaries against their own citizens. This suggests deep cultural sickness, a crisis of confidence in the values that defeated totalitarianism in the 20th century.

Thiel nevertheless thinks that worries about AI taking over the world are more dangerous than AI itself, because the fear of existential threats plays directly into the cold hands of deracinated elites who are working to establish a global managerial state. Even so, there is something satanic about AI, a ghostly entity that is increasingly capable of hacking human minds on a very large scale. What Thiel said of Bacon seems to apply to the developers of Large Language Models (LLMs): they’ve “summoned a demon they don’t believe exists”.

The Antichrist is, by definition, negative and dependent. It rejects Christ and Christian values while offering a spurious imitation of them. AI is a similarly dependent being. It is a simulacrum of human intelligence and language, capacities of thought and speech the Greeks called logos. But AI lacks essential elements of human logos: its embeddedness in the world through birth in a body bound for death, and the moral and intellectual interiority that makes the human being an image of God. Speech is a living voice that springs from the soul — to give interiority its biblical name — embedded in the body of an existing individual. But AI is not a living being, and it replaces inner plenitude with mechanical, algorithmic emptiness. Embeddedness in space and time expresses itself as concern for, and responsiveness to, the actual conditions of existence, the biblical paradigm of which is Adam’s naming of the animals who live alongside him in Eden. But while AI requires material substrates — servers and other hardware — it inhabits them in purely occasional and contingent ways, like the demons that beg Christ to pass from the mad Galilean to the herd of pigs. Its relationship with actuality is equally contingent. It exists in a digital cloud of pure possibility, where it arranges information according to no criterion of truth besides probability and the rules of logic. That’s why ChatGPT and other LLMs are so prone to hallucinations, like citing books that exist only in Borges’s fictional, virtually infinite Library of Babel.

Yet, like the sham philosopher and bad citizen Plato calls “the sophist”, who is equally indifferent to truth, AI has a seemingly divine ability to imitate virtually anything with lifelike plausibility and vividness, and in multiple media. The market, whose whims have for decades guided the world’s best software engineers, has made this soulless capacity of representation, tailored to the tastes of the individual consumer, available to almost everyone on the planet. It has taught us to spend hours every day in its virtual reality, entertaining or distracting ourselves with the shadows it casts on the walls of our own private caves. Yet, using AI for more serious purposes is no less a Faustian bargain. Every advance AI makes in serving our desires degrades fundamental human capacities and gives it more mastery over human beings. Using AI to navigate makes us less capable navigators. Using AI to write makes us less capable writers. Using it to make decisions weakens our executive capacities of judgment and action. Peak AI, ministering to the inner emptiness and boredom of atomized, directionless selves, will mean peak human debility and enslavement. Aren’t these the goals of the Antichrist — which, whatever form it may take, always seeks to remake human beings in its own image?

Not so fast: perhaps AI is really a katechon. That is the argument of Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska in The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. Karp (a classmate of Thiel’s at Stanford who also studied philosophy and, with Thiel, founded Palantir Technologies) and Zamiska, his longtime deputy, insist that the enemies of the West will prevail unless software developers work in close collaboration with the American government to produce AI-powered military capabilities superior to that of our adversaries, as Palantir has done using LLMs. They acknowledge that this will require a massive cultural shift among our technological and cosmopolitan elites, who’ve embraced an “ethereal”, “post-national”, and “disembodied” morality that scorns patriotism, and who’ve learned “that belief itself, in anything other than oneself perhaps, is dangerous and to be avoided”. Yet it is the market’s deployment of advanced technology, including AI, that has above all promoted this “Hollowing Out of the American Mind” (the title of the book’s second part), not least by rapidly dissolving social bonds, encouraging pathological self-absorption, and making possible — even incentivizing — digital swarms of doxxing and online cancellation.

Considered in the context of Karp’s and Zamiska’s urgent call to arms, the revelation of this contradiction is genuinely apocalyptic. Whether it will accelerate or slow the advent of the Antichrist and the bang or whimper of the world’s end depends on our individual and collective capacities to make informed decisions that call for moral courage — capacities that have been eroded by technologically-induced oblivion, historical, moral, and metaphysical forgetfulness, and our ingrained habit of “ced[ing] direction over our interior lives, the development of our moral selves, to the market”. Contemplating our predicament, it is hard not to feel discouraged. Hope alone remains in the Pandora’s box our clever man-gods have constructed — hope, without which the understanding (at least, for those whose prayers delivers no consolation) would be plagued by the perplexity and fear that have flown therefrom. It’s time to take it out of the box and hold it close to our hearts and minds, where it might inspire new growths of wisdom.

By the Nineties, the project slumped into embarrassing failure, from the end of modernist town planning to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The results of the 20th-century experiments were stagnation, famine, gulags, censorship, and eugenics.

Unfortunately, the Californian counter-culturists who fled the collapse of the Sixties dream and found refuge in Silicon Valley didn’t get the memo. Locked in their rooms, with their rudimentary computers, they set about creating a non-earthly utopia. They dreamed about other worlds and other intelligences, fusing anarchism with New Ageism and libertarianism with science fiction.

So began the tragi-comic rebirth of utopianism. Since then, the ideology has evolved with the growth of AI and cybernetics. It is now mainstream right across the tech world, with adherents including tech guru Ray Kurzweil, and billionaires Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen. Today’s pioneers of repeating-the-past predict a future of unbounded technological and economic growth.

The “Tech Utopians” have two main projects. The first is abundance: an end to poverty, hunger, sickness, and back-breaking labor. This will supposedly be achieved through vast social engineering projects, masterminded by an elite class, and with the aid of genius machines.

The second is the improvement of humans through scientific progress. A perfect “blank slate” human will be created for utopia 2.0, and they will be morally, intellectually, and physically enhanced. Humans won’t just be cured of illness. They’ll be cured of mortality itself.

These ideas, however, are hardly new. They appeared in nascent form as far back as Plato. Then, during the Enlightenment, they grew stronger, with the promise of a blank-slate society built upon rationalism and science, in which a better type of human would emerge. Today’s Tech Utopians, though mostly claiming to be libertarians, are attempting the same projects — only this time they plan to use AI and biotech to achieve their goals. Elon Musk, for one, envisages a “future of abundance” once AI reaches human-level intelligence (so-called AGI).

At the moment, there is a split between so-called libertarian accelerationists (like Musk and Peter Thiel), the technocrats (like the late Klaus Schwab) and the Left-accelerationists (like Aaron Bastani) over the question of how exactly abundance will be brought about. At one extreme, you have Bastani’s Left-accelerationist “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”, with its vision of a robotics-enhanced society, with Universal Basic Income and free housing, food, education, electricity and healthcare for all. On the other you have Thiel and the Effective Accelerationism plan to destroy all bureaucracies and to replace democracy with a “cognitive elite” of tech specialists who will rule autocratically over newly formed city states.

Uniting the two sides is the idea that the abundance problem will be solved by complex-systems analysis, powered by exponentially growing AI superintelligence.

Is this progress? Alas, no. Even in 1810, French socialist Charles Fourier envisioned a vast “calculating machine” that could solve all human problems. This machine would organize labor, reward undesirable work with tokens, and even assign optimal sexual partners for better offspring and enhanced pleasure. In this way, the “machine calculante” would ensure universal happiness. Perhaps not incidentally, Fourier also believed that his perfect society could turn the sea into lemonade by using gigantic parabolic mirrors to focus moonlight on the waves.

Fourier’s ideas may have been insane, but they were part of a growing faith in the ability of “systems” to deliver harmony and abundance. These ideas were tested in the many agrarian socialist collectives of the 1880s, and then later in the planned economies of communism. Within the USSR, for instance, there were repeated attempts to link military computers with civilian ones, to make a totalising “Automated System for State Planning”.

The National Socialists also hoped to realize their dream of an abundant New Germania through calculation. Hitler himself envisaged a Crimea rich with fruit and cotton, and a Black Sea inexhaustibly full of fish. Yet Hitler’s fantasies had darker echoes too: according to one historian, the Nazis worked with IBM to devise a computer system that organized the transport of millions of people to the gas chambers.

When Tech Utopians tell us that AI will guarantee abundance, then, they are unwittingly pushing us back into the dangerous utopian delusions that emerged from the 19th century — and that failed so catastrophically in the 20th century.

Some might argue that the reason utopia failed in the past was that we didn’t have a super-intelligent computer. Now that we’re close to creating one, all our problems will soon be solved. But such an argument is built on the fallacy that humans are no more than rational beings in cages of flesh. Therefore, all interactions can be planned, all diseases cured. This couldn’t be more wrong.

Suggested reading

The age of nihilism is over

By Mary Harrington

Then there’s the question of improved humans. If you’re going to create a perfect society, you need to enhance people, or else they will bring with them all of the flaws of biology and history — suffering, jealousy, hatred, genetic sickness. As American transhumanist Zoltan Istvan said: “Death is the first major challenge for the species to overcome to truly transcend our biology. There’s nothing in the way out there saying we must continue to die.” Meanwhile entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt, who is working on a technology called “Mindcloning”, says: “We’re able to put into computer form people’s mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs attitudes and values and keep them alive in a cyber form, looking forward to the future when their minds might be able to be downloaded back into a regenerated human body.”

In a similar spirit, Tech Utopians are now pushing for CRISPR DNA improvements in babies to prevent genetically inheritable diseases, such as sickle cell disease. The next step, for some, is “designer babies” — which, while legally controversial, is now technically possible.

Meanwhile, the transhumanists intend to use AI, genetic engineering, bio-tech, and cybernetics to create a post-human species which will overcome aging and disease. Transhumanist leaders such as Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom, co-founder of Humanity+, now form a powerful belief-core inside Silicon Valley.

And then there is Musk, whose company, Neuralink, is experimenting with new technologies like Brain Chip Interface (BCI), which enables direct communication between the brain’s electrical activity and computers. Musk hopes to implant surgically installed brain chips into millions of people within a decade. He and his acolytes believe these enhanced human subjects will soon be able to communicate telepathically and download knowledge in an instant. Eventually, they insist, we will see a merger of human consciousness with superintelligent AI, allowing us to achieve digital immortality.

Are these utopian technologies leading us forward? Once again: no. Rather, they are regressing back to dogma found in Plato’s Republic, where selective breeding is proposed to create the “guardian class” of philosopher-kings to run the ideal society.

Suggested reading

ChatGPT will kill off the Romantic genius

By Sam Leith

There are even echoes of Stalin’s scientists, who sought to achieve a breakthrough in human evolution in the form of the “New Soviet Man”. To this end, Soviet scientist Ilya Ivanov tried to create a super-strong human-chimpanzee hybrid, while Alexander Bogdanov sought immortality through blood-transfusion experiments. It’s an experiment that we’ve recently seen repeated by “longevity biohacker” and transhumanist guru Bryan Johnson, who took blood from his teenage son in the attempt to stay young.

This is not the only poignant parallel. Nikolai Koltsov, a Soviet-era biologist, developed eugenic “sperm banks for geniuses”. Nowadays, one of the goals of transhumanist organization Humanity + this decade is to use technology “to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities”.

Such connections are arguably not coincidental but causal. According to tech historians and activists Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, leaders of the AGI movement “subscribe to [a] set of ideologies which have emerged from the modern eugenics movement and therefore have inherited similar ideals”. They say that the Tech Utopians are guilty of discriminatory attitudes around racial differences in IQ, and that the Tech Utopian goal is “to create a superior being akin to a machine-god”, a process which is resulting in experimental technological “systems that are unscoped and thus unsafe”.

There is evidence for this in the degree of suffering caused in the Brain Chip Interface experiments. Neuralink is currently under federal investigation for the claim that 1,500 animals died during surgical BCI experiments, with the company accused of “causing needless suffering”, related to “Musk’s need for speed research”.

The transhumanist mission will inevitably require a large number of human test subjects. After all, Tech Utopians, with their belief in “long termism”, tend to view short-term sacrifices as essential to the attainment of their transcendent future goals.

Yet as history shows, utopianism always demands its blood sacrifices in the name of the distant paradise. It excludes those deemed unworthy, or it uses them as its lab rats in the name of “improvement”. In other words, today’s Tech Utopian visions aren’t about progress. They are a regressive repeat of history, born out of a willful blindness to the past. We are accelerating backwards into preventable disasters we thought we had left behind.

I could see why Edward was interested in the play. The AI community, to which he belongs, is driven by these kinds of future visions: utopian, quasi-divine abundance and control over nature — regardless of whether that outcome is wanted, or whether we will destroy ourselves trying to bring it about. Already, their capital, San Francisco, is marked by this worldview. The technology that’s generated in “SF” is itself the product of a rationalist eschatology that sees the human as a “bootstrapping” mechanism (in the words of Elon Musk) for higher forms of life and intelligence.

Beneath this apparent rationalism lurks a profoundly religious sensibility that seeks to reconfigure the human past the point of recognizability, all in service of generating a sort of machine-angel synthesis. SF, then, isn’t just a place. It’s a theological state of mind.

In the city’s techno-rationalist circles, the answer to the question of whether we should want to live in The Culture is: “Yes, if possible”. ChatGPT founder Sam Altman, for instance, is one of many technologists with a serious interest in life extension (the pursuit of extending human lifespan), biohacking (modifying one’s biology through various interventions), and merging human cognition with artificial cognition (often called brain-computer interfaces).

More From This Author

The Millennial virtue economy is dead

By Matt Gasda

Peter Thiel invests in parabiosis, the experimental practice of transfusing young blood into older bodies in pursuit of eternal youth. Elon Musk is building brain implants. Ray Kurzweil takes hundreds of supplements a day. Jack Dorsey fasts for days at a time. Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison quietly fund longevity startups. If, as the existentialist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued, “we perceive the world with our body”, then the high priests of the SF cult are building not only new bodies, but new perceptions. Out of these new visions will presumably emerge new ethics.

If the members of a technologically optimized overclass see, hear, and move differently — how will they see the rest of us, the non-optimized?

Accelerating integration with technology changes how you experience the world. While in SF, I took Waymos (autonomous vehicles operated by a Google subsidiary) everywhere, rather than traditional taxis or Ubers. There was a particular feeling as the cars passed through areas of squalor. In Frisco (the old working-class name for the city), I felt like I was living in a completely gated experience, a protected techno-bubble. The experience was seamless and efficient, and it changed my behavior. Because there was no driver, I found myself feeling weirdly liberated: like I was passing through material reality like a god or alien observing humans. Somehow, I believed the car could and would protect me.

I liked my Waymo rides to the food co-op, because they spared me from having to mentally and emotionally engage with the bad neighborhood surrounding the health-food store. I could close my eyes as I left the “hacker house” where I was staying — and then open them in an enormous, shiny store offering food designed to optimize my body. You start to like rationalist civilization. AI does the legwork of maintaining homeostasis. There’s no real existential pressure; you start to forget that you live in a fragile, mortal body; you start to feel like you should have total control over everything that happens to you.

The future is here, it’s arriving a little more each day, and it’s concentrated in the Bay Area. If we want a preview of what happens when techno-futurism becomes a ruling-class ideology, if we want to understand what future culture will feel like, we just have to look at rationalist-utopian, accelerationist, godless, and increasingly childless San Francisco.

Bay Area techno-rationalist culture resembles — and, in many ways, is — the rebirth of the Shakers. The 19th-century sect similarly believed that the end times were imminent, and consequently emphasized self-discipline, radical environmental redesign, and withdrawal from the world. Techno-rationalists are Shakers without God. Or rather, theirs is a god who has yet to be built, but the project is coming along nicely.

San Francisco is almost like someone took parts of Davos and placed them inside Naples: a clean, efficient, rational minimalist elite lifeworld nested inside social decay, nested inside breathtaking natural beauty. Life is absolutely pleasant in San Francisco, if you live on the upper edge of the K-shaped economy. Of course, all American cities have this feature to some degree: the affluent live differently than everyone else, everywhere.

But in San Francisco, there is a deeper feeling that this is simply a necessary part of the social Darwinism entailed in transhumanism: that the poor and the “bad” will die off while the techno-affluent live longer, healthier lives, protected by AI.

An astonishing amount of human energy has been spent building this increasingly automated techno-empire, and the end result seems to be something like redemption for a very few, elimination and redundancy for the many. Everywhere I took a Waymo, I saw billboards advertising AI labor — replace your real workers. Soon it will be: replace almost everyone. This is the vision: a priestly, self-medicating, self-optimizing, transhumanist class that lives a life of leisure on an automated grid, protected from the decay around them and from the downsides of the civilization they have built.

San Francisco is also the first city, I think, where a non-negligible portion of the population —  and certainly the most rich and powerful portion — is planning, if not to live literally forever, to live beyond our biological lifespan, confident that technology can build a heaven on Earth for some.

Suggested article

The rise of Yuppiefuturism

By Louis Elton

The Golden State has always been an incubator for cults and prophecies. The rocket geeks who built Cal Tech and turned the state into a defense and aerospace Mecca also indulged strange and occult visions, as the Marxist geographer and California writer Mike Davis reminded us. The latest cult has supplanted ballistics aimed at the Soviets with moonshots to eternal life. For example, Bryan Johnson, tech entrepreneur known for his extreme anti-aging regimen, tweeted recently, “I am building a religion”, adding: “First, here’s what’s going to happen: + Don’t Die becomes history’s fastest-growing ideology. + It saves the human race. + And ushers in an existence more spectacular than we can imagine. It is inevitable. The only question is: will you be an early or late adopter”?

And what if you dissent? What if you don’t want to optimize? What if you still prefer the old religions to the new? What if you have no interest in building a killer app or tracking your biomarkers every day? For now, you won’t be punished. You won’t be called a heretic. But as this cult expands — as I believe it will, because of what it promises — and as caste differences sharpen, tensions will inevitably rise. Refusal will begin to look like a threat. Noncompliance will read as dysfunction.

It isn’t hard, for this reason, to imagine a future where AI-driven cars have humanoid robots in the front seat—not as drivers, but as bodyguards: to protect the transhumanist overclass from the dissenters and neo-Luddites who have been left behind (or were never invited to join the revolution). And it’s also hard to imagine that those bodyguards won’t, at some point, be necessary.

Decentralised finance would be the latest MAGA foray into Silicon Valley’s various and sundry roads to billions. First came Trump’s venture into nonfungible token digital trading cards (Trump as cowboy, Trump as astronaut, and now 50 new ones including Trump fondling Bitcoin); his eponymous cryptocurrency TrumpCoin (each of which is presently worth a shade above a cent — down 2% this past week); and of course his social media venture, Truth Social, which features an ever-plummeting stock price.

Three strikes and you’re out? Not for Trump, who’s swinging for Strike Four. There’s a pattern here, and it’s more than failure. There’s a political undercurrent to Trump’s venture into DeFi, one that has sent the commentariat into yet another bout of head-scratching.

The easy-bake explanation for Trump’s digital fascinations is that the matchmaker was J.D. Vance, the populist finance bro from Narya Capital who has made it clear that he has no taste for reining in tech monopolies. Others trace the tryst to Vance’s ex-boss, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who has adored Trump ever since he descended the golden escalator in 2015. Those with more of a philosophical bent argue instead that power gravitates towards money and vice versa, and thus the mutual admiration society of the ex-most powerful man on the planet and the digitally richest man on the planet — Elon Musk, now rumoured to become bean-counter in chief of Trump presidency 2.0.

Suggested reading

The night Trump lost the election

By Lee Siegel

In a manner typical of this pragmatic approach to the odd coupling, the Financial Times suggested that the vibe between the smartest wonks in the room and the Alzheimer-adjacent egotist is simply a marriage of convenience — that tech entrepreneurs Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz are chasing lower tax burdens for their $42 billion VC firm, a16z. Not to neglect the pseudo-academics who cannot escape their self-imposed dungeons of political ideology, and thus take it for granted that the torrid affair is simply a matter of shared love and respect for libertarian values, which Trump supposedly shares with long-time MAGA acolyte, Tyler Winklevoss.

There may be something to the crypto connection, but not because of politics, libertarian or otherwise. “If we don’t do it, China is going to do it,” rambled Trump. “China is doing it anyway.” Which suggests that behind all the idiocies and get-rich-quickeries, perhaps there is an actual geopolitical strategy.

I came to this conclusion after stumbling across an obscure article reporting that the US Armed Services had “ramped up exploration of blockchain for military use”. A bit more research found that the United States House Armed Services Committee draft for fiscal year 2025’s National Defense Authorization Act did indeed include funding for potential applications of Bitcoin for their “Special Operations Command”.

It turns out the Pentagon’s legions of buzz-cut computer nerds are deep into conceptualising what has come to be called “Software-Defined Warfare” — that is, the belief that the next big conflict will resemble a massive computer game (at least, for those who work command-and-control from 18 stories beneath the bedrock of Arizona). Of course, the particular brand of software expertise required to emerge victorious from such a battle can only come from Silicon Valley, where those who were once called death merchants now work in the “commercial tech defense innovation space”.

All of which reminded me of a long-forgotten legal dispute involving Thiel, and one of the many companies he has co-founded — Palantir Technologies. (The name is taken from those communication and surveillance devices — that is, crystal balls — that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about in his epic of bloody global warfare, The Lord of the Rings, a book that has turned out to be the ur-text for tech VCs.) The precise nature of Palantir’s software business was not widely understood until that case in 2016, when the firm won a ruling that allowed it to compete for an Army contract valued at more than $200 million, thus adding to the more than $150 million Department of Defense money Palantir had already banked. The cherry on top was the $2 million Palantir had received from a rather sinister sounding entity, “In-Q-Tel”, which happens to be the investment arm of the CIA.

Such facts outline the dirty little secret of the marriage of MAGA and Silicon Valley: their shared fascination with all things autocratic and military, from the epic battlefields of The Lord of the Rings to the Space Force Trump proudly signed into being as the stand-alone, sixth branch of the US military, replete with its uniform straight out of Star Trek wardrobe reject storage. It’s not that Trump actually wants to fight wars. He just wants to play dictator on TV. Not to mention the salient fact: there’s money in it.

That money is the driving force behind the Silicon-MAGA merger is not a matter of conjecture, but of economic history. During the Second World War, the Office of Scientific Research and Development spent $450 million on weapons research and development in an effort to destroy the Evil Empires of Germany and Japan by means of radar-directed bombers, anti-radar jammers and electronic-frequency telemetry. Silicon Valley took its modern form when, after the war, an engineer named Frederick Terman, ex-head of the super-top-secret Harvard Radio Research Lab, went west to become Dean of Stanford Engineering and kindle the flames of Spook Entrepreneurship. Those were the days when the invisible secret powers hell-bent on taking over the world were not a matter to be contemplated by conspiracy theorists, but by the mavens of “Signals Intelligence”.

Donald Trump, like Silicon Valley itself, is a child of the Cold War. He came of age as America’s cult of paranoia blossomed during the decade after the Second World War. It was perhaps inevitable that Fred Terman’s programme would double in size as the NSA, CIA, Navy and Air Force nestled into the verdant coast between San Francisco and San Jose. During the Korean War, Terman became Provost of Stanford’s School of Engineering, and made a fateful choice. He encouraged his students not to become academics but to consult for privately held companies, or else start companies themselves — greasing the wheels of entrepreneurship by allowing them to license his department’s intellectual property for free. Thus did Silicon Valley assume its modern form at the height of American reactionary culture, as the country suffered through Joseph McCarthy’s attack on the Deep State, a Civil Rights backlash, and an obsession with enemies domestic and abroad. In other words, precisely the themes that possess Donald Trump.

By the end of the Fifties, two brothers from Palo Alto, Russell and Sigurd Varian, had become so thoroughly wracked with anxiety about American weakness that they devised a method to use microwaves to detect tiny specks moving through the sky hundreds of miles distant, such as missiles and airplanes. The result was an extraordinarily complex device known as the klystron, in which the Sperry Corporation soon invested. The profits would transform Sperry into one of America’s most renowned defence contractors, the off-shoots of which would include Honeywell (makers of Chinook attack helicopters), Lockheed Martin (creators of the ATACM rockets), Raytheon Technologies (radars and mine-hunting sonar) and Northrop Grumman (fighter jets, stealth bombers). Each and every one from the Valley.

Needless to say, these companies and those that inevitably followed were not brimming with peace-loving, ankh-wearing hippies. The general ethos of authoritarianism encouraged the rise of those slide-rule junkies who were more often than not as combative and paranoid as Trump himself. The most MAGA-prophetic of them all was a Nobel-Prize winning Palo Alto native named William Shockley, who co-invented the solid-state transistor. Shockley Semiconductor was the first company to bring actual work on silicon semiconductors to Silicon Valley. Much like Donald Trump, Shockley lashed out in demented rage at any and all perceived enemies. But perhaps more to the point, he was a stupefyingly bad manager — domineering, erratic, paranoid, apt to change his mind at the last minute. Another problem: Shockley was a racist. When he entered the Republican primary for a California Senate seat in 1982, he publicly declared his policy solution to make America Great: those with an IQ of less than 100 should be sterilised.

Suggested reading

Will Kamala have the last laugh?

By Matt Feeney

While Shockley amassed less than 1% of the Republican primary vote, his influence on the tech world knew no bounds. Ex-Shockley employees would found more than five-dozen chip companies in the Bay Area, and many would catch the attention of the east coast financial establishment, thus igniting the first wave of West Coast Initial Public Offerings — Varian in 1956; Hewlett Packard in 1957; Ampex in 1958. By the end of the Fifties, the “Traitorous Eight” who had stormed out of Shockley Semiconductor had set a pattern of venture capital investment emulated to the present day. The greatest of their nascent west coast VC firms was Kleiner Perkins, which would eventually evolve into Sequoia Capital, which has not only bet much of its $85 billion on war technology, but publicly backed Trump last May.

It’s not only about the money. The traditional Menlo Park nerd possesses a particular personality profile that contains glimmers of your average MAGA dude. Like Donald Trump, Right-wing tech bros like to prattle on the airwaves, from “Thiel Talks” to “The Ben & Marc Show”. Early Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya co-hosts the Trump-coddling “All-In” podcast with South African venture capitalist David Sacks (angel investor in Airbnb, Uber and SpaceX), who also managed to elbow his way onto the speakers list at the Republican National Convention. Our stockpiles of weapons, Sacks declared “are dangerously depleted”. The solution was obvious: more weaponry, more investment.

Even as Sacks promoted Trump’s candidacy at the RNC, he was boosting his own investment in a start-up military drone-manufacturer called Anduril — and soon thereafter, potential backers flocked to fund the latest incarnation of Honeywell and Raytheon. By the time the RNC had nominated Trump, VCs had raised $1.5 billion for Anduril, presently valued at $14 billion.

Suggested reading

The Hollywood liberals who rule America

By Frederick Kaufman

It should come as no surprise that like Palantir, the name Anduril was inspired by The Lord of the Rings. Remember that sword that was reforged from the shards of Narsil by 11 smiths in Rivendell? Neither do I. But the nomenclature reiterates the fact that the wonks of Silicon Valley, like the fearful Manichaeists of MAGA, view the world as if it were Tolkien’s Middle Earth, a world brimming with invisible conspiracies and unimaginable riches, a world in which saying things can make them true, a world where dark-skinned immigrant Orcs battle white-skinned elves.

A fascination with global warfare has been a constant Trump trope, as since 2016 he has warned us again and again that we are hurtling towards “World War Three”. The coming apocalypse has endured as one of the mantras of his 2024 campaign, and once again the apocalyptic fascination strangely aligns with the ambitions of west coast digiterati, as Anduril’s co-founder, Brian Schimpf, has declared the global military theatre as a “constant threat environment”. It is no coincidence that Schimpf speaks in the same autocratic accents as Trump, declaring during a recent YouTube conversation that the way to peace and prosperity is not the democratic process, but to “just force change into the system”.

Perhaps Silicon Valley’s new generation, fed upon the milk and honey of video games, a global pandemic, and the business gospel of “move fast and break things” has grown comfortable with apocalyptic ideation. At the heart of their loathing of bureaucracy lies the infant boy’s infatuation with smashing any and all playthings. The bros have come to love the violence that lies at the source of their filthy lucre, no matter the cost. And so there should be no confusion as to why Silicon Valley loves MAGA and MAGA loves Silicon Valley: when each looks into the other’s eyes, they see themselves. To those spectrum-y engineers seduced by the epic nonsense of The Lord of the Rings and empowered by the rush of their own breathtaking economic superpowers, Donald Trump has become the ultimate fantasy: a crypto-president whose digital source code they might well soon possess.

That a private American company should gain such a foothold in the NHS would normally cause concern among privacy and health service advocates. And that it could be Palantir — part-funded in its early days by the CIA and with Western armies among its clients — is causing high anxiety. “Is Palantir really the kind of company we want at the very heart of the National Health Service?” asks Cori Crider, director of Foxglove, a campaign group dedicated to challenging the excesses of tech giants. “This is a company who, at the start of the pandemic, had no track record of working with healthcare staff. They’re not a healthcare company. They weren’t a health data company. They were essentially a tech company who supported spies, police, the military and border forces.”

Palantir, in partnership with Accenture, is in the running with Quantexa, a British company partnered with IBM, and Oracle Cerner to build the “Federated Data Platform” (FDP), described by the NHS as a system “which will enable NHS organisations to bring together operational data – currently stored in separate systems – to support staff to access the information they need in one safe and secure environment”. NHS England says there are currently no plans to include GP records in the FDP, but privacy campaigners fear that that could change with mission creep, and if it did, Palantir could gain access to them. The winner of the FDP contract was supposed to have been named in September, an announcement then delayed to the middle of this month, and now said to be imminent — but few in the NHS believe it will be anyone but Palantir.

The NHS — budget this year £182 billion — has the largest repository of health data in the world. It services around a million GP appointments a day, and over a quarter of a million hospital appointments. According to consultants Ernst and Young, the information gleaned from NHS activities could be worth £9.6 billion a year. With the advent of AI, mining this treasure trove of data could mean the discovery of better medicines and treatments, improved patient care and vast savings. But in the wrong hands, it could see the NHS being used as a cash-cow, and it could mean a loss of privacy, the end of patient trust, and the slow death of the NHS as we know it.

So, how did Palantir get in the running — and why are they being hotly tipped as a shoo-in for the FDP contract, worth £480m over seven years? The company, named after the crystal “seeing stones” in J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, was founded by Thiel, a Stanford law graduate, in 2003 with the intention in his words of adapting PayPal’s anti-fraud software in order to “reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties” (he had sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in October 2002). Before the 9/11 attack on New York, the US intelligence agencies had been blind-sided; Thiel was convinced his seeing stones would give them better vision in the future.

An early investor in Palantir was the CIA, through a venture capital arm named In-Q-Tel. The first of four iterations of Thiel’s data systems — Palantir Gotham — is used by the US National Security Agency, the FBI, the Western military, police, US immigration services and fraud investigators. It is capable of pulling together vast amounts of data and making connections that could solve problems insoluble to mere humans. It is currently being used by the Ukrainian army in its war with Russia.

Suggested reading

Peter Thiel on the dangers of progress

By Mary Harrington

There have been reports — neither confirmed nor denied by Palantir — that its software helped to locate Osama bin Laden. Former CIA director George Tenet once said he wished the agency had had Gotham before 9/11, the suggestion being that it might have pulled together disparate dots into one large picture of terror plot planning. Another iteration, called Metropolis, is a finance analytics platform widely used by hedge funds and banks. In March 2020, at the onset of the pandemic, executives from major tech companies, including Palantir, Google, Meta and Amazon, were asked by the UK government whether they could help with the planning and implementation of its responses to Covid-19. Palantir immediately stepped in, offering the use of another of its systems, Foundry… for just £1. Its offer was accepted by beleaguered health officials.

Palantir advisers were embedded in the NHS while Foundry was used in planning to effectively distribute medicines, ventilators and vaccines, monitor staff levels and intensive care bed availability — creating the kind of joined-up health response that would not have been previously possible with the UK’s fragmented network of trusts and care providers. Once a vaccine became available, it was involved in its rollout. By the end of the pandemic, Palantir’s £1 punt had paid off.

“A £1 contract seemed odd at the time, but it obviously gave them a foot in the door,” says Dr David Wrigley, digital lead on the BMA’s GP Committee, which has expressed concerns over the use of patients’ data on the FDP. “They will have learned about NHS systems and contracts, seen how the system operates and how best to bid for other contracts going forward.” Palantir’s next move to curry favour with the UK government was to offer its services again, for six months, to help with the logistics of housing Ukrainian refugees following the Russian invasion. But this time it charged nothing whatsoever. The company says it is proud of the role that it played at a time of great suffering for Ukrainian families. But this move did its relationship with the UK, and its long-term income, no harm at all.

Since then, Palantir has been awarded several other NHS contracts worth £60 million, with none going out to tender. Last month, it was awarded £5.5million to continue running Homes for Ukraine over the next 12 months for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) — again with no tendering process. The probity of this deal was questioned by the National Audit Office (NAO) in a report published last week. It pointed out that: “In February 2023, the Government’s Chief Commercial Officer, wrote to Palantir noting his concern about the practice of offering services to public sector customers for a zero or nominal cost to gain a commercial foothold, contrary to the principles of public procurement which usually require open competition.” Asked about this criticism, Palantir said there was: “nothing unusual in a business offering a prospective customer the opportunity to trial before purchase. Indeed the Government’s own guidance states that ‘where a service is being outsourced for the first time, a pilot should be run’ and that ‘if you’re buying a product, consider asking for a demonstration or trial on a smaller scale’.”

More from this author

The forgotten victims of online child abuse

By Steve Boggan

But a more polemical vision of how Thiel sees British people’s relationship with the NHS was revealed in January when he made some unguarded comments during a Q&A session at the Oxford Union debating society. He said they were suffering from “Stockholm syndrome”, held ideologically captive by their healthcare system, and that the NHS needed “market mechanisms” to improve, adding that: “In theory, you just rip the whole thing from the ground and start over… In practice, you have to somehow make it all backwards compatible in all these ridiculous British ways.” He said British people needed to stop thinking the NHS was “the most wonderful thing in the world” and accept that it is an “iatrogenic” institution. An iatrogenic illness is a malady caused by the treatment itself. “Highways create traffic jams, welfare creates poverty, schools make people dumb, and the NHS makes people sick,” he said.

Palantir quickly distanced itself from his comments. Joanna Peller, the company’s UK health lead, said: “Peter Thiel made these comments as a private individual and our CEO [Alex Karp, at Palantir since 2004] has made it clear he firmly disagrees with them and that he wishes ‘we had a health care system in the US that served the poor and underserved as well as I perceive the British system does’.” Few people in the NHS would argue that its countrywide IT systems couldn’t be improved, but many billions of pounds have been wasted in previous unsuccessful attempts to merge them. At the moment, there are 42 administered by “Integrated Care Systems” comprising hospital trusts, local authorities and care providers.

The first attempt at digitising and uniting records held by GPs and hospital trusts was launched in 2002 and called the National Programme for IT. It began with a budget of £6.2 billion but was mired in technical difficulties and a lack of trust among health staff. It was scrapped in 2011 after racking up £12 billion in costs. One of the private contractors who pulled out of the scheme before it was junked was Accenture, Palantir’s current bidding partner. In 2021 the government launched the General Practice Data for Planning and Research system, designed to enable records to be used for more than simple personal care. Advances in technology meant that the data in them could be used for the same purposes envisaged for the FDP — better care, medicines and healthcare planning.

However, patients were advised that where their data was to be shared for anything beyond care — for research or planning — they had the right to withhold their data under an NHS “National Data Opt-Out”, and they did in their droves. “More than a million people opted out because there was a lack of trust in the system,” says Foxglove’s Crider. “And each time someone opts out, the data set gets smaller and so its usefulness for research is diminished.” Sam Smith, policy lead at medConfidential, which campaigns for patient privacy, says he believes even more people will want to opt-out if Palantir wins the FDP contract. But there is confusion over whether they will be able to. Smith explains:

“The NHS England website says people will not be able to opt out, but this is contradictory because we all have the right to opt out of sharing our personal data if it is to be used for anything other than patient care, for purposes such as research and planning — but that is exactly what FDP is supposed to be used for… Last month, Sir Chris Whitty [chief medical officer for England] urged people not to opt out precisely because their information could help with research and planning. So what is it to be? Can people opt out, or can’t they?”

In a letter to the Health and Social Care Committee in August, Lord Markham, under-secretary of state for health, said the government was considering reforming the National Data Opt-Out. I asked NHS England whether these reforms would make it easier or harder for patients to opt out, but it did not answer the question. On the subject of Palantir and the FDP, a spokesperson said:

“The NHS is conducting a fair and transparent procurement process for a supplier of the federated data platform, in line with public contracts regulations, and this process has not yet concluded… Better use of data brings huge benefits for patients — a federated data platform will ensure more joined-up care and better use of resources, connecting existing NHS data in one secure environment to help speed up diagnosis and reduce waiting times and hospital stays.”

Palantir’s Peller emphasises that patients’ data is safe with the company. “Unlike many other technology companies, we’re not in the business of collecting, mining or selling data,” she says. “What we do is provide tools that help customers understand and organise the information that they hold, along with training and support in using those tools. We are legally defined as the ‘data processor’ while the customer is the ‘data controller’. Customers retain full ownership of their data. Palantir is granted no rights to such data and can only carry out that processing which it is instructed to do by the customer, while UK government customer data is only hosted in the UK.” She says Palantir is “now helping to reduce the care backlog and ensure patients receive vital treatment sooner in 36 NHS Trusts across England”. These are trusts invited (some say pressured) by NHS England to run trials of Foundry, and this is the reason Palantir is considered a shoo-in for the FDP contract — it is too embedded to get out.

However, in response to a written Parliamentary question in March, health minister Will Quince said nine of these had been “paused” while two had been suspended. A variety of reasons were later given, ranging from a lack of funds to administrative delays, and assurances were made in August that some of the paused pilots were up and running again. But at least two — Liverpool Heart & Chest Hospital, and Milton Keynes University Hospital — have indicated that the system wasn’t right for them. I asked NHS England how many of the 36 pilots were currently operational, but received no answer. This only confuses the picture, as Palantir insists they all are.

Suggested Reading

How Turbo-Wokism broke America

By David Samuels

Whichever company is announced as the provider of the FDP, its success will not only be judged on whether the NHS is finally blessed with the joined-up digital wizardry it so badly needs, but also on whether it manages to provide that and retain the trust of patients. “If a person goes to see their GP and holds back important or embarrassing information because they’re afraid it will be shared with a private company, then that is not only dangerous for the patient, but also very sad,” says the BMA’s Wrigley. “Because that could mean the end of the doctor-patient relationship as we know it.”

When he’s not serving as the object of fantastical (and sometimes James Bond-themed) progressive demonology, Thiel is a Silicon Valley legend. He co-founded PayPal, and was the first outside investor in Facebook, on whose board he sat from 2005 until this year. He invests in new enterprises via the Founders Fund. He started the big data firm Palantir, which successfully sued the US Army in 2016 over an intelligence analysis system procurement process, and subsequently won the contract to deliver that system. He is worth an estimated $4.9 billion.

He’s also, famously (or notoriously, depending on your political priors) interested in culture and politics. As such, in our emerging post-liberal world of lords and princes, Thiel is a prime mover across many fields, and his interests and priorities affect a great many people. And this is perhaps the trait that, above all else, invites parallels to premodern figures such as Lorenzo De’ Medici, the Florentine statesman and banker who was also his era’s foremost patron of the arts.

For Thiel, this extends to personal as well as financial interventions, and I met him in such a context. We were both on the teaching faculty for a week-long seminar at Stanford in Palo Alto, with the magnificent title “The Machine Has No Tradition: a seminar on technology, revolution and apocalypse”. We sat down together after a day spent with Stanford grad students, Silicon Valley whizzkids and young DC politicos, wrestling with the question of what technology is. Thiel had just led a four-hour session on the French thinker René Girard.

The grand themes of technology, revolution and apocalypse hung in the air. So, too, did the parallel facts of my having enough common intellectual preoccupations with Thiel to land us both on the same academic roster, while remaining separated from him by an incommensurably vast power asymmetry. Against that backdrop, I wanted to understand the interests and priorities of this sociopolitical titan, on his own terms. More plainly: how does Peter Thiel view his own project?

The overarching answer seems to be: real as opposed to illusory progress. Post-liberal thinkers such as Patrick Deneen, author of the bestselling 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, argue that many contemporary social ills are an effect of the way the liberal project cannibalises social goods, such as family life or religious faith, in order to pursue narrow metrics such as (on the Left) personal freedom or (on the Right) economic growth. Thiel sees many of the same ills as Deneen, but offers a strikingly different framing: we’re consuming ourselves not because the fixation on progress is inevitably self-destructive beyond a certain threshold, but because material progress has objectively stalled while we remain collectively in denial about this fact.

In Thiel’s view, this has been the case since the mid-20th century, except in digital technologies. “We’ve had continued progress in the world of computers, bits, internet, mobile internet, but it’s a narrow zone of progress. And it’s been more interior, atomising and inward-focused.” Over the same period, he tells me, “there’s been limited progress in the world of atoms”.

Thiel characterises this stagnation as a long, slow victory of the Club of Rome, a nonprofit founded in 1968 to drive political change premised on the belief that infinite growth is impossible. As Thiel sees it, this tacit postwar abandonment of the growth aspiration has resulted in “something like a societal and cultural lockdown; not just the last two years but in many ways the last 40 or 50”. There’s “a cultural version, a demographic version, and a technological version of this stagnant or decadent society,” he suggests. And the upshot of this paralysis has been “a world of technological stagnation and demographic collapse”, along with “sclerosis in government and banal repetition in culture”.

He’s been making the case for real-terms tech stagnation for 15 years now, he tells me, against a mainstream Left and Right that doesn’t want to know: “it was always striking how much it went against the stated ideology of the regime.” Perpetuating the fantasy of progress, against a backdrop of its actual stagnation, is at the heart of delusions on both Left and Right, he argues: “the Silicon Valley liberals don’t like it, because they think they’re driving this great engine of progress”, while social conservatives “have conceded the ground to the liberals, because they believe the Left-wing propaganda about how much science and technology are progressing”. And against this backdrop of cross-party denial, institutions and the wider culture are increasingly shaped by real-terms stagnation.

In his view, much of what passes for “progress” is in truth more like “distraction”. As he puts it, “the iPhone that distracts us from our environment also distracts us from the ways our environment is unchanging and static.” And in this culture, economy and politics of chronic self-deception, as Thiel sees it, we tell ourselves that we’re advancing because “grandma gets an iPhone with a smooth surface,” but meanwhile she “gets to eat cat food because food prices have gone up.”

Suggested reading

The scapegoating of Peter Thiel

By Luke Burgis

In this context, Thiel argues, much of what passes as “progress” in economic terms is actually an accounting trick. For example, much of what looks like GDP growth since the Fifties was simply a matter of changing how we measured the value bundled up in family life. If, he points out, “you shift an economy from a single-income household with a homemaker to one with two breadwinners and a third person who’s a child-carer, statistically you have three jobs instead of one and therefore you have more GDP, and you will exaggerate the amount of progress that’s happened”.

That is: if what you’re calling “progress” is not so much a change in the activities taking place, but rather a change in how you’re measuring those activities, in what sense has anything really changed, let alone improved? After all, he points out, between 1880 and 1960 automation so far reduced working hours that analysts predicted by the year 2000 the average family would subsist happily on the wage of one worker putting in seven hours a day, four days a week, with 13 weeks’ paid holiday. But then “it somehow went really into reverse”.

Since then, many goods once common to America’s middle class have been cannibalised to preserve the illusion of progress. “We are much less of a middle-class society,” he points out, in the sense of “people who think their children will do better than themselves”. And this growing scarcity, coupled with denial of that scarcity, has profoundly corrupted once-trusted institutions. Even the Club of Rome was, in his view, “not pessimistic enough about how badly a zero-growth world would work, and how much it would derange our institutions”. For most of our institutions “depend on growth; and when the growth stops, they lie and they become sociopathic”.

In this context, what Thiel dismissively refers to as “the woke religion” is less a driving force in contemporary politics than part of this vast collective displacement activity. Notably, it’s often a delivery mechanism for resource competition, for example in universities where student numbers are ever-rising even as paid positions shrink, a pinch that “brings out the worst in people”. So much of what looks like an unhinged new ideology is actually the brutal office politics pursued by too many academics competing for too few paid positions? “Yes,” he says, “and maybe there’s some way to get people to be nicer to one another in a world of limited resources. But we never seem to be even able to talk about that.”

If, he suggests, it were more obvious to people that we now live in a stagnant world, more might be said and done to address it. But the key reason this isn’t happening is “that we’ve been distracted from the lack of progress” by “the shift from exteriority, from measurable things” such as “faster speeds, supersonic airplanes or longer life expectancies” and re-oriented on “the interior world of yoga, meditation, psychology, parapsychology, psychopharmacology, psychedelic drugs, video games, the internet et cetera”.

More from this author

How Satanism conquered America

By Mary Harrington

The governing thread in Thiel’s interventions in culture and politics, then, seems to be re-orienting the wider direction of travel away from what he views as displacement activities, back toward more concrete forms of progress of the sort that might translate into a return to this kind of widespread optimism. This includes a streak of political philanthropy that has recently leaned toward supporting candidates who campaign on the material interests of America’s languishing middle class.

Blake Masters, who co-wrote Thiel’s bestseller Zero to One, is now running for the Senate in Arizona with Thiel’s support; recent polling has Masters as the frontrunner in the Republican primary. Another politician with Thiel support is Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance, who received a $10m Thiel donation that some credit with bumping Vance to victory in May’s primary for the US Senate in Ohio. Both Masters and Vance make the increasingly bleak state of America’s once thriving and prosperous middle class a central part of their campaigning platform. One Masters campaigning video takes as its central premise the argument that it should be possible to support a family on a single income — something that, for a growing swathe of the middle sort, hasn’t been the case for decades.

Importantly, though, he doesn’t see restoring middle-class aspiration as a matter of returning to the past, but of seeking new real-world advances in science and technology. Along with Thiel’s own investments, which include many futuristic projects such as biotech and space exploration, the principal vehicle for his efforts to drive this change is the nonprofit Thiel Foundation, which promotes science and innovation. Its programmes include the Thiel Fellowship, which gives 20-30 young people aged 22 or under $100,000 each, every year, to drop out of college and work on an urgent idea. Graduates include Austin Russell, who founded Luminar and is the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, and Vitalik Buterin, who co-founded the cryptocurrency Ethereum.

Those among us temperamentally sceptical of never-ending progress and growth may be shifting nervously in our seats by this point. Thiel seems unfazed by the idea that technology may infringe on what’s “natural”. How do we prevent runaway tech changes dragging us into some monstrously inhuman dystopia? Can we retain our humanity, I ask Thiel, in the context of just how transformative technology can be?

He seems to view this as a largely academic question, and not really in keeping with his understanding of Christian civilisation as fundamentally oriented toward the future. “I think of Christianity as deeply historical. Some sense of a certain type of progress of history is a deep part of Christianity.” And from this perspective, the notion that there exists an unchanging human nature doesn’t really fit with the Christian outlook, but belongs — as he puts it — more “in the classical than the Christian tradition”.

“The word ‘nature’ does not occur once in the Old Testament,” he tells me, while “the concept of ‘nature’ as something that’s eternal and unchanging” isn’t a Christian one either. “It seems to me that the Christian concepts are more things like grace or original sin.” From this perspective, Thiel argues, the problem with transhumanism isn’t that it seeks to remake humanity, but that it isn’t ambitious enough in this regard: “the Christian critique of transhumanism should be that it’s not radical enough, because it’s only seeking to transform our bodies and not our souls.” It appears, in other words, that while Thiel is unflinchingly realistic about what’s immediately achievable, he doesn’t see any given or self-evident limits to what we could set our sights on.

Suggested reading

René Girard's apocalypse is now

By Blake Smith

What if the Club of Rome is right, though, and we really have reached the limits to material growth? I put to him for a number of reasons — culturally and materially — it seems more than possible that we’ve irretrievably passed the point of Peak Progress. If this is so, he tells me, the first response should be frank realism. We should, he suggests, “at least be able to talk about it, and figure out ways to make our society work in a low-growth world”. But he sees this attitude less as realism than a cop-out: “I think that sounds like a lazy excuse of people who don’t want to work very hard. It sounds too much like an excuse.” Far from being a matter of humans bumping up against natural limits, he argues, “I want to blame it on cultural changes, rather than on us running out of ideas”.

What, then, does he see as driving the cultural side of stagnation? Thiel thinks the decline of Christianity is a major factor. To him “a more naturally Christian world” was “an expanding world, a progressing world” that hit its apogee in late Victorian Britain. “It felt very expansive, both in terms of the literal empire and also in terms of the progress of knowledge, of science, of technology, and somehow that was naturally consonant with a certain Christian eschatology — a Christian vision of history. Then somehow the stagnant ecological world that we’re in is one in which there’s been a collapse of religious belief. I want to say they’re somehow sociologically linked.”

I put it to him that many historians date the slow implosion of Christianity from the emergence of just the kind of scientific enquiry Thiel wants to encourage in the name of a Christian-inflected tech progressivism. Was it ever plausible, I ask him, that we could hold the worlds of faith and of science and technology in equilibrium? He appears to view this, once again, as a largely irrelevant academic question; the real implosion of mass religiosity in Britain, he suggests, coincided with the end of the British Empire.

“If you had an expansive view and you were going to make disciples of all nations, and send missionaries to the world, and somehow that project no longer made sense, then would this somehow also lead to a collapse within your own society. I think my sense is that Britain was still very Christian in the Fifties, then it had somehow completely collapsed by 1980. So it maps onto the end of colonisation.”

He sees a parallel process at work in the stalling and retreat of American empire: “I would map America in 2000 onto Britain in 1950, and America in 2020 onto somewhere like Britain in 1975 or 1980, where somehow the expansionary part of America has very much faded.” America has abandoned its mission of imperial evangelism: “in 1999 or 2005 there was still this sense that you were proselytising the world, and I think that has strangely collapsed. I’m not sure what the causation is, but there’s some way that the growth of Christianity was linked to it and when it stops expanding it’s in very serious trouble.”

More from this author

The American Right's civil war

By Mary Harrington

What’s missing from the world now is a clear vision of the future — or even any vision. Reviving Christian faith might help, he thinks: “if we were more Christian, we would also have more hope for the future, and if we’re less Christian we’re going to have less hope. And there’s probably less action.” Failing this, any vision of the future at all would help, especially if it’s an optimistic one. Though he doesn’t particularly like science fiction, he says, more upbeat stories on this front might help: “If one could produce science fiction that were less uniformly bleak that might help on a literary level.”

Failing other options, Thiel thinks even bleak or apocalyptic visions are better than no vision at all. The picture of European climate catastrophe associated with Greta Thunberg is, as he sees it, one of only three realistic European futures; the other two are “Islamic sharia law”, and “Chinese Communist AI”. He views the social-democratic models typical of contemporary European politics as variations on the theme of stagnation: “a sort of eternal Groundhog Day”. And while Greta’s vision is “in some ways too apocalyptic, in some ways not apocalyptic enough”, it is at least “a very concrete picture”, and represents the least worst of the three alternatives to stagnation.

Failing a mass revival of Christianity, what political or material levers does Thiel think we should pull to restart some kind of future? “Zoning laws and the FDA,” he tells me. One of the biggest issues is housing, which he notes “is linked to family formation” — and, he suggests, another field in which scarcity and resource competition is fanning the flames of political derangement. “Real estate prices doubled and people got a lot crazier.” Fixing this would be a good route into addressing our sclerosis, because “it’s not pure technology. You’d think it would be easy to change the zoning laws, but in practice it’s extremely hard to do.”

As for the FDA, Thiel points out that even the pessimists in the Club of Rome thought healthcare could go on advancing. And again, as with zoning laws, he argues that if we’re stuck on this front it’s not because we’re running out of resources. “I’ve done some investing in biotech over the last 15-20 years. It’s very strange; my sense for the science is that we could be making a lot more progress, and then in practice it’s extraordinarily difficult because of regulatory constraints and other things. So biotech is an area where I think it’s not quite resource-constraints; my read on it is that’s more cultural than natural. Again: we don’t have to talk about limitless human life, but just: can we have a cure for dementia? Is that absolutely impossible? I would claim we don’t know enough about science to know that’s absolutely impossible.”

He acknowledges that there are implicit risks in forging ahead with new discoveries. “I think there are dangers to science and technology, but there are also great dangers in stagnation,” he tells me. In his view, though, the only way out is through: the fantasy of returning to some form of vanished past is just that, a fantasy. “We can’t go back to the Paleolithic era, we can’t go back to an agrarian economy, we can’t even go back to a 19th century industrial economy. And then it seems to me that we don’t know how to make a zero-growth society work.”

More from this author

Do we need Caesar Elon Musk?

By Mary Harrington

In that context, we need to base our vision of the future on something: “And maybe science and technology aren’t that much, but I would say if we stop believing in the teleology of science and technology it’s not that we go back to some Thomistic or medieval concept of teleology. We become fully epicurean.”

Is Thiel an uncompromising materialist and realist, or a visionary idealist? It’s hard to say, and what I say would make little difference anyway. “Speaking truth to power” has always been, ambivalently at least, a fantasy of print-era writers; less acknowledged, though, is the fact that such pugnacious independence was always premised on the writers themselves being able to make a living direct from a paying audience. And in the digital era of information super-abundance and flimsy copyright, this is a luxury available to an ever-shrinking roster.

In almost all other contexts, the lot of writers is once again shaped by the intellectual and political preoccupations of the 21st century’s lords and princes. It would be absurd to pretend that I could force an account of the Thiel worldview according to the print-era fantasies of writerly independence, or even to hold him to some “objective” discursive standard (a conceit which all sides treat in any case as increasingly outmoded). Rather, like Lorenzo de’ Medici, Thiel reorders the cultural world around himself, like iron filings responding to magnetism.

And in this, if little else, he represents a return to tradition. Those still committed to the democratic vision of politics may be tempted to treat figures such as Soros or Thiel as exemplars of dangerously untrammelled power, exerting a malign influence over a political process otherwise characterised by democratic checks and balances. But I’ve come to think that this has it backwards. To my eye, Peter Thiel isn’t an aberration in an otherwise seamless march of democratic progress, but a reversion to the historic norm. Or to put it another way: I’m coming to suspect the democratic era was a flash in the pan, and what’s now emerging is a 21st century variation on an ancient form of power, more monarchic or feudal in character than “populist”, let alone democratic.

And as I’ve argued, the alternative to such figures may not be democracy but governance by a decentralised post-democratic swarm (analogous, perhaps, to what Thiel calls “Chinese Communist AI”). Given these options, we may yet conclude that the political return of human lords and princes — however unnervingly untrammelled their power, or remorselessly tech-optimist their worldview — is far from the worst option currently on the table. The premodern world of aristocratic patronage was far from being a cultural desert, an achievement that contrasts sharply with the militantly anti-aesthetic (and anti-human) character of post-democratic swarm politics. If I’m right about the prognosis for liberal democracy in the digital age, the available options for our future may be culturally vibrant human-led neo-feudalism, or aggressively anti-cultural swarm governance. And in this case, even those of us who mourn the passing of the liberal world may yet find ourselves, however ambivalently, on the side of Caesar.

Since then, his work has found acclaim far beyond the academy: business gurus, political pundits and Twitter personalities invoke his social theory — and particularly his account of the ‘mimetic’ origins of desire — to explain an ever-widening array of phenomena. But if his ideas are increasingly popular, their roots are usually ignored.

Girard meant his ideas to serve a religious purpose. He claimed in one of his final books, published in English as Battling to the End (2010), that his work had “been written from a Christian perspective”, and specifically a Catholic one. He was not, however, a cultural conservative trying to offer a defence of traditional Christian morality. While his theory of desire is inseparable from his belief in Christianity as the true faith, it is also tied to a radical perspective: one in which the end times foretold in the New Testament are upon us.

Girard’s theory of desire, separated from its Christian context and purposes, is appealingly counter-intuitive and expansive. It offers the intellectual pleasure of over-turning (perhaps a bit too readily) what is said to be conventional wisdom, and of reducing apparently distinct processes to a single causal mechanism.

According to Girard, we commonly misunderstand individuals as pursuing pre-determined aims common to all human beings — like sex or status. These desires, we assume, are satisfied by what we manage to attain. In fact, Girard argues, our desires arise not so much from such natural drives as from a universal tendency to envy and emulate other people, which orients us to seek out whatever our rivals (that is, everyone else) are seeking. We want what we want because other people want it.

Girard saw imitation not only as a fundamental social process, but also as a source of violence that, if unchecked, might unravel society. This is, in some ways, an ancient insight. The poet Hesiod, at the dawn of Greek literature, observed that strife can lead us to imitate and surpass the achievements of our neighbours in socially beneficial cycles of competition — or it can lead to envious rage and violence. In the eighteenth century, the founders of laissez-faire economic thought argued that what they called “emulation”, copying our rivals’ behaviour with the aim of outdoing their success, was the basis of economic growth, but also a source of conflict among individuals and nations.

The originality of Girard’s thinking lies in his argument that societies manage the ambivalence of imitation — its capacity to promote social cohesion or to degenerate into spirals of competitive violence — through “scapegoating”, or the exclusion of some agent identified with imitation’s negative aspects. In his account, scapegoating is a function of religion, and takes the form of sacrifice, the physical destruction of some victim who was understood as responsible for, or in their innocence expiating the sin of, dangerous imitation. The violence of sacrifice precludes the violence of mimetic desire.

More from this author

Is Emmanuel Macron a superman?

By Blake Smith

Girard has found posthumous popularity in Silicon Valley circles — most prominently with Peter Thiel. The historian and philosopher Justin E.H. Smith has written a particularly sharp critique of the way would-be finance and technology gurus use Girard to give a veneer of sophistication to otherwise trivial observations about trends. But Girard intended his theory not to provide bite-sized insights for the business world, but to serve a specific, religious purpose as a justification for Christianity.

According to Girard, the death and resurrection of Christ had freed humanity from the cycle of potentially destructive imitation that scapegoating had been intended to contain. The message of the Gospel was that a perfect man, without any violence in him, had offered himself as the final sacrifice — and as a model for all future imitation. In his death, Christ abolished the need for further scapegoats. In his life, he provided an example for followers — an example that, unlike all previous objects of imitation, could produce no envy or aggression but only love and peace.

Suggested article

The scapegoating of Peter Thiel

By Luke Burgis

For Girard, Christianity is the end of “religion”. In the traditional sense, “religion” had always meant a system of rules and procedures for containing the violence of mimetic competition and maintaining social order through rituals of sacrifice. Only Christ, Girard argues, offers an escape from these systems.

Unfortunately, for most of the history of Christianity, the radical message of the Gospel was suppressed by the Church. Ever since the late Roman Empire, ecclesiastical leaders worked with politicians to prop up social hierarchies and justify inequality. Christianity was presented as another version of ancient religions, in which priests accepted payment from congregations in return for rituals of blessing and sacrifice. The Church fulfilled the role of what Girard, drawing on an obscure term from the theology of eschatology, calls the katechon, a force that holds back the return of Christ and the destruction of our world.

This is a Protestant vision of religious history. It views the Catholic Church and its compromises — first with the Roman Empire, then with all subsequent political authorities — as an occlusion of the true message of Christianity. But for Girard, a Catholic, this was not a betrayal, but rather a necessary stage in a historical process that is finally coming to an end.

In Girard’s vision of history, the secularisation of the West — the decline of the political role of religion, and of religious belief — means, in an apparent paradox, that the Gospel can, for the first time, “become clear”. For centuries, our societies had existed on the basis of a usually unspoken, and philosophically incoherent, compromise between pre-Christian values (of preserving society through rituals of sacrifice) and the message of Christ, who showed that sacrifice is now unnecessary and that the end of the world is at hand.

Secularisation dissolves this compromise. It hastens the apocalypse, and thus the second coming of Christ, by ending the social rituals that had constrained the violence of competition: “all that remains is mimetic rivalry, and it escalates to extremes.” A society without religion, ritual, constraint, or limit, in which atomised individuals compete with each other in steadily worsening spirals of envy and hostility, is the clearing in which Christ will reappear.

Suggested article

Boris is our sin-eater

By Mary Harrington

Pundits discussing the mimetic aspects of media trends or the role of “scapegoating” in cancel culture use Girard’s concepts to explain a world that he insisted is on the verge of perishing. Those who critique Girard’s ideas make a similar mistake to those who wish to take them up for political purposes. Justin E.H. Smith, for example, condemns “the Girardian version of Catholicism as a clerical institution ideally suited to the newly emerging techno-feudalist order” promoted by Thiel. But Girard argued that the role of the Church as a “clerical institution” is coming to an end, as its long compromise with politics ceases — and that this is both a terrifying and joyous event.

His apocalypticism may be disturbing, or indeed mad, but it is not compatible with conservatism — or even with politics as such. Girard is not merely a source of stimulating or useful ideas for Silicon Valley. He is a messianic man of faith, for whom the decline of religion, and of the West, makes straight the way of the Lord.

You would expect that kind of statement from a “defund the police” advocate, but Rittenhouse is a former youth police cadet whose support for “Blue Lives Matter” was used to try and paint him as a racist and far-Right extremist. His world-weary cynicism about the FBI, expressed as Carlson nodded along approvingly, signals a major shift in a central axis of American politics.

Distrust of federal law enforcement was, until quite recently, a markedly Left-wing attitude, but it now represents a baseline among Republican voters. In February 2015, a Reuters poll found that almost 84% of Republicans reported a “favorable” view of the FBI. By February 2018, only two years into Donald Trump’s presidency, a different Reuters poll showed 73% of Republicans agreeing that “members of the FBI and Department of Justice are working to delegitimise Trump through politically motivated investigations.” Imagine how those same people feel now, after Special Counsel John Durham’s indictments have exposed the FBI’s role in perpetrating the Trump-Russia dossier fraud.

What does it mean when America’s law-and-order party comes to see law enforcement, along with much of the federal government, as fundamentally illegitimate? The answer is being worked out by a crop of Republicans whose project is to extend the politics of Trumpism beyond Trump. Blake Masters, a close business partner of tech investor Peter Thiel who’s running for a Senate seat in Arizona, has called for “standing up to the bureaucratic national-security state.” In a campaign ad, Masters describes a nation under siege from within, “up against a media that lies to us, schools that teach our kids to hate our country, and corporations that have gotten so big, they think they’re bigger than America.”

More from this author

The triumph of America's ruling class

By Jacob Siegel

There are clear echoes in that message of Steve Bannon, Trump’s original campaign manager and another Thiel associate, who championed a war against the administrative state on behalf of American workers. Bannon lasted less than a year in the White House, but he now runs one of the most popular podcasts on iTunes, War Room, which has more than 100 million total downloads. In an appearance on the podcast this week, Masters told Bannon: “I consider that you simply don’t negotiate with terrorists. And I believe the Democratic Party, Schumer, Pelosi and Biden are holding us hostage.”

Masters, along with two other Thiel-backed political candidates — Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance, who’s running for the Senate in Ohio, and Army Special Forces veteran Joe Kent, a self-described “Trump endorsed America 1st Congressional candidate,” who’s running for a House seat in Washington state — distinguished themselves from other Republicans by offering early and vocal support for Rittenhouse.

It’s easy to see why, since the Rittenhouse trial seemed tailor-made to illustrate the premises of their brand of populist nationalism. A young, working-class, white Trump supporter, Rittenhouse was subjected to a public smear campaign in which President Biden himself impugned him as a white supremacist in a campaign video. Meanwhile, the state prosecution deflected attention away from the evidence supporting Rittenhouse’s self-defence claims and onto his motives by suggesting that he had come to Kenosha looking for trouble — despite the fact that Rittenhouse could be seen on video, shortly before the shooting, offering medical aid to Black Lives Matter protesters.

As the prosecution bumbled its way through the trial and got publicly scolded by the judge, it only further proved the point of those who see an American regime spanning the upper layers of government, media, and business that is not only illegitimate but incompetent, run by emissaries of a “clown world,” as a popular phrase on the Right has it.

Suggested reading

Kyle Rittenhouse could still tear America apart

By Park MacDougald

“Think about what this says about our disgusting elite leadership in this country,” Vance said in a video message recorded days before the Rittenhouse verdict. “If we don’t defend this young boy who defended his community when no one else was, it may very well be your baby boy that they come for.” The day Rittenhouse’s acquittal was announced, Masters tweeted: “This case reminded us that our justice system, like every other institution our ancestors built, is under siege, and that the besiegers are very close to victory.”

The rallying cry of the “Rittenhouse Republicans,” which at times approaches the rhetoric of revolution, is that the ruling class has become parasitic on the lives of ordinary Americans. “We despise our government & corporations benefiting from the security & labor of our working class solely for the benefit of elites who have no loyalty to our nation, rather they despise us & are using the wealth they generate to fund our decline,” Kent recently tweeted. Both Masters and Kent say they think Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election.

Aside from the specifics and symbolism of the Rittenhouse case, publicly supporting him makes sense in terms of the demographic changes in the makeup of the major political parties. While Wall Street business executives and upper middle class professionals now overwhelmingly back the Democrats, the Republicans have, by default as much as by choice, increasingly courted the working class. Over the past decade, the party’s biggest gains have been among white voters without a college degree, and in the 2020 election, it made some inroads with voters of all races without a college degree.

Trump’s conception of a power struggle with the U.S. “Deep State” saw a contest between the voters’ elected representative and the shadowy forces controlling the levers of government behind the scenes. But for Kent, Masters, Vance, and the other aspiring heirs of Trumpism, the state itself is the enemy. Their efforts, like Trump’s, are directed as much against Republican orthodoxies and the Beltway establishment as against Democratic policies. Gone is the old conservative divide between “good” institutions like the military and the corporate boardroom and “bad” ones like the media and teacher’s unions. “Our military leadership is totally incompetent,” Masters said recently in the wake of the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan. “Our top generals have turned into woke corporate bozos,” he tweeted, “and our troops deserve better.”

More from this author

How 9/11 created the surveillance state

By Jacob Siegel

But where Trump’s approach was visceral and inseparable from his singular personality, his would-be successors are more sober and more ideological. They are also supported by the kind of political infrastructure that was conspicuously lacking in the chaotic and chronically understaffed Trump administration.

Masters, Vance, and Kent are all political newcomers between the ages of 35-41, and all three are backed by funding from Thiel. The Vance and Masters campaigns both received $10 million through super PACs, while Kent got $5,800, the legal limit in his race. Their vision for America, broadly aligned with the post-libertarian ideas Thiel has espoused over the past decade, calls for a secular, nationalist politics of the common good. The greatest threat to the American people, they say, is the unchecked power of the Democrat-dominated administrative state and the transnational corporations operating under its auspices.

The conventional script for beltway Republicans in the pre-Trump era called for limiting the power of government and letting social policy be set by individual choice and market mechanisms. But for the national populists and conservatives of the new post-Trump Right, that laissez faire approach simply cedes power to woke corporations and lobbying interests. The only way to reform the state is to take control of it and replace current ruling class functionaries with a new elite that will serve the interests of working and middle-class Americans.

“The end goal is human flourishing,” Masters recently told the journalist Peter Savodnik. “You want a strong middle class in America. There’s a whole set of values and a whole lifestyle attendant to that. I think that’s a goal, and I think too many conventional, you know, business Republicans they’re agnostic on that. They don’t care what the consequences of their policies are.”

Suggested reading

Test article

By J. D. Vance

It now remains to be seen whether Masters and the others can win. In Ohio, Vance is battling it out in a tight primary race against the state treasurer, Josh Mandel, another Trump supporter from the party’s increasingly crowded populist wing. In Arizona, Masters was trailing behind the state’s Attorney General Mark Brnovich 27% to 9% in a recent poll. But Trump, who previously called Brnovich “lackluster” for refusing to order an audit of Arizona’s 2020 election result, only entered the race a few weeks ago, with a scheduled appearance at a fundraiser for Masters. In Washington state, a poll from early November shows Joe Kent leading both the Democrat, Brent Hennrich, and the six-term incumbent Republican, Jaime Herrera Beutler, who broke with her party and voted to impeach Trump, in his House race.

With poll numbers for Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris at historic lows, the Democrats are looking exceptionally vulnerable going into the 2022 midterm elections. The crucial question for the Rittenhouse Republicans is how far voters want to go in rejecting the current system. So far, the most visible repudiation of the Democrats has come from the Virginia governor’s race, which was won by Glenn Youngkin, a classic C-suite Republican. Perhaps the greatest challenge to the firebrands of the new Right isn’t from Democrats but from the push by the leaders of their own party to restore the Beltway consensus.

Yet there are signs that the old version of bipartisan centrism in DC may be unsustainable. A recent Harvard poll of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 found that 39% overall believe American democracy is in trouble. That’s a significant segment of young voters, but what’s notable is that the disillusionment was far more pronounced on the Right. More than half of young Trump voters think America is a “democracy in trouble”. Nearly a quarter, 22%, believe it has already “failed”.

If you’re the kind of person who writes for a living and you wish to paint a legendary start-up founder in the most nefarious light possible, you also need a good origin story. You might weaponise pop psychology mixed with school-age gossip, served neat, to suggest something like the following: because a person was bullied or shy as a kid, he must necessarily have psychological defence mechanisms that explain all of the reasons you don’t like him or his politics. It’s a relatively vile flavour of historicism.

And it’s been applied, by journalist Max Chafkin, to Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, legendary Silicon Valley investor and, more recently, backer of Republican U.S. Senate candidates J.D. Vance and Blake Masters. Last week, New York Magazine published an extract from Chafkin’s new biography, The Contrarian, under the headline: “Peter Thiel’s Origin Story: His ideology shaped Silicon Valley. It began to form when he was an angry young man.” The piece begins with a fantastical story about Thiel as a 20-year-old college student talking himself out of a speeding ticket by saying that he thinks the relevant laws are unconstitutional.

When I talked to Thiel last week, I told him I found this story far-fetched. It’s hard to believe he told a cop that he doesn’t believe in speeding laws — and even harder to believe that the cop would’ve accepted this argument. Yeah, it’s pretty weird, Thiel tells me. “Yes, I drove a Rabbit to a chess tournament back in 1988,” he says.

“Yes, I probably drove pretty fast. And yes, I probably got pulled over by the police and I probably talked myself out of a ticket. But the key part of the story could not possibly have happened: there is no way that I would have said ‘I’m not sure if the concept of a speed limit makes sense. It may be unconstitutional. And it’s definitely an infringement on liberty.’ I was trying to talk myself out of a speeding ticket, and I would have known never to say anything remotely like that. That’s crazy! I wouldn’t have said it then, I wouldn’t say it now.”

The story seems designed to serve as a window into Thiel’s innermost psychology. But what of its origin? What if a college kid — someone who was in the car with Thiel that day — is just remembering the most “hilarious” version of a story from 33 years ago? Thiel tells me that his best guess about what happened is this:

“We spent the rest of the ride coming up with, and joking about, more and more ridiculous excuses that I might have used. The ‘speeding is unconstitutional’ excuse was so preposterous that it’s what stuck in someone’s memory.”

Imagine the mental and soul-splitting gymnastics that one must have to perform to turn an incident like that into a framework through which you interpret nearly the whole of another person’s life.

Suggested reading

America's establishment still sneers at the Right

By Gavin Haynes

Thiel and I are both students of Stanford professor René Girard (which is how we met — I recently wrote a book about Girard’s ideas). From his academic burrow at Stanford, Girard was a voracious news-watcher, but his interest was not in the news itself, but in the news-making events behind it all; in the effect that the news had on the events; in the interpretation of those events; and in the fascination that certain people or events engender in others. Best known for his theory of mimetic desire — that humans unconsciously imitate the desires of others — Girard saw hyper-imitative behaviour everywhere.

Fascination, Girard told his biographer Cynthia L. Haven, is always a sign of mimesis. When a number of people become obsessively focused on one person or thing, it attracts other people to it. (“For example,” Haven told me, “look at the millions of American eyes on suspected killer Brian Laundrie right now. What has that done to him and us?”) Our perception of reality is distorted by it. And people are fascinated by Peter Thiel. The sensationalised speeding ticket story is one of many outrageous claims made about the man — including that he is a nihilist.

“Man, I feel I am an extreme opposite of a nihilist,” Thiel tells me.

“I believe in ideas. Maybe I believe in ideas too much. I think back to some ideological debates, like the ones on campus at Stanford, and I actually believed there were people on the other side of these debates — I thought we were actually talking about ideas. But now I have a much more mimetic read on it. I think the people who are ideological are in the minority.”

People who think they’re talking about ideas are often talking about fashion. (At the Met Gala this year, ideas were literally fashion: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore a white dress with the words “TAX THE RICH” emblazoned in red across the back.) Thiel reflects on his Stanford days and his early career: “Those who seemed nihilist are the ones who seemed more driven by fashion than by ideas. The people least driven by fashion were the people who had unfashionable ideas.” That’s not to say that every unfashionable idea is more principled or sincerely held than fashionable ones. But perhaps we can examine a person’s relationship with the truth based on how well an idea has served them, or how much they’ve had to suffer for it.

Suggested reading

The scapegoating of Peter Thiel

By Jack Hutchison

Girard believed in the existence of “things hidden since the foundation of the world” (which is also the title of his magnum opus.) He argued that there are important truths to be discovered in the world, truths which are covered up by layer upon layer of mimesis and lies — lies which are themselves propagated through uncritical, imitative behaviour. It’s an anti-nihilist position.

“We live in a world today,” wrote Girard, “especially in the humanities, where the very notion of truth has become the enemy. The idea is you must have plurality. So, today, the interest of plurality takes precedence over the search for truth. You have to say ahead of time that you don’t believe in the truth. In most of the circles in which I move, decency is equated with a skepticism verging on nihilism.”

It’s not hard to see why Girard was not popular in academia, or why Peter Thiel is not popular among people who graduated from Ivy League schools with degrees in the humanities. One of Thiel’s initiatives, the Thiel Fellowship, pays entrepreneurial students $100,000 to drop out of college and work on their ideas for two years. The psychology of being a student at these schools is reminiscent of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Thiel tells me. Disappointment is inevitable. (At a freshman orientation at Yale in the early 2000s, the Dean supposedly said something like: “Congratulations, you’ve made into Yale. You’re set for life.” Does anyone believe that anymore?)

But, despite the headline of the new biography, Thiel is not fundamentally a contrarian. A hardcore contrarian sticks a minus sign in front of whatever the majority thinks — which can be a miserable, counter-productive, way to live. But when I interviewed Thiel for my book, Wanting, he told me that he bet on Facebook (Thiel made the first outside investment in the company) precisely because he saw the vast majority wanting to use it. “I bet on mimesis,” he said. People would want to be on Facebook because other people wanted to be on Facebook. And part of Facebook’s power was the need to talk about what was on Facebook — so it was doubly mimetic. (Today, something very similar is happening in cryptocurrencies: people who love cryptocurrencies don’t just invest in them; they talk about investing in them.)

Suggested reading

The crypto revolution is failing

By Greg Barker

Most nihilists are not contrarians. It’s easier to go with the flow rather than put yourself at risk of ostracisation because you believe something to be true. And in a purely relational framework in which acceptability and consensus are more important than what is true, to be a “centrist” is seen as something unequivocally noble. Yet it’s often the case that the sacred centre — the place of consensus — is simply the place where the greatest number of lies are told.

Thiel, then, is not a strict contrarian, but a Girardian: he believes that the truth exists, that the truth is rare, and that the truth is almost always obscured by the majority and the minority alike. They are locked in their own battle for power; whichever narrative is more fashionable often passes for the truth in any given milieu. Thiel’s own book, Zero to One, makes his position clear. “You can’t escape the madness of crowds by dogmatically rejecting them,” Thiel writes. “The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.”

Entrepreneur Marc Andreessen likes to say that a successful businessperson gets two magazine covers: one on the way up, and one on the way down. Thiel certainly got his first one. He was lauded as one of the “PayPal mafia,” the group of early PayPal executives who nearly all went on to successful second (and sometimes third) acts. At that point, mimesis worked almost entirely in his favour — but now the tables have turned.

A fundamental part of Girard’s theory was that when human beings mimic one another, conflict is inevitable — and is often resolved by what he called “the scapegoat mechanism”. Just as mimetic desire can converge on one person and make that person an overnight celebrity (see Tik-Tok), blame converges mimetically on one person, too. We might call this a “Girardian moment”. It can be, for the life of the scapegoat, a very dangerous moment.

Suggested reading

Silicon Valley's fake diversity problem

By ANTONIO GARCÍA MARTÍNEZ

Peter Thiel’s Girardian moment came on 21st July 2016, the year after Girard died. Thiel took the stage at the Republican national convention in support of Donald Trump. He had fantasies, perhaps, that Trump might disrupt our sclerotic government. (Disruption came — but not in the way anyone, including Thiel, probably imagined.) He must have known what he was doing at the time, throwing his hat in the proverbial ring — a ring that was, in fact, an amphitheater filled with many hungry lions, and with billions of spectators working themselves into a frenzy over the Trump association.

On that day, the mimetic forces began to converge against Thiel. There has been a non-stop barrage of stories painting him as an ever-more extreme and controversial figure ever since. The media can’t resist making him Trumpian totem, digging up Roth IRA investments he made 20 years ago — a decision to place a risky bet that took advantage of our antiquated tax code. He is seen as the kind of dangerous figure that should be purged from our midst.

The sensational new biography of Thiel has solidified, perhaps, his status as a Girardian scapegoat. But Thiel might find comfort in the words of Girard himself. “Books themselves will have no more than minor importance,” he wrote, speaking of history’s unfolding. “The events within which such books emerge will be infinitely more eloquent than whatever we write and will establish truths we have difficulty describing and describe poorly, even in simple and banal instances.”

Books are often just symptoms of our underlying condition. They are products of the culture from which they emerged. Ours is a scapegoating machine.

When Bitcoin, the first ever cryptocurrency, was launched in 2008, it was hoped its “Blockchain” technology — which records transactions and cannot be hacked — would spark a digital revolution. If a transaction could be carried out securely without the need for an established bank, it would, we were promised, mark the end of corporate capitalism — and the dawn of a new era of decentralisation.

Just over a decade later, however, Blockchain has become the centre of the financial elite’s new-age banking system. Indeed, behind the scenes, they’re going all in on crypto.

Using its very own cryptocurrency, the world’s largest bank JPMorgan has completed its first “interbank crypto trade” with fellow Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs. They carried out the transaction of JPMCoin, JPMorgan’s version of a digital dollar, using its new blockchain system. And with more than a dozen institutions now signed up to it, exchanging more than $1 billion daily, a digital financial revolution is in the making.

Ordinary citizens, however, won’t be part of it. When it was first conceived, crypto’s leading advocates insisted that we had entered a new era of financial autonomy: all you needed to defeat crony capitalism was a Bitcoin wallet and an internet connection.

Suggested reading

The West can learn from China

By Marshall Auerback

But in reality, the crypto rebellion has failed to liberate us, or achieve anything else its founder Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned. Rather than producing a more open, more liberating, more financially free society, the crypto movement has empowered not just another cabal of corrupt financiers, but a hidden cartel of criminals, Wall Street rejects, and what U.S Senator Liz Warren has described as “shadowy super-coders”.

Its prominent members continue to run rampant around the globe, circumventing laws, regulations and ethics to accumulate multi-billion dollar fortunes. Not a single country appears to want to host crypto-billionaire “CZ” and his company Binance, the biggest cryptocurrency exchange platform in the world. Meanwhile, Brock Pierce, the billionaire co-creator of cryptocurrency Tether, is currently using his wealth to engage in “crypto colonialism” in Puerto Rico, where dozens of “entrepreneurs” hope to build a new city that only uses virtual money.

Sensing this rising elite is getting a free pass, the world’s financial power structures have responded with a regulatory hailstorm. And as it has intensified, the more “controversial” outlets have tried to meet regulators’ demands.

Binance has tried to appear more credible by “looking at the potential IPO route” and appealing to regulators, while BlockFi, a cryptocurrency lender that matches all the Securities and Exchange Commission’s criteria for a Ponzi scheme, has had to obey securities laws to continue operating in the US, with five states  —  New Jersey, Alabama, Texas, Vermont and Kentucky  —  striking the fintech company with either cease and desists (requests to stop alleged illegal activity) or show-cause notices (proof that they are not a scam).

As for the bosses of ill-famed Tether, they recently appeared on CNBC, trying to convince everyone that their currency has a one-to-one backing — for each Tether in circulation, they claim to have $1 in their reserves backing it up (though still won’t perform an audit of their reserves).

Since the US Government has come down hard on any entity not playing ball, some of the crypto elite have started to question whether true decentralisation is a delusion. Indeed, they are starting to realise that it is a lot easier to build a fortune  —  and keep it  —  when they participate in the “official” system and follow the rules.

Suggested reading

Bankers are running the country

By Peter Franklin

It’s the same realisation Peter Thiel had in 1999. Back then, his original vision for PayPal was to create a truly anonymous money-transfer system, free from state influence and control. “It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means,” he declared, before quickly backtracking and rising through the ranks of Silicon Valley.

Fast forward to today, and the crypto elite have mimicked Thiel’s change of direction. Rather than simply throwing in the towel and admitting the game is up, they have abandoned their cyber-libertarian roots and merged with their enemy: the financial behemoths of Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and Silicon Valley.

It’s easy to see why this would seem appealing; a number of crypto elites are already reaping the rewards of cosying up to the establishment. Jeremy Allaire’s Circle — the company behind the huge, unaudited cryptocurrency USDC — has partnered with Silicon Valley payment giants, Mastercard and Visa. Meanwhile, Brian Armstrong, the CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, revealed in a tweet in May that he’d held meetings in D.C with high-ranking state officials, including Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell.

All of which raises a peculiar question: Why is the Federal Reserve’s head honcho, Bitcoin’s supposed arch-enemy, collaborating in undisclosed meetings with the CEO of crypto’s main cashier? In Bitcoin Gospel, that’s heresy.

The answer lies in what I suspect are the crypto elite’s real intentions: namely, that they were never really in it for the freedoms Bitcoin could offer, but more for the untold riches it promised. Now they’ve succeeded, it’s all about wealth preservation, and in the age of bailout capitalism, becoming “too big to fail” is the ultimate protection. That is why getting in the good books of Wall Street and the Federal Reserve seems to be the top priority for crypto billionaires. If a crisis emerges, and they threaten to bring down the existing power structure’s financial order, guess what? They’re first in line for a taxpayer-funded bailout.

Right now, it seems inconceivable that the financial elites would bail out the crypto market. But as the bubble gets bigger and becomes tied to Wall Street through its investments, the likelihood increases.

Suggested reading

Is community crypto the future of money?

By David Z. Morris

Take Tether, for example. On top of its $63 billion market cap, half of its reserves are now backed by real-world debt securities issued by Wall Street companies. Given it is a modern wildcat bank, one that issues its own currency, and has failed to provide any proof its assets exist, it is unlikely we will ever know how much debt Tether owns. But if it’s revealed that Tether’s value is, in fact, a swindle, Wall Street could eventually face losses amounting to more than a slight haircut.

In which case, don’t be surprised when the Federal Reserve comes to its rescue. It’s easy to forget that Wall Street can’t be distinguished from the Federal Reserve; the financial elites know that if something goes wrong, Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, will be there to step in and bail them out at whatever cost.

And if the next crypto crash does threaten to bring down their system, if wildcat banks like Tether become too big to fail, our current financial power structures will do everything they can to ensure that the status quo is maintained. Two classes of elites will become one, with the “less desirable” parts of the crypto world  —  and likely the taxpayer’s purse  —  becoming collateral damage.

What happens next is anyone’s guess. But with the likes of Goldman Sachs combining forces with such unsavoury characters in the crypto elite, it is not impossible to imagine them wreaking havoc around the globe: charging clients obscene crypto fees and betting against their own Bitcoin products to make even more money. The rest of us, meanwhile, will watch on from afar, knowing that we’re powerless to stop or escape yet another era of financial repression.

In recent weeks, the big tech platforms have been trying to clear the underbrush of fake news. This time, the theory goes, we just need to get our message out. After all, Hillary only spent a billion dollars on hers.

What happened — the deep story of an America coming apart — should have been the point of departure for wide-ranging introspection from the losing side, yet from the New York Times down, many have instead become convinced that they alone hold the reins of decency, and that they will be judged by history simply on how well they re-state their class shibboleths to each other.

It is from within this prison of valour that Andrew Marantz conducts his entertaining interviews with the new online Right in Anti-Social: How Online Extremists Broke America — just released in paperback.

Suggested reading

The tragedy of Hillary Rodham Clinton

By Tanya Gold

Marantz is a New Yorker staff writer. (It shows.) From 2011 on, he followed many of the social media outriders who seemed to clear the way for Trump. People like steroid-loving Twitter blowhard Mike Cernovich, who laundered conspiracies about ‘sick Hillary’ into the news cycle; needy semi-cranks like vlogger Laura Loomer; anti-PC-as-performance-art vulgarians like Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes; ballsy bandwagoneers like alt-lite crumpet Lauren Southern; and occasionally real nasties like the anti-Semitic podcaster Mike Enoch, who, in one of history’s great acts of cognitive dissonance, was eventually expelled from his own movement for having a Jewish wife.

By Marantz’s mirror they’re a charmless bunch: vain and along for the ride. A Proud Boy deliberately farts in an elevator. McInnes spoils for a fight. Cernovich sponges off his wife while writing Pick-up Artist blogs. At the DeploraBall, the Trump inauguration party for the alt-ish Right, everyone seems more interested in comparing their Twitter follower counts than in talking politics.

These are the people hotwiring the attention economy, Marantz contends. As he lays out to billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, in a chance meeting in a corridor at the DeploraBall, the idea that the cream always rises is a fiction. Shit floats. And social media is ultimate proof of that.

The implied premise — that racism is a contagion that is taking over America  — is not one Marantz wastes any time questioning. To the New Yorker set, the problem’s obvious: a bunch of yahoos got ahold of Reddit and Twitter accounts. Thus, America’s out of control id can only be contained by pruning the worst elements off the internet, because otherwise ordinary dupes will be dragged ever-rightwards.

Lately, this trope has become its own micro-genre. Who could forget the New York Times’ celebrated Rabbit Hole podcast, in which a young man watches some anti-feminist YouTube videos, then gets into Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern, gets a job, does nothing, harms no one, but is saved from his radicalisation by watching yet more YouTube videos — this time of hip young Marxists on ‘BreadTube’ (Communism never being responsible for any historical carnage)?

More from this author

Facebook is radicalising your parents

By Gavin Haynes

In this world view, Trump is portrayed as the ur-yahoo: in 2011, he hijacked the attention economy with the birther slurs, and thus set the verbal and moral template for the likes of Milo Yiannopolous to go for attention above all, to grab the mic and say into it all the dirtiest words they could think of.

But this is only a shallow why. These people also rode in on the currents of social frustration that had been submerged pre-social media. On the opposite side of the aisle, so too did the likes of Alyssa Milano, the often bizarrely hyperbolic Twitter-famous actress who popularised the #MeToo hashtag. Is she just a different kind of attention hijacker?

“Gradually,” Marantz writes, “reluctantly, I admitted to myself that institutions can also have significant upsides… it’s possible for a thing to be uncool and also necessary.” The reluctant censor always cuts such a comi-tragic figure — a bit like Michael Palin’s sympathetic crucifixion administrator in The Life Of Brian. Still, he heads to Reddit HQ, to argue that the platform should delete subreddits like r/TheDonald. But it’s already too late — Cernovich has triggered the libs once too often, and Trump wins.  

The day after the election, Marantz’s Facebook feed is full of people posting the same prescient section from the philosopher Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country. Written in 1998, Rorty claimed that the gap between the masses and the elite was widening, and foresaw a US dictatorship by 2014:

“Something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for. . . . One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion.  All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back.”

Rorty popularised the idea of ‘vocabularies’: that civilisations speak to themselves in a unique argot which structures their consciousness. “Europe did not decide to accept the idiom of Romantic poetry,” Rorty wrote. “Or of socialist politics, or of Galilean mechanics. That sort of shift was no more an act of will than it was a result of argument. Rather, Europe gradually lost the habit of using certain words and gradually acquired the habit of using others.”

Suggested reading

How paranoia drives politics

By Daniel Kalder

Here, society is portrayed as a system that self-hypnotises. Repetition and expansion of ideas bends the possibilities for thought, and so what we prune and what we nurture counts for a lot. The ‘arc of history’ is still a thing in Rorty’s view — but it must be consciously bent by us in a positive direction.

On the back of Rorty’s argument, Marantz would like to say that we shouldn’t be shy of discriminating: there are always better and worse takes. And on that he’s entirely right. But it’s in the words ‘us’ and ‘positive direction’ that the sleight-of-hand lies. Who’s us? What’s positive? Marantz’s DC lawyer friends — whom he finds sat round the living room making their banners to go on the Women’s March — already seem to have their answers.

The problem is that the tussle over elites is seldom about their intellectual horsepower — it’s about their vantage point. In truth, democracy proceeds from something akin to the argument for animal welfare: not ‘can they think?’, but ‘can they feel pain?’

In this regard, one story is particularly striking. The Gateway Pundit is a Trump-loving clickbait blog started by a Midwestern 20-something from his bedroom. But post-2016, they’re invited to send a correspondent to the White House: the barbarians are inside the gates.

Marantz records a confrontation in the briefing room between their correspondent, Lucian Wintrich, and a gang of old school White House hacks, furious at having their turf, and weltaunschung, invaded.

“OK,” she said. “Are you a racist?”
“No, of course not.”
“What are your views when it comes to integration?”
“I’m all for it.”
“Races mingling?”
Wintrich smirked.
“My boyfriend’s Colombian, so we tend to mingle,” he said.

The irony is delicious. Wintrich might be serially incompetent, intellectually inferior, doing little more than wiggling his bum at the ‘elite’, yet he ends up winning the encounter precisely because the old media have never taken the phenomenon of people like him seriously enough to do their homework, and can only react in their own sclerotic vocabulary: daubing everyone with the same Nazi brush.

Suggested reading

Does TV really rule America?

By Justin Webb

Four years on, it’s jarring how little has changed. Establishment political hacks are still regularly baffled to learn that intellectual and political lifeforms exist beyond reforms to Working Tax Credits and the pieties of inclusion. 

Here, the gatekeepers must take their share of the blame. Marantz complains about the Overton Window shifting, yet within a few lines, he’s convinced that Jordan Peterson holding individual rights as cardinal over any form of collectivism is a racist dog whistle: “This is the sort of false equivalence [between collectivisms of the left and right] that would have been staggering just a few years ago.”

Would it? Or is it more staggering that institutionalist journalists have redefined perhaps the core Enlightenment value as a racist dog whistle? Or even that the neologism of the ‘racist dog whistle’ now allows them to claim things without direct evidence? It certainly suggests that any movement of the Overton Window might not all be in one direction; perhaps even that we now have two separate windows. Overton French Doors.

The question of why Peterson has connected with so many remains as uninteresting as why Trump did, or Cernovich does. From start to end of Anti-Social, the answer’s obvious: because half the country is secretly racist and these people give them the cover to express that.  

Suggested reading

The woke have no vision of the future

By John Gray

You might ask which new vocabulary grew up first: the pronoun checks, -isms, phobias and ‘systemic’ iniquities of what is now the establishment Left, or the ‘MSM’-bashing, ‘virtue signal’-despising, ‘SJW’-allergic new online Right? The latter seems the more reactive, in that theirs is a language of negation, of opposing to something already there.

Either way, much as it might be easier to play whack-a-mole censorship, if America is to pull past its present funk, the world of the gatekeepers is first going to have to admit that at least part of the reason that such a gap in the market has opened for the yahoos is because the vocabulary of nice, well-educated New Englanders has accelerated away from the broader population in recent years. Even back at Charlottesvile, “white supremacy” still broadly connoted hoods and crosses. Today, it means Tom Cotton and ill-advised H&M kidswear. “To change how we talk is to change who we are,” Marantz concludes. Quite right.

Strangely enough, in his book taking on the New Left godheads like Rorty, Fools, Frauds & Firebrands, Roger Scruton ends on a similar thought. Scruton argues that a key task of the modern Right is simply to scythe through the often obscure postmodern linguistic trifles of its opponents — that nothing can be solved without first arriving at a common vocabulary.

It is only when we have found again the language that is natural to us that we can answer the great accusations that are constantly thrown at our world from the left.

 And it is only when we have found that language that we can move on from the one-dimensional left/ right, with us/ against us, progressive/ reactionary dichotomies that have so often made rational discussion impossible.

Rorty couldn’t have said it better himself. Or could he?

“It was the end of the world,” begins Notes From An Apocalypse with a knowingly stylish flourish, “and I was watching cartoons with my son.” He’s quite the worry-wart, is Mark O’Connell — at least by the account of himself he gives in his new book. He leads a relatively comfortable life as a writer in Dublin, never too far from a flat white or a craft beer. His last book, To Be A Machine, was widely feted and occasioned a good deal of guiltily undertaken air travel on the promotional tour. He has a wife and two young children, whom he clearly adores.

Yet he can’t stop panicking about the end of the world. He is terrified of (ahem) pandemics, nuclear holocaust, cascading ecological catastrophe, asteroid impact, societal breakdown and moths. And he — I don’t quite want to say cheerfully, but nearly cheerfully — indulges this terror in himself.

“For close to a year my online homepage was set to r/collapse, a subreddit entirely devoted to news links and discussions pertaining to civilisational collapse and adjacent concerns. I would open my browser and would immediately be greeted by a crowd-curated selection of signs and portents, apocalyptic apocrypha. Black snow falling on Siberia. An iceberg twice the size of New York City that was breaking off from Antarctica. Business Insider’s top ten major cities that could be unlivable within eighty years. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”

Most of us — even the pessimists — tend for convenience alone to set our homepages to, say, our Gmail inboxes. But O’Connell is made of sterner, or less stern, stuff. Oh, and the moths! He mentions, just in passing, that of all his “quite intense nature-based phobias”, “I was, most pressingly, terrified of moths.” Having one brush his face is “a prospect beyond the realm of the thinkable”.

He explores this terror with his therapist, mentioning that he links it to his increasingly fragile sleep. The therapist notices that he uses the word “fragile” a lot, and asks him: “What comes to mind for you when you say this word?”

I said nothing for what seemed a very long time, attended to a couple of seagulls screeching at each-other, the desolate staccato of a can being punted along the street by a gust of wind.
“Do you really want to know?” I said, straightening myself up on the couch.
“Of course I really want to know,” she said, smiling.
“Death,” I said. I was smiling back, but I was surprised to hear myself say it, and strangely chastened.

The fine, well-written, and fiercely entertaining book in which he explores his interest in all things apocalyptic is in some ways, as that little exchange suggests, a nonfiction novel in which O’Connell appears as an essentially comic protagonist.

But it’s also a serious, or semi-serious, piece of reportage — in which O’Connell variously meets the vendors of mid-range apocalypse real-estate (a guy selling decommissioned concrete weapons bunkers in a vast ranch in South Dakota); investigates the tech billionaires planning, when the Big One arrives, to do a bunk to New Zealand to set up an Ayn-Rand-style post-democratic society; meets the Elon Musk fanboys (they are usually boys) who think the human race’s best chance of survival is colonising Mars; spends 24 hours communing with nature among pessimistic ecologists in the Scottish highlands; and takes a package tour of Chernobyl.

More from this author

Why I'm reactivating World of Warcraft

By Sam Leith

And it’s an essay, in which he investigates his own phobias and Left-liberal anxieties, and his sense of complicity and hypocrisy. He brings the findings of his reporting and reading — everyone from Hannah Arendt and Schopenhauer to Dr Seuss (there’s a fine and feeling mini-essay on The Lorax) — to interrogate the meaning of the apocalypse.

As he argues early on — contemplating the culture of “preppers” who fantasise about taking to the woods with a “bug-out bag” when SHTF (shit hits the fan) — the expectation of catastrophe is as much fantasy as fear. And it is ideological: fantasies of self-reliance after the breakdown of society play as much into myths of the American past as visions of its future. Preppers fetishise a notion of frontier masculinity in which the white prepper, a Mad Max Davy Crockett, is freed from the reciprocal obligations of “civilisation” to fend for himself.

O’Connell finds equally problematic the rhetoric around “colonising” Mars, and the more or less naked way in which private property secured by main force, and the idea of every man for himself, underpins all these dark visions of the future.

And the apocalypse is not just ideological: it’s an aesthetic and a commercial commodity. It’s MarsCoin entrepreneurs, sales pitches for post-Apocalyptic gated communities, and versions of the same proleptic Ruinenlust that drove the Grand Tour.

As O’Connell tours Pripiyat, enduring the wearisome banter of his tour guide, he finds himself reading Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices From Chernobyl, and comes on her quotation of an ad for a version of just the tour he’s on: “Life gets boring, and people want a frisson of something eternal… Visit the atomic Mecca. Affordable prices.”

Suggested reading

Did Chernobyl kill communism?

By James Bloodworth

O’Connell is, as I say, a good writer, though he does like to let you know it. And he does have a way — though he’s wanly aware of it, which is part of the joke — of turning anything he sees into a symbol of something else. Signs and portents. Donald Trump isn’t just a silly-haired pillock. He’s “only the most visible symptom of a disease that has long been sickening the country’s blood — a rapidly metastasising tumour of inequality, hyper-militarism, racism, surveillance and fear that we might as well go ahead and diagnose as terminal-stage capitalism.”

Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley tycoon who has bought a New Zealand bolt-hole, is described as “pure symbol: less an actual person than a shell company for a diversified portfolio of anxieties about the future, a human emblem of the moral vortex at the centre of the market”. Later the real Thiel is glimpsed: “an actual human, goofily got up in polo shirt and shorts, sweating in the heat”.

Then there’s O’Connell himself, who declares early on: “My days are a procession of last things, seals opened. I myself am the apocalypse of which I speak. That is the prophecy of this book”. Later on, we meet him failing to put up a tent. A nice woman in the next-door tent offers to help.

“I will not pretend that accepting her offer did not involve a certain measure of masculinity-related discomfort, but it seemed to me that the embarrassment of politely declining, only to then continue foundering in tent-purgatory, would be exponentially more severe than the comparatively benign embarrassment of accepting.”

He tells us this before musing on the “paradoxical poeticism” of her second name.

O’Connell’s book, in this way, deftly walks the line between pomposity and self-satire. You read on for the laughs, and stay for the serious thinking that it smuggles in. He recognises that in thinking about last things we are thinking, inescapably, of ourselves: it’s a canvas on which we paint our fears and our fantasies.

So his conclusion, such as it is, is that he needs to get over himself — which is to say, get over the apocalypse. He ends back in Dublin, blowing a raspberry at his newborn daughter. And — who knows? — perhaps he now has his home page set to Gmail.

Notes From An Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back, by Mark O’Connell is published by Granta this week.

Suggested Reading

Immigration, citizenship and those "go home" tweets

By Matthew Parris and Freddie Sayers

At the inaugural National Conservatism conference, the latest high-profile attempt to add intellectual heft to Trump shaped conservatism, not a single mention was made of the row over the President’s tweets. For two and a half days, pro-Trump thinkers and politicos – including Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, Fox News provocateur Tucker Carlson and White House National Security Adviser John Bolton – went about trying to build a new conservative coalition. For two-and-a-half days, they ignored the headlines.   

In one sense, this was unsurprising. The event’s organisers want to resuscitate nationalism as a mainstream political force and, in doing so, redefine modern conservatism. Attendees didn’t want to talk about a Twitter storm, they wanted to talk big ideas and the sweep of history. Trump’s outburst was an inconvenient intrusion on that. But the silence was nonetheless revealing. 

The conference’s organisers were at pains to make clear what the nationalist awakening is, and what it is not. It is not white nationalism. It is not ‘blood and soil’. Several alt-Right figures had been denied accreditation for the conference. On the opening night, co-convener David Brog pointed to the door and asked that anyone who defined what it means to be American in racial terms leave. “Your views are not welcome here,” he said. 

This was a far-cry from the rough and tumble of a Trump rally; it was a bookish crowd of bespectacled and besuited conservative thinkers quoting Burke and Xenophon. And, unsurprisingly, everyone except for bow-tied waiters going about their business, remained in their seats after Brog’s request. But not mentioning the news undermined the hosts’ objectives.

Suggested Reading

What if the US President went mad?

By Sam Leith

Those objectives were set out unapologetically by Yoram Hazony, another organiser and a prominent Israeli intellectual whose influential 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism helped set the backdrop for the conference.

“Today is our independence day,” he declared:

“Today we declare independence from neoconservatism. We declare independence from neoliberalism. From libertarianism. From what they term classical liberalism. You can give it any name you want but that set of ideas that sees the atomic individual, the free and equal individual as the only thing that an educated person needs to know about politics and if he or she knows the free and equal individual then he or she has the ability to set out and rule the world. That worldview we are declaring independence from today.”

*

Hazony’s call to arms was typical of the conference generally, which was as much about owning the libertarians as it was “owning the libs”. The event was another reminder – not that one were needed – that the coalition that constituted the conservative movement from the 1960s to the early 2000s lies in tatters. 

For decades, the majority of that movement accepted the logic of fusionism: the libertarian and traditionalist wings knew they needed each other and made peace, albeit an uneasy one, with one another. That has changed – largely thanks to Trump. 

Emboldened traditionalists, including the national conservatives, are reconsidering their answers to the biggest questions in politics. And, like an enthusiastic recent divorcee, they are playing the field in the marketplace of ideas. The breadth of mainstream Right-wing American politics is wider than it has been for generations. Proceedings at the conference were astonishingly nonconformist, a reflection of the fact that all bets are off on the American Right in 2019. Sometimes that open-endedness was thrilling. Other times it was unnerving.

Suggested Reading

Test article

By JD Vance

Almost none of the economics in Tucker Carlson’s speech, titled “Big business hates your family”, would have been taken seriously in Right-wing Washington circles before 2016. According to Carlson, the main threat to Americans living the lives they want to live comes from business, not government. He praised Democratic Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s The Two-Income Trap, which she co-authored with her daughter, as “one of the best books on economics” he has read and more important than anything social conservatives have written recently. Echoing the Left’s critique of so-called woke capitalism, he described identity politics as a distraction obscuring who the winners are in today’s economy. 

The new anti-business consensus is striking and if there is a grand realignment happening in American politics (it certainly felt like that was what was happening among the national conservatives this week) it is far from clear who, if anyone, will be left to stick up for the market.

*

Elsewhere, on the rise of China, technology, the opioid crisis and the consequences of deindustrialisation in America’s heartland, the new nationalists seemed determined to break with the past, but unsure on exactly which path to take instead. 

The outlines of a concrete agenda were discernible. Attendees voted in favour of a motion in favour of a new American industrial policy, securing the border was almost universally settled on as an urgent priority. The West’s welcoming into the fold of China, including its admission into the World Trade Organisation, was overwhelmingly spoken about with regret, and attendees were gearing up for a new cold war. John Bolton described this East-West showdown as having “elements of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations. In his speech on Sunday night, Peter Thiel called for an FBI and CIA investigation into Google for “seemingly treasonous” cooperation with the Chinese. On Tuesday, the President promised to look into his supporter’s accusations. 

Suggested Reading

The monopolists’ manifesto

By Peter Franklin

At the crescendo of his speech, Thiel delivered a broadside against American Exceptionalism. “That exceptionalism obscured everything,” he said:

“The doctrine of exceptionalism has lead to a country that is exceptionally overweight, that is exceptionally addicted to opioids, that has exceptionally dysfunctional public infrastructure where it costs ten times as much to build a mile of subway as it does in socialist western Europe, that is in short exceptionally un-self-aware, exceptionally un-self-critical… Nationalism has nothing to do with this sort of exceptional un-selfawareness… Nationalism is going to ask hard questions.”

That might the start of the search for a new conservatism, but two and a half years into the Presidency of a self-described nationalist, the movement should arguably have fewer questions and more answers. Ultimately there was a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde quality to the new nationalists gathered in the Ritz-Carlton ballroom. 

*

Sometimes the brand of nationalism being expounded on stage sounded entirely innocuous. “To oppose nations is to oppose a force of nature,” argued Chris DeMuth. One minute Brog sounds like Oprah, or an actor delivering a banal ‘political’ Oscar acceptance speech: “We need to love our fellow citizens. We must feel connected to each other. A connection is deep enough to overcome our superficial differences.” Who could disagree with that? 

But then fellow organiser Hazony declared nothing less than Judeo-Christian jihad on liberals and fellow conservatives alike for trying to “privatise religion”: 

“We thought we could just stay reasonable having gotten rid of God’s scripture. And guess what, there’s no shred of truth to this at all. We tried it. We did. It turns out it was God and scripture that were holding the entire set of structures together. Not reason, tradition. You throw out Christianity and the Jewish contribution too with it, you throw out God and within two generations people can’t tell the difference between a man and a woman. They can’t tell the difference between a foreigner and a citizen. They can’t tell the difference between this side of the border and the other side of the border. They can’t tell the difference between paying back your debts and simply borrowing forever. The only way to save this country, to bring it back to cohesion, the only way to bring it back to independence and health, the only way to do it is going to be to restore those traditions.”

What is it that Hazony wants? Is he hoping for some kind of spontaneous culture-wide religious revival? If so, he could be waiting a long time. Or does he want to nationalise God as part of an overtly political programme? That is not a solution that strikes me as being in keeping with America’s republican traditions, nor is it one that the country is likely to unite around. This was the problem with a lot of what I heard at the conference. Either conservative nationalism is a series of civic bromides that only the wokest of the woke would object to, or it is something spikier, something millions of reasonable Americans from both parties will take issue with, and with good reason.

Suggested Reading

What's more powerful than Trump?

By Peter Franklin

America’s new nationalists never miss an opportunity to emphasise just how divided the country is: ‘The times are dire’; ‘What can bind up our wounds? What can bring us together?’; ‘These are frayed times’. 

Yet they are unstinting in their refusal to build any bridges or acknowledge any share of the blame for that disunity. They appear oblivious to the risks of what happens when their theory becomes real-world politics, risks that chants of “send her back” in North Carolina on Wednesday made abundantly clear. In the eyes of many, the President and some of his more zealous supporters are a real source of conflict and division. Until they face up to that tension – perhaps by calling out, or at least acknowledging the existence of, Donald Trump’s racist tweets – their solemn sounding calls for national unity will ring hollow.

I was in a queue at a train station ticket window. I didn’t have to be: these days you can buy train tickets online and collect them from a ticket machine. But not on this day. IT problems meant the machines weren’t working properly.

So when a man tried to collect his ticket, he couldn’t. Explaining this to the attendant at the ticket barrier, he was refused entry. He didn’t have a ticket, so he couldn’t come through, he was told. Mr. Exasperated displayed proof of his online purchase on his mobile phone. The attendant was not impressed: “I can’t let you through without a ticket and that’s not a ticket.” And so instead of joining his train, Mr. Exasperated had to join a queue.

And that’s what made by blood boil. Not the ‘sorry, not sorry’ attitude of the train company, but the fact that nineteen years into the 21st century, a mobile phone can’t be a train ticket. Well, it could be – we’re not talking about technology so advanced as to be “indistinguishable from magic” here. It’s the sort of user-friendly system that train companies could easily put in place if they wanted to. But when your customers can’t go anywhere else, why bother?

And that, in a microcosm, is why competition is good.

Or is it?

Suggested reading

Is there anything Amazon can’t dominate?

By Peter Franklin

In his book about entrepreneurship, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, Peter Thiel argues that new enterprises should aim to become monopolies and that competition isn’t always healthy.

The book was published in 2014, but its influence has grown – especially in Thiel’s stamping ground, Silicon Valley. Indeed, it can be read as a justification of the monopolistic tendencies of big tech companies.

In that respect, Zero to One is among the most important books of our age. If you don’t have time to read it, there’s an in-depth review by Scott Alexander on the brilliant Slate Star Codex.

Let’s start with the kernel of Thiel’s argument:

“The title comes from Thiel’s metaphor that ordinary businessmen like restaurant owners take a product ‘from 1 to n’ (shouldn’t this be from n to n+1?) – they build more of something that already exists. But the greatest entrepreneurs bring something ‘from 0 to 1’ – they invent something that has never been seen before.”

What’s wrong with the ‘1 to n’ approach to business? New entrants to established markets provide more choice and more competition, which is good for us, isn’t?

That’s debatable:

“This was the promise of the classical economists: capitalism will optimize for consumer convenience, while keeping businesses themselves lean and hungry. And it was Marx’s warning: businesses will compete so viciously that nobody will get any money, and eventually even the capitalists themselves will long for something better.”

Those are the rival theories, but in practice competition isn’t always of the cut-throat variety. Even when they’re not forming actual cartels, most suppliers in the same market will try to avoid ultimately self-destructive tactics like full-on price wars.

Suggested reading

Why Mariana Mazzucato is wrong about the 'entrepreneurial state'

By Michael Liebreich

Thiel’s focus, however, is on escaping competition altogether by developing a product that can’t be copied by others. Instead of merely adding another version of something that already exists (i.e. going from 1 to n), Thiel’s advice is to create something that didn’t exist before (i.e. going from 0 to 1).

There are many ways of establishing monopoly. For instance, you can secure the rights to a ‘natural monopoly’ such as those enjoyed by train operating companies. Another is cartelisation – which one might regard as a shared monopoly.

Thiel’s interest is in creating markets not fixing them. And, according to Alexander, he mention four particular paths from zero to one: “proprietary technology”, “network effects”, “economies of scale,” and “branding”.

But whether a monopoly is created by fair means or foul, what’s to stop the monopolist from using that power against the public interest? Arguably that’s a question stemming from a glass half-empty view of the world, so here’s the glass half-full:

“Since it doesn’t have to worry about competing with anyone, it [the monopolist] has wider latitude to care about its workers, its products, and its impact on the wider world. Google’s motto — ‘Don’t be evil’ — is in part a branding ploy, but it’s also characteristic of a kind of business that’s successful enough to take ethics seriously without jeopardizing its own existence.”

In other words, the optimistic question is this: ‘free from the pressures of competition, why wouldn’t the monopolist use its power for the common good?’

Unfortunately, there’s a long list of answers to that one, but let’s stick to the most obvious: greed. Landlords hold the most natural monopoly of them all – and they use their position to extract as much money from the economy as the market will bear. The landlords of Silicon Valley are no exception – something lamented by a certain Peter Thiel.

Suggested reading

The cost of property may slowly kill Silicon Valley - but a Land Value Tax might give it new life

By Peter Franklin

Admittedly, landlords did not create the product they monopolise, God did; and Thiel’s Zero to One argument concerns the monopolies created by genuine innovators.

However, that still leaves a number of counter-arguments. Here are three:

Firstly, the fact is that ‘1 to n’ – i.e. copying existing innovations – is an engine of global progress. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty across the developing world by local enterprises imitating, adapting and, on occasion, stealing innovations from more developed countries. If what you care about is achieving basic standards of nutrition, health, literacy and income, then the lesson of the last thirty years is that copying works.

Secondly, zero to one isn’t the whole story. Look a bit closer and you see that the starting point is often rather more than zero. The tech giants wouldn’t be where they are now without the internet and other key technologies – whose creators (including government agencies) chose to share. The giants shouldn’t guard their own monopolies so selfishly, not when they owe so much to others.

Thirdly, even if we assume a starting point of ‘zero’, we shouldn’t be so impressed by the achievement of getting to ‘one’ that we ignore the means by which the monopoly is maintained. If the monopolist uses its power and wealth to kill (or merely buy-out) the competition at birth then it is destructive, not creative.

Whatever the downsides of 1 to n, the opposite process – i.e. n to 1 – is much, much worse.

Suggested reading

The traitors and thieves of Silicon Valley

By Jonathan Tepper

I’ve counted down the top 50 UnPacked highlights from 2018 – the facts, figures, ideas and events that may not have made the headlines, but which provide a more reliable insight into the forces shaping the future.

Today, numbers 20 to 11:

#20

The widest longevity gap

At a time of intense debate about inequalities between men and women, rich and poor and between other groups and identities, there’s one social divide that goes largely unseen.

Writing in the New York Times, Dhruv Khullar opens our eyes:

“Americans with depression, bipolar disorder or other serious mental illnesses die 15 to 30 years younger than those without mental illness — a disparity larger than for race, ethnicity, geography or socioeconomic status. It’s a gap, unlike many others, that has been growing…”

Obviously, suicide risk plays a part, as do other “unnatural causes”, but that’s not the only reason why people with severe mental illness live shorter lives:

“…they’re much more likely to die of the same things as everyone else: cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and respiratory problems.”

Far from diverting resources away from general healthcare, investing in mental health services is a vital preventative measure.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 20 to 11

Flyover Country

#19

How beer could save capitalism

In sector after sector, we see monopolists squeezing out the competition and robots squeezing out the human workforce. Is this the technology-driven future of capitalism?

In the Atlantic, Derek Thompson cheers us up with news of one industry moving in the opposite direction – the US beer industry:

“…in the last decade, something strange and extraordinary has happened. Between 2008 and 2016, the number of brewery establishments expanded by a factor of six, and the number of brewery workers grew by 120 percent. Yes, a 200-year-old industry has sextupled its establishments and more than doubled its workforce in less than a decade.”

Are workers drowning their sorrows? Actually no, Americans are drinking less beer by volume, but they’re paying more for it. Quality has triumphed over quantity, and craftsmanship over automation.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 20 to 11

Capitalism

#18

Digital self harm

Anyone who doesn’t see the dark side of social media should acquaint themselves with the concept of ‘digital self harm’.

It’s defined and tentatively quantified in Aaron Kheriaty’s briefing for First Things:

“In the first systematic investigation of this behavior among adolescents, recently published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, Justin Patchin and Sameer Hinduja report their findings from a large, randomly sampled population-based study of 12-to-17-year-olds in the U.S. Of the 5,593 adolescents surveyed, one in twenty admitted to engaging in ‘digital self harm’. Specifically, 6 percent reported that they had ‘anonymously posted something online about myself that was mean.’ Among these, 36 percent said they had done it a few times, and 13 percent said they had done it many times. Likewise, 5 percent responded affirmatively to the statement, ‘I have anonymously cyberbullied myself.’ Among these, 37 percent had done it a few times, and 18 percent had done it many times.”

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 20 to 11

Technology

#17

Peter Thiel complains about the rent

Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur, is a very rich man, but even he thinks that rent is too high.

Reporting for Yahoo Finance, Julia La Roche quotes remarks Thiel made at an event hosted by the Economic Club of New York:

“One thing I’ve been thinking about as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley is the vast majority of the capital I give to the companies is just going to landlords. It’s going to commercial real estate and even more to urban slumlords of one sort or another. And that’s an odd thing to be doing as a venture capitalist. That’s so disproportionate…”

Thiel is a libertarian – he’s got no problem with people getting rich through their own efforts. But the landlords of Silicon Valley and other super-productive areas aren’t contributing to that productivity, they’re taking away from it.

Their profits should be taxed accordingly.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 20 to 11

Technology

#16

Xue Liang 

You’re being chased through a city. Your pursuers are closing in. What do you do?

Standard procedure is to lose yourself in a crowd. Except that might not work for much longer.

Earlier this year, a fugitive from Chinese justice was arrested at a pop concert in Nanchang. How did the police spot him in a crowd of 60,000 people? In a report for the Washington Post, Amy B Wang explains:

“Details about Ao [the suspect] had been in a national database, and when he had arrived at the stadium, cameras at the entrances with facial-recognition technology had identified him — and flagged authorities…

“‘He was completely shocked when we took him away,’ police officer Li Jin told Xinhua news agency…”

Inevitably, the Chinese state has plans to extend these capabilities – to create a “comprehensive, nationwide surveillance system known as ‘Xue Liang,’ or ‘Sharp Eyes’.”

Sauron would be proud.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 20 to 11

Technology

#15

Merkel contemplates a European civil war

In a fascinating piece for Spiegel Online, René Pfister reveals that Angela Merkel has been thinking about the Thirty Years’ War – a devastating conflict that raged across Central Europe from 1618 to 1648.

It was preceded by a long period of calm, ushered in by the Peace of Augsburg, a compromise between the Protestants and Catholics of the Holy Roman Empire, signed in 1555:

“To Merkel, the Peace of Augsburg is much more than some distant historical date. Rather, it is a warning of just how thin the varnish covering civilization really is. Just as people in the late 16th century were erroneous in their belief that the Peace of Augsburg would be enduring, we could be just as mistaken today in the belief that the postwar order, with all its treaties and alliances, serves as a guarantee that the scourge of war will not return.”

The end of the peace can be blamed on the Hapsburg Emperor, Ferdinand II, who tried to impose the will of the strongest power – and its ideology – on the other states.

I wonder if Angela Merkel can think of anything like that in today’s Europe?

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 20 to 11

Global Affairs

#14

The self-driving future is a bus(t)

2018 was the year when optimism about automated vehicles turned to pessimism. In March, a pedestrian was hit and killed by a self-driving car in Arizona – a tragedy that symbolises just how far the technology needs to progress before we can trust it. Some experts wonder whether road vehicles will ever go fully driverless.

But if that’s true, what should we make of the news that the Chinese company Baidu has begun mass production of its Apolong self-driving minibus? According to the BBC, the 14-seater vehicle has “no driver’s seat, steering wheel or pedals”, which sounds pretty driverless to me.

The catch is that the Apolong is designed for controlled environments “such as airports and tourist sites.”

But perhaps that’s how we’ll get to the driverless future – via segregated bus routes and not on the open road.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 20 to 11

Technology

#13

How technology divides rich from poor

Access to technology has always divided the rich from the poor. It continues to do so today, only now it’s question of whether the latter are over exposed. Writing for the New York Times, Nellie Bowles notes that the children of the poor spend more time glued to screens than the children of the rich:

“Lower-income teenagers spend an average of eight hours and seven minutes a day using screens for entertainment, while higher income peers spend five hours and 42 minutes, according to research by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit media watchdog… Two studies that look at race have found that white children are exposed to screens significantly less than African-American and Hispanic children.”

In another article for the NYT, she reveals that nannies employed by Silicon Valley professionals are instructed to “keep phones, tablets, computers and TVs off and hidden at all times”.

How’s that for hypocrisy?

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 20 to 11

Technology

#12

Liberal nationalism

Liberalism and nationalism are portrayed as opposing philosophies – one seen as being ‘open’ and the other as ‘closed’.

Writing for the Guardian, Ivan Krastev reminds is us it wasn’t always this way:

“Remember how nationalists and liberals were allies in the overthrow of communism in 1989… Appealing to national sentiment was critically important as a way of mobilising society against the communist regimes. Poland’s Solidarity movement was not liberal, but a mixed – social and nationalist – coalition that endorsed the values of liberal democracy.”

The history of liberal nationalism goes back much further – it was, for instance, a vital force in the European revolutions of 1848.

Europe’s liberal elites need to rediscover the virtues of positive national self-expression, because in refusing to do so they’ve left open a political space that populist politicians have eagerly exploited.

Read more...

The Year UnPacked: 20 to 11

Flyover Country

#11

China has tech giants too

America’s tech giants are sometimes referred to as GAFA (i.e. Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple). If you include Netflix then they become the FAANGs.

Writing for Wired, Christina Larson implores us not to forget the BATs:

“China’s established internet titans – Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, sometimes called ‘BAT’ – began as clones of US companies like Google and eBay. But these giants have since evolved in distinct new directions, rather like megafauna evolving new breeds within a Galapagos Islands ecosystem.”

China protects this ecosystem behind various barriers, but it is also aided by the fact that technophilic Chinese consumers provide markets for digital services that are massively bigger than those in the West:

“In a country where personal cheques and credit cards never went mainstream, paying with your smartphone has become the norm: in 2016, China’s mobile payment market was 50 times the size of that in the US, according to research firm iResearch.”

Meanwhile Europe, which has neither BATs nor FAANGs, is looking rather toothless.

Suggested reading

The innovation game: Can China regain its lead over the West?

By Peter Franklin

Now read the top 10 of The Year UnPacked

For instance, here he is in conversation at an event hosted by the Economic Club of New York. The interview lasts about 50 minutes and is fascinating throughout.

Reporting on the event for Yahoo Finance, Julia La Roche leads with his most striking comment:

“One thing I’ve been thinking about as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley is the vast majority of the capital I give to the companies is just going to landlords. It’s going to commercial real estate and even more to urban slumlords of one sort or another. And that’s an odd thing to be doing as a venture capitalist. That’s so disproportionate…”

Thiel is a free market libertarian – he’s got no problem with people getting rich through their own efforts. Indeed, he’s not exactly poor himself.

However, the landlords of Silicon Valley and its environs aren’t primarily benefiting from their own efforts. Land values in and around San Francisco haven’t reached ridiculous levels because of what landowners have done, but because of what others have done – above all the innovators and entrepreneurs of the tech industry.

It is the geographical concentration of talent, knowledge, investors and supporting infrastructure that makes particular locations so attractive to incomers – the San Francisco area being a classic example:

“Back in 2005, Thiel was asked during a panel discussion at Stanford University where the next Google (GOOGL) might emerge.

“At the time, Thiel answered that he thought there was a 50% chance that the next Google would be within a 5-mile radius of that room. Unbeknownst to him, that company was Facebook (FB), which was just 1.8 miles away and a company he had invested in early.”

Now, Thiel thinks that the high cost of living is helping to drive innovators and entrepreneurs out of the area – therefore making it less likely that the next big thing will happen locally. Rent extraction doesn’t just suck value out of what local economies have already achieved, it also inhibits the ability of those economies to reinvent themselves – i.e. it is a force for stagnation.

But is there anything to be done about it? Like any limited resource, space in a sought-after location needs to be allocated somehow. Assuming we don’t want a centrally-planned state system in which the state gets to decide who works where, there seems little alternative to the property price mechanism.

What can be done however, is to levy a windfall tax on surging rental values. Properly structured, a Land Value Tax would automatically fulfil this function.

Recommended reading

Could a Land Value Tax tame unscrupulous landowners?

By Liam Halligan

Such a tax would be paid by the landlord not the tenant. It couldn’t be ‘passed on’ to the tenant in the form of higher rent, because rent levels would already be at whatever the market can bear. The tax would therefore he paid out of the landlord’s income and by making land ownership less profitable should have a calming effect on property prices – and ultimately rent levels.

Furthermore, the revenue from the tax could be used to fund the regeneration of other parts of the country (or even the same city) – thus increasing the supply of suitable space for business.

Alternatively, the revenue could simply be used to cut other business taxes, in particular employment taxes – thereby shifting the burden of taxation from job creators and on to rentiers.

Recommended listening

Test article

By Charlie Pickles and Tom Copley

Because once a start-up starts up, the very last thing it wants to have to do is compete, face markets, and meet the challenge of innovation. It wants to rise rapidly to dominance, destroy competitors, and quash any innovative and potentially disruptive upstarts. A rising star company is as interested in market capitalism as  Lenin. If you doubt me, ask Zuckerberg (Facebook), or Page and Brin (Google), or Bezos (Amazon); although, of course, you might not get a candid response.

If you want a straight answer, go to Peter Thiel, venture capitalist-cum-entrepreneur, co-founder of PayPal, and Facebook’s first outside investor. Not to mention always worth listening to, as he speaks his mind. “Competition is for losers,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal [1.  Peter Thiel, in the Wall Street Journal for September 12, 2014: “Competition Is for Losers: If you want to create and capture lasting value, look to build a monopoly.” https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536.]. Every company should aspire to become a monopoly. Monopolies are good things.

The monopoly conundrum

Of course, monopolies are nothing new, and governments since at least the days of Roman Emperor Justinian have been pushing back[2.  Sir Edward Coke writes in his judgment in “the Case of Monopolies” “For we read in Justinian that monopolies are not to be meddled with, because they do not conduce to the benefit of the common weal but to its ruin and damage.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darcy_v_Allein.].

Sometimes they’ve taken advantage of cosy relationships with business favourites; sometimes they’ve broken them up. It may make sense for a power or water company to be a sole supplier, and in that case governments have often used regulation to control their prices.

But the classic monopolies of the 20^th century involved industries like steel and railways. In 1902, America’s most flamboyant President, Teddy Roosevelt, confronted the leading tycoon of his generation, J. Pierpoint Morgan, and fired the first salvo.

Morgan’s Northern Securities Corporation was an effort to control a large slice of America’s railways, and – why else? – enforce monopoly pricing. Roosevelt used the 1890 Sherman Act to stop this railway gamble in its tracks. And the US went on to break up the “trusts”[3.  On US anti-trust law: Marvin Ammori, in Wired for October 16, 2012: “Monopolies: Anti-Trust Law Protects Consumers, not Competitors.” https://www.wired.com/2012/10/antitrust-is-supposed-to-protect-consumers-not-competitors/.], as they are known in the United States, in industry after industry[4.  Some background here: Elena Holodny, “19 robber barons who built and ruled America,” in Business Insider for July 29, 2017. https://uk.businessinsider.com/robber-barons-who-built-and-ruled-america-2017-7.].

Is the new economy different?

In place of the old industrial and banking giants that used to dominate the global economy, we now have tech companies. Three of them have grown into vast monopolies.

Amazon dominates e-commerce. Among many striking statistics, it owns 74% of the e-book market. But it’s into other things too, like selling cloud storage and, just recently, buying Whole Foods, a US supermarket chain.

Facebook displaced early social-networking pioneers like MySpace and now commands 77% of mobile social traffic, with two billion monthly users. The aim is to sign up everyone on the planet. Excluding China, where the service is banned, they’re half-way there.

Google brushed aside Yahoo and other early search machines – and has never been challenged since. It now has 88% of global search advertising. Its aim, of course, is to have absolutely everyone use it to access all the world’s knowledge.

What’s more – and this is potentially sinister – between them, Facebook and Google account for 75% of referrals to major news and entertainment sites[5.  Some data sources on Facebook and Google: Adam Hartung, “The Trend To Facebook Referrals Is A Risk To Google Search.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2017/05/26/the-trend-to-facebook-referrals-is-a-risk-to-google-search/#242e21a16715. “40 Essential Social Media Marketing Statistics for 2017.” https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/01/05/social-media-marketing-statistics.].

Social networking and search are offered “free” to consumers in exchange for data. And data, as The Economist magazine has said[6.  “The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data,” The Economist, May 6, 2017 https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21721656-data-economy-demands-new-approach-antitrust-rules-worlds-most-valuable-resource.], is the new oil. They use (our) data to target ads, and they sell it on to others for similar purposes. From one point of view, both Google and Facebook are in the same business: advertising driven by user data.

Amazon is different. Its business model has been to build e-commerce market share to the exclusion of all else, including (at the moment) profits. Like the robber baron monopolies of the early 20^th century, its approach has been predatory. It destroyed much of high-street bookselling, including the large US bookseller chain Borders. It fought viciously with the Hachette publishing group to keep book prices where it wanted them. A monopoly to customers in several sectors, in publishing it has operated as a “monopsony” – a dominant buyer, who can set prices with suppliers in the way in which monopolists set them for consumers.

The key to making monopolist profits, of course, is to stay a monopolist. Peter Thiel’s defence of monopolies includes the idea that they are “serial” in nature; in due course, a fresh disruptor will come along and send the current one packing. But this is disingenuous. If you’re a monopolist, absolutely everything depends on stopping that from happening. The incumbent advantage of these huge global companies is formidable. And if someone could become a threat? Buy them, like Facebook’s done with Instagram and WhatsApp.

What would Teddy do?

While Amazon sells things for cash, Facebook and Google seem to give things away. One estimate has it that these online “freebies” are worth $280 billion a year. One result is that users tend not to see themselves as “customers” and tend not to see Facebook and Google as “real” companies – like BP, Starbucks and British Airways.

Of course, this “free” use is not the result of generosity on the part of Zuckerberg, Brin and Page. It’s an optical illusion. Their business model makes it highly profitable for them to offer users social media and search services in exchange for their data. An illustration of the scale of data being bartered by users: in 2012 Max Schrems, an Austrian law student, asked Facebook for all his data. What he got was a pdf that ran to well over 1,000 pages[7.  Olivia Solon, in Wired for December 28, 2012: “How much data did Facebook have on one man? 1,200 pages of data in 57 categories.” https://www.wired.co.uk/article/privacy-versus-facebook You can download your own data: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2016/01/18/how-to-download-facebook-archive/.].

Neither Facebook nor Google has offered a subscription-based alternative to their obscure barter business model. Why? Because it would alert their billions of users to what is really going on, as we hand over data and privacy for service.

Breaking up is never easy

Three huge challenges face any effort to treat Facebook and Google and Amazon as the anti-competitive monopolies that they are.

First, users like them. And because most people are users, that means that most people like them. They have become integrated into our daily lives in complex ways.  They just don’t look like overbearing corporate giants run by the 21^stcentury equivalent of the “robber barons” that Teddy Roosevelt tackled head-on. While Bezos is plainly a businessman, his company has a genius for consumer-friendliness. Zuckerberg, Page and Brin still look enough like kids who make fun stuff – and have joined the ranks of the multi-billionaires by some kind of fluke. The effect is dangerously disarming.

No-one refers to any of them as “tycoons” or “moguls”. The intimacy of our engagement with their businesses – we use their services in bed and in the bathroom and in the car – has blinded most of us to the fact that these young men have inherited the corporate mantle of JP Morgan and Andrew Carnegie – and that they run their companies just as ruthlessly[8.  Natasha Bertrand, “How Amazon’s Ugly Fight With A Publisher Actually Started,” in Business Insider for October 7, 2014. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-did-the-amazon-feud-with-hachette-start-2014-10?IR=T .].

Second, as we’ve noted, we don’t pay Facebook and Google directly for their services – in contrast to the widely disliked cable and phone companies whose monthly bills are costly. The obscure data-for-service barter system they have developed leaves most users barely aware that they are consumers at all.

Third, these three companies have mastered the lobbying process; they are powerful players in Washington (and other capitals). As a recent article in the Financial Times by Rana Faroohar pointed out, “Big Tech has quietly become the dominant political lobbying power in Washington … to avoid regulatory disruption of its business model, which is now the most profitable one in the private sector.”[9.  Rana Faroohar, “Release Big Tech’s Grip on Power,” in the Financial Times, June 18, 2017. https://www.ft.com/content/173a9ed8-52b0-11e7-a1f2-db19572361bb?mhq5j=e6.] They don’t just lobby politicians – the process is more sophisticated. According to Faroohar, Google alone has funded more than 140 Washington-related organizations with grants and sponsorship – to make friends and quieten criticism, “trying desperately and in myriad ways to avoid the ‘m’ word.”[10.  Ibid: “Over the past few years, Big Tech has quietly become the dominant political lobbying power in Washington, spending huge amounts of cash and exerting serious soft power in an effort to avoid regulatory disruption of its business model, which is now the most profitable one in the private sector.”]

So where do we start?

A modest proposal

Even if monopoly pricing (the main monopoly bugbear) is not present (Amazon, at the moment, makes little profit) or obscure because of barter (Google and Facebook), governments must ensure the integrity of the market. They need to encourage innovation, and therefore a fair crack of the whip to new entrants as they challenge incumbents. So why permit takeovers of challengers? Why not push for tech solutions such as open APIs[11.   API stands for Application Programming Interface – the protocols that enable one programme to speak with another. If they are made public, people from other companies can develop applications that interface with them. So, for example, you might not need Facebook Messenger to chat with someone using the service.] to set developers free to innovate?

Why can’t there be a dozen companies, some data-bartering, others subscription-based, enabling Facebook-type service – and inter-connected like our phone companies are?

Second, markets need pricing. Never before have we had major enterprises operating on the basis of a foggy barter. Data-for-service deals need to be explicitly priced, and cash alternatives (service for cash, or cash for your data) offered.

Third, to the extent that any of these companies is a natural monopoly like a water company – because, for example, that’s the only way to capture network effects or deliver economical service –  it must simply join the list of regulated industries.

Fourth, monopsony effects (such as Amazon’s dominance of book-buying from publishers) are legitimate concerns if the integrity of the marketplace – as the health of small business – is seen as in the public interest.

Winning through freedom

It was Adam Smith who pointed out long ago that capitalism magically transforms the pursuit of private profit into a winning situation for all of us. But that is true only if the market is free to do its work. As the factors behind the monopolistic growth of the Unholy Trinity become increasingly prevalent in the global internet economy, securing a win for the consumers of the 21^st century will require us to challenge their pretensions and encourage new entrants to compete with them.

This will involve facing down powerful interests, but that’s hardly new.

In 1602, Sir Edward Coke, doyen of English jurists, faced off against Queen Elizabeth I herself. In what is known as “The Case of Monopolies”[12.  Key facts are given in the Wikipedia entry on Darcy v. Allein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darcy_v_Allein.] he struck down a monopoly (for playing cards) that the Queen had handed to a courtier. Darcy Esquire v Thomas Allin, London Haberdasher and the arguments Coke used in his judgment are just as relevant today.

The main focus of the essay is on just how much Facebook knows about it’s users – Lanchester calls it the “biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind”. Also of interest is something he reveals about the first outsider to invest in Facebook – the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Peter Thiel:

“Thiel’s $500,000 investment in 2004 was crucial to the success of the company. But there was a particular reason Facebook caught Thiel’s eye, rooted in a byway of intellectual history. In the course of his studies at Stanford – he majored in philosophy – Thiel became interested in the ideas of the US-based French philosopher René Girard, as advocated in his most influential book, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Girard’s big idea was something he called ‘mimetic desire’. Human beings are born with a need for food and shelter. Once these fundamental necessities of life have been acquired, we look around us at what other people are doing, and wanting, and we copy them. In Thiel’s summary, the idea is ‘that imitation is at the root of all behaviour’.”

“…The reason Thiel latched onto Facebook with such alacrity was that he saw in it for the first time a business that was Girardian to its core: built on people’s deep need to copy.”

Lanchester’s description of Girard’s philosophy as a “byway of intellectual history” is apt in that the intellectual establishment – especially in America – is immensely more impressed with Girard’s compatriot and contemporary, the post-modernist Jacques Derrida.

It’s typical of Thiel – an iconoclastic libertarian who dissents from Silicon’s Valley’s modish liberalism – to go against the flow. And yet the basic truth of Girard’s account of human nature and history should be obvious; anyone who has children can see that the “deep need to copy” is fundamental to who we are.

Perhaps the reason why Girard’s philosophy isn’t more widely taught is that it stems from a Biblical worldview:

“Girard was a Christian, and his view of human nature is that it is fallen. We don’t know what we want or who we are; we don’t really have values and beliefs of our own; what we have instead is an instinct to copy and compare. We are Homo mimeticus. ‘Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and who turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.’ Look around, ye petty, and compare.”

Consider the Biblical account of the fall from Eden, in particular the third chapter of the book of Genesis  in which Satan, in the form of a serpent, persuades Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. Crucially the snake’s clinching argument was an appeal to the ultimate in ‘mimetic desire’: “…and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

So, is that what lies at the heart of social media? John Lanchester is worried it might be:

“The view of human nature implied by these ideas is pretty dark. If all people want to do is go and look at other people so that they can compare themselves to them and copy what they want – if that is the final, deepest truth about humanity and its motivations – then Facebook doesn’t really have to take too much trouble over humanity’s welfare, since all the bad things that happen to us are things we are doing to ourselves.”

Things may be even worse that Lanchester fears. Girard taught that mimetic desire is contagious, with the struggle to possess the object of desire resulting in violent conflict. Soon it is the violence itself that goes viral rather than the original desire. To prevent the ‘mimetic crisis’ from turning into a war of “all against all” (to quote Hobbes), human societies have, throughout history, opted instead for a war of all against one – i.e. a victim, sacrifice or scapegoat on which the group’s pent-up violence can be focused and released.

Girard saw in the victimisation process the origin of archaic religion and, by extension, all human culture and institutions. He also saw in Christianity – and in particular the death and ressurection of Jesus Christ – the ultimate refutation of the victimisation process, because it proclaims the innocence and victory of the ultimate victim.

How telling, then, that in our post-Christian society, social media isn’t just a facilitator of mimetic desire, but also of an online, globalised process of victimisation. The next time you see someone singled out for the digital equivalent of a human sacrifice, think very carefully before joining in.