From the connection with Musk and PayPal to the relationships with Trump, Epstein and Palantir: who is Peter Thiel and why his technocratic vision can change freedom, power and the destiny of humanity.
There is a character in Silicon Valley who has not reached the popularity of his partners. His name is Peter Thieland it is The black soul of Silicon Valley as per the title of the precious book written by Luca Ciarrocca. Before understanding who Thiel is, it is best to include him in the field of Big Tech protagonists and clarify why he becomes “unique”. The others are those we know well: Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp); Jeff Bezos, big boss of Amazon; Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet (Google, YouTube); Sam Altman, father of ChatGpt; Tim Cook, Steve Jobs’ heir to Apple. And, of course, Elon Musk, the genius of Tesla, of X, of StarLink.
Apart from Pichai, the others like to expose themselves a lot, especially after having made a huge leap in image from their nerdy beginnings. The apotheosis was the brawl between Musk and Zuckerberg which should have ended at the Colosseum in a sort of epic gladiatorial clash. Nothing was done about it (fortunately) but it was enough to inconvenience even Achille and Ettore: the marketing operation was enough for both of them to show the evolution of their bodies after going to the gyms.
Even Bezos seems unrecognizable compared to Amazon’s early days. Along with their bodies, obviously, their turnover has grown, but even more so their positions with respect to the challenges of worlds that appear distant to us, no matter how much we think we know them.
Invisible power and the network of influence
Those who don’t like muscular clashes, however, avoid the spotlight and have won – because for now he is the real winner – he is precisely Peter Thielwhose name is known only to insiders and a few others. Instead it is better to know who this latest champion of modernity is. The best portrait was written by Luca Ciarrocca, who without prejudice and with great wealth of detail gives us a complete map to decrypt the character and his complex network.
Ciarrocca, who is a chronicler of old lineage, does not choose the form of the essay but that of the novel so as to keep us glued to a plot that appears science fiction but is instead tremendously true. The black soul of Peter Thiel is innervated by current events: he is there in the files and in the relationships with Epstein, the pedophile financier at the end of a network where the great political and financial powers met by overlapping orgies and summits; he is there in the financing and explicit support in favor of Donald Trump, when all the other Big Tech players had embraced the dem battles; he is behind JD Vance’s rise from university to vice president of the United States; he’s been there together with Musk, since the days when together they besieged the credit card fort by creating PayPal. And obviously he is behind the colossal game of satellite networks, data control and the influence that their management produces on the great challenges.
The technocratic vision and data control
Peter Thiel has never hidden his theses and indeed has theorized them in his books, conceived as the extension of his chessboard. As in chess, what can be hidden are not the pawns but the moves and even more so the game strategy. If you want to understand where we’re going to end up, it’s a good idea to get into the chess player’s head. From the first move. Indeed, from the way he places the pawns, thinks about them and projects them into the future.
So what is the future? Thiel outlines it as if it were an encrypted path, a puzzle game mixed with philosophical elements: it is the future in which technocracy it would eliminate the possibility that man makes mistakes and ruins the world. Put like this, it would seem perfect and in fact we are in the same mold as the Silicon Valley paradigm: making humanity evolve, leading it out of error and avoiding destruction. Not even God has ever thought that man could be denied the will of sin and error. But these new gods or Masters instead think it and put it into practice. It’s the great challenge of Palantir and of Thiel’s other companies that work with data and bend it to control small and macro scenarios, from the health and insurance fields to immigration, from petty crime to wars, from the control of every corner of the earth to the occupation of space.
From the hippy dream to surveillance capitalism
Let’s be clear, Thiel and the others represent the evolution of what Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did in carrying out a “hippy” vision that they betrayed shortly thereafter by developing the surveillance economy. Today that type of capitalism makes a leap in quality, arriving at the construction of technological prerequisites in order to control future actions and therefore distort full freedom of action with the predictive concept.
They will deny us freedom, giving us once again the illusion of giving it to us. The exacerbation of the problems will be the narrative prerequisite for the political response of total control. The only ones who will not be controlled will be them. Because, as Charles Baudelaire said, the devil’s best trick is to convince us that he doesn’t exist…
