Thread by @doctorow

Peter Thiel: "I’d rather be seen as evil than incompetent." It's the far-right billionaire's most telling phrase. Thiel wants us to think he's an evil genius, because he wants us to think he's a genius. 1/

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

pluralistic.net/2022/07/28/des… 2/

So much of Thiel's activity is self-mythologizing, like when he made us think he was infusing teenagers' blood to become immortal:

vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/p…

But as @BenBurgis writes for @Jacobin, Thiel isn't an evil genius, "he's just a rich guy":

jacobin.com/2022/07/peter-… 3/

Burgis cites @chafkin's 2021 Thiel biography, *The Contrarian*, which shines a glaring light on the distance between Thiel's stated commitment to high-minded ideals of "liberty" and his self-serving defense of mass surveillance and human rights abuses:

bookshop.org/books/the-cont… 4/

If you think Thiel is an evil genius, then maybe these contradictions are the result of your puny brain lacking the subtlety to understand how, on a higher plane of reasoning, they can be resolved. 5/

If you understand that Theil is an ordinary mediocrity, no better than you or me, sickened by pathological greed, then there's a much simpler explanation: it's all bullshit, and the only thing Thiel really cares about is becoming richer and more powerful. 6/

That explanation goes a long way to explain why a "libertarian" would defend Apartheid, regret that women are allowed to vote, state that "freedom and democracy" are incompatible, and secretly fund a suit to destroy a media org that embarrassed him:

forbes.com/sites/mattdran… 7/

Thiel's self-mythologizing provides a cover for all of this, while making him far richer: for example, his campaign to make us think that Palantir played a role in killing Osama bin Laden was an obvious gambit to increase the share-price of Palantir. 8/

Burgis cites @NathanJRobinson's @curaffairs article, "Two Ways Of Responding To Conservatives," which used Jordan Peterson as a template for critiquing self-mythologizing far-right figures without helping them by calling them evil geniuses:

currentaffairs.org/2018/05/two-wa… 9/

Robinson proposes a test: "Does it reinforce the person’s self-conception or undermine it?" Burgis applies this test to Thiel, urging us not to dwell on the drinking blood, taking votes away from women, or funding "neoreactionaries" like Curtis Yarvin. 10/

Rather, Burgis says, we should focus on how Thiel spends his political money, backing "populists" like JD Vance, who say they're fighting for working people, but who oppose universal healthcare, universal childcare, and against raising the minimum wage. 11/

Burgis: "Thiel *is* dangerous — not because he’s an evil mastermind, but because he’s a billionaire who enjoys playing with our politics and he couldn’t care less about the people who get hurt in the process." 12/

Burgis's critique ties nicely into @STS_News's idea of "criti-hype" - criticism that starts by accepting it's subject's own self-mythologizing, then damns them for it. 13/

Think of critics who accept Google's claims that its "AI"-driven ads can sell anything to anyone, then criticize it for having built a mind-control ray:

pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/eut… 14/

Like Thiel, Google would rather be seen as evil than as incompetent. 15/

When Google's critics accuse the company of having perfected machine learning mind-control, they help Google sell ads, because the advertisers Google is pitching aren't upset that Google has a mind-control ray, provided Google will rent it out to them. 16/

A smart synthesis of criti-hype comes from @mariafarrell, whose "Prodigal Techbro" is a great way to understand the problems with allowing ourselves to be lured into "evil genius" talk:

conversationalist.org/2020/03/05/the… 17/

Farrell's prodigal techbro is an ex-Big-Tech geek turned anti-Big-Tech crusader, whose anti-Big-Tech position starts with the proposition that they and their former colleagues were all evil geniuses. 18/

Prodigal tech-bros claim to have hijacked our brains' reward-centers with junk-science psych like "Big 5 Personality Types" and "Sentiment Analysis" (conveniently omitting the fact that these have been seriously undermined by the #ReplicationCrisis):

replicationindex.com/category/big-f… 19/

Focusing on what Big Tech *says* it does isn't just a problem because it perpetuates the companies' self-mythologizing, but also because it distracts from what we know Big Tech *actually* does. 20/

If we repeat the lie that Big Tech's ad billions are the result of its mind-control ray, then we omit the fact that Facebook and Google entered into an illegal conspiracy to rig the ad market:

techcrunch.com/2022/03/11/goo… 21/

"Just a rich guy" is the perfect epithet for Theil, who, after all, is not an ideologue or an 11-dimensional chess master. He's just another thin-skinned, greedy bastard who uses his money and power to accumulate more money and power. The rest is just window-dressing. 22/

Image:
Dan Taylor for heisenbergmedia.com (modified)
flickr.com/photos/heisenb…

CC BY 2.0:
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.…

Austin Powers, New Line Cinema (modified)
warnerbros.com/company/divisi…

Fair use
eff.org/issues/intelle… 23/