Whenever I see billionaires saying something like this, I read it as “we’re so confident that our power is now unassailable that we don’t need to pretend anymore.” I’m sure a lot of our oligarchs–including many elected Democrats–believe this as well, but they’re less sure that the system has now been adequately rigged and that the inertia is large enough that it cannot be overcome. The further along things get, the more I suspect we’ll see public takes like this.
This. The billionaires were playing things a little coy, but with the AI shit, they KNOW the govt is useless and that people are too atomized to stop them so they’ll just volunteer that they’re building a surveillance state/trying to automate out all human labor/consuming all the natural resources/etc". No inferences needed.
Many of them have been openly talking about building luxury bunkers, secret farms, working on logistics for how to keep their private security loyal to them (even as far as using electrocution collars), because they are well aware the systems they’ve been perpetuating are not sustainable and one way or another, the end is nigh. It’s not like any of that will actually end up insulating them in the long term, but as you and Philosoraptor already pointed out, they’re deeply deluded by their own success so far and sure as hell aren’t ever going to compromise with their subjects, the dirty masses. The abject failure of “liberal democracy” (capitalism) along with the approaching horizon of its own death that it created is right out there in the open for anyone with eyes to see.
There was this Harvard study a couple decades ago where they had a group of people play monopoly and gave one person a clear advantage. Most of the time the person with the obvious advantage still believed they were the better player.
The parasite class are morons. They just have all the resources and the contradictions are rapidly sharpening.
Of course, he knows. He is one of the people doing ripping off.
He is the embodiment of the smart Capitalists seeing things the same way as Marxists, just with the moral polarity reversed. I haven’t read it, but every summary of his book I heard is basically: “try to be a monopoly and don’t enter a market if you can’t have a monopoly. Falling rate of profits suck and superprofits and lack of competition is good if you’re the one profiting from it”
Thiel is fucking insane. His antichrist shit is batshit nonsense.
He’s the antichrist. He is just trying to trick rubes into looking elsewhere.
If the antichrist was a real thing that existed he would absolutely be one of my picks. Good thing it isn’t and is just an insane fantasy that unhinged people have.
I dunno, someone anti “love your neighbour like yourself” sounds pretty real to me (and the dominant political group in the post-Keynesian/late-stage Capitalism west)
Listen, I grew up super religious. The idea of the antichrist is a lot more than just anti-love-everyone.
Same, Evangelical Christian. I was making a point.
He is a literal actual blood-consuming vampire.
Yes. And he looks like one too.
It is morbidly fun to see the current capitalist crisis slowly rebirth third-positionism among the smarter reactionaries.
You just know that Thiel thinks Sauron is the protagonist of LOTR.
He named everything based on the evil things from LOTR, so you don’t even need to guess lol
If you think sports fans are crazy wait till you see the tons of people batting out for the billionaire team fucking em over and not getting a dime for it
Everytime I read or hear about piece of shit ghoul Peter Thiel, it straight up makes me sick.
I fell down a rabbit hole chasing these sources, and in the true communist fashion, it is now our rabbit hole :bugs-stalin:
- First, the tweet above.
- The pictures are from Peter Thiel: Capitalism Isn’t Working for Young People (archive.is), which is a recent interview of Thiel.
- The article mentions leaked emails in the byline. Digging around, I think I found the leaked emails on somebody’s substack. I obviously haven’t verified, but you can see the whole exchange.
- The relevant section on Socialism is a little over half way down
There are many themes that could be developed more here; let me make a few quick points for now:
Nick – I certainly would not suggest that our policy should be to embrace Millennial attitudes unreflectively. I would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why. And, from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate; and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.
What I would add to Mark’s summary is that, in a healthier society, the handover from the Boomers to the younger generations should have started some time ago (maybe as early as the 1990s for Gen X), and that for a whole variety of reasons, this generational transition has been delayed as the Boomers have maintained an iron grip on many US institutions. When the handover finally happens in the 2020s, it will therefore happen more suddenly and perhaps more dramatically than people expect or than such generational transitions have happened in the past. And that’s why it’s especially important for us to think about these issues and try and get ahead of them.
One example of such an “iron grip” from my colleague Eric Weinstein: Of the 67 top research universities in the US, 62 have Baby Boomer presidents (three are Silent Generation and only two are Generation X). Today, the median age of these 67 university presidents is 65 years-old… And this is very different from the recent past. Only thirty years ago, in 1990, the median age of these same university presidents was a much lower 52-years old; the older generation did not completely refuse to give up power; and therefore much greater generational diversity was to be found in university leadership.
Or, to take a small but suggestive example from US Presidential leadership: Three Presidents (Clinton, Bush 43, and Trump) were all born within 70 days of one another, in the summer of 1946. These three people were literally at the head of the Baby Boomer class that was born nine months after World War II ended in September 1945. In my mind, they somehow derived much of their power from the self-referential narcissism of the Boomers as this unusually large cohort of people voted for people like themselves and could afford to ignore anyone younger… and again, this iron grip has been maintained for a shockingly long period of time; but it will not be maintained forever.
Every last person within 2 links of that tweet is utterly high on their own position in society, substitutes their personal material benefit for economic/human progress, and patronizing towards anyone who believes in something that benefits the majority of humanity.
