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There very obviously is a reasonably ideologically coherent right-wing counter-elite hiding in plain sight in Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel is the Grand Heresiarch, Roger Mercer was an early backer from the East Coast, and Steven Hsu, Dominic Cummings and Curtis Yarvin were all early recruited talent. Right now the biggest players are Elon Musk and Mark Andreesen, with David Sacks as court jester. Balaji Srinivasan is pursuing a separate project, but is clearly sympathetic. Richard Hanania's vomit-inducing hagiography of this group makes him the spoony bard of the movement. If the current elite is vulnerable to a coup by a shadowy cabal, then this group have the cash and talent to pull it off. They also control two important power centres - VC money (Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins have the prestige, but A16Z and The Founders' Fund have the cool) and Twitter. The main reason the Thielosphere doesn't matter more is that Trump has cut off all the oxygen for any anti-establishment right movement that isn't MAGA, and the Thielosphere disagrees with MAGA on too many points to be allowed near power in a MAGA regime.
"Rationalists et al." are a group with cash and talent who are close to the Thielosphere on the social graph and are sufficiently hostile to the centre-left establishment that they might have been recruitable in a slightly different world. I am 90% confident that Thiel did spend serious cash and effort trying to bring Eliezer Yudkowsky into his network, and I wouldn't be surprised if he had reached out to Scott Siskind as well. Cade Metz' hatchet job accused Scott, almost certainly correctly, of being widely read within the Thielosphere, and therefore presumably sympathetic.
If I was advising George Soros and Klaus Schwab on emerging threats to their world empire, I would include the Thielosphere on the list of things that aren't an immediate threat but need an eye kept on them if they become one. And if I were the Globohomo Elite, Third Class assigned to dealing with the Thielosphere then stopping them absorbing the rationalists would be part of my job. Obvious options include threatening to drive the rationalists out of polite society unless they dissociate themselves from right-wing heresy (worked on Eliezer) or offering a more attractive alternative.
Amusingly, the flow of money from SBF into effective altruism probably was part of the reason that the Thielosphere and the rationalists parted company. SBF was a (as it turns out, rogue) member of the establishment - even to the point of which VCs invested in him (Sequoia backed FTX largely because they were afraid of A16Z becoming the dominant player in crypto). Peter Thiel couldn't or wouldn't compete with SBF in rationalist-buying. If that was an op, then someone has earned a promotion to Globohomo Elite, Second Class.
People on this forum give these guys way too much credit. The tech/VC types keep making the same mistake of thinking that money and power are the same thing. I’ll update my priors if they can get the politics of their own backyard, SF, in any kind of reasonable order. Visit SF and visit NY and decide for yourself if the tech guys are in any way competent enough leaders to govern better than the finance and law guys.
I’m skeptical (they seem too busy cranking out AI SaaS slop to do anything serious) but who knows.
The tech people are not in charge in SF, and never have been.
thats my point, despite having a ton of money they’ve totally failed to accomplish anything political
If money was all someone needed to become powerful we'd be loving in the 2010s era neoliberal anomie of President Michael Bloomberg and be all the better for it. Power is relative influence over other people to action ones will, but oftentimes what matters is getting people to do something they were inclined to do anyways and convince them that it was your idea. No amount of high end pulled pork buffets could get people motivated to attend Bloombergs political rallies, and no amount of VC lavishing on startups can generate politically influential mass. Commies and MAGA capture the politically motivated crazies dedicated enough to waste time on entryist politics, VC captures nerds who would prefer to jerk off to, and play, MOBA games.
Yes. This is my point. These people are not/unable to make themselves politically relevant.
You're right, but I guess the reason some in this forum see fit to ruminate openly about this clearly observable situation is the extant conspiracy of VC and SV actually being one of the agents of chant. We can see its not true based on outcomes, yet ink and neurons are expended hyping up their capabilities and attributing consequences to this group of dweebs, who themselves seem to be intent on sucking themselves off. Thats the discrepancy that invites speculation.
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