The Tech Moguls’ Ultimate Goal
The totalitarian dreams of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and their pals
Peter Thiel is a German-born lawyer and investor who co-founded PayPal together with Elon Musk and others, made billions from his early-stage investment in Facebook, and founded Palantir, a data analytics firm that has won some $2.9 billion in U.S. Government contracts since 2009 and another half billion or so in contracts with Britain’s National Health Service and other UK entities.
Thiel has become an éminence grise of sorts to the libertarian tech mogul crowd and has been a mentor to J.D. Vance, whom he hired to work in his investment firm, making Vance a wealthy man by most standards, with an estimated net worth of $10 million. In 2009, shortly after the financial crisis that sparked the Great Recession, Thiel published a short article in “Cato Unbound”, a newsletter of the libertarian Cato Institute, which served as his equivalent of Martin Luther nailing his ninety-five theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517.
“I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years”, Thiel writes, “to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself ‘libertarian’. “But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He goes on to say, “I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.”
To escape from politics, Thiel turns his attention to outer space, seasteading, and cyberspace, which he thinks may “create a new space for freedom”. Fair enough. If his pal and former partner Elon Musk can get him to outer space, I’m all for it. If he wants to set up little libertarian spaces on floating platforms or uninhabited islands, go for it. But cyberspace… that is something different. Instead of fleeing the world of politics, he seeks to transcend it.
“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”.
That’s an extraordinary statement. He wrote that in 2009, but 16 years later his words are proven prophetic. I think we have seen how the Internet has created new worlds that have impacted and forced change on the existing social and political order. It is not a pretty sight. Maybe you like the idea of a social order created and run by a tiny coterie of extraordinarily wealthy men (and they are all men), but the problem is that such a world would be run entirely for their own benefit.
I don’t much like the idea of benevolent overlords shaping the world to improve conditions for everyone, but I like even less the fact of a small group of malevolent overlords shaping the world to their own exclusive benefit. Total freedom for the plutocrats and widespread misery for everyone else. A world beyond politics where the rich have everything ordered as they want, while everyone else can go hang.
Politics, like government, is messy, with people and groups jockeying for position and trying to elbow aside their rivals and ending up with compromises that don’t fully satisfy anyone. But it is infinitely preferable to a world run by a small group of self-appointed philosopher kings.
And so, as always, we come back to Plato who, in addition to banning music in his Republic, never quite figured out who was to appoint or anoint the philosopher kings. Socrates admits that only in the ideal state will a philosopher be able to achieve his full potential and be the savior of his country. But how then can the ideal state be created if it is ruled by lesser men? In practice, whether in Greece or Rome, the default option was for rulers to be selected by men of property, who no matter how virtuous they might be, would choose as rulers those most likely to protect and advance their interests.
Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and their ilk seek to transcend those limits, to appoint themselves as philosopher kings and amass as much money and power as humanly possible. And no doubt they all share Peter Thiel’s stand against “the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual”. Not for everyone, of course, but for those with the means. The best way they, especially Musk, can think of to achieve these goals is to destroy as much of government as they can.
They can’t get rid of Congress and the Supreme Court, and they are answerable, if at all, to the President. But there lies the whole Federal bureaucracy, which operates the daily machinery of government. It applies laws and regulations, manages government payments, monitors and forecasts the weather, maintains national parks and monuments, cares for veterans, administers foreign aid, disburses funds for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps, inspects meat and dairy products, ensures the safety of medicines and cars, conducts and funds medical research, administers the Census, and carries out a thousand other functions that help keep us safe, healthy, educated, and free.
Musk, Thiel, and their pals cannot tolerate this. It is already hard to see how the government prevents them in any significant way from doing anything they might want. OK, if Musk shoots someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue he will probably be arrested and charged – only Trump can do that and claim immunity. And if they decide suddenly that they want to drive their cars on the left side of the road instead of the right, the police will stop and fine them. These are pretty minor constraints, on a par with paying a smaller share of their income in taxes than the lady at the Jack in the Box drive-thru.
But if you have become accustomed to doing exactly what you want when you want, even these minor constraints feel like a major irritant, After all, these tech bros have created a new world and feel they should be free to order it as they wish.
I like to think that the Federal bureaucracy will prove more resilient than Musk & Co. think, not unlike the Hydra of Greek myth, which would grow two new heads for everyone Hercules or another hero chopped off.
As soon as Musk’s adolescent hitmen think they have permanently shuttered one agency and have moved on to another, some staff will be left and some guy in the server room will figure out how to reboot the system and find the missing data somewhere else in the cloud. Slowly, like the monster at the end of a horror movie, which everyone thinks is dead, but which then opens a gleaming yellow eye, there may still be some life in the old beast. It may prove harder to kill a sprawling bureaucracy than these tech moguls, whose every hint of a command is instantly translated into action, imagine. Their totalitarian dreams may be harder to realize than they think.
Politics and government will always be with us except, perhaps, in North Korea. And, having once visited that people’s paradise, I will always choose politics over Pyongyang.