He claimed that the "multiculture" led to a lessening of individual freedoms. While a student at Stanford, Thiel founded a right-wing journal, still up and running, called The Stanford Review — motto: Fiat Lux "Let there be light".
Thiel is a member of TheVanguard. Org, an internet-based neoconservative pressure group that was set up to attack MoveOn. Thiel calls himself "way libertarian". TheVanguard is run by one Rod D. Martin, a philosopher-capitalist whom Thiel greatly admires. On the site, Thiel says: "Rod is one of our nation's leading minds in the creation of new and needed ideas for public policy. He possesses a more complete understanding of America than most executives have of their own businesses.
This little taster from their website will give you an idea of their vision for the world: "TheVanguard. Org is an online community of Americans who believe in conservative values, the free market and limited government as the best means to bring hope and ever-increasing opportunity to everyone, especially the poorest among us. The chairman's message says: "Today we'll teach MoveOn the liberal website , Hillary and the left-wing media some lessons they never imagined.
What about his philosophy? I listened to a podcast of an address Thiel gave about his ideas for the future. His philosophy, briefly, is this: since the 17th century, certain enlightened thinkers have been taking the world away from the old-fashioned nature-bound life, and here he quotes Thomas Hobbes' famous characterisation of life as "nasty, brutish and short", and towards a new virtual world where we have conquered nature.
Value now exists in imaginary things. Thiel says that PayPal was motivated by this belief: that you can find value not in real manufactured objects, but in the relations between human beings. PayPal was a way of moving money around the world with no restriction. Bloomberg Markets puts it like this: "For Thiel, PayPal was all about freedom: it would enable people to skirt currency controls and move money around the globe.
Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries — and then sell Coca-Cola to them?
Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway. Thiel's philosophical mentor is one Rene Girard of Stanford University, proponent of a theory of human behaviour called mimetic desire.
Girard reckons that people are essentially sheep-like and will copy one another without much reflection. The theory would also seem to be proved correct in the case of Thiel's virtual worlds: the desired object is irrelevant; all you need to know is that human beings will tend to move in flocks.
Hence financial bubbles. Hence the enormous popularity of Facebook. Girard is a regular at Thiel's intellectual soirees. What you don't hear about in Thiel's philosophy, by the way, are old-fashioned real-world concepts such as art, beauty, love, pleasure and truth. The internet is immensely appealing to neocons such as Thiel because it promises a certain sort of freedom in human relations and in business, freedom from pesky national laws, national boundaries and suchlike.
The internet opens up a world of free trade and laissez-faire expansion. I think it's fair to say that Thiel is against tax. More Videos GOP baseball gunman was anti-Trump. Scalise returns after shooting.
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Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. Hodgkinson, 66, was married and lived in Belleville, Illinois. Chuck Fleischmann, R-Tenn. Scott Applewhite. A police officer takes photos after the shooting during a practice of the Republican Congressional baseball team at Eugene Simpson Statium Park June 14, in Alexandria, Virginia. At least five people people including a top Republican congressman were wounded in a Washington suburb early Wednesday morning when a shooting erupted as they practiced for an annual baseball game between lawmakers.
Senior congressman Steve Scalise was shot in the hip, according to fellow Republican lawmaker Mo Brooks who told CNN at least two law enforcement officers and one congressional staffer were also shot in the incident in Alexandria, Virginia. Multiple injuries were reported from the instance, the site where a Congressional baseball team was holding an early morning practice, including House Republican Whip Steve Scalise R-LA who was reportedly shot in the hip.
Neighborhood residents gather with law enforcement personnel near Eugene Simpson Field, the site where a gunman opened fire June 14, in Alexandria, Virginia. Investigators and emergency personnel gather adjacent to Eugene Simpson Field, the site where a gunman opened fire June 14, in Alexandria, Virginia. Not someone I want to help get any richer. The third board member of Facebook is Jim Breyer. Now these are the people who are really making things happen in America, because they invest in the new young talent, the Zuckerbergs and the like.
What's In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or not and check out their website , this is the venture-capital wing of the CIA. When she left the US department of defence, Senator Chuck Robb paid her the following tribute: "She brought the technology and operational military communities together to design detailed plans to sustain US dominance on the battlefield into the next century.
Now even if you don't buy the idea that Facebook is some kind of extension of the American imperialist programme crossed with a massive information-gathering tool, there is no way of denying that as a business, it is pure mega-genius. Its scale really is dizzying, and the potential for growth is virtually limitless.
I'll bet they do. It is Facebook's enormous potential that led Microsoft to buy 1. A recent rumour says that Asian investor Lee Ka-Shing, said to be the ninth richest man in the world, has bought 0. The creators of the site need do very little bar fiddle with the programme. In the main, they simply sit back and watch as millions of Facebook addicts voluntarily upload their ID details, photographs and lists of their favourite consumer objects.
Once in receipt of this vast database of human beings, Facebook then simply has to sell the information back to advertisers, or, as Zuckerberg puts it in a recent blog post, "to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web". And indeed, this is precisely what's happening. On November 6 last year, Facebook announced that 12 global brands had climbed on board. All trained in marketing bullshit of the highest order, their representatives made excited comments along the following lines:.
This is about Blockbuster participating in the community of the consumer so that, in return, consumers feel motivated to share the benefits of our brand with their friends. Sign up to Facebook and you become a free walking, talking advert for Blockbuster or Coke, extolling the virtues of these brands to your friends. We are seeing the commodification of human relationships, the extraction of capitalistic value from friendships.
Now, by comparision with Facebook, newspapers, for example, begin to look hopelessly outdated as a business model. A newspaper sells advertising space to businesses looking to sell stuff to their readers. But the system is far less sophisticated than Facebook for two reasons.
One is that newspapers have to put up with the irksome expense of paying journalists to provide the content. Facebook gets its content for free. The other is that Facebook can target advertising with far greater precision than a newspaper. Admit on Facebook that your favourite film is This Is Spinal Tap, and when a Spinal Tap-esque movie comes out, you can be sure that they'll be sending ads your way.
It's true that Facebook recently got into hot water with its Beacon advertising programme. Users were notified that one of their friends had made a purchase at certain online shops; 46, users felt that this level of advertising was intrusive, and signed a petition called "Facebook!
Stop invading my privacy! Zuckerberg apologised on his company blog. He has written that they have now changed the system from "opt-out" to "opt-in". But I suspect that this little rebellion about being so ruthlessly commodified will soon be forgotten: after all, there was a national outcry by the civil liberties movement when the idea of a police force was mooted in the UK in the mid 19th century. Futhermore, have you Facebook users ever actually read the privacy policy? It tells you that you don't have much privacy.
Facebook pretends to be about freedom, but isn't it really more like an ideologically motivated virtual totalitarian regime with a population that will very soon exceed the UK's? Thiel and the rest have created their own country, a country of consumers. Now, you may, like Thiel and the other new masters of the cyberverse, find this social experiment tremendously exciting.
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