Tumgik
#peter thiel
Text
Silicon Valley ideology quietly admits (its) freedom is not compatible with (our) democracy.
-Maria Farrell
1K notes · View notes
bitterkarella · 8 months
Text
Midnight Pals: $8
Stephen King: submitted for the approval of the Elon Musk: [emerging from bushes] eyyyyy stephano king! Musk: you still no paya $8 for X? King: no elon i'm King: wait King: $8 for what?
Musk: eyyyyy iss x now! Musk: cuz x itta do everything! Musk: it da everything app! King: what do you mean it'll "do everything?" Musk: eyyyy you know Musk: it do Musk: it do Musk: it do-a alla da things capiche???
Musk: now you alla post onna da x capiche? King: Musk: King: Musk: [grappling with King] gimmie da $8! King: [struggling] no! never! i'm never paying for twitter! Musk: [struggling] itsa notta twitter! IT'SA X!!!
King: criminy elon why are you so obsessed with the letter x? Musk: eyyyy itta all start 24 years ago Musk: 24 years ago dissa very night Musk: in desa very woods...
[24 years ago] Young Musk: eyyyy i maka da X dot com! I no paya da taxes! eyyy!! Peter Thiel: [rising from coffin like count orlock] once again, elon, there is nothing you can possess which i cannot take away Young Musk: mama mia!!
333 notes · View notes
tweetingukpolitics · 4 months
Text
Tumblr media
57 notes · View notes
odinsblog · 8 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
I was stunned to find the number of people in the tech industry who are all-in on the theory of scientific racism and eugenics. They've been out about that for years, though.
There's a sort of complex where this was the birth of, whether you want to call it the intellectual dark web, I think that was the moment there. They've sort of been radicalized gradually, as happens with these things, where they started with, like, Slate Star Codex was a really big key central point for them to gather and sort of say, well, we have to interrogate and question a lot of these (egalitarian) assumptions. They were very actively courted by the neo-reactionary movement.
So you have things like Peter Teal holding dinner parties with the founders of the movement, and sort of people who have explicitly endorsed slavery, explicitly endorsed disenfranchising women, and people of any non-male gender from being able to vote.
And I always resent it because I sound like a crazy person by just merely accurately describing what they have publicly said. I sound like a conspiracy theorist who's pinning up red strings on a cork board by literally being like, “This is a thing they said out loud, in public, multiple times.” And people are like, “There's no way.” And I'm like, I don't know what to tell you, but it's all out there. We have receipts for ten years.
They are way out there, and they have an explicit agenda of normalizing, really radical, really hateful agendas.
And for me, it's like, it's just a very simple thing.
It's like I have to care about my kid’s safety. I have to care about my friend's safety, I have to care about, you know, basic moral values that we used to agree on.
And that's the other thing too, is because I knew these people 10 and 20 years ago. Like the first blog that Marc Andreessen ever had, I set up. It was on a platform I helped build. So I know that there was a point in which, at least from the public visible face, this was once a reasonable person. And for them to embrace the sheer intellectual dishonesty, along with the hatred… the fact that they're just like, they don't care that they're lying because it's an effective tool to get what they want.
That stuff is… I don't know.
It really soured me on the traditional tech industry.
This is what their tech is for. The things they fund are meant to carry out their agenda.
Let me give you a clear example: To the people who believe in this extremist racist ideology, Elon Musk being willing to lose tens of billions of dollars in value of his own money, presumably, in Twitter, turning into “X,” is a principled person who puts his values ahead of the dollar. He is so committed to advancing this reactionary movement that he's willing to forego tens of billions of dollars of personal wealth in order to advance it.
And what rational people see as the destruction of Twitter is rather, the destruction of the ability for anybody to ever again make a Black Lives Matter hashtag, or to make a Me Too hashtag. And that is because he's not a dumb person. Like the thing that a lot of progressives and reasonable people want to just say, well, he's racist and evil, so he must be dumb.
He's not a dumb person.
Peter Thiel's not a dumb person.
So if we assume they're smart people who understand how systems work and have virtually unlimited resources, then why would they choose to do this?
Well, there must be a reason.
And there is a reason.
It's just one we don't like to confront.
Even more insidious is the fact that these tech moguls own huge companies with enormous influence, and wielding that kind of power over their employees creates a herd mentality within their workforces.
So if, for example, Facebook's board includes both Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen. They don't have to give somebody an order to say what kind of content they want to promote on the newsfeed, on Facebook.
Everybody who works there knows this is who our bosses are. This is what we got to do, because they're smart. Everybody's smart, everybody's very reasonable.
And so you don't have to imagine, like I said, I don't have to be a conspiracy theorist that's putting up some red strings on a cork board to connect the dots and whatever. You're like, “Oh, I'm a midlevel product manager at a company. I'd like to make a name for myself and make the share price go up. And I know the boss's boss has been on every podcast in the world saying we need to promote more voices that are calling for ethnic cleansing,” okay?
Message received.
That's what a person who has no moral context would do. And there are a cohort of people in the technology industry that have come up entirely consuming media owned and created by these people, because they know the programming site Hacker News, which is owned by a venture capital firm and run by Paul Graham, is one of these guys.
They read blogs written explicitly by these guys. They consume it. They were on clubhouse. They're in a Discord chat with others that are sort of buying the stuff. They have a full wraparound media bubble. If they just read substacks and listen to the blog posts or read the blog posts from these folks, you can have what feels like an entire media diet shaped solely by this dialogue.
And this is why they're trying to own the media outlets and the distribution, like Twitter, alongside owning the platforms. And the fact that they can control more parts of society, right? The leverage of owning the distribution networks, the leverage of owning media outlets, the leverage of owning the platforms is very, very different, because we do have a lot of historical precedent.
If we go back 100 years ago and we say you're reeling from coming out of a pandemic, you are reeling from economic precarity and inequality at unprecedented levels, and you see the rise of, again, a direct parallel, virulent antisemitism. And you have things like the oil barons giving way to the Henry Fords of the world, the labor crackdown of the Pinkertons, Ford's embrace of, you know, to the point where he's pen pals with Hitler, and IBM building the technology.
The first person that ever asked me to do technology work for him was a neighbor of ours, and he had a tattoo on his wrist. And I was a little kid and didn't know what it meant. And I asked him what it was. It was his concentration camp tatoo. And what people don't realize is those are database entries in an IBM database.
And IBM's stance at the time was that they were neutral.
This is what technology does to enable the rise of fascism and victimization around the world. And we have a direct precedent less than 100 years ago, of how these technologies are used.
And I don't say that lightly.
I'm not saying we're there yet, but that is how you get there. And I would be surprised if the pattern doesn't play out in some ways, in terms of if you have tycoons of industry at a moment when the world is reckoning with massive social change, cultural change, along with recovering from things like economic destruction, inequality and pandemics… And you have rising military threats around the world.
That is exactly where we were a century ago.
—ANIL DASH shares his thoughts and experiences on Richard Hanania and rampant neo-fascism in Silicon Valley
147 notes · View notes
anarchistin · 9 months
Text
You've probably heard of the "Tragedy of the Commons," which claims to be a "realist" account of what happens when people try to share something – a park, a beach, a forest – without anyone owning it. According to the "tragedy," these commons are inevitably ruined by "rational" actors who know that if they don't overgraze, pollute or despoil, someone else will, so they might as well get there first.
The Tragedy of the Commons feels right, and we've all experienced some version of it – the messy kitchen at your office or student house-share, the litter in the park, etc. But the paper that brought us the idea of the Tragedy of the Commons, published in 1968 by Garrett Hardin in Science, was a hoax.
Hardin didn't just claim that some commons turned tragic – he claimed that the tragedy was inevitable, and, moreover, that every commons had experienced a tragedy. But Hardin made it all up. It wasn't true. What's more, Hardin – an ardent white nationalist – used his "realist's" account of the commons to justify colonization and genocide.
87 notes · View notes
mudwerks · 7 months
Photo
Tumblr media
(via Jeffry Epstein Arranged Meetings With Peter Thiel and Thomas Barrack – Rolling Stone)
oh those billionaires
[total fucking assholes]
24 notes · View notes
saywhat-politics · 1 year
Text
Start with multi-billionaire Peter Thiel, and follow the money.
You may recall that in 2016, Thiel spoke at the Republican National Convention to make the case for why Trump should be the next president of the United States.
In the midterm elections of 2022, Thiel donated $15 million to the Republican Ohio senatorial primary campaign of JD Vance, who alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”
Thiel also donated at least $10 million to the Arizona Republican Senate primary race of Blake Masters, who also claimed Trump won the 2020 election and who admires Lee Kuan Yew, the authoritarian founder of modern Singapore.
Masters lost. But thanks to Thiel’s munificence, Vance is now in the U.S. Senate.
Thiel and other wealthy self-described “libertarians” want Trump to be re-elected president in 2024. I’ll get to the reason in a moment.
What connects Thiel to the bank bailouts?
Days before Silicon Valley Bank failed, Thiel’s venture firm, Founders Fund, advised clients to pull their deposits out. This contributed to the run on the bank.
Some $50 million of Thiel’s own money was still stuck in the bank. Then, guess what? Thiel and other rich depositors got bailed out by the Fed.
Charges of hypocrisy have been leveled at Thiel and other wealthy depositors who claim to be libertarians but were rescued by the government.
58 notes · View notes
mitchipedia · 2 years
Text
“The left wants a villain. The right wants a sugar daddy.”
— Peter Thiel helped build big tech. Now he wants to tear it all down. “Inside the billionaire investor’s journey from Facebook board member to an architect of the new American right.” By Elizabeth Dwoskin at The Washington Post.
211 notes · View notes
Text
Vivek Ramaswamy has described himself as an “outsider”, accusing rivals for the Republican presidential nomination of being “bought and paid for” by donors and special interests.
But the 38-year-old Ohio-based venture capitalist, whose sharp-elbowed and angry display stood out in the first Republican debate this week, has his own close ties to influential figures from both sides of the political aisle.
Prominent among such connections are Peter Thiel, the co-founder of tech giants PayPal and Palantir and a rightwing mega-donor, and Leonard Leo, the activist who has marshaled unprecedented sums in his push to stock federal courts with conservative judges.
Ramaswamy is a Yale Law School friend of JD Vance, the author of the bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy who enjoyed success in finance before entering politics. At Yale, Vance and Ramaswamy attended what the New Yorker called an “intimate lunch seminar for select students” that was hosted by Thiel. Last year, backed by Thiel and espousing hard-right Trumpist views, Vance won a US Senate seat in Ohio.
Thiel has since said he has stepped back from political donations. But he has backed Ramaswamy’s business career, supporting what the New Yorker called “a venture helping senior citizens access Medicare” and, last year, backing Strive Asset Management, a fund launched by Ramaswamy to attack environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies among corporate investors. Vance was also a backer.
Ramaswamy’s primary vehicle to success has been Roivant, an investment company focused on the pharmaceuticals industry founded in 2014.
The Roivant advisory board includes figures from both the Republican and Democratic establishments: Kathleen Sebelius, US health secretary under Barack Obama; Tom Daschle of South Dakota, formerly Democratic leader in the US Senate; and Olympia Snowe, formerly a Republican senator from Maine.
Ramaswamy’s links to Leo – recently the recipient of a $1.6BN donation from the industrialist Barre Seid, believed to be the biggest ever such gift, but now reportedly the subject an investigation by the attorney general of Washington DC – are many.
As reported by ProPublica and Documented, Ramaswamy has spoken at retreats staged by Teneo, a group Leo chairs and which aims to connect high-powered conservatives, to “crush liberal dominance” in American life.
Other Teneo speakers have reportedly included Ron DeSantis, the Florida Governor polling ahead of Ramaswamy in the Republican primary, and the former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who trails Ramaswamy and clashed with him on stage in Milwaukee.
ProPublica also linked Thiel to the genesis of the Teneo group. According to a document seen by The Guardian, Ramaswamy became a Teneo member in 2021.
Elsewhere, Ramaswamy is a board member of the Philanthropy Roundtable, a group with ties to Leo, and a member of the Federalist Society, the Leo-driven group which works to stock the courts with conservatives.
Ramaswamy has also spoken to and received an award from the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF), a group of Republican state treasurers.
In June, in South Carolina, the Post and Courier newspaper reported that last year, before launching his presidential bid, Ramaswamy attempted “to leverage his [Republican] connections to gain access [for Strive] to lucrative contracts to manage pension funds … [with] total assets of $39.6BN”.
Similar pushes were mounted in Missouri and Indiana, the paper said. Curtis Loftis, the South Carolina state treasurer, told the Post and Courier there was “nothing improper” about such approaches.
Asked about Ramaswamy’s claims to be an outsider in light of his links to rightwing donors, activists and establishment figures, a campaign spokesperson told The Guardian: “Vivek has lived the American dream and has had tremendous success in business.”
“There’s a colossal difference between someone who has friendships and business relationships with wealthy individuals and politicians who change their policies and positions to please their Super Pac donors,” they added.
In the Wisconsin debate, Ramaswamy flourished in the absence of Donald Trump, the former US president who faces 91 criminal charges but nonetheless leads Republican polling by huge margins.
Amid speculation that Ramaswamy might end up Trump’s running mate, Reed Galen, a Republican operative turned co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, called Ramaswamy “a classic 2020s America tech bro bullshit artist … Trump for the 21st century”.
Ramaswamy’s claim to be an outsider, Galen said, was part of his “fundamental understanding … that MAGA [the pro-Trump Republican base] wants him to show that the rest of these people [in the primary] are politicians. He’s willing to be the showman … the outsider. Anti-establishment. ‘If anything is there, I dislike it because it’s there.’ You know, ‘I’m going to have fun with this. I’m not going to take it seriously because you’re a bunch of hacks and goons.’”
But in another sense, regarding Ramaswamy’s ties to the likes of Leo and Thiel, Galen said: “I think that he’s an insider.”
“He walks into a room with Leonard Leo and says, ‘What do you need me to do?’ … And they’re like, ‘Here’s what we want you to do. Here’s what we need you to do.’ Right?”
“Do I think [Ramaswamy] cares about [issues like restricting] abortion? No, not particularly. I don’t think he has a firmly held belief on it. But if he thinks that it will help him, and in exchange for that Leonard Leo will throw a little chicken feed of the $1.6BN that old man gave him, to help him? Sure, what the hell?”
“He didn’t ever think he’d get this far. So now he’s just gonna push it as far as he can.”
Ramaswamy, Galen said, was closely tied to a world of donors and non-profits in which Leo is “certainly at the center. And this movement only moves in one direction, and it’s toward the darkness. It’s towards authoritarianism. And it’s because it finds people like Ramaswamy. And the more that all these other candidates will now attack him, they will drive him further and further into the arms of those people.”
12 notes · View notes
cloobert · 2 months
Text
The Steroid Olympics
Tumblr media
There's been some talk floating around online lately about The Enhanced Games, including an episode of the Trashfuture podcast I'd certainly recommend.
I've become fascinated--not because I'm a right-wing tech-and-immortality fetishist, but rather because of the specific and insidious way the project uses progressive language to hide its true nature. It's evil in a fascinating and specific way that leans on progressive language to do its dirty deeds.
First, I should explain the project. "What if the Olympics let every athlete do as many steroids as they want?" is the basic pitch. Going deeper, it's part of a certain subset of global capital's fascination with what's called here Human Enhancement: the search for immortality and transcendent physical power. It's also, importantly, a project trying to justify itself and in doing so get rid of the stigma around steroid use in sports (notably not the stigma around steroid use in, you know, HRT.) Also it's a for-profit project co-founded by a pharmaceutical CEO whose companies specialize in Human Enhancement fare.
Look at the tiles on the website:
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Pay the athletes. Science is real. Enhanced inclusive language. We'll absolutely look deeper, but there's already a very present sense of what a good friend of mind called crypsis.
Tumblr media Tumblr media
There's an almost convincing facsimile of progressive language here. But the tiger is lurking in the grass.
Let's enter some of these tiles. See how a camouflaged predator works.
Tumblr media
This is immediately insidious. There's a rhetorical conflation between antivaxxers and anyone who opposes to doping here. And remember, this organization is selling the fantasy of "what if athletes juice so hard they were superhuman."
Tumblr media
And then we get into the sloppy propaganda-history. It's a lineage more wrenched into place than discovered, and that makes no distinction between war, bloodsport, and sport in a more modern sense.
Tumblr media
Bufotenin (not bufotein) is the DMT-anolouge you get from licking toads. Perhaps not the same, conceptually, as anabolic steroid use.
Moving on from the bad history, we have this:
Tumblr media
Cherry picking science, in addition to simple lies. Remember, this is The Steroid Olympics. "When used properly" is mutually exclusive with "this is a sports body that gives prizes for every world record you set", right? No matter how much this talks about safety, the basic structure is unsafe for players. And to be clear, steroid abuse of the sort these games are about is *extremely* bad for you. Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America by Abraham Josephine Riesman, the excellent history of Vince McMahon and the Word Wrestling Federation, spends many a word on the awful ramifications of widespread steroid use in the WWF. Use of the kind that's necessary to become "superhuman" in the way this site sells is tremendously dangerous, and the site cherry picks research to hide this.
However, this part isn't the most egregious.
The crypsis, the hiding in the grass, becomes central in the Enhanced Inclusive Language portion.
Tumblr media Tumblr media
This is the kind of thing that would go viral on here maybe 10 years ago. A single deprecated theory on etymology being sold as the primary one to create a specific narrative. The word "dope" does, in fact, come from the Dutch. However, per the Wall Street Journal:
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Notice also the "black athletes are disproportionately accused of doping." This is, by all accounts, true. But the issue there is pretty clearly not that doping is illegal. It's racism. And racism that would not be addressed by changing the language around doping.
This will continue in the next post:
5 notes · View notes
ravenkings · 5 months
Text
Tumblr media
tbh it's kind of shocking to me that more people don't talk about peter thiel on this website considering that he has like a james bond villain-level god complex and all the money and insidiously evil inclinations to match
7 notes · View notes
Text
Palantir’s NHS-stealing Big Lie
Tumblr media
I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then SAN FRANCISCO (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!
Tumblr media
Capitalism's Big Lie in four words: "There is no alternative." Looters use this lie for cover, insisting that they're hard-nosed grownups living in the reality of human nature, incentives, and facts (which don't care about your feelings).
The point of "there is no alternative" is to extinguish the innovative imagination. "There is no alternative" is really "stop trying to think of alternatives, dammit." But there are always alternatives, and the only reason to demand that they be excluded from consideration is that these alternatives are manifestly superior to the looter's supposed inevitability.
Right now, there's an attempt underway to loot the NHS, the UK's single most beloved institution. The NHS has been under sustained assault for decades – budget cuts, overt and stealth privatisation, etc. But one of its crown jewels has been stubbournly resistant to being auctioned off: patient data. Not that HMG hasn't repeatedly tried to flog patient data – it's just that the public won't stand for it:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/nov/21/nhs-data-platform-may-be-undermined-by-lack-of-public-trust-warn-campaigners
Patients – quite reasonably – do not trust the private sector to handle their sensitive medical records.
Now, this presents a real conundrum, because NHS patient data, taken as a whole, holds untold medical insights. The UK is a large and diverse country and those records in aggregate can help researchers understand the efficacy of various medicines and other interventions. Leaving that data inert and unanalysed will cost lives: in the UK, and all over the world.
For years, the stock answer to "how do we do science on NHS records without violating patient privacy?" has been "just anonymise the data." The claim is that if you replace patient names with random numbers, you can release the data to research partners without compromising patient privacy, because no one will be able to turn those numbers back into names.
It would be great if this were true, but it isn't. In theory and in practice, it is surprisingly easy to "re-identify" individuals in anonymous data-sets. To take an obvious example: we know which two dates former PM Tony Blair was given a specific treatment for a cardiac emergency, because this happened while he was in office. We also know Blair's date of birth. Check any trove of NHS data that records a person who matches those three facts and you've found Tony Blair – and all the private data contained alongside those public facts is now in the public domain, forever.
Not everyone has Tony Blair's reidentification hooks, but everyone has data in some kind of database, and those databases are continually being breached, leaked or intentionally released. A breach from a taxi service like Addison-Lee or Uber, or from Transport for London, will reveal the journeys that immediately preceded each prescription at each clinic or hospital in an "anonymous" NHS dataset, which can then be cross-referenced to databases of home addresses and workplaces. In an eyeblink, millions of Britons' records of receiving treatment for STIs or cancer can be connected with named individuals – again, forever.
Re-identification attacks are now considered inevitable; security researchers have made a sport out of seeing how little additional information they need to re-identify individuals in anonymised data-sets. A surprising number of people in any large data-set can be re-identified based on a single characteristic in the data-set.
Given all this, anonymous NHS data releases should have been ruled out years ago. Instead, NHS records are to be handed over to the US military surveillance company Palantir, a notorious human-rights abuser and supplier to the world's most disgusting authoritarian regimes. Palantir – founded by the far-right Trump bagman Peter Thiel – takes its name from the evil wizard Sauron's all-seeing orb in Lord of the Rings ("Sauron, are we the baddies?"):
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/01/the-palantir-will-see-you-now/#public-private-partnership
The argument for turning over Britons' most sensitive personal data to an offshore war-crimes company is "there is no alternative." The UK needs the medical insights in those NHS records, and this is the only way to get at them.
As with every instance of "there is no alternative," this turns out to be a lie. What's more, the alternative is vastly superior to this chumocratic sell-out, was Made in Britain, and is the envy of medical researchers the world 'round. That alternative is "trusted research environments." In a new article for the Good Law Project, I describe these nigh-miraculous tools for privacy-preserving, best-of-breed medical research:
https://goodlawproject.org/cory-doctorow-health-data-it-isnt-just-palantir-or-bust/
At the outset of the covid pandemic Oxford's Ben Goldacre and his colleagues set out to perform realtime analysis of the data flooding into NHS trusts up and down the country, in order to learn more about this new disease. To do so, they created Opensafely, an open-source database that was tied into each NHS trust's own patient record systems:
https://timharford.com/2022/07/how-to-save-more-lives-and-avoid-a-privacy-apocalypse/
Opensafely has its own database query language, built on SQL, but tailored to medical research. Researchers write programs in this language to extract aggregate data from each NHS trust's servers, posing medical questions of the data without ever directly touching it. These programs are published in advance on a git server, and are preflighted on synthetic NHS data on a test server. Once the program is approved, it is sent to the main Opensafely server, which then farms out parts of the query to each NHS trust, packages up the results, and publishes them to a public repository.
This is better than "the best of both worlds." This public scientific process, with peer review and disclosure built in, allows for frequent, complex analysis of NHS data without giving a single third party access to a a single patient record, ever. Opensafely was wildly successful: in just months, Opensafely collaborators published sixty blockbuster papers in Nature – science that shaped the world's response to the pandemic.
Opensafely was so successful that the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care commissioned a review of the programme with an eye to expanding it to serve as the nation's default way of conducting research on medical data:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/better-broader-safer-using-health-data-for-research-and-analysis/better-broader-safer-using-health-data-for-research-and-analysis
This approach is cheaper, safer, and more effective than handing hundreds of millions of pounds to Palantir and hoping they will manage the impossible: anonymising data well enough that it is never re-identified. Trusted Research Environments have been endorsed by national associations of doctors and researchers as the superior alternative to giving the NHS's data to Peter Thiel or any other sharp operator seeking a public contract.
As a lifelong privacy campaigner, I find this approach nothing short of inspiring. I would love for there to be a way for publishers and researchers to glean privacy-preserving insights from public library checkouts (such a system would prove an important counter to Amazon's proprietary god's-eye view of reading habits); or BBC podcasts or streaming video viewership.
You see, there is an alternative. We don't have to choose between science and privacy, or the public interest and private gain. There's always an alternative – if there wasn't, the other side wouldn't have to continuously repeat the lie that no alternative is possible.
Tumblr media
Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.
Tumblr media
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/08/the-fire-of-orodruin/#are-we-the-baddies
Tumblr media
Image: Gage Skidmore (modified) https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peter_Thiel_(51876933345).jpg
CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en
516 notes · View notes
titleknown · 1 year
Link
In other news, Peter Thiel is a cartoonishly supervillainous fascist who deserves to be put down like a rabid dog.
44 notes · View notes
its-gita-time · 1 year
Text
HI I’m going to be on this livestream in an hour! It’s for supporters of Tech Won’t Save Us, a really excellent podcast hosted by Paris Marx.
Tumblr media
We will be crowning the worst person in tech. It was a bracket, but we’re down to two choices: Peter Thiel vs Elon Musk. You can vote here!
22 notes · View notes
kramlabs · 5 months
Text
“Finding” antibodies in a human (after synthetic exosome injection) vs designing antibodies in a lab
Tumblr media Tumblr media
:
Tumblr media Tumblr media
*george Webb…. Not sure what to think.
3 notes · View notes
msclaritea · 1 year
Text
This article is from 2019 and never more important than now. Maybe people didn't take it seriously then. I hope they will, now.
"Shortly after World War II, when Europe lay in ruin and humanity was newly traumatized by the spectacle of organized violence that an authoritarian regime could achieve in the industrial epoch, the Western World experienced a sudden cultural shift. This new regime of thought is sometimes called postmodernism, but that term is obscure and overused; a better way to think about this is that there was no longer a unifying narrative, a guiding thread that united humans in the West. Whereas some countries might have previously had religious bonds, or ethnic bonds, or monarchial bonds, or even political bonds around, say, an authoritarian leader, suddenly there were none anymore — or at least none that were universally believed. Individualism and identity were more important, and politicians and legal bodies would now have to consider how to govern subjects in an ambiguous, pluralistic, multicultural world.
At the same time, it was becoming clear that the forces that shaped the world — the power to  organize society, or to exterminate it — were in the hands of scientists and technologists. The atom bomb, the intercontinental ballistic missile, the radio, the car, electrification, the refrigerator and the moon landing all happened in a span of about a hundred years. Science and technology spurred World War II, and led to its conclusion. And as the war receded from memory, it was apparent that the areas of greatest economic growth were all in technical fields — computers, engineering, communications, biotech and material science.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, a French philosopher who studied the condition of knowledge in this new era, realized that technology had changed the way that humans even thought about what knowledge was. Knowledge that computers could not process or manage — for instance, the ability to think critically or analyze qualitatively — was increasingly devalued, while the kinds of knowledge that computers could process became more important. As Lyotard wrote:
The miniaturisation and commercialisation of machines is already changing the way in which learning is acquired, classified, made available, and exploited....The nature of knowledge cannot survive unchanged within this context of general transformation. It can fit into the new channels, and become operational, only if learning is translated into quantities of information. We can predict that anything in the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable in this way will be abandoned... Along with the hegemony of computers comes a certain logic, and therefore a certain set of prescriptions determining which statements are accepted as “knowledge” statements.
Lyotard wrote this in 1978, before the modern internet even existed. Today, the idea that computational forms of knowledge — and/or the kinds of people who traffic in that knowledge — are more valuable to our society seems to be universal. Thanks to generous grants from the tech industry and well-heeled nonprofits like the Mellon Foundation, humanities academics across the world have been spurred to do more research in what is called the "digital humanities" — a vague term that often means applying statistical and quantitative tools to data sets that involved humanities research, such as literary corpuses. The tech industry investments in digital humanities fulfills Lyotard's prophecy that society would cease to see the humanities' brand of knowledge as useful; that it would attempt remake the humanities into a discipline characterized by discrete information, rather than a means of analyzing, considering, and philosophizing the world.
In the same essay, Lyotard actually distinguishes between two different types of knowledge: the "positivist" kind, that is applicable to technology; and the "hermenutic" kind of knowledge. Hermeneutics, meaning the study of interpretation, is what the humanities (and to some extent social sciences) concerns itself with. One can see how this kind of knowledge might be difficult for computers to catalogue and use. The idea that a computer could produce a literary analysis of a Vonnegut short story sounds absurd because it is: this is not the way that computers process data, this is not what humans generally regard computers as useful for, and it is certainly not what they are designed to do by the tech companies. Unsurprisingly, then, this type of humanities knowledge has become devalued, and not even considered "knowledge" by many.
So this leads us to a predicament in which slowly, since the postwar era, humanities skills and associated knowledge have been devalued, while STEM knowledge — an acronym for "Science, Tech, Engineering and Math," meaning the kind of quantitative knowledge associated with technology — reigns supreme. One of the most interesting places that you can see this trend is in fiction: the kinds of heroes and protagonists that people admire and look up to in fiction are increasingly those with STEM knowledge, as these people are seen as heroes because we uncritically accept that STEM knowledge is what changes the world. There is a reason that Iron Man is a billionaire technologist, and Batman is a billionaire technologist, and The Hulk's namesake Bruce Banner has multiple PhDs in the Marvel canon, and that the mad scientist Rick Sanchez (of "Rick and Morty") is essentially an immortal, infinitely powerful being because of his ability to understand science and wield technology. We admire these people because they possess the kinds of skills that our society deems the most valuable, and we're told that we, like them, can use these skills to master the universe.
(There is a potent irony here, of course, in that it is artists who write these narratives, and artists who are partly responsible for creating and popularizing this kind of STEM-supremacist propaganda. Weirdly, though, you rarely see a superhero or a super-spy who started life as a painter, or a novelist, or a comic book artist.)
Moreover, in real life, people who possess technological knowledge, primarily the scions of Silicon Valley, are widely adulated, viewed as heroes who will inherently change society for the better. This manifests itself in various ways: some technologists, like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have set up philanthropic foundations to "solve" our social problems — though curiously, the means by which that happens always seems to enrich themselves and their fellow capitalists along the way. Some of them promise widespread social change for the better via their own businesses, as though running a for-profit tech company was in and of itself a gift to the world and a net positive for social cohesion: you see this in many tech companies that advertise themselves as operating "for good," such as in the PR rhetoric of Facebook.  Then, there are those who believe that their contribution to society will be helping us leave this planet, and who are investing heavily in private spaceflight companies with the ultimate intention of colonizing space; this includes both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
In all these cases, the idea that people with STEM knowledge are predestined to save the world is an idea has become so dominant we don’t even question it. Some call this attitude STEM chauvinism, though I prefer the moniker STEM Supremacy. The noun "supremacy," I believe, is called for, because of how the idea that STEM knowledge (and those who posses it) is superior to other forms of knowledge has become so hegemonic that our culture openly mocks those who possess other forms of knowledge — particularly the hermeneutic, humanities-type knowledge. There is a fount of memes about humanities majors and how useless their fields are; some of these memes depict humanities majors as graduating to working at low-wage jobs like McDonalds; others mock critical humanities majors (particularly gender studies) as being out-of-touch, social failures.
Such discourse is intersectional with other supremacist beliefs, such as patriarchy, and often these kinds of memes that celebrate STEM knowledge and mock humanities knowledge will simultaneously mock women and celebrate masculinity. It was unsurprising to me when, last year, it leaked that a Google engineer, James Damore, had circulated an anti-diversity manifesto in which he used discredited science to argue that there were biological reasons for the gender gap. He went on to argue that there were reasons men were more interested in computers and in leadership, and women less. Though Damore was fired, he maintains that many of his peers agreed with him. Such incidents speak to the ways that different chauvinist tendencies, one of STEM Supremacy and one of patriarchy, can intersect to form novel noxious political ideologies.
The concept of "STEM Supremacy" relies on a popular belief that STEM knowledge is synonymous with progress. Yet if you take this kind of belief a bit too far, you might be keen to abandon democratic ideals and start to believe that we really should live in a society in which the STEM nerds rule over us. This has resulted in a number of half-baked supremacists within the tech industry who advocate either for authoritarian technocracies or, more bizarrely, monarchy.
I’ll give a few brief examples. There’s Google engineer Justine Tunney, a former Occupy Wall Street activist who now calls for “open-source authoritarianism. ” Tunney has argued against democracy and in favor of a monarchy run by technologists, and advocated for the United States to bring back indentured servitude.
But perhaps best-known among the techno-monarchists is Mencius Moldbug, the nom de plume of Curtis Yarvin, a programmer and founder of startup Tlon — a startup that is backed at least in part by billionaire anti-democracy libertarian Peter Thiel, who famously once wrote he did not believe democracy and freedom were compatible, and expressed skepticism over women's suffrage. Moldbug's polemics are circular, semi-comprehensible, and blur political theory and pop culture; Corey Pein of The Baffler described his treatises as "archaic [and] grandiose," while being "heavily informed by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and George Lucas."
Both of these so-called thinkers constitute parts of a larger movement that calls itself "Dark Enlightenment," alternatingly known as "neoreactionaries." True to its name,  the political agenda of Dark Enlightenment includes a celebration of patriarchy, monarchy, and racialized theories of intelligence differentials. 
The notion that monarchy is popular again in Silicon Valley might sound absurd. We associate monarchies with stodgy, quaint medieval kingdoms, the opposite of the disruptive, fast-moving tech industry. And yet those in the tech industry who see monarchy as appealing are keen to point out how the hierarchical aspects of monarchial rule are actually familiar to their industry. As Pein mentions in his Baffler essay, Thiel delivered a lecture in 2012 in which he explained the connection:
A startup is basically structured as a monarchy. We don’t call it that, of course. That would seem weirdly outdated, and anything that’s not democracy makes people uncomfortable.
[But] it is certainly not representative governance. People don’t vote on things. Once a startup becomes a mature company, it may gravitate toward being more of a constitutional republic. There is a board that theoretically votes on behalf of all the shareholders. But in practice, even in those cases it ends up somewhere between constitutional republic and monarchy. Early on, it’s straight monarchy. Importantly, it isn’t an absolute dictatorship. No founder or CEO has absolute power. It’s more like the archaic feudal structure. People vest the top person with all sorts of power and ability, and then blame them if and when things go wrong.
[T]he truth is that startups and founders lean toward the dictatorial side because that structure works better for startups. It is more tyrant than mob because it should be. In some sense, startups can’t be democracies because none are. None are because it doesn’t work. If you try to submit everything to voting processes when you’re trying to do something new, you end up with bad, lowest common denominator type results.
The underpinnings of STEM Supremacy are, as I've laid out, complicated to see and stretch back to the end of World War II — but when put together they form a broader picture of where the philosopher-kings of the tech industry are heading, and what they believe. If we continue to live in a society that devalues humanities-type knowledge and glorifies STEM knowledge, this kind of thinking will persist, I fear. And the tech industry is partly responsible for cultivating this noxious worldview, in the sense that their PR apparatuses glorify STEM knowledge and encourage the public to view their leaders as demigods.
This isn't a unique phenomenon. Any situation where a certain ideology is denigrated and another valorized, there will be at some point a corresponding rise in a chauvinism in favor of the valorized ideology. The situation today is made more complicated by the fact that the tech industry benefits from the normalization of STEM Supremacist beliefs. The unearned trust that the public has for tech startups and tech industry ideas, the lack of regulation, and the absurd valuations of companies that continue to lose money — this is all motivated by an underlying belief that these companies are innately good, their owners smart, and their work more vital than other fields. Whether they admit it or not, you can draw a line from the public relations departments of tech companies and Justine Tunney's call for "open-source authoritarianism."
Ironically, the only antidote to all this sophistry is the humanities — the kind of critical thinking that they entail, and the kind of thinking that it is impossible for computers to do. I've often wondered if part of the tech industry's investment in digital humanities is designed to help stave off critical discourse or criticism of their companies. Indeed, by remapping the idea of what knowledge is in the first place, the tech industry is helping to realize a future in which we lack even the language to think critically about their role in society. Or maybe even a future in which they rule over us as monarchial, benevolent dictators — at least in their eyes. Perhaps this was the plan all along. (Oh yeah. It was)
By KEITH A. SPENCER
Keith A. Spencer is a senior editor at Salon who edits Salon's science/health vertical. His book, "A People's History of Silicon Valley: How the Tech Industry Exploits Workers, Erodes Privacy and Undermines Democracy," was released in 2018. Follow him on Twitter at @keithspencer, or on Facebook here.
_______________________________________________
THESE FUCKERS IN SILICON VALLEY WANT A MONARCHY !!
Tumblr media
"Few Catholics outside the D.C area are likely familiar with Fr. Arne, who never wrote a book or made national headlines. Yet a list of those who appear in Eberstadt’s book to laud his role among “billionaires and Supreme Court Justices” indicates the breadth of his influence: George Weigel, Fr. Thomas Joseph White, Arthur Brooks, Hadley Arkes, Peter Thiel, and Fr. Paul Scalia, to name but a few..."
"From his perch on K Street at the Catholic Information Center (CIC), Father Arne Panula shepherded some of the nation’s power brokers into the Catholic Church..." Mary Eberstadt
Tumblr media
“As recently as 2017, Billy [Barr] was on the board of directors of the DC-based Catholic Information Center, led by the ultraright and secretive group Opus Dei…Its board includes the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, and White House counsel Pat Cipollone..."
*Above thread is chockful of more information!*
8 notes · View notes