彼得·提尔，相信反基督的技术寡头
PayPal创始人可能是科技行业几十年来最具影响力的人物。 他传播阴谋论，但他并不是一个与现实离异的怪胎：他看到特朗普的崛起几乎比其他人都早，他是副总统J·D·万斯事业的幕后黑手。 而他的国防和间谍公司Palantir 已经与世界各国政府签订了合同
2016年绿巨人霍根起诉小报"高克"未经他同意发布性视频时，没有人给他赢的机会。 但霍根胜诉，获赔1.4亿美元损失，导致网民灭亡。 他秘密资助霍根的律师。 他想报复Gawker，因为它嘲笑了他多年，并且把他当成同性恋。
法律胜利之后 PayPal的创始人Thiel认为陪审团对霍根的支持预示着社会的深刻转变。 纽约房地产开发商在当年的选举中，当时，唐纳德·特朗普仍然是一个不太可能的候选人。 他后来告诉了大西洋。 数周后，他在共和党国民大会发表演讲，帮助发布 Trump的政治生涯。
十年后，58岁的彼得·蒂尔(Peter Thiel)是自20世纪70年代末史蒂夫·乔布斯(Steve Jobs)出现以来，硅谷最具影响力的人物。 他是一个自由主义者，反对技术保守主义的建立者，他支持政治人物的兴起，例如副总统J·D·万斯(J. D. Vance)，他在他的投资基金之一Mithril Capital为他工作，德克萨斯州资深共和党参议员泰德·克鲁斯(Ted Cruz). 他激发了美国的技术民族主义，反对二战后诞生的国际组织，如联合国和北约。 9月下旬，他参加了在纳什维尔的系列讲座，他在讲座中警告“反基督主义者”和管制人工智能的危险。 这不是他第一次隐蔽攻击那些在宗教言论中监管大科技的人。 去年他在旧金山，罗马和巴黎的类似会议上也这样做了。
“他是在硅谷追求这些极端主义、反民主思想的一小撮强大教派之父”。 称 Gil Durán, “30年来，他一直鼓吹反对民主和政府，他称之为`根本邪恶'，同时投资给政府提供监督的公司。 He 新增：“他对基督教言论的劫持掩盖了硅谷的真正宗教，许多人相信他们正在创造出一个叫做AI的神，它将赋予永恒的生命，让他们乘坐航天器前往天空，享受无尽的，丰富的天堂。 硅谷正在以自己的形象重塑基督教。”
他的智力行李在左边发出警报他反对税收，建立了一个在多个国家拥有居留权的公司机构，以尽量减少他的税收负担；拒绝被唤醒的运动，包括气候变化；厌恶大学；鼓励创业创始人藐视监管限制。
几个月前，他前往阿根廷，在那里购买了一座豪宅。 他与哈维尔·米莱政府建立了密切的联系，并正在巴塔哥尼亚探险土地，以恢复他创建自治城市的梦想，这些城市根据自己的法律运作，独立于其他行政当局。 这与他在Próspera Zede(洪都拉斯罗阿坦岛的一个城市居民点)推动的类似
Thiel也是全球科技景观中最黑暗的公司之一Palantir的创始人。 在九一一袭击事件三年后，当布什政府把安全置于公民自由之上时，Palantir处理大量数据库，以寻找模式和弱点。 该公司以J.R.R.Tolkien的"魔戒之王"中的一个物体命名，由于中情局的合同而诞生。 今天，全世界各国政府都使用其服务。
“他不相信民主，人类在没有某种权威的情况下能够和平共处，”哲学家、维也纳大学教授马克·科克尔伯格(Mark Coeckelbergh)解释了伦理与技术之间的关系。 “Thiel相信精英的角色；他认为如果你不把人民置于专制政权之下，暴力事件就会发生。 他相信有一群像自己这样的有远见的精英，他们应该领导世界。 他认为创建AI的技术公司应该自由经营，不受管制或限制，以加速进步。”
他是一个充满矛盾的古怪的人。 正如"The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and the Rise of the Silicon Valley Oligarchs"的作者马克斯·查夫金(Max Chafkin)描述的那样，他非常聪明，但也在社会上尴尬。 蒂尔于1967年出生于德国法兰克福，是一位工程师的儿子，他的工作带走了世界各地的家庭。 在种族隔离的南非呆了几年之后，在蒂尔还是个孩子的时候，这个家庭移民到了美国。 他们定居在旧金山湾区的福斯特市。 在那里，1980年代初期，与共和派和福音派基督教家长一起，蒂尔在棋盘和科幻小说书中长大。 在学校里，他被认为是一位被教师视为杰出的学生，被同学视为书呆子。 他无穷无尽地阅读了幻想和科幻——罗伯特·A·海因莱因，艾萨克·阿西莫夫，阿瑟·C·克拉克——但他最喜欢的作品是"魔戒之王"，他承认自己重读了十几次。
1985年到达斯坦福大学时，由于他傲慢，内向的性格，他成为了与欺凌相近的笑话和嘲讽的对象。 他在那里结识了自由主义哲学家艾恩·兰德(Ayn Rand)，并发现了勒内·吉拉德(René Girard)和他的模仿欲望理论。 法国思想家写道：“ 我们渴望别人想要的东西，因为我们模仿他们的欲望。 ”蒂尔参加了吉拉德的斯坦福课程，并阅读了一些作品，如《敬双行》：文学、米梅西斯和人类学论文。 正是在这一时期，他发展了自己的反共主义和对大学和知识精英的不信任。 他的观点使多年来他积聚的怨恨得到自由。
Girard的作品给他留下了深刻的印记。 蒂尔围绕法国哲学家和人类学家的思想发展出令人不安的政治，社会和技术理论，认为模仿性欲望会导致嫉妒，社会竞争以及作为释放阀门的替罪羊的出现以避免大规模冲突。 由此他关于"反基督"(Antichrist, Armageddon)和"卡特川"(Katechon)的理论，一个希腊语术语的意思是限制"反基督".
称 Gil Durán, “他对于他个人神学所围绕的反神论者，“这是反基督教的，他的布道指责他的所有政治敌人可能是反基督教的媒介。 他鼓励人们把我们当前的政治看成是存在于善与恶之间的战斗。 他指责格蕾塔·图恩伯格，亚历山大·奥卡西奥-科尔特斯，对AI的批评者，甚至教皇都是可能的安提克里斯。 这纯粹是胡言乱语，如果硅谷亿万富翁想看到邪恶的面孔，他们应该照镜子。”
他还借鉴了保守派政治理论家如利奥·施特劳斯和卡尔·施密特的作品，后者是纳粹党的前党员。 他把关于自由民主缺陷的论文和吉拉德的模仿欲望理论混为一谈。 正如Coeckelbergh所解释的那样，“吉拉德对蒂耶尔的影响表现在文明、民主下的暴力威胁。 从卡尔·施密特(Carl Schmitt)看来，他采取这种朋友对敌人的思维，那里真的没有民主的地方"，因为我们必须时刻准备防御敌人。 在2009年，蒂尔写了一篇有争议的散文：“ 自1920年以来，福利受益者的大幅增加以及选举权的扩大——对自由主义者来说臭名昭著的两大选区——使得“资本主义民主”的notion变成了一种矛盾。 ” 在因这部作品遭到严厉批评后，他发表了一份没有解决问题的道歉。
“战争虚拟”的作者Roberto J. González教授分析了技术公司如何为新型战争武装军队，他相信Thiel的哲学思考除了说服一些投资者和高管“他们是拯救西方文明的崇高、甚至神圣使命的一部分 ” 外，没有什么影响。 但是，Thiel确实“通过其投资公司产生了巨大影响。 Thiel的风险投资公司创始人基金资助了Palantir、Anduril、Clearview AI、Flock Safety和其他获得大规模、数十亿美元政府合同的国防和监视新企业
离开斯坦福并在华尔街和华盛顿失败后，蒂尔回到旧金山地区幻灭，来自家人和朋友的融资钱开始设立基金投资技术创业。 1998年，他结识了俄罗斯出生的年轻工程师马克斯·列夫钦，他正在实验软件以交换IOUs. 他们共同创建了PayPal，这是一个用户之间的电子支付平台，可以让他们逃避政府控制——这个想法预见到了他日后会拥护的一些加密原则。
在PayPal 发布之后几个月，另一位年轻的工程师加入了他们：埃隆·穆斯克。 在公司经历了一段时间的内战后，蒂尔成为首席执行官。 他避开了银行监管，允许不受控制的金融运动，这一策略成为了锡耶主义的种子。 大约在那个时候，被称为PayPal黑手党的集团——该公司的前雇员和创始人——在特斯拉，SpaceX,OpenAI和YouTube等主要技术公司中成为投资者。 2002年，他们以超过15亿美元的价格将公司卖给eBay.
Ber Tarnoff与Muskism的Quinn Slobian合著，研究Tesla创始人的思想，Thiel“长期以来一直对退出国家的战略感兴趣
Thiel在PayPal的榜样，他在投资新兴公司时的大胆态度以及他的侵略风格在一本书中结晶了结实，《零到一：指出 on Startups》，或者《如何构建未来》，他在这本书中提出企业家几乎是神圣的，君主制比民主更有效率，教派是一个良好的组织模式。 Thiel鼓励打破规则，创建成功实现垄断的公司，他真正的痴迷，Chafkin 指出在他的传记中。 对Thiel来说，目标不是提高生产率或竞争力：而是从全新的概念或思想中制造垄断。
由于出售PayPal的收益，2004年他决定投资50万美元，由哈佛大学的一位名叫马克·扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)的二年级生创办的创业项目。 为了换取投资，他获得了新生社交网络的10%，这最终使他成为了一个有远见的人，他把自己管理公司的破坏性愿景强加给扎克伯格。 企业家必须是不可接触的，必须保留权力，必须打破规则才能取得成功。 以这种方式，扎克伯格在Facebook上崛起，被认为是新经济中最有害的公司之一。
投资Facebook的那一年，他创立了创始人基金，这是一家风险投资公司，旨在发现具有改变世界潜力的破坏性公司。 基金投资组合包括
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Peter Thiel, the tech oligarch who believes in the Antichrist
The PayPal founder is probably the most influential figure in the technology industry in decades. He spreads conspiracy theories, but he is not an eccentric divorced from reality: he saw Trump’s rise before almost anyone else, and he is behind the career of Vice President J. D. Vance. And his defense and espionage company, Palantir, has signed contracts with governments around the world
When Hulk Hogan sued the tabloid Gawker in 2016 for publishing a sexual video without his consent, no one gave him a chance of winning. But Hogan won the case and was awarded $140 million in damages, which led to the online outlet’s demise. Peter Thiel, one of Silicon Valley’s most shadowy figures, tipped the legal battle: he secretly funded Hogan’s lawyers. He wanted revenge on Gawker because it had ridiculed him for years and outed him as gay.
After that legal victory Thiel, the founder of PayPal, believed the jury’s support for Hogan signaled a deep social shift. He foresaw, before most, the victory of a New York real estate developer with a reputation as a womanizer in that year’s election. At the time, Donald Trump was still an unlikely candidate. “Wow, he might win the election,” Thiel thought, he later told The Atlantic. A few weeks after that he delivered a speech at the Republican National Convention that helped launch Trump’s political career.
A decade later, Peter Thiel, 58, is the most influential figure in Silicon Valley since Steve Jobs emerged in the late 1970s. A libertarian, anti-establishment promoter of technoconservatism, he is behind the rise of political figures such as Vice President J. D. Vance, who worked for him at Mithril Capital, one of his investment funds, and Ted Cruz, the senior Republican senator from Texas. He has inspired the United States’ technological nationalism and opposes international organizations born after World War II, such as the United Nations and NATO. In late September he took part in a lecture series in Nashville in which he warned about the “Antichrist” and the dangers of regulating artificial intelligence. This is not the first time he has cloaked attacks on those who would regulate Big Tech in religious rhetoric. He did the same last year at similar conferences in San Francisco, Rome and Paris.
“He is the father of a small but powerful sect that pursues these extremist, antidemocratic ideas in Silicon Valley,” says Gil Durán, a writer and journalist and author of The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, in an email interview. “For 30 years, he has preached against democracy and government, which he called ‘fundamentally evil,’ while investing in companies that provide surveillance to the government.” He adds: “His hijacking of Christian rhetoric conceals Silicon Valley’s true religion, where many believe they are creating a god called AI that will grant eternal life, let them travel to the heavens in spacecraft and enjoy an endless, abundant paradise. Silicon Valley is reshaping Christianity in its own image.”
His intellectual baggage alarms the left. He opposes taxes, has set up a corporate apparatus with residency in multiple countries to minimize his tax burden; rejects the woke movement, including climate change; loathes universities; and encourages start-up founders to flout regulatory limits.
A few months ago, he traveled to Argentina, where he has bought a mansion. He has forged close ties with Javier Milei’s government and is scouting land in Patagonia to revive his dream of creating autonomous cities that operate under their own laws, independent of other administrations. It’s something similar to what he promoted in Próspera Zede, an urban settlement on the Honduran island of Roatán that he wants to expand to other parts of the world.
Thiel is also the founder of Palantir, one of the darkest companies in the global tech landscape. Founded three years after the 9/11 attacks, when the Bush administration prioritized security over civil liberties, Palantir processes massive databases that search for patterns and vulnerabilities. The company, named after an object in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, was born thanks to a CIA contract. Today, governments around the world use its services.
“He does not believe in democracy, nor that human beings can live together peacefully without some authority,” explains philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh, a professor at the University of Vienna who studies the relationship between ethics and technology. “Thiel believes in the role of elites; he thinks that if you don’t keep people under an authoritarian regime, episodes of violence will occur. He believes there is an elite of visionaries like himself who should lead the world. He thinks the tech companies that created AI should operate freely, without regulation or limits, to accelerate progress.”
He is an eccentric man full of contradictions. As Max Chafkin, author of The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and the Rise of the Silicon Valley Oligarchs, describes him, he is very intelligent but also socially awkward. Thiel was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1967, the son of an engineer whose work took the family around the world. After spending a few years in apartheid South Africa, the family emigrated to the U.S. when Thiel was still a child. They settled in Foster City in the San Francisco Bay Area. There, in the early 1980s, with Republican and evangelical Christian parents, Thiel grew up amid chess pieces and science fiction books. In school, he was considered a brilliant student by teachers and a nerd by classmates. He read fantasy and science fiction endlessly — Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke — but his favorite work was The Lord of the Rings, which he admitted he had reread a dozen times.
When he arrived at Stanford University in 1985, he was the target of jokes and taunts that bordered on bullying because of his arrogant, introverted character. There he became acquainted with the libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand and discovered René Girard and his theory of mimetic desire. “We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires,” the French thinker wrote; Thiel attended Girard’s Stanford classes and read works such as To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis and Anthropology. It was during this period that he developed his anti-communism and his distrust of universities and intellectual elites. His views gave free rein to the resentment he had built up over the years.
Girard’s work profoundly marked him. Thiel developed disturbing political, social and technological theories around the French philosopher and anthropologist’s thought, which holds that mimetic desire leads to envy, social rivalry and the emergence of scapegoats who serve as a release valve to avoid mass conflict. From this comes his theory about the Antichrist, Armageddon and the Katechon, a Greek term meaning that which restrains the Antichrist.
“He has an unhealthy obsession with the Antichrist, the figure around which his personal theology revolves,” says Gil Durán. “It is anti-Christian, and his sermons accuse all his political enemies of being possible vectors of the Antichrist. He encourages people to view our current politics as an existential battle between good and evil. He accuses Greta Thunberg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, critics of AI and even the Pope of being possible Antichrists. It’s pure gibberish, but it’s also a kind of confession. If Silicon Valley billionaires want to see the face of evil, they should look in the mirror.”
He also drew on the work of conservative political theorists such as Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt, the latter a former member of the Nazi party. He mixed their theses on the deficiencies of liberal democracy with Girard’s theory of mimetic desire. As Coeckelbergh explains, “Girard’s influence on Thiel manifests in the threat of violence under civilization, under democracy. From Carl Schmitt, he takes this friend-versus-enemy thinking, where there is really no place for democracy” because we must always be ready to defend ourselves from the enemy. In 2009, Thiel wrote a controversial essay: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” After being harshly criticized for the piece, he issued an apology of sorts that did not settle the matter.
Professor Roberto J. González, author of War Virtually, which analyzes how tech companies are arming the military for a new kind of war, believes Thiel’s philosophical reflections have little impact beyond convincing some investors and executives “that they are part of a noble, even sacred, mission to rescue Western civilization.” But Thiel does have “immense impact through his investment firms. Thiel’s venture capital firm, Founders Fund, financed Palantir, Anduril, Clearview AI, Flock Safety and other defense and surveillance start-ups that have received massive, multibillion-dollar government contracts,” he concludes, highlighting the contradiction between Thiel’s libertarian ideas and his dependence on public contracts.
After leaving Stanford and failing in Wall Street and Washington, Thiel returned to the San Francisco area disillusioned, and raised money from family and friends to start a fund to invest in tech start-ups. In 1998, he met a young Russian-born engineer, Max Levchin, who was experimenting with software to exchange IOUs. Together they created PayPal, an electronic payments platform between users that allowed them to evade government control — an idea that anticipated some of the principles of cryptocurrencies he would later champion.
A few months after PayPal launched, another young engineer joined them: Elon Musk. After a period of internal wars at the company, Thiel became chief executive. He skirted banking regulation and allowed unchecked financial movements, a strategy that became the seed of Thielism. Around that time, the group known as the PayPal mafia — former employees and founders of the company — emerged as investors in major tech firms such as Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI and YouTube. In 2002 they sold the company to eBay for more than $1.5 billion.
Ber Tarnoff, co-author with Quinn Slobian of Muskism, a study of the Tesla founder’s thinking, does not believe Thiel borrowed libertarian ideas from Musk. Thiel “has long been interested in exit strategies from the state, unlike Musk, whose emphasis has always been on state symbiosis.”
Thiel’s example at PayPal, his boldness in investing in emerging companies and his aggressive style were crystallized in a book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, a bestseller in which he argues that entrepreneurs are nearly divine, that monarchies are more efficient than democracies, and that sects are a good organizational model. Thiel encourages breaking rules to create successful companies that achieve monopolies, his true obsession, Chafkin notes in his biography. For Thiel, the goal is not to be more productive or competitive: it is to create monopolies from entirely new concepts or ideas.
Thanks to the proceeds from selling PayPal, in 2004 he decided to invest $500,000 in a start-up founded by a Harvard sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg. In exchange for his investment, he received 10% of the nascent social network, which eventually made him a visionary, and he imposed his disruptive vision for managing the company on Zuckerberg. The entrepreneur must be untouchable, retain power, and rules must be broken to succeed. In this way, Zuckerberg rose at Facebook, considered one of the most harmful companies of the new economy.
The year after investing in Facebook, he founded Founders Fund, a venture capital firm aimed at discovering disruptive companies with the potential to change the world. The fund’s portfolio incl
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