SneerClub

Kayfabe.

Although one of the mortal risks of kayfabe has always been that the performers begin to buy too deeply into the performance, cf. Macho Man Randy Savage's rap album

A lot of this is complaints we've heard from Thiel before that are starting to get pretty tired, i.e. everything stagnated during the 1970s and the lack of immediately applicable Big Science since then means that there is no more Progress. But it is important to remember that Thiel and his fellow venture capitalists are in the business of selling money, and the most important price they attach to that money is not interest or equity, but ideological compliance. (I credit Del Johnson on Twitter for laying this out clearly and simply, and I dearly wish he would expand and diversify his platforms.) Thiel is enacting a pro-wrestling-style kayfabe performance to try to rotate the market into which he is selling his money.

It is most interesting that Thiel's position here is essentially "how do you do, fellow Christians," and he offers very little if anything to people of a more technical bent. In fact, if this was your first encounter with Thiel, you would be forgiven for thinking he was essentially against technology. The only meaningful message here is that Thiel no longer has any upside in investing in technical enterpreneurs, and instead wants to preserve his wealth and infleunce by throwing in with the remnants of the evangelical movement as the Trump era draws to a close. In a sense, he's trying to salvage his investment in Trump by pivoting to explicitly Christian rhetoric and downplaying his prior career.

Two notes stand out to convince me that Thiel is using (and perhaps trapped in) the logic of kayfabe:

Oppenheimer lamented, "We need new knowledge like we need a hole in the head." Nick Bostrom has proposed "preventative policing" and "global compute governance" in his Vulnerable World Hypothesis. Eliezer Yudkowsky's latest book is If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.

Two out of three of these people have taken money from Thiel or his close associates. Thiel helped to create the condition he is describing here. Vince McMahon may have shot up 'roids and stepped into the ring 30 years ago (something which turned me off to WWF/E programming during its golden age), but he was also ultimately the guy signing everyone's paychecks and dictating the storylines.

Q: How do you view Silicon Valley's "Techno-Optimist Manifesto"?

It represents a kind of corporate utopianism. In the 1990s, there was a broad cultural optimism that technology would solve everything. But by 2025, that optimism has shrunk. Today's visions are narrower, less inclusive, and far less confident. The grand, utopian projects have given way to incremental gains, overshadowed by fears of collapse.

Thiel is essentially "cutting a promo" on Andreessen's prior screed, and part of that is conflating it with the relatively unambitious, unaccomplished startup market that continues to exist in its wake. But there is surely no effective acrimony behind the scenes. We will continue to see A16Z money invested right alongside Thiel Capital, Founders' Fund, etc. We will continue to see smaller A16Z and YCombinator startups attach themselves as limpets to Thiel-funded platform companies. We will continue to see plenty of Silicon Valley cash on deposit with Thiel's whatever-the-hell-LOTR-reference-it-is-this-week bank. As there is no real enmity, Thiel's likely focus going forward is as the main salesman getting Midwest and Southern MAGA money into the SV ecosystem, while giving these people a figleaf of deniability that they are still "conservatives" and not funding all the things they have been programmed to hate about California.

Lastly, I find that Thiel reveals what will likely be his fatal flaw:

Q: Is the Antichrist an individual person, or an institution?

Early Christians thought it was Nero. Lutherans and Anglicans pointed to the Pope. But until the modern age, humanity lacked the power to destroy itself. That has changed. Because our era uniquely possesses this destructive capacity, the Antichrist today can only be understood as an individual, not merely an institution.

I cannot take most of Thiel's 20 years of whining about "no progress since 1971" seriously; it simply ignores all the technological benefits that have primarily accrued at an individual level. Thiel ignores all this because it does not offer an easy place for him to slot himself in as a rentier. But I am willing to consider that he sincerely, durably believes in Rene Girard's theory of the scapegoat as central social figure. Moreover, he implies here that he still believes in the social media he has funded as a tool to "focus fire" on these supposedly necessary scapegoats. That is very likely part of his sales pitch behind closed doors if you're, say, a franchisee magnate from Alabama looking to diversify into alternative investments. And while Thiel himself has wisely stayed above the Twitter fray, he's seen how his colleagues can use it to manipulate the public dialogue.

However, as I argued in another forum earlier this week, I firmly believe that short-form social media as the "public square" is dying. Facebook's properties are at best plateauing and at worst stagnating, Twitter is a financial disaster (and really always has been), Bluesky is burning runway. People are retreating into more private settings with barriers to entry like Discord servers, and fitfully grasping towards healthier boundaries in online behavior. Partly due to abuses incited by Thiel's colleagues.

This is why I wonder if Thiel is trapped in the logic of kayfabe. Like the aging wrestler, he needs something to be true that just plain isn't. And though he remains a feared and reviled figure this decade, each time he steps into the ring from here on out will be on ever weaker footing.