GenXploitation, Oxymoronic National Conservatism, and Peter Thiel
Taking Thiel seriously and literally in Miami on the "Tech Curse"
So much promise but so off the mark.
(I’ve elsewhere pointed out the inherent problems with Chisraeli agent Yoram Hazony’s “national conservatism” and how its something of an oxymoron. As I am a not a traitor I wasn’t able to attend the conference the first time it was held and I have lost the appetite to attend these sort of things nowadays even if I were to be invited in.)
What struck me from watching Peter Thiel’s keynote address at the Miami National Conservatism Conference on September 11th is that as the Internet grows it’s becoming easier and easier to see that many Internet businesses are very parasitic off of the real economy.
One of the great successes of the Biden government has been finally tackling that misbehavior by doing as robbin hood/bank robber Jesse James did — going where the money is. In this case, it’s meant reining in the ad-based, exploitative model. To a great extent the deep state has had help from the two deep state tech companies — Apple (which put the knife in Meta) and Google, both of which were turned from their Chimerica origins.
There’s clearly an effort to eliminate the advertising based models from the Internet and I’m glad to have played a small part in that by suing all the way to the Supreme Court. I believe in a post-advertising-based Internet. Changing how the Big Tech companies make their money would be revolutionary but I believe totally necessary. A government can’t allow its people to be exploited by foreign actors or rapacious salespeople.
Biden’s government, hewing to its Silent Generation antecedents, knows that America isn’t so much cursed by tech as it is to addiction masquerading as technology. The problem of technology in America is that we have too little — not that we have too much. Is America really as technologically impressive as it was during Edison or Ford’s day? Certainly not. To read G. Pascal Zachary’s Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (1999) or J. Shurkin’s Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age (2006) or Tom Nicholas’s VC: An American History (2019) is to come away with awe for the post-World War II technological marvels. It’s not for nothing that America was 50% of global GDP. We had some great stuff and great minds working on it. They were working on the B29 bombers not messing around with the blockchain.
The military industrial complex was real and it was impressive. Indeed to the extent that tech companies provide a real value — that is, without exploited their workers — the Biden government has more or less let them be. Biden’s presidency has been a golden age for the satellite industry, notwithstanding the compromised nature of companies like Capella whose Iranian founder and Chinese capital should have elicited more attention from the national security state. The argument between Umbra — the real deep state SAR company — and Capella over the use of satellites is well worth watching. Should we allow Chinese-backed companies like Capella to gouge our military and industry? Or build a world where anyone can buy satellite data?
In any event the Biden Administration has poured money into satellites and renewable energy, continuing a key Obama policy of decreasing our dependence on the Middle East.
Yes, Biden would prefer that Amazon pay its workers more money from its sizable AWS profits but he’s perfectly willing to let the son of the deep state continue to run his empire unimpeded.
No, Biden doesn’t want Elon Musk or Oracle’s Larry Ellison working for the Chinese to overthrow our system of government. To the extent that Ellison and Musk have troubles it’s because the deep state rightly sees them as not on team at best.
We must therefore separate technology companies into those which have positive externalities and those which are predatory of the broader American public. Or, if you want, those companies which promote industriousness or those which promote sin.
I’ve tended to separate the companies into the pro-social tech companies of Microsoft and Amazon and the Seven Deadly Sin companies which LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman laid out in his seminal 2011 essay. I’ve elsewhere explored the problems that this kind of thinking caused.
If you believe, as I do, that much of the wealth of Silicon Valley comes from GenExploitation, it becomes a lot easier to justify taxing those billionaires either directly through a wealth tax or through commandeering their fortunes and foundations to deep state ends. Don’t we tax that which we want to see less of?
There’s some indication that the smarter of the tech billionaires have gotten the memo. One can somewhat see the money that Hoffman has poured into Joby as a direct response to Thiel’s view that we wanted flying cars but got 140 characters. You can almost see Hoffman joking, well, now we have flying cars!
I think, though, that there’s a darker problem here that Hoffman needs to account for — the sustained GenExploitation of the younger generations. Yes, he hung around with Jeffrey Epstein but his damage to the younger generations was systematic.
Take the example of LinkedIn which taxes your professional network by forcing you to pay $60 a month just to be a member. Or AirBNB, which drives up the cost of rental apartments in desirable cities. Or Yelp, which shakesdown small business owners across America.
Or OpenDoor, which also drives up the cost of housing and was accused sexual predator Keith Rabois’s brainchild. (I edited this slightly to make clear that Rabois was accused of sexual impropriety while at Square. He ultimately resigned his position — and wound up at another venture capital firm.)
Perhaps the reason we see so much GenExploitation is that they went to a school founded by a robber baron. Stanford, built by a railroad magnate and his murdered wife, taught its students to network and mine their social connections. In the case of Stanford that isn’t too difficult but it’s hardly a model for the rest of the country. It is the path to a tech oligarchy, constructed as it is with Chinese cash.
One way to think about the GenXer crowd is that by sheer numbers they were massively outnumbered by the Boomers and Millennials that they had to network amongst themselves. To defeat the Boomers they had computers. To defeat the Millennials they had GenXploitation by making them think tech was liberating them when it was really taking advantage of them. Hype man Jason Calcanis pushing fake companies on the young people is probably the best example but I could have picked one of many SPACs. This is predatory behavior hiding in plain sight.
The exception, is, of course, Amazon, which is running the data infrastructure of the world. Could it be because of the intelligence services pedigree of its founder? You’re not supposed to ask.
The lack of public spiritedness of the Silicon Valley class is apparent to all of us who meet with them. They mouth platitudes about being pro-American while raising money from Chinese backed venture funds. Many of their funds are fronts without even knowing that they are fronts. What on earth was Stemcentrix all about? Could it be because AbbVie — which bought Stemcentrix — was rolling out in China?
No, data isn’t the new oil. Data can be architected and organized. Data can be weaponized and exploited to sell advertising for products we don’t need and we don’t want. The amount of ad fraud is shocking and the Fortune 500 companies who paid their toll to Facebook now are looking elsewhere.
"The fact that real estate in Florida or Texas has melted up over the last two or three years is not evidence that you're succeeding and building a better model than California," Thiel said. "I'm worried that that's evidence that you're becoming like California."
California was more or less captured by the Chinese and international mob. Texas and Florida were captured long before that. They’re just completing the project of getting more tech now because the tech people from California want to retire and not pay California taxes.
Thiel talks about the elites wanting homelessness and defund the police because it pushed up their home prices but what has he done about it? Has he backed law enforcement technology companies? Thiel didn’t back Othram — which is solving nearly every murder and rape through genomics — and he barely backed Clearview, the facial recognition company which is catching criminals. Show me your book and it’ll show me your values.
I don’t mean to be picking on Peter. I criticize him because he’s seemingly the most likely to be reformed. It’s way easier to pick on Sequoia and all of their stuff (23&me, AirBnB, Instagram…) or Chamath, or a16z.
Now what of China and America? Perhaps the turning out of the Chinese against District Attorney Chesa Boudin should be seen as a welcome change that China wants to keep its assets expensive. San Francisco is a very Chinese city, after all. Perhaps crime is an area where the U.S. and China could work together.
There could well be areas in which the United States’ deep state and China’s deep state could come together but that would mean a conversation about what exactly is in each nation’s interests. Such a conversation could begin by asking what, if anything, America’s billionaires are doing for America. China shakes down its billionaires. Will we?
No, we aren’t cursed by tech; we are cursed with tech billionaires who put themselves first. Peter Thiel at least recognizes there is a problem. For that, he gets plaudits.
Still I wonder how much good Thiel could do for the world if he were truly free to call it like he sees it. Maybe he could lead the non-compromised bits of Silicon Valley to a greater future and a new American century. Let’s just hope it’s not run from Miami.
Thank you for another interesting read. Thiel is always a fascinating subject, and he does seem like one of the good guys, if good guys are capable of achieving billionaire status.
“Don’t we tax that which we want to see less of?”
Ideally this would be true, but it seems like we prefer to tax income, productivity and property ownership. I’d rather see waste fraud and abuse eliminated and limited taxation related to consumption.
Precise, as I have noted in the few articles I have read. I might not agree with you on everything at my current level, but maybe I will at some point. You have shown (me, at least) that there is more actual depth to this whole paradigm, as opposed to the propagandized depth that has run rampant in every form of social media.
All of this to ask, humbly, what would you point to the best example of a group, company, project or effort that is, maybe not thriving yet, but making business ends meet in the non-advertising model of the internet?
My answer to this question, is what is ocurring within the BSV ecosystem. The best examples I would put forward is blockpost.network or Twetch.com as far as "social communication". But there are a good amount of other B2B oriented companies that are finding success still being pretty far from mainstream adoption.
And thank you for the free tier on the stack. I will upgrade once I get out of my current hole.
edited: typo