With all the hoopla over Facebook and Twitter among the chattering classes recently, including a movie that I can't believe anyone on the planet would actually pay money to see, there's a strong wind in the sails of people who insist "e-business" and "social networking" is the wave of the future and will change the way everything does investing and make every young person with a computer and some moxie rich, just like it was supposed to do, oh, about twelve years ago. Concurrent, you should get to know e-prophet
Peter Thiel. He was the original chief financial backer of Facebook, who handed Mark Zuckerberg a cool half-million to build the ultimate ad-revenue and microtransaction generating website, and then founded PayPal to routinely freeze large customers out of their cash like an international mob bank.
Jacob Weisberg wrote an article about the guy that stopped me in my tracks when I read it, and I encourage anyone to read it.
It mainly relates to
a little proposition Thiel recently made; his advice to young people entering college: drop out and start a website-based business, because all it takes is a computer and a little moxie (and six years and a cool half-million) to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. He'll even find ten people under 20 who's sparkle-in-the-eye he likes the most to give a hundred grand if they impress him, like the Willy Wonky of iCommerce or something. To get an idea of why this is actually frightening and not just dumb,
take the man at his word to the Cato Institute. The people of the American democracy are angry at the world of venture capitalism, therefore if the world is to survive, that is if fabulously rich people are to survive, democracy has to shape up or ship out. People should build unregulated city-boats and space-stations to float around International Waters, free of those pesky taxes or labor laws or human rights. Rich people should linger forever in cryogenic undeath, so they never lose control of their investments and that damn estate tax never takes half-a-percent of your nepotistic gift to the world. That he's also a flaming homosexual with apparently little regard for the intellectual capacity of women and non-whites is just icing on the graphic-novel villain-esque cake.
This, to me, is the true face of libertarianism, transhumanism, and command-capitalism. Men with the ambition and acumen to wring people and the stock market out of millions are entitled to set the rules, and it's time for everyone else to suck it up and get with the program, because if you weren't lucky enough to be born rich or screw your way to the top, then you have no right to complain about anything. Thiel himself means nothing, certainly not to me - as little as a hundred years from now, his permanently frozen head will be mounted on a pillar reading, "I am Ozymandias, CEO of CEOs; look on my clickthrough ye mighty and invest."
It's what he represents that scares me - the already quintessential 21st century attitude - you, yes
you, can sit at home naked and crank out a funny little program, and people will pay you millions to be a celebrity; if your startup fails, it was everyone's fault but yours, especially the law's; and if you get fucked over by a business or your employer, you have no one to blame but yourself for not seeing it coming and somehow being sharper than them. We went through these pie-in-the-sky investment pit shenanigans with Pets.com once before, and now some hoary old veterans want to relive the glory days of 2001, and slapped on a veneer of Gernsbeck futurism to snazz it up. I fervently hope this little venture of Thiel's falls flat on its ass, and every one of his Golden Ticket holders goes bust in record time, just to put some daylight back into the tech-business world.
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Topic: The Transhuman Ozymandias - Realistically Creepy (Read 11012 times)