Mr. Thiel,
You are a man of #business and #finance. That, recently, has become my occupation too. We are both men who deal in the realm of facts, not fantasies. Modern pirates who are trained to perceive the furthest cloud by scanning the farthest horizons.
I used to admire you (on these grounds of your similarity to myself) as one of the few men in The Age who can Get Things Done. The newspapers said you were gay, but also, racist. But people are telling me that your recent funding decisions are baffling. I felt that I had to retract my admiration, or proffer my advice; I have chosen the second option.
I have heard, Mr. Thiel, that you are responsible for the existence of #Palladium Magazine. Ever since my earliest days reading the wise words of #NRx on #governance and #institutions I was dumbfounded as to how any of these particular people had jobs. So you will forgive me if I simply assume that this is true. I can see no other explanation for this extraordinary species’ survival. I guess that you are doing this out of the idea, conceived around 2009, that Liberals were not listening to your politics because they were not perceived as being posh enough; so you would finance this ersatz intellectual clique to LARP as The Economist for people who don’t believe in Democracy.
I am not going to critique this on ideological, but #business, grounds. Palladium Magazine is not a good a investment. It is filled with dummies like Sambo Burgers who literally get paid to utter truisms such as “Great Founder Theory”. You understand this Mr. Thiel, because you are not some dumbass tech Maths geek, you are one of nature’s aristocracy: a humanities student. Maybe when you give greenback wings to these sad fantasies of “an intellectual circle”, you do it as some kind of joke, well it is very funny, but it is not profitable.
Palladium, and things like it, do not appeal to High-Status Liberals because these people don’t care about ideas at all. To put it in the language of Palladium: you do not try to edge people towards your own Schelling Points through signaling, you create symbolic reproductions of Enemy Schelling points and then reorientate their loyalties. tldr. Leftists believe whatever they’re told to believe. If you want to influence bourgeois leftists, you would fund extremely anti-racist content to outcompete all the lesser anti-racist content, and then shame the dunces into believing in Eugenic Nazism through Left-wing language once you have monopoly. This same fallacy also underwrites what I suspect is your funding of “moderate”, “anti-woke” people on the Left as well. It is treating your enemies as rational people to be (even dishonestly) persuaded to migrate across “the political spectrum”, rather than robots who respond to a few magic phrases to *DO* anything their masters want.
Maybe your endeavours are what we #businessmen call a “hedge”, you will fund everyone in the Red Team of U.S politics so that whosoever wins will have some debt to you. This is a fallacy, because pretty soon the entire Red Team will be irrelevant as the Democrats show there is no penalty for establishing a dictatorship. Because all these things, Mr. Thiel, all of these things are distractions from the real issue: the future will no longer be decided by whoever can fund the most online pikers. We are now passed the point where there is this small online world that you manipulate in order to then manipulate an obese TV audience of Boomer voters. Everyone is now online. The election was stolen alongside trillions of dollars in a bailout dwarfing ‘08. The Collapse is here, you need guns! Mr Thiel!
Because you know what I can only guess, that the recent troubles have just begun because the elites can no longer be blackmailed to co-operate with one another. In other words, what a businessman like you can easily see, loyalty is now the $trillion dollar investment. Whoever invents a way to generate fanatical loyalty will be picking dollars up off the floor. Their customer base will be the world’s power-structure itself. You need to fund people with practical technology that does stuff if you want to exploit this. You need someone who will spread their wings like a gigantic bat, and cast a shadow over this epoch. Such a man will, as the poet says, enjoy:
The thirst of reign and sweetness of a crown/That caused the eldest son of heavenly Ops/To thrust his doting father from his chair,/And place himself in the empyreal heaven,
You, Mr. Thiel, are not simply lucky, but incredibly blessed by talent. You can participate in this power struggle. I, for generational reasons, cannot. By the time I am 40 even were I a billionaire it will all be over and new snakes will have been placed at the bottom of new ladders.
Let us not squander this opportunity. I want you to carefully read what it is that Palladium Magazine publishes and say: yep, I can afford to give money to produce this, but not back something with trillions of potential returns in hegemonic power.
Please direct your goons to: @gigameds on twitter if interested, but I will only reveal the actual nature of this invention to you personally in the flesh.
Cheers.