The self-proclaimed defenders of freedom, private property and individualism could actually be liberticians who have created weapons to eliminate privacy and dilute the individual into a mass. In “1984,” Orwell described totalitarianism as a kind of giant eye that penetrates people’s privacy. Henkel Von Donnersmarck magnificently described in “Das Leben der Anderen” (The Lives of Others) the espionage of the State infiltrating the privacy of the people. Two brilliant and illuminating portraits of 20th century model totalitarianism. But what Andrew Nicol wrote and Peter Weir directed looked in the most lucid and original way at 21st century model totalitarianism. In the magnificent “The Truman Show”, upon discovering that he lived in a reality invented for the consumption of a culturally emasculated society, Truman Burbank rebels against the power that controls everything.
The question is whether humanity will rebel like Truman Burbank when it discovers itself observed in its privacy; If you can understand in time that the word “freedom” in the mouths of the neo-reactionaries is the bullet in the rifle of the “liberticides”, because it has a meaning as distorted from its true spirit as the word “democracy” in the name of the extinct German Democratic Republic (GDR) and in the current Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a country commonly called North Korea. Those who claim to defend private property and claim individualism have created the technology to abolish privacy and, therefore, dissolve the individual into a multitude stripped of sovereignty. Peter Thiel’s technology and his ideology would be the basis of the coming totalitarianism.
In “The Straussian Moment,” Thiel uses a devastating example to explain what he is proposing. He maintains that just as 9/11 “showed that to save democracy freedom had to be sacrificed,” the current advance of technological innovation shows that to save “freedom” democracy must be sacrificed. A meaningless phrase, unless freedom is understood as something different from what it means in liberal-democratic thought. The word Freedom, in Thiel’s mind, is adulterated in the same sense that the ultraconservative current that calls itself libertarian adulterated it. In the pages of his book “From Zero to One” it is clear that its author is not even interested in market freedom, because he proposes leaving everything in the hands of “creative monopolies” that he considers powerful turbines of the “vertical progress” of technology.
Murray Rotbard also proposed generating large monopolies and giving them the economic prominence that the market should have in liberalism. But what is distinctive about Thiel and other neo-reactionaries is the creation of the instruments that will generate the new totalitarianism. For the most powerful disciple of the French philosopher René Girard, author of the Theory of Mimetic Desire, “freedom and democracy are incompatible.” Peter Thiel’s technology companies are advancing rapidly in the management of the private information of the world’s inhabitants. Latin American democracy, which in recent decades was weakened by Chavismo and pro-Chavista populism, is now haunted by the fierce and plutocratic ultra-conservatism that generates leaders like Bolsonaro and Milei. Thiel is the main promoter of what has been called “dark enlightment”: dark illustration.
He financed the political rise of the opaque JD Vance and amassed an immense fortune with Palantir Technologies, providing massive data analysis and predictive surveillance to the Pentagon, the CIA and ICE, the pack of ferocious wolves that Trump uses in the hunt for immigrants. Palantir Tecnologies is a link in the new focus of antidemocratic power. In the 1950s, Dwaight Eisenhawer called the anti-democratic power made up of the unscrupulous military and weapons manufacturers the “military-industrial complex.”
The current correlate of that de facto power and naturally enemy of the Rule of Law, is the “digital-military complex.” The most powerful exponent of that factual power is Peter Thiel, the businessman who largely manages the Trump government and to whom Milei is opening the door to real power in Argentina. The creator and CEO of Palantir has maintained in his books that “freedom and democracy are incompatible; that it is necessary to leave all power in the hands of innovative elites and that it is urgent to “remove the majority from government decisions.”
In his essay “The Education of a Libertarian” he promotes authoritarianism with “social Darwinism,” maintaining that the drivers of technological innovation must govern, without bureaucratic, political and legal obstacles. A kind of “sophocracy”, but instead of the government of the philosophers that Plato proposed in “The Republic”, Thiel proposes that the CEOs of technology companies manage power without controls or limits. Trying to bring to reality the method that Thomas More devised in his book Utopia, where he describes egalitarian life on a non-existent island, Thiel proposes “seasteadings” and they are floating cities on the high seas over which the laws of any country do not govern.
Sharing convictions with Schmittian intellectuals, such as the neo-reactionary Curtis Yarvin, he proposes starting post-democracy, where instead of presidents elected and controlled by society, they are governed by millionaire owners of technology companies. As a lucid article in La Marea, a valuable independent media organized as a non-commercial cooperative, summarizes his thoughts, the power of the world that Peter Thiel proposes no longer rests on weapons but on algorithms.
Thiel can spy on billions of people around the world, he has gravitated to the Trump administration since the jealous and intellectually mediocre head of the White House got rid of another anti-democratic techno-plutocrat: Elon Musk. And he will continue to pull the strings of power from Silicon Valley, if he gets Trump’s successor to be JD Vance, the gray man he financed and who responds like a dog to his master.
That technological investment is coming to Argentina is good economic news, but if Thiel is also going to use his massive data collection capacity here and it is going to be with Milei, a president who is a fan of billionaires, which he always does, then it is not good news for liberal democracy and its public and individual rights and freedoms. Perhaps, on his last visit he congratulated Milei for preventing journalists from entering the Casa Rosada. Freedom according to Thiel, Trump and Milei does not include freedom of the press. Or it includes it as long as it is not exercised by journalists. Those people who they admit still “don’t hate enough.”
Image gallery
