{"id":31367,"date":"2026-04-18T09:48:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T09:48:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/31367\/"},"modified":"2026-04-18T09:48:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T09:48:11","slug":"tech-oligarchs-fear-only-death-taxes-and-greta-thunberg-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/31367\/","title":{"rendered":"Tech oligarchs fear only death, taxes, and Greta Thunberg | Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Thiel may be a crackpot, but he\u2019s one of the crackpots who rule the world. Founder of PayPal and Palantir, philosopher, doctor of law, disciple of the French philosopher Ren\u00e9 Girard, and a key supporter of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, he is one of the most powerful figures in the United States and the world. He\u2019s not entirely sure he wants the human species to survive through transhumanism<\/a>. He envisions a human-machine alliance, a technical extension of the human mind through artificial intelligence, an augmented, technically and virtually immortal human being \u2014 a new species, in short.<\/p>\n

One of the great challenges Thiel faces is overcoming mortality<\/a>. He\u2019s not entirely satisfied with being immortal in a digital replica. \u201cI would prefer to preserve my body as well,\u201d he has stated. When he dies, he has stipulated that he should be cryogenically frozen, primarily, he tells us, for ideological reasons, to highlight the potential for future technology. In other words, death is no longer seen as a mysterious existential condition, but as a deficiency or an inconvenient malfunction destined to be overcome technically. It\u2019s understandable that someone who views immortality as a biotechnological challenge within reach would consider the transcendence of humanity as a possibility, and even have doubts about whether it would be desirable. The Nietzschean \u00dcbermensch thus appears, for the first time, just around the corner.<\/p>\n

However, for Thiel, although it may be shocking to hear, we have been technically stagnant for 50 years. It was around the 1970s that a major shift occurred in the Western world, and things began to slow down and stall. Essentially, people started worrying about the limits and costs of growth. And environmentalism brought everything to a standstill. \u201cWe landed on the moon in July of 1969, Woodstock started three weeks later and, with the benefit of hindsight, that\u2019s when progress stopped and the hippies won,\u201d he opined<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The hippies won! Woodstock was the great battle of the 20th century, and the hippies won. \u201cOf course, not everyone became Charles Manson<\/a>. But in my telling of the history, everyone became as deranged as Charles Manson and the hippies took over.\u201d Historians must be breathless listening to this. Taking a cursory look at 20th-century history, one wonders if seeing things this way requires something strange in the head. Perhaps it\u2019s the nature of anarcho-capitalism, because Thiel is an anarcho-capitalist by vocation; that is, he is in favor of the complete privatization of power, the replacement of all public power (including military power) with private power. For this very reason, his greatest fear is the arrival of the Antichrist, whom he identifies with a global state dictatorship most likely presided over by Greta Thunberg<\/a>. \u201cI\u2019m not sure it\u2019d be North Korea, but it would be super oppressive,\u201d he says of this society.<\/p>\n

Naturally, this becomes clearer when considering what Thiel sees as signs of totalitarian governance: \u201cThe FDA, which not only regulates drugs in the United States, but, de facto, throughout the world, because other countries abide by its decisions,\u201d or \u201cthe U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which effectively regulates nuclear power plants worldwide.\u201d All this regulation, apparently imposed by the hippies, has us technically stagnating. The Antichrist intends to establish a \u201cuniversal stagnation\u201d under the banner of \u201cpeace and security,\u201d something that, it seems, was already foreseen in the Bible, in the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, 5:3. […]<\/p>\n

So we\u2019re going too slowly. We need to accelerate. As Marc Andreessen\u2019s Techno-Optimist Manifesto<\/a> states: \u201cWe believe in accelerationism.\u201d He, too, considers the regulation of nuclear energy to be the worst crime perpetrated against humanity, because it has made us renounce \u201cthe miraculous solution of virtually unlimited, emission-free energy: nuclear fission.\u201d […] While we wait for science to conquer nuclear fusion, the first step would be to fill the world with thousands of fission power plants. And, of course, to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence: \u201cWe believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives,\u201d the Manifesto tells us. Slowing it down would be devastating for the development of medicine (and for the project of merging man and machine, of course). […]<\/p>\n

According to Thiel, we are standing before Armageddon or the Antichrist: either the dystopia of chaos and the end of the species, or a totalitarian world dictatorship. Fortunately, according to him, there is a third way: for an aristocratic global elite to prudently take control of technological development. The problem, however, lies in what these people call \u201cprudence.\u201d We are hearing reports of what this crony-driven ultra-capitalism might look like \u2014 or what Francisco Jos\u00e9 Fern\u00e1ndez-Cruz Sequera has aptly described as \u201ca political regression to the most primitive form of local tyranny imaginable, all wrapped up in the most advanced technology ever created.\u201d […]<\/p>\n

According to Thiel, \u201cthe biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk.\u201d The situation in Silicon Valley is extremely serious because the risk factor has been eliminated, rendering science ineffective. To combat this decline, we must accept taking many risks. Welcome a war, a crisis, a volcano, or an earthquake! What matters is the Nietzschean impulse that allows us to escape this decline. The rubble of chaos will not fall on the heads of these cronies \u2014 Thiel, Bezos, Andreessen, Musk, etc. \u2014 as has always been the case throughout history: it will fall on us, for our own good. \u201cWhile they, in shelters, will watch us on television,\u201d as Spanish punk band La Polla Records sang.<\/p>\n

We can glimpse other conversations among the prudent elite who will save us from the dictatorship Greta Thunberg intends to impose. Commenting on a meeting in support of Donald Trump, Thiel tells us: \u201cIt was a meeting with Elon and the CEO of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis<\/a>, that we brokered. And the rough conversation was Demis telling Elon: I\u2019m working on the most important project in the world. I\u2019m building a superhuman AI. And Elon responds to Demis: Well, I\u2019m working on the most important project in the world. I am turning us into interplanetary species.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although we are \u201cstagnated,\u201d it is hard to keep up with Musk\u2019s imagination; he believes, for example, that by 2040, there will be 10 billion humanoid robots in the United States. Apparently, Musk was very worried, even disillusioned. He feared that artificial intelligence would allow Thunberg to chase him to Mars with her soporific sermons, although it is also AI that will design the rockets with which humans will install ourselves there. Apparently, it\u2019s no joke, although it\u2019s hard to believe that one can reason like that unless under the influence of some drug. In other words, these tech buddies destined to save us from Armageddon and the Antichrist are on drugs. And they\u2019re heavily drugged. Although their real project, as we\u2019ve seen, is immortality. They think they have the means to transcend ordinary human conditions. So, in the end, we will be governed by an immortal elite as prudent as the one we are witnessing. We have already seen that Putin and Xi Jinping, for now, are determined to live to 150<\/a>. That\u2019s what awaits us in the transhumanist future that lies ahead. Incipit Zarathustra.<\/p>\n

Thiel, it seems, thinks it is more practical to conquer the sea for purposes of anarcho-capitalism through \u201cseasteading\u201d \u2014 floating \u201clibertarian countries\u201d in international waters.<\/p>\n

I believe Evgeny Morozov has best described this elite of \u201cintellectual oligarchic legislators,\u201d \u201cendowed with investment portfolios that function as philosophical arguments.\u201d […] This new class of philosophers has access to resources that philosophy has never before possessed. To begin with, as Morozov points out, they wield \u201cfortunes so enormous that they distort the basic physics of reality.\u201d This must be taken very seriously. It is as if they were black holes in a society vainly attempting to govern itself by Newton\u2019s laws. […] Furthermore, they are literally the owners of the networks that sustain societal discourse: \u201cThey have colonized both the medium and the message, the system and the lifeworld.\u201d<\/p>\n

Plato\u2019s philosopher king merged with the Oracle of Delphi. They are not intellectuals merely probing the future, because they have the power to create it. Their theories are being tested on the world\u2019s population \u201cin the most extensive unregulated experiment in history\u201d: \u201cThis, then, is the final tactic: oligarchic intellectuals reshaping legislation, institutions, and cultural expectations until prophecy and reality merge into a single hallucination (courtesy of ChatGPT, of course).\u201d<\/p>\n

These men are not like Rothschild, Rockefeller, or George Soros<\/a>. They are not simply billionaires. They have a radical program for transforming the world. They are revolutionaries and philosophers, and they have a new vision of humanity in mind. Trying to realize it is like a game to them. And they have the means to play, and to keep playing big, for a long time. They are willing to risk the very essence of humanity.<\/p>\n

Carlos Fern\u00e1ndez Liria (Zaragoza, 1959) is a philosopher and professor at the Complutense University of Madrid. This text is a translated excerpt from Contra la Ilustraci\u00f3n oscura (Against the Dark Enlightenment, Arpa Editores), published on April 8.<\/p>\n

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