What's Wrong With Silicon Valley Libertarianism?

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/10/18/what-s-wrong-with-silicon-valley-libertarianism.html

by olalonde • 15 years ago

5 14 15 years ago

newsweek.com

jerf3• 15 years ago

This is just a hatchet job, barely worthy of newsweek, let alone HN.

kenjackson5• 15 years ago

Is there anything in it that's false?

I ask because literally everything I've heard about the guy is negative.

olalonde• 15 years ago

That's just the loud minority. There are also many libertarianism fans on HN ;)

teodesian3• 15 years ago

Everything? You make it sound like he's a child rapist or something.

Has he ever tried to violently force his worldview on anyone? No. Is he a criminal? No.

Is he trying to advance his own agenda, like anybody else? Yes. This is the same kind of demagoguery used against rock and roll music; they're afraid his evil ideas will corrupt our poor citizenry!

It treats the reader as a mindless lump unable to think for himself. That might work on TV, but not on the internet.

jerf3• 15 years ago

Who can tell? The ideological vasoline is smeared on the lens so thick I can't see the subject anymore.

glenra• 15 years ago

Most of what's false is the spin, including paraphrases such as "winner-take-all capitalism", a phrase I doubt Thiel actually used.

Seasteading in particular is a really exciting project. Thiel funds it because he wants to live in a world that still has frontiers, places people with unpopular ideas - religious, ideological, technological or otherwise - can escape to and try to live in new ways. Seasteading could revitalize political experimentation generally, yet here again the paraphrases are uncharitable and inaccurate - the claim that seasteads are intended or expected to be "law-free floating communes" is Jacob Weisberg's uninformed take on the subject, not Thiel's.

There's approximately zero chance Thiel himself would want to go live on a seastead - he invests anyway in large part to make the world a better place - the same reason he invests in kids who'd likely do better without college.

And how, exactly, is investing in long-term longshot bets less noble than to fund shorter-term projects like self-driving cars? Don't get me wrong, I love self-driving cars and I'm glad Google is throwing weight behind them, but self-driving cars were inevitable already. Google funds them because it fell naturally out of their other business interests and they stand to make vast sums off it in the short term - it's an easy bet for them to make. If Thiel likes to take the longer road, what's wrong with that?

teodesian3• 15 years ago

The primary beef this seemed to have with Thiel was that he was "withdrawing consent" from democracy, believing it to be incompatible with liberty.

Not good for the writer of the article that Thiel is technically correct. Divine right of the mob is no better than the divine right of kings, oligarchs or whatever else.

Anyone can look around and see that democratic government is just as capable of genocide and police-statery as the next.

They go on to criticize him for committing heresy against public education and our university system. I'd think the users of HN would realize by now that a degree doesn't necessarily imply someone is smart or has skills needed to do some job.

They finish off with the usual "libertarians are all selfish" argument. They then hold up other members of the elite as an example of not being selfish >snicker<. Nobody's perfect, and you can always make anybody rich look like Satan.

This is clearly just a hit piece to make people holding a particular worldview feel good and find a new enemy to attack. There's no concrete criticisms here, nor is the interview here in depth enough for you to understand his context or worldview.

bluekeybox• 15 years ago

> Divine right of the mob is no better than the divine right of kings, oligarchs or whatever else.

Absolutely. If the mob says a witch must be burned; is that still the democracy that the author had in mind? It seems that there are two definitions of democracy: one that implies a liberal system of the sort that developed in the West that has public institutions, several branches of power, and regular referendums, and another that implies that the majority is always right (aka "tyranny of the majority", "dictatorship of the masses" etc). I have a feeling that Thiel had the second definition in mind when he criticized democracy, and the author of the article decided to take advantage of the ambiguity of the word "democracy" and paint Thiel as an authoritarian of some sort. Either that or the author is really confused and shouldn't be writing about politics.

What's Wrong With Silicon Valley Libertarianism?

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