Peter Thiel, Techno-Utopian

Peter Thiel, the founding investor in Paypal, was portrayed in The Social Network as a conniving, Gordon Gekko admirer, and his real-life activities and beliefs are being reexamined, as in a piece in Newsweek:

Jacob Weisberg, What’s Wrong With Silicon Valley Libertarianism?

Thiel’s belief system is a mixture of unapologetic selfishness and economic Darwinism. In a personal statement produced last year for the Cato Institute, he announced: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” The public, he says, doesn’t support unregulated, winner-take-all capitalism, and so he won’t support the public any longer. “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,” he writes. If you want to go around saying that giving women the vote wrecked the country and still be taken seriously, I suppose it helps to hand out $100 bills.

What differentiates Silicon Valley’s style of libertarianism from Glenn Beck’s raving-weeping variety is its laissez-faire attitude toward personal behavior and the lack of demagogic instinct. Thiel, who is openly gay, wants to flee the mob, not rally it through gold-hoarding or flag-waving. Having given up hope for the United States, he writes that he has decided to focus “my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom.” Both Theil’s entrepreneurship and his philanthropy are animated by techno-utopianism. With PayPal, he sought to create a global currency beyond the reach of taxation or central-bank policy. He sees Facebook as a way to form voluntary supra-national communities.

I commented on Thiel’s bizarro world political beliefs when his Cato paper came out:

Beware Peter Thiel

This guy, who heads Clarium Capital, and is a managing director of the Founders Fund, is off-the-rails, barking-at-the-moon crazed. What sort of person in 2009 suggests that the emancipation of women, and I presume ‘welfare beneficiaries’, has been a negative addition to politics.

I bet he would only be happy if we re-instituted monarchy and asked him if he would serve.

I don’t think we should hold up Peter Thiel as the poster child for Silicon Valley, but I must state that I found the libertarianism that animates a great deal of the tech scene in the Bay Area very wearing.

Yes, I admit to be a howling progressive. I can’t help but think about the line from A Fish Called Wanda when Wanda (Jamie Lee Curtis) shouts at Otto (Kevin Kline), making the case that he’s dumb because of all of his inaccuracies about science, politics, and philosophy:

“The central tenet of Buddhism is not ‘every man for himself!”

Dear Mr Thiel, and all your cultish friends: The purpose of life is not to amass wealth without concern for other people. Any just political or ethical system has to be based on maximizing the benefits for the most disadvantaged (John Rawls’ maximin), therefore creating a society or political sphere based on principles of social equality.

But there is a strong current of elitism and privilege in Thiel’s thinking about the world and his place in it, that ‘every man for himself’ should be the central tenet of some new order he would gladly see instituted here, or on some space colony populated by death-cheating billionaires, waiting for the singularity.

His newest tack is to offer money to college kids to get them to drop out of school (which he calls ‘stopping out of school’):

The Thiel Fellowship will give entrepreneurs under age 20 a cash award of $100,000 to drop out of school and pursue their business ideas. In announcing the program, Thiel made clear his contempt for U.S. universities, which, like governments, he believes, cost more than they’re worth and get in the way of what really matters in life, namely tech startups.

Well, if you don’t believe in a civil society where all get to vote and think that Hobbesian markets should determine everything, maybe it is a logical next step to conclude that all education intended to broaden the mind or to learn from the mistakes of the past is a waste of time.

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It is as if Mr. Kirkpatrick can’t accept the notion that someone who creates a great company might also be boorish and arrogant and sometimes even rotten. To him, Mr. Zuckerberg isn’t just a great businessman, he’s also a good guy. “Mark is the most impactful person of his generation,” he told me. “That is what we should be trying to understand: how someone so young could create something so important.”

Yet where is it written that driven entrepreneurs are also good guys? More often than not, they’re anything but. As a human being, Steve Jobs is the very definition of the word “jerk;” yet he’s also the greatest chief executive alive. The young Bill Gates could be obnoxious in the extreme. At the age of 24, Marc Andreessen was so arrogant that he allowed Time magazine to photograph him on its cover sitting on a throne barefoot.

Unpleasant personality traits are almost required of young entrepreneurs trying to build something lasting. It requires tremendous arrogance to believe that their idea is better than anyone else’s. They need to be immensely selfish, putting their fragile creation ahead of everything else, including important relationships. And they have to be ruthless, tossing overboard friends who were once useful and no longer are. Those are the qualities Aaron Sorkin captures so beautifully in “The Social Network.” That is what Mr. Kirkpatrick largely misses in “The Facebook Effect.”

There is much about Mr. Kirkpatrick’s book that is useful in understanding Mr. Zuckerberg and the importance of Facebook as a social phenomenon. I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from reading it. Nor would I discourage anyone from reading “The Accidental Billionaires,” which is a fun, zippy airport read. But for deep, lasting truths?

It’s “The Social Network,” hands down.

Joe Nocera, ‘The Social Network’ Captures the Facebook Obsession

In The Shadow Of Big Lies And Big Money

Malcolm Gladwell’s supposed takedown of social networks — they aren’t really revolutionary, he argues — continues to be paired up with ‘The Social Network’ as a one-two punch smack in the kisser of the web. Buried in the newest of these, an Op-Ed by Frank Rich, is a painful truth: for all the talk of transparency, openness, and change on the web, these tools haven’t slowed ‘big lies and big money’ in the American political circus:

Frank Rich, Facebook Politicians Are Not Your Friends

Just as “The Social Network” hit the multiplexes, Malcolm Gladwell took to The New Yorker with a stinging takedown of social networks as vehicles for meaningful political and social action. He calculated that the nearly 1.3 million members of the Facebook page for the Save Darfur Coalition have donated an average of 9 cents each to their cause. He mocked American journalists’ glorification of Twitter’s supposedly pivotal role during last year’s short-lived uprising in Iran, suggesting that the rebels’ celebrated Twitter feeds — written in English, not Farsi — did more to titillate blogging technophiles in the West than to aid Iranians in their struggle against totalitarian rulers.

“With Facebook and Twitter and the like,” Gladwell wrote, “the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will” was supposed to be upended, so it would be “easier for the powerless to collaborate, coordinate, and give voice to their concerns.” Instead, he concluded, we ended up with the reverse: social media increase the efficiency of the existing order rather than empowering dissidents. In his view, social networking is far less likely to recreate the civil rights movement of the 1960s than to track down missing cellphones for Wall Streeters.

Gladwell’s provocative Internet critique is complemented by a much-buzzed-about independent movie — in this case, an actual documentary — that was released shortly before “The Social Network.” No one will confuse this ham-fisted film, titled “Catfish,” with a Fincher-Sorkin production, but it’s highly unsettling nonetheless. It tells of a 25-year-old Manhattan photographer who strikes up a devoted Facebook friendship with a small-town Michigan family whose 8-year-old daughter is a painting prodigy. When the photographer seeks out his virtual friends in the real Michigan, it’s inevitable that he and the audience will learn the hard way, as the Times film critic A.O. Scott put it, that cyberspace is a “wild social ether where nobody knows who anybody is.”

Even if Gladwell and “Catfish” are overstating the case, they certainly have one if you look at the political environment in our election year of 2010. The Internet in general and social networking in particular have done little, if anything, to hobble those pursuing power with such traditional means as big lies and big money. Perhaps what’s most remarkable this year is the number of candidates who have tried to create fictitious avatars like the Facebook impostors in “Catfish.” These candidates and others often fashion their campaigns to avoid real reporters (and sometimes real voters). Some benefit from YouTube commercials paid for by impossible-to-trace anonymous donors. In this wild political ether where nobody knows who anybody is, the Internet provides cover, not transparency.

Go online, and you’ll discover that many of those now notorious false fronts for oil billionaires and other corporate political contributors have Facebook pages. We don’t know who has written checks to Crossroads GPS, the more shadowy wing of American Crossroads, the operation concocted in part by Karl Rove to raise $50 million to attack Democrats. (There’s already $32 million in the bank, $10 million more than was spent by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004.) But the American Crossroads page on Facebook sure looks like a bottom-up populist movement, festooned with photos of thousands of ordinary folk voting their “like” of the site. The Save Darfur Coalition page may have infinitely more friends, but it’s American Crossroads that has real clout in the real world even if nobody knows who is behind the screen.

The web is powerful, but can be used to herd opinion based on faulty reasoning just as well as it can open people’s eyes to new perspectives.

Honestly, the web is dangerous. I don’t mean in the way most people worry about it — bullying teenagers into suicide, or deranged stalkers or burglars taking advantage of Foursquare check-ins — but on the contrary, to use the cracks in out cognitive wiring to control our behavior.

Fear mongering, xenophobia, and ignorance are all at work in the efforts of politicians to herd people off a cliff at the next election, using the body count as a way to get into office.

So, if the web isn’t a benign force ushering in the age of Aquarius maybe it is bad, the commentators are saying. But this is just holding up a mirror: we created the web to happen to ourselves, and what comes of it is up to us.

Our prejudices, cognitive limitations, and ignorance aren’t magically fixed by networking us together. There is mounting evidence that the social web is an amplifier, but the behavior you put in to be amplified can be from any slice in the human condition.

As my friend Jamais Cascio once remarked, there will someday be a hashtag used during atrocities in a genocide somewhere. But we won’t blame the hashtag, or hashtags in general.

The web isn’t just patty cake and beanbag, and it’s no longer some sidebar to human events: it is deeply enmeshed in everything, like nervous tissue is spread throughout all our bodies.

But we don’t wonder about the inherent downside of gray matter just because it is implicated in depression, hate, murder and deception.

So let’s turn our focus back on the actual groups and individuals who benefit from concealing their identities and true purposes — like Crossroads GPS — and stop scapegoating the web and social network applications. You might as well blame ink and paper for the printing of hate literature, or the imprisonment of Liu Xiaobo.

At the same time, I would like to see more slimy doings exposed, and nefarious actors pulled out from under the rocks. Hey, Frank: you work for the New York Times! Should the Times be doing more, using the web as a tool of investigation, and rallying people to counter the herding going on by Fox News and the Koch brothers?

Louis Brandeis said ‘Sunshine is the best disinfectant,’ and our activities online can cast a shining light: but the brightest lights cast the darkest shadows.

In the shadows of the web we will continue to find big lies and big money, trying to control us, and herd us. To them, the web is just more wool to pull over our eyes.