A German from Frankfurt at the helm of Silicon culture
The 47-year-old Peter Tiel is the most radical expression of the entrepreneurial spirit and culture of Silicon Valley, the largest and most advanced incubator of the contemporary world. Thiel is more than a technologist, as the founder of PayPal, or an investor, as the largest shareholder of Facebook. On these terrains Thiel can be challenged by other and more referenced figures such as the founders of Google or Marc Andreesen. Peter Thiel is above all a theorist and a cyberthinker. It is not for nothing that he is German (from Frankfurt), as Kant, Hegel and Marx were German, and he graduated in philosophy from Stanford under the influence of an atypical thinker like René Girard, the creator of the anthropological theory based on the mechanism of the goat expiatory, which is also the title of one of his famous books translated into Italian by Adelphi. Thiel was also one of the best American chess players under 21, further proof of his vocation as a strategic thinker.
Some of his intuitions are as paradoxical as they are legendary. His book Zero to One (translated into Italian by Rizzoli) climbed the New York Times Bestseller List for non-fiction to number one and held for several weeks. Thiel's personality also inspired the writers of the HBO series Silicon Valley in modeling the figure of Peter Gregory, released in the fifth episode of the first season following the untimely death of the actor who played him. Fortune compares Thiel's role to that of public intellectuals like Thorstein Veblen or Norman Mailer.
Thiel unchained
Here are some pearls of Thiel's thought. Internet monopolies: they are not a bad thing, they are far from the basis of the development of the new economy and of creative innovation. Not to worry they are transient realities. Got it, European Commission?
Innovation: for over half a century no innovation has been seen that has really affected people's lives, nothing like the internal combustion engine or the light bulb of the second industrial revolution; we expected the flying cars and got the 140 twitter characters.
Europe: he will never invest in continental Europe, his work ethic is repugnant (Steve Jobs also held a similar opinion). In fact, he then invested in two start-ups in Berlin.
Instruction: Thiel has set up a specific fund to encourage young people to drop out of school and train as entrepreneurs at the helm of a start-up. In fact, it was Thiel who gave the first half a million dollars to Mark Zuckerberg for The Facebook. We also see it in a scene from the film The Network when, pushed by Sean Parker, Mark shows up in pajamas and slippers to meet Thiel and other potential investors for the first investment round; if he had gone there in a suit and tie and with a college degree, he wouldn't have taken the money.
Startup: in all the most innovative, most daring, ambitious and crazy initiatives of the Valley there is the hand of the German from Frankfurt. Vegan and animal rights activist has put a lot of money into some start-ups, including Modern Meadow, which aim to replace meat in human nutrition with a 3D substitute that will not make consumers regret its taste.
The divorce between freedom and democracy
One could go on for pages and pages to get to the last sensational episode that has filled the pages of the newspapers. Peter Thiel paid wrestler Hulk Hogan more than $10 million in attorneys' fees in a lawsuit against gossip site Gawker that a Tampa, Florida court ordered to pay Hogan $140 million over Gawker's dissemination of a private video where the muscular wrestler has sex with a friend's wife. Soon after Gawker took the books to court because the compensation is higher than his own turnover. General amazement! It tastes like the World Cup final: the right to privacy versus the right to information. But what does Thiel have to do with it?
It seems that Thiel has resolved to hire the most expensive team of lawyers in Hollywood (Harder, Mirell & Abrams) for the defense of Hogan not so much for revanchism against Gawker who had forced him into an involuntary out after an article entitled, Peter Thiel is totally gay, people, as much as from the determination to want to affirm an ethical-philosophical principle at the basis of his thinking and his action: freedom is a superior value to democracy and since the principle of freedom is not always reflected in the practices of democracy, it is necessary restore the right hierarchies by any means. In an essay titled The Education of a Libertarian, Thiel stated bluntly, "I no longer believe that liberty and democracy are compatible." The second, with its inefficient and hypocritical representative mechanisms, has hopelessly suffocated the first. The nurturing relationship broke down. Freedom is no longer pursuable by political means. His last hope is in technology: "New technologies can create new spaces for freedom," writes Thiel.
Therefore, the person who believes in freedom as a supreme value must be able to find new spaces where it can be achieved and these spaces must be sought elsewhere: in cyberspace, in the cosmos and in large autonomous communities on mobile floating platforms (Seasteading) built in international waters. With technology you can create these new communities that are not tied to the classic concept of the nation-state. These are communities capable of producing a change in the existing political and social order. Facebook is one such community.
The individual is the new dimension of the social
If democracy allows Gawker to violate Hogan's freedom it is right that democracy ends for Gawker. And amidst the wonder of a nation used to everything, Gawker was annihilated. Amen! Annihilated by a right-wing billionaire say Gawker's. From a libertarian who has turned into a follower of Nietzsche, the “Economist” rises.
Now although Thiel's ideas and behaviors may seem bizarre and irritating, they are not so far-fetched or projected in an improbable time. Democracy is in fact suffering from a profound crisis and increasingly serves the aspirations of an individual who wants to realize himself in a society that concretely offers the opportunity. If phenomena such as Trumpism and Brexitism become mainstream, it means that there is something no longer working in the mechanisms of democracy and representation as they developed after the publication in 1989 of Francis Fukuyama's The End of History.
Thiel writes: “The fate of our world could depend on the effort of a single person to produce or spread the gears of freedom, which make the world a safe place for capitalism”. The struggle of a single person like Hulk Hogan to defend his individual freedom is the struggle of an entire community.
Thiel, this time in magnificent solitude in the Valley and among the tech elite, is a big Trump voter for California. Thiel's direct endorsement of Donald Trump has amazed observers even though Thiel is a lifelong supporter of Ron and Rand Paul's libertarian wing of the GOP. What do libertarians have to do with Trump? Undoubtedly, Thiel's rapprochement with Trump is the result of Thiel's anti-political culture, as hypothesized by the "Economist", but perhaps it is also the landing point of the evolution of a culture that is more meritocratic-elitist (from an elected class) than libertarian of a certain radical wing of Silicon Valley. The Economist, which is the most important liberal think-tank in the world, dealt with this evolution in an article on Peter Thiel that we offer to our readers translated by Ilaria Amurri. Enjoy the reading!
Revenge is a cold dish
For Peter Thiel, being the center of attention is normal. He is arguably the world's most accomplished technology investor, co-founding PayPal and Facebook's first outside financier, and the eminence grise behind nearly a dozen Silicon Valley startups.
He has always professed to be a libertarian and has used his fortune to support a wide variety of outlandish causes, such as helping build private islands independent of government control or paying young entrepreneurs to start new companies instead of going all the way. university and has even declared war on death. He was the butt of humor in HBO's hit series Silicon Valley, and he is portrayed briefly in the Mark Zuckerberg film The Social Network.
Yet the last period has been particularly intense even by his standards, in fact he admitted that he had financially supported the wrestler Hulk Hogan (who is actually called Terry Gene Bollea) in the lawsuit filed against Gawker, a gossip site that had violated it privacy by posting his own porn video. Hogan is actually just one of many beneficiaries of Thiel's largesse in the legal arena. In 2007, Gawker's Valleywag blog ran a piece titled "Peter Thiel Is All Out Gay, Folks." For the entrepreneur, revenge seems to be a dish best served cold, so after going out, he secretly financed a team of lawyers to find "victims" of Gawker and help them sue the site.
A Florida jury awarded Bollea $140 million in settlements (although legal experts believe the sum will eventually be reduced or the sentence will be overturned on appeal), and Thiel told the New York Times that he it would be “one of the greatest philanthropic acts I have ever done”. However, many judged him brutally, condemning him for abandoning his libertarian principles in an attempt to silence Gawker and contesting lawsuits brought "by third parties" (in which external figures intervene financially in a legal dispute to gain an advantage), fearing that billionaires turn the legal system into a tool to bend to their whims.
Lights and shadows in Thiel's action
It must be recognized, however, that it is quite easy to find holes in the argument against Thiel: Gawker's invasion of Bollea's privacy was in no public interest, and the same principle that allows Thiel to pay to sue Gawker also allows any kind of "white knight" to make the big financial companies pay. Even anonymity can be defensible: if a court case is successful, no one should care who is paying, and if Gawker can justify his behavior on the grounds of freedom of expression, then Thiel can certainly justify himself with the excuse of having facilitated the course of justice.
Yet his behavior continues to arouse many doubts, especially regarding the intent to "act as a deterrent" for Gawker. Essentially Thiel is using his considerable wealth to get revenge, but what if other billionaires use their money to ruin the media, for example, simply because they don't agree with their politics? In doing so, Thiel is helping to fuel a contentiousness that most other libertarians rightly regard as a scourge on the American economy and society. He certainly has the good fortune to be one of the most interesting minds in American business, but Gawker's case suggests that he may be taking a turn for the worse.
In his heyday, Thiel was somewhere between a libertarian and a maverick. While a student at Stanford in the late 80s and early 90s, he railed against the new academic orthodoxy of multiculturalism, diversity, and political correctness by founding a conservative journal, the Stanford Review, and publishing a provocative book called The Diversity Myth. He even defended a law student, Keith Rabois, who had decided to test the limits of free speech on campus by standing in front of a professor's house and yelling “Hey fagot! I hope you die of AIDS!”. When he was still a Silicon Valley rookie, the libertarian vision inspired many of his business decisions. He hoped that PayPal would birth a new world currency, out of the control of central banks and governments, and that Facebook would help people create spontaneous communities distinct from classic nation states.
From libertarian to nicciano
Today, however, his thought has taken on a darker connotation. In an essay he wrote in 2009 for the Cato Institute, a specialized center with a libertarian orientation, he declared that he no longer believed "that freedom and democracy were compatible", placing the blame in part for the growing statism on the excessive increase in public welfare, without missing a grandiloquent ending on the central role of the individual in a renewed society. In a 2014 book, From Zero to One, he downplays the advantages of competition and celebrates the power of "creative monopolies," which "bring entirely new categories of abundance into the world." In practice now he is about as libertarian as a Nician can be, one who believes that the most gifted entrepreneurs can change the world with willpower and sheer intellect.
There are many reasons for Peter Thiel's Niccian turn. One is certainly his counter-tendency spirit: the same bad temper that made him reject everything that is "politically correct" could be hidden behind the decision to present himself as Donald Trump's delegate at the last Republican convention. A second reason is of a philosophical nature: there is a strong libertarian current which is much less interested in the common sense of the great masses than the genius of great men and this is reminiscent of Atlas Revolt, by Ayn Rand, in which the creative minority of entrepreneurial genius it is withdrawn from the world leaving the masses to enjoy the fruits of socialism. The third reason is his pessimism: he is so worried that the technological revolution hasn't brought the expected improvements in terms of productivity and tangible results that he believes that Silicon Valley and America need a good jolt.
In truth, however, the more important cause is the passage of time, which has too often turned genius into freakishness, driving intelligent men to waste their energies in stupid battles. It would be a terrible irony if the man who declared his opposition to "the ideology of the inevitability of death" had fallen victim to one of the more classic symptoms of advancing years.
