4 ms·

Eschatological thinking: why Peter Thiel is talking about the Antichrist

18 points by anigbrowl 1y ago

randcraw 1y ago
Which part explains why Thiel spent millions to get the antichrist elected President?
- shironandonon_ 1y ago
  I think the article is saying it was done to speed the bringing about of the apocalypse. Will it happen? Stay tuned I guess.
- timbit42 1y ago
  While I'm not going to discuss who is or isn't an antichrist, there is no "the Antichrist". There are many antichrists because it's anyone who denies Christ (1st and 2nd John). Revelation doesn't even mention any antichrist so there is no link between one and the apocalypse.
gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
Daub (Stanford professional commentator) has analyzed his mindset. He explains Thiel's attraction to esotericism: >Girard’s ideas are another flyby between tech and the academy. The Girardians may lament the marginal status of his theories within the academy; even Thiel may lament it. But secretly, or not so secretly, that marginality is what draws a man like Thiel to Girard. For in Girard you get your own intuitions repackaged as esoteric knowledge. You get a feeling of oppositionality while remaining at the center of things. You get to feel like a victim while having all the power. And this, as we’ll see, may be the most secret of Silicon Valley’s secret desires. https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://fabricating.it/media/pages/repository/23d8a22dfe-1616916755/adrian-daub-what-tech-calls-thinking.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://fabricat...
davesque 1y ago
Does it really take an entire article to explain how Thiel, like so many before him, has simply been corrupted by wealth? His choice of topics to obsess over seems pretty arbitrary to me.
ranprieur 1y ago
Because he's jealous?
jondwillis 1y ago
TL;DR cynical profit motive and/or still self-hating for being gay. Edit: allegedly.
joules77 1y ago
Read some actual scholars like Charles Taylor (instead of the under developed/work in progress theories of Peter Thiel) who shows why Technocracy is not capable of generating Meaning/Shared Story/Transcendence the way religious systems once did. And how its going to try to cope with that limitation. Why is all that required? The microbes, plants and frogs don't require all that to survive and flourish. Chimps do. Cuz the 3 inch brain of the chimp, for whatever reason, hates randomness/unpredictability/lack of control. It exposes the limitations of rationality/logic/thinking/intelligence. So how does the chimp (and tech tools it produces) cope? As technocracy/scaling/optimization/efficiency etc grapples with its own limitations, more and more people will start looking at how other systems produced Meaning/Shared Story/Hope/Faith/Transcendence in the face of limitations without collapse. People like JFK and Obama (if you read their speeches) tap into those learnings to give the chimp troupe a secular version of it. That generates hope but hope is not enough. What all religious systems do is also produce an army of pastors who will be present with people who suffer (not just give speeches, podcasts, ted talks and apps). Pastoral Care is a missing feature of the Technocracy. The more it denies that its a required feature the more lost and confused everyone gets.
- gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
  PC requires coordinated hard work, funding, formalish education.. in contrast, memes are cheap (antidotes to religion).. (For better or worse Thiel is only capable of building the scaffolding for memes, but not generating the memes themselves..) Mimetics/Memetics are the AKs or mocktails of an emotive war
  - mallowdram 1y ago
    Mimetics and memetics are not similar. Are they Molotov cocktails of an affective war? No, they're tapeworms that users don't understand the functionality of. Molotov throwers OTOH know the precise function of what's in their hand. The intents of either are inaccessible.
    - gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
stareatgoats 1y ago
This is a rather meandering article, but it makes a cogent point: the concept of the "end times" has been a driving force for many of not most social movement history, and across most cultures. It has always been a useful tool for people with ulterior motives, be they political or economical, or both. And it does not come in an exclusively religious form either; even Marx with his telosity taps into this as well as the article points out. Recently one need not look further than the furor around the expected effects of climate change to get a sense of a "secular" end-of-times mentality. But as this last point illuminates, just because the end of times prophecies have been crying wolf for thousands of years doesn't mean we can discard it. We may yet be obliterated, be it by galopping climate change, a meteor shattering our planet, have a lethal pandemic, or have nuclear war lay most of earth inhabitable. These are realistic threats, and people have probably always been aware that our exitence is fragile. All we can (and should) do is do our best to mitigate them. What we definately should *not* do, is to try and make these things happen, just so that we may (or may not) live forever in a blissful afterlife. Or (and this is the main problem) suspend mitigating efforts because they are inconvenient in the short perspective. Just sayin.
mallowdram 1y ago
We should see technology's threshold here as an end point for communication. > Words/symbols/metaphors have reached the limit of usability and functionality, their arbitrariness fully unmasked. > Narratives/mythological thought-causality/mythistory/religion are as well way past the threshold of arbitrariness, all above's paradoxes far beyond resolving. > Binary which counts into prediction the above as "intelligence" has reached its limit, ML/AI is largely a dud and requires both expert supervision and slave labor review. So the tech idea of an arbitrary apocalypse and stand-in antichrist (which is laughable both from a mythological POV and a modern day puppet) is simply the most recent magic trick of media, when in reality there are real things: specifics, actions, syntax, behavior, ecology. These are fully beyond the reach of the binary/arbitrary, so tech billionaires are posing and throwing fits of rage.

18 points by anigbrowl 1y ago

randcraw 1y ago

Which part explains why Thiel spent millions to get the antichrist elected President?

shironandonon_ 1y ago
I think the article is saying it was done to speed the bringing about of the apocalypse. Will it happen? Stay tuned I guess.
timbit42 1y ago
While I'm not going to discuss who is or isn't an antichrist, there is no "the Antichrist". There are many antichrists because it's anyone who denies Christ (1st and 2nd John). Revelation doesn't even mention any antichrist so there is no link between one and the apocalypse.

gsf_emergency_2 1y ago

Daub (Stanford professional commentator) has analyzed his mindset. He explains Thiel's attraction to esotericism: >Girard’s ideas are another flyby between tech and the academy. The Girardians may lament the marginal status of his theories within the academy; even Thiel may lament it. But secretly, or not so secretly, that marginality is what draws a man like Thiel to Girard. For in Girard you get your own intuitions repackaged as esoteric knowledge. You get a feeling of oppositionality while remaining at the center of things. You get to feel like a victim while having all the power. And this, as we’ll see, may be the most secret of Silicon Valley’s secret desires. https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://fabricating.it/media/pages/repository/23d8a22dfe-1616916755/adrian-daub-what-tech-calls-thinking.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://fabricat...

davesque 1y ago

Does it really take an entire article to explain how Thiel, like so many before him, has simply been corrupted by wealth? His choice of topics to obsess over seems pretty arbitrary to me.

ranprieur 1y ago

Because he's jealous?

jondwillis 1y ago

TL;DR cynical profit motive and/or still self-hating for being gay. Edit: allegedly.

joules77 1y ago

Read some actual scholars like Charles Taylor (instead of the under developed/work in progress theories of Peter Thiel) who shows why Technocracy is not capable of generating Meaning/Shared Story/Transcendence the way religious systems once did. And how its going to try to cope with that limitation. Why is all that required? The microbes, plants and frogs don't require all that to survive and flourish. Chimps do. Cuz the 3 inch brain of the chimp, for whatever reason, hates randomness/unpredictability/lack of control. It exposes the limitations of rationality/logic/thinking/intelligence. So how does the chimp (and tech tools it produces) cope? As technocracy/scaling/optimization/efficiency etc grapples with its own limitations, more and more people will start looking at how other systems produced Meaning/Shared Story/Hope/Faith/Transcendence in the face of limitations without collapse. People like JFK and Obama (if you read their speeches) tap into those learnings to give the chimp troupe a secular version of it. That generates hope but hope is not enough. What all religious systems do is also produce an army of pastors who will be present with people who suffer (not just give speeches, podcasts, ted talks and apps). Pastoral Care is a missing feature of the Technocracy. The more it denies that its a required feature the more lost and confused everyone gets.

gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
PC requires coordinated hard work, funding, formalish education.. in contrast, memes are cheap (antidotes to religion).. (For better or worse Thiel is only capable of building the scaffolding for memes, but not generating the memes themselves..) Mimetics/Memetics are the AKs or mocktails of an emotive war
- mallowdram 1y ago
  Mimetics and memetics are not similar. Are they Molotov cocktails of an affective war? No, they're tapeworms that users don't understand the functionality of. Molotov throwers OTOH know the precise function of what's in their hand. The intents of either are inaccessible.
  - gsf_emergency_2 1y ago

stareatgoats 1y ago

This is a rather meandering article, but it makes a cogent point: the concept of the "end times" has been a driving force for many of not most social movement history, and across most cultures. It has always been a useful tool for people with ulterior motives, be they political or economical, or both. And it does not come in an exclusively religious form either; even Marx with his telosity taps into this as well as the article points out. Recently one need not look further than the furor around the expected effects of climate change to get a sense of a "secular" end-of-times mentality. But as this last point illuminates, just because the end of times prophecies have been crying wolf for thousands of years doesn't mean we can discard it. We may yet be obliterated, be it by galopping climate change, a meteor shattering our planet, have a lethal pandemic, or have nuclear war lay most of earth inhabitable. These are realistic threats, and people have probably always been aware that our exitence is fragile. All we can (and should) do is do our best to mitigate them. What we definately should *not* do, is to try and make these things happen, just so that we may (or may not) live forever in a blissful afterlife. Or (and this is the main problem) suspend mitigating efforts because they are inconvenient in the short perspective. Just sayin.

mallowdram 1y ago

We should see technology's threshold here as an end point for communication. > Words/symbols/metaphors have reached the limit of usability and functionality, their arbitrariness fully unmasked. > Narratives/mythological thought-causality/mythistory/religion are as well way past the threshold of arbitrariness, all above's paradoxes far beyond resolving. > Binary which counts into prediction the above as "intelligence" has reached its limit, ML/AI is largely a dud and requires both expert supervision and slave labor review. So the tech idea of an arbitrary apocalypse and stand-in antichrist (which is laughable both from a mythological POV and a modern day puppet) is simply the most recent magic trick of media, when in reality there are real things: specifics, actions, syntax, behavior, ecology. These are fully beyond the reach of the binary/arbitrary, so tech billionaires are posing and throwing fits of rage.