Peter Thiel Has Wanted To End Politics For A Long Time
If the tech fascists can't escape the annoyance of politics, they would like to end politics altogether
Peter Thiel, by far the wettest of our big, beautiful oligarchs, wants what every libertarian wants: To strap himself to a rocket and blast off to somewhere far away from the filthy, writhing masses of everyday people going about their lives, somewhere laws and politics don’t exist and human beings can be properly exploited by those with the power and money and resources.
That Thiel has more power and money and resources than (almost) anyone in human history is merely coincidental. The sweaty man has principles, after all.
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Like every tech-fascist in the third decade of the 21st Century, Thiel is bored out of his fucking mind. He wants something to do. The designed frictionlessness of the 2020s has made life boring for everyone (people on Bluesky get mad when I say this because they intentionally misinterpret it so that I’m saying no one works hard anymore; they do this because it feels good to be angry all the time and because they suffer from main character syndrome).
Imagine how boring life is when you have more money than you could spend in a thousand lifetimes. In ten thousand. In a million. That’s Thiel and Musk and Zuckerberg and Altman and the rest of the Silicon Valley futurist ghouls: So bored they have decided to destroy the world and live forever as a hobby. I would have suggested golf or pickleball. Maybe both. They have the time.
Thiel way back in 2009 wrote an essay for the librarian Cato Institute about some of the crazy shit he might do if he one day had the means.
Thiel, along with the rest of the American right wing – and yes, all libertarians are just embarrassed Republicans – had decided it was done with democracy after one (1) Black man was elected to lead the American empire. This was the end of the line. We won’t be playing this game anymore, the American right said with one voice. Barack Obama’s election was a radicalizing moment for white people across the world. For white folks – especially those with an obscene amount of money – perhaps nothing could be worse than a Black man at the top of the hierarchy. The 2008 presidential election was the End Times for those whose worldview was built on the presumption of white supremacy. It was a failed casino magnate and a reality show host who understood the raw power that could be harnessed from this burning ball of thrumming white rage.
Denny Carter
A crying, coping Thiel in his April 2009 essay wrote about ways in which rich libertarian weirdos could escape the world of politics, or the world in general with a Black man serving as president (Thiel never mentions Obama so I suppose the timing of this essay was a coincidence).
I went ahead and read the whole goddamn essay so you didn’t have to. Thiel’s thoughts on ending politics – or, at minimum, running away from a system in which regular people have a say in how things are run – illuminate and clarify much of what the tech fascists pursue today after all but installing Donald Trump to a second term in the White House. Just last week the psychos at Palantir, headed by CEO Alex Karp, who might be the most dangerous man alive, released a manifesto talking about which cultures deserve to exist, dismissing soft power as a legitimate foreign policy, calling for the return of a military draft, charging that Allied Forces were too hard on Germany after World War II, and berating those who see politics as a way to improve society somewhat. These guys are crazy in all the worst ways.
Thiel, quite naturally, cofounded Palantir.
Thiel once reportedly told a college roommate, Julie Lythcott-Haims, that South African apartheid was nothing but a "sound economic system working efficiently, and moral issues were irrelevant." Thiel, Lythcott-Haims said, "seemed indifferent to human suffering or felt that oppressing whole swaths of humans was a rational, justifiable element of a system of governance."
Those opposed to the fascism that has been birthed, facilitated, and perpetuated by tech fascists over this past decade would do well, I think, to fully understand this wretched, twisted worldview and what it means for western democracies whose existence poses a threat to the ultimate goals of Thiel and Musk and the rest of these comically evil men. There is no room in the tech fascists' Dark Enlightenment for democratic self governance; of this they are terribly clear.
"We are in a deadly race between politics and technology," a newly-rich Thiel wrote in 2009, sneering at the mere idea of democracy as being at the whims of the "unthinking demos." "The future will be much better or much worse, but the question of the future remains very open indeed. We do not know exactly how close this race is, but I suspect that it may be very close, even down to the wire. Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism."
A world safe for capitalism. How brave. How courageous. Allow me to translate this for you: Thiel and his cohort wants a world drained of the kind of politics that demands they be part of a society, a larger human community, a place where there are no taxes and people are eager to reconsider those pesky age of consent laws.
These oligarchs care not for humanity because in very basic ways they do not identify as part of humanity. They are something superior – David Bowie's homosuperior comes to mind – and separate from the unwashed hoards living ordinary lives. The capacity to have anything at any time breaks your fucking brain.
Escaping Politics Via The Internet
Creating a virtual world free from the libs telling everyone what to do has been a persistent obsession for (fascist) futurists.
Thiel, naturally, is no different. Way back in 2009, before capitalist enclosure destroyed the internet’s potential for slightly improving life on earth, he saw the internet as a “space for new modes of dissent and new ways to form communities not bounded by historical nation-states” ruled by annoying liberal women, a constituency that Thiel sees as an existential threat to the libertarian dream of escaping poor people.
By starting a new Internet business, an entrepreneur may create a new world. The hope of the Internet is that these new worlds will impact and force change on the existing social and political order. The limitation of the Internet is that these new worlds are virtual and that any escape may be more imaginary than real. The open question, which will not be resolved for many years, centers on which of these accounts of the Internet proves true.
Maybe, through the power of online, they could generate a new world in which one did not have to buckle one's seatbelt and one could maybe rethink age of consent laws because one is a fucking creep.
Denny Carter
Mark Zuckerberg's botched attempt to create a virtual world was likely a forerunner of what is to come from the tech-fascist crowd. With an endless funding stream – one that elected Democrats would do well to cut off – these absolute weirdos will keep trying to generate a virtual world where elections don't happen and people have no rights and, again, age of consent laws are reimagined by men who think about such laws all the fucking time.
Zuck and the rest want the world of Ready Player One with less nostalgia porn and more indentured servitude. They want a world in which New Deal-style protections for regular folks don't exist, and have no chance of existing.
Escaping Politics In Space
Space travel, Thiel writes in his 2009 essay, represents nothing more than "a limitless possibility for escape from world politics." Men like Thiel crane their necks and look up at the night sky and see the twinkling of far-off stars and the majesty of the vast blackness beyond our dust speck of a planet and they see a place where liberals can't boss them around anymore. They see a perfect new world devoid of lady bosses and well-read women and, mostly importantly, Hillary Clinton.
Thiel back in 2009 seemed less bullish than other tech freaks on the prospects of space travel as an avenue to libertarian utopia and the libertarian fascination around a quick re-examination of age of consent laws. He says libertarians (Republicans) will have to suffer through life with the libs for at least another few decades before someone comes up with a viable way to escape the planet, and with it, politics.
But the final frontier still has a barrier to entry: Rocket technologies have seen only modest advances since the 1960s, so that outer space still remains almost impossibly far away. We must redouble the efforts to commercialize space, but we also must be realistic about the time horizons involved.
This is the part where I curse you with the knowledge that the white supremacist leaders of the so-called accelerationist movement dream of a day when white people can flee the planet and start a whites-only civilization on some distant rock, where they won't have to see a Muslim lady at the supermarket or a Black man on the sidewalk or a Latino family at their kid's soccer game.
Accelerationists like Nick Land call it hyper-racism. They claim it's not actually racist. These guys' politics almost always come down to removing themselves from multicultural democracy. If they have to leave earth forever to achieve this – and to take a quick peak at age of consent laws – then so be it.
Escaping Politics In The Ocean
If Thiel and his buddies can't be launched into space – away from the libs – or permanently logged into a virtual world – away from the libs – maybe they can make their own little countries in the middle of the ocean, away from the libs.
Between cyberspace and outer space lies the possibility of settling the oceans. To my mind, the questions about whether people will live there (answer: enough will) are secondary to the questions about whether seasteading technology is imminent. From my vantage point, the technology involved is more tentative than the Internet, but much more realistic than space travel.
Like homesteading, seasteading is that thing where white men look for anywhere on earth that does not have brown and Black people and women who would like to sometimes leave the kitchen. It is a natural extension of the frontiersman's desire to establish a community where he makes the rules, where he is the law, and where he can have anything he wants and treat anyone as badly as he wants.
The homesteader sought a place without society so he could create his ideal society, replete with authoritarian terror. So the seasteader, usually a white guy whose brain has been irreparably broken by the internet, seeks to create a chunk of land on the water where he can be king. No libs allowed.
Thiel has poured lots of cash into seasteading research. White men who have been obsessed with the idea of a libertarian (Republican) utopia way out in the middle of fucking nowhere have studied the potential for seasteading and the enormous resources it would require. With Thiel's help these fellas established the Seasteading Institute. It's difficult to grasp just how bored these guys really are. Maybe it's not possible.
What sort of person dedicates their life to escaping politics and human society? A person who wants to design a game they cannot lose. Thiel, a lifelong Republican who spoke at the 2016 RNC and had an office in Trump Tower a year later, wrote his Cato Institute essay just six months after the GOP had been wiped out and very much appeared to be atrophying into a regional political party that could not compete with their center-left opponents on the national level. The zoomers don't remember. For millennials, the game appeared to be over. We had won.
Denny Carter
Maybe Thiel wasn't aware of the Republican Party's plans to ditch small-d democratic norms beginning in 2010 and dismantle the republic one institution at a time. Maybe Thiel doubted John Roberts' willingness and capacity to usher in a post-constitutional United States, crush any and all progressive policies, and play defense for the nation's then-nascent fascist movement.
Whatever Thiel knew or did not know in the months after Democrats swept to power in the 2008 elections, he certainly didn't like losing. So he sought a place where he could not lose and where these fucking aggravating liberals didn't run the things that made society tick. The internet, space, the fucking ocean – whatever, Thiel said, just get me out of here.
Those of us who enjoy democracy and hope to have some of it in the future should understand that Thiel and the Silicon Valley monsters who rule our politics right now not only hate democracy and self governance, but politics itself. These guys have no desire for political struggle, for the pushing and pulling and the general messiness of the whole venture.
If the Silicon Valley fascists can't find their escape from the annoyance of politics, where they (for now) don't have the Final Say In Everything, they would very much like to end politics here on earth. It's the next best thing.
That means they can't be part of government in whatever comes after this current cycle of fascism. These tech-obsessed men are enemies of governments everywhere and should be seen that way by those elected to offices big and small. It's the only thing they're honest about. They must be cut out of the small-d democratic equation. Let them strap themselves onto their rockets. Who cares.
Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
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