Multiple Silicon Valley accelerationists like Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and Mark Zuckerberg are getting attention for what some consider their challenges to values that many consider central to humanity: introspection, civil society, education, and privacy.
Egghead Declares War on Introspection
Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz who bears an uncanny resemblance to Marvel Comics’ Egghead…
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) March 17, 2026
…sat for an interview with David Senra that went viral because of Marc’s claim that he has “zero” introspection.
Here’s the fuller quote:
David Senra: You said something that I love and I never hear other entrepreneurs talk about, but I think it’s super important that you don’t have any level of introspection.
Marc Andreessen: Yes. Zero. As little as possible. Why? Move forward. Go. I found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It’s a real problem and it’s a problem at work and it’s a problem at home.
This statement inspired Émile P. Torres of the Realtime Techpocalypse Newsletter to respond: “Silicon Valley truly is run by sociopaths with no empathy for others and no ability or desire to reflect on their behaviors, feelings, and ideas.”
Torres uses this claim as a jumping off point for an examination of the mindset of Silicon Valley Accelerationists in general.
…there are two general groups of accelerationists. The first group thinks that ASI will by default be value-aligned. Marc Andreessen seems to hold this view. He appears to think that if we just plow ahead with ASI, it will by default bring about a utopian world of radical abundance, human enhancement, and space colonization. The second group thinks that it doesn’t even matter whether ASI is value-aligned. Indeed, many argue that ASI shouldn’t be value-aligned — it should have its own “alien, inhuman” values.
In both cases, the conclusion is — as noted — pedal to the metal. That’s why Karnofsky thinks this isn’t a coordination problem. Even if one, two, or all of the companies disbanded, there would still be people who’d immediately start new companies to race toward ASI as quickly as possible.
There’s no stopping the ASI race unless the government swoops in and imposes robust regulations to prevent this from happening. And since the government won’t do that, we’re kinda screwed — not because ASI is actually around the corner. I don’t believe that at all. But rather, because the race itself is causing profound harms to the world. Because we don’t need AGI or ASI for AI to destroy our society.
Peter Thiel vs. ‘the Very Foundations of Civil Coexistence’
Meanwhile, Palantir co-founder, Peter Thiel is getting some attention from the New York Times because his continuing lecture series on the Antichrist (spoiler: It’s probably Greta Thunberg) has hit Rome, home to the Pope.
Mr. Thiel, an investor in artificial intelligence, says he is drawing on biblical prophesies to warn of an Antichrist who will promise safety from existential risks like nuclear war, climate change and artificial intelligence only to bring about something worse: one-world, totalitarian government.
Now, Mr. Thiel is encountering resistance from Christian thinkers in the Roman Catholic Church, just as he tries to build support for his ideas in the church’s backyard in Rome.
This week, Mr. Thiel arrived in Rome to deliver four lectures on the Antichrist. The series, which began on Sunday, is exploring how “occult forces are ceaselessly at work, intent on destroying what remains of the West,” according to the conservative Christian group hosting him.
In response, Catholics have decried Mr. Thiel’s vision in several articles over the past week.
The piece that’s gotten the most attention is Rev. Paolo Benanti’s “American heresy: Should we burn Peter Thiel?” (original in French).
Some quotes (via Google translate):
Thiel is above all a political theologian operating at the very heart of the Silicon Valley ecosystem.
Both enigmatic and influential, his figure does not emerge as that of a simple entrepreneur but as that of a thinker who has woven a complex ideological framework from very diverse sources: from the mimetic philosophy of René Girard to the anarcho-capitalist prophecy, to recently arrive at a theologico-apocalyptic framework that is as disturbing as it is structured .
Thiel’s entire action can thus be read as a prolonged act of heresy against the liberal consensus: a challenge to the very foundations of civil coexistence, which he now considers outdated.
Benanti connects Thiel’s philosophical studies to his early support of Facebook:
In the business world, Thiel relied on this philosophical intuition to make his most successful investments.
We know, for example, that he used the theory of mimetic desire to anticipate the success of Facebook, investing very early in the social network, at a time when it was still in its infancy. Where many saw only another slightly geeky blog aimed at students, Thiel detected a perfect “mimetic machine”: a platform designed to exploit a fundamental human need—to observe others, imitate them, and desire what they desire.
He himself reportedly explained René Girard’s theories to Mark Zuckerberg, persuading him to scale up with a striking phrase: “whoever owns a machine for producing desire owns the world.” For him, the introduction of the “Like” button, and its subsequent evolution, was not merely a technical innovation: it represented the perfect algorithmic implementation of mimetic desire, a device designed to amplify and monetize mimetic desire on a planetary scale.
And what is Thiel’s protege Zuckerberg up to lately, why nothing less than an attack on all forms of online privacy.
Zuckerberg Attacks Privacy at the Root
A Reddit researcher just exposed how Meta funneled over $2 billion through shadowy nonprofits to push age verification laws that would force Apple and Google to build surveillance infrastructure into every device—while conveniently exempting Meta’s own platforms from the same requirements.
Meta’s lobbying operation spans 45 states using nonprofit shells to avoid transparency requirements.
The investigation by GitHub user “upper-up” traces funding through organizations like the Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA), which launched December 18, 2024, and testified for Utah’s SB-142 just days later. Bloomberg and Deseret News reported Meta’s backing of DCA, part of a $70 million fragmented super PAC strategy designed to evade FEC tracking. Traditional election spending disclosure requirements don’t apply to this fragmented approach.
Proposed laws would embed persistent identity verification directly into operating systems.
The technical reality hits harder than policy abstractions. These bills mandate OS-level APIs that apps can query for age data—creating a permanent identity layer baked into your phone’s core functions. Meta’s Horizon OS for Quest VR already implements this infrastructure through Family Center controls. Now they want Apple and Google to build similar systems that every app can access, turning age verification into persistent device fingerprinting.
Age verification bills target Meta’s competitors while leaving Meta platforms untouched.
Taylor Lorenz has more at The Guardian:
Over the past year, more than two dozen countries around the world have proposed bans on social media use for vast swathes of their public. These laws, often proposed under the guise of “child safety”, are ushering in an era of mass surveillance and widespread censorship, contributing to what scholars have called a “global free speech recession”.
…
In the US, online age verification laws have passed or are being considered in more than half of the nation’s states. In the coming weeks, a package of 19 “child safety” bills, several which require identity verification for social media, are set to move forward in the House of Representatives. Big tech platforms such as Meta, Google and Discord have begun pre-complying with the laws in order to get ahead of regulation.While social media bans may seem like a prudent measure to protect children, they are not only ineffective, they endanger both children and adults. There is little evidence that social media is driving any type of widespread mental health crisis in children. Studies have repeatedly shown the opposite. Removing anonymity from the web, which will inevitably happen when tech companies are required to identify and ban children, allows for easier government tracking and censorship of journalists, activists and whistleblowers, who rely on online anonymity.
And while some claim the laws would curb big tech’s power, only the largest tech companies have the resources to shoulder the extensive costs of age verification systems. Non-profit and indie platforms could be forced to close, consolidating big tech’s power further. Mass surveillance systems, once constructed, could also be easily leveraged by governments and bad actors.
Thiel and Zuckerberg are in good company among their fellow Silicon Valley accelerationists, just check what Palantir co-founder Alex Karp has been getting up to.
Karp’s Tech To Destroy Educated Women
Karp spoke to CNBC and was his usual charming self, saying “This technology disrupts humanity’s train, largely Democratic voters, and makes their economic power less, and increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working class, often male voters. These disruptions are going to disrupt every aspect of our society.”
Here’s how The New Republic summed up the implications of Karp’s arguments:
This sounds like a direct, long-term pitch to the GOP from a CEO whose tech firm already has numerous government contracts and is deeply embedded in the Pentagon. Karp’s message is loud and clear: My technology will take political capital away from one of your greatest enemies—liberal women with degrees—and give one of your favorite demographics to patronize—working-class men—more political power to transfer to you. He’s aligning his technology with both GOP political strategy and the larger male-centered culture war that the right has been waging for the better part of a decade now. And how exactly would his technology only hurt Democrat women?
Karp also made a Patriot Act–era argument, justifying his admittedly “dangerous” technology by claiming that Palantir will allow us to “be American” in the future.
“These technologies are dangerous societally,” Karp continued. “The only justification you could possibly have would be that if we don’t do it, our adversaries will do it. And we will be subject to their rule of law.… Why is it that we’re absorbing the risk of disrupting the very fabric of our society, including the most powerful parts of our society, if it’s not because it’s about maintaining our ability to be American in the near term and long term?”
Looks like the future is in the best possible hands, amirite?
29 comments
Comments are closed.
..and rewrite it as needed.
I have been skeptically watching Elon Musk’s xAI’s Grok and Grokipedia. He has explicitly claimed a determination to make Grok, “maximally truth-seeking” by which he claims to mean “factually accurate” and “anti-woke”, with a post-graduate, Ph.D level of knowledge. Being explicit about imposing a value alignment such as Musk is, does not make it clear to me that his claims are anything more than a PR strategy. How will Grok’s search for truth going to work? Will Grok engage in theoretical or experimental research? Debate scholars on controversial issues?
There are not many issues where I could, based on my university education, “proofread” Grokipedia, but I have compared Grokipedia with Wikipedia on a few economics topics, where I know the Wikipedia articles are poorly written and poorly sourced. (Wikipedia’s editors agree that these articles are fairly low quality.) Grokipedia started by simply copying Wikipedia, but claims to have been busy with fact-checking and copy-editing. I can confirm that the copy-editing makes improvements to readability.
I prompted the deletion of a particularly poor and brief Wikipedia article, on “The Great Deflation”. Grokipedia has steadily expanded it. Grok is not very critical of sources, accepting a lot of what I would regard as right-wing claims by gold bugs for example (which were in the original Wikipedia article which I deleted), but has adopted a mostly neutral voice and has also dug up contrary claims.
As usual the NYT’s function is to obscure rather than illuminate. As a recovering Catholic it is rather a scream to see the institutional reactionaries on the defensive from the Francoist Catholics. Payback for crushing the Liberationists in Latin America back in the day which left the Protestant holy-rollers to fill the vacuum…tsk, tsk. If it’s not the Albigensians its somebody else. The FT has a little better take on the controversy if only because it gets a bit more into the weeds. Maybe the Czar can slip out of the Undisclosed Region, get down there, sneak in and give us dope on this latest in a very, very long line of proto-catholic orthodoxies.
Can not be rid of this rancid sub-class of plutocrats quickly enough. “Gen ⍺ hanging the last squillionaire-tech-bro by the entrails of the last kleptocrat” should be this millenium’s Diderotian coda on their existence (via brainyquote.com).
PS:
NAT! When you dropped that Andreessen tweet yesterday, and it appeared on my X feed, I laughed so hard, I almost coughed up my uvula! 😂
I’m not liable for injuries. Perhaps I should add a release to that X feed.
#OnAccelerationistBullshit
These soulless, greed-without-bounds techno-miscreants are little more than deep-pocketed snake oil salesmen trying to find a different potion to peddle.
The fact is there is a lot of great tech acceleration going on in places that don’t require flux-capacitor power per rack or provide false premise for workforce reduction. The best meme retort for the AI Hype Men comes from “Mean Girls” (via giphy.com): “Stop trying to make
fetch[ubiquitousAI|AGI|ASI] happen. It’s not gonna happen”This tweet gave me a chuckle … (via X)
… so much so that I decided to check out where our boy #EggHead was on NFTs and The MetaVerse.
It didn’t take long … :)
NFTs
• Marc Andreesen on Why We Need to Take NFTs Seriously (via YouTube)
• Marc Andreessen explains the utility of NFTs as long-term innovation (via nounft.com, #Natch)
MetaVerse (and OMFG, this way worse)
• Notes from the MetaVerse (via substack)
• Selling The Metaverse (via The American Conservative; offers same quote above but … ↓)
… and that last quote tells you how you should treat anything coming out of his, and all the other AI hype-beasts’ mouths. NFT’s & The MetaVerse were sh**ty ideas/platforms and are rightfully dead now.
Thanks again, Nat!
Thank YOU, those are great finds. I’m traveling this week so had to write this post ahead and wasn’t able to include the news about the family blogging Metaverse shutting down $80 billion later. These morons!
Hopefully we’ve reached peak stupidity, but I doubt it…
It’s always darkest right before it becomes completely black or something like that
RUEcon ….
Cough … Gates Digital Capitalism per – He famously coined the term
“friction-free capitalism” in his 1995 book The Road Ahead, predicting that the internet would make markets incredibly efficient, reducing transaction costs and creating a “shopper’s heaven” where computers negotiate directly.
Here is an overview of Bill Gates’ relationship with digital capitalism:
1. From “Friction-Free” to Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI)
Friction-Free Capitalism (1990s): Gates envisioned an “information highway” that would act as a universal middleman, allowing buyers to compare all goods worldwide to find the best price, bringing efficiency to the core mechanism of capitalism.
Digital Public Infrastructure (2020s): Currently, Gates supports the development of DPI—secure digital IDs, mobile payments, and data exchange—as a “game-changer” for global health and development, arguing that it connects people in developing countries to economic opportunities just as roads and railways do.
Digital Currency: Gates advocates for digital, low-transaction-cost currencies over decentralized alternatives like Bitcoin, citing the success of his foundation’s funding in India and Kenya for improving financial inclusion for the poor.
Anyone remember the whole reason of his CORE Ed drive was to IP education via his digital platforms and market forces are always the most efficient = looks at bank account~~~~
skippy:
Hahahahaha! Digital Rentier Platforms R Us!
About to turn in for the night, but here’s a relevant tweet re:bank accounts I just saw… :)
G’nite m8!
People like you who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It’s a problem, at work and at home. Enough introspection! Go! Move forward!
#iSeeWotUDidThere … :)
Peter Thiel (degenerate g_y vampire ) and all these ultimate Tech bro accelerationist, they all love power for their own-sake, regardless of the exploitation and cruelty it inflicts on others. This is blasphemy of the spirit, which cannot be forgiven (see Gospel of John), and we should not forgive this either… with their love of tech magic and the religion of money, these ‘males’ are the real witches of the present age who are truly wicked; antiquity does record appropriate solutions for these kind of problems. (How appropriate that it involves wood, which is a renewable resource.)
It seems obvious that if the Antichrist were to appear in today’s world, he would go on tour to deliver lectures on the Antichrist.
EggheadConehead (with apologies to Dan Aykroyd).beat me to it. every photo of andreessen results in a thinks: “we are from france!”
It seems like Peter Thiel is engaging in projection
He needs to look in the mirror in search of the anti-Christ
What separates us geezers from the youngsters is that I have a clear recollection of a time when I had a right to privacy. I had a friend who is a member of the federalist society tell me no I don’t and lo and behold that is true in the right wing country we now live in. What’s that? Yes, yes, he voted for biden
This sort of thing has old roots in Silicon Valley. It was Scott McNealy, the CEO of Sun Microsystems who said this-
‘You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.’
And I should point out that he said this way back in 1999. Your loss of privacy is their means of profit.
Its all about a private platform mate … zero commons … build it and then let everyone and their dog/cat frolic … monkey goo endorphins = market share and profit … consumers must consume thingy …
Like Uber et al is not about profit …. its about shaping society/reality … few gens later jackpot ….
There’s no such thing as the Anti-Christ. There sure are a lot scary humans though.
One should not forget, that for Girard, mimetic behavior is the essential cause for violence between humans, and the only way out of this logic is Christianity.
In this sense, it’s logical to exploit Mimesis as a capitalist, and to surveil and surpress it as a christian.
Is there a link to a primary source for Thiel’s views on anti-Christ? Maybe I missed it in the article, but everything seems to be secondary reporting. The exact same issue came up a couple of months ago, and the best I could find was an incoherent interview Thiel gave to US media.
He is making listeners sign NDA type documents and hasn’t published the doc. One source attended a lecture and published notes but they were only online for a day and stupidly I didn’t save it.
Why am I thinking of L. Ron Hubbard all of a sudden?
Thanks.
From the horse’s mouth in Ross Douthat’s interview of Thiel several months back. Spot cut.
Not surprisingly, the “Christian” Thiel completely distorts the verse he cites as the core of his thesis, turning it from a warning against complacency into a warning against caution.
Sticking with Marvel Comics, they think themselves as Tony Stark (Iron Man), but they’re super villians. And not even the military-industrial corporate villians like Obediah Stane (played by Jeff Bridges) or Justin Hammer (played by Sam Rockwell). Not even Egghead, but the colorless generic executives behind Roxxon (derived from Exxon), which is Marvel’s standin whenever they need greedy, unethical, immoral corporate bad guys.