Elizabeth Spiers decides to stick her neck out for Gawker, the hard-to-like publisher wrestling with Peter Thiel, the gazillionaire apparently pissed off by coverage about him. [All emphasis mine.]
Elizabeth Spiers, On Peter Thiel and Gawker
[…] You have to admire Thiel’s sheer and apparently unending determination to make Denton and Gawker pay for coverage he didn’t like — it’s Olympic level grudge-holding. But the retribution is incredibly disproportionate in a way that seems almost unhinged. It would be hard to argue that Thiel was materially damaged by Gawker’s coverage in the way that he’s now trying to damage Gawker. His personal finances haven’t been destroyed and even the most egregious things Gawker has written haven’t put literally everyone who works for Thiel out of a job. (What did Lifehacker ever do to Peter Thiel?)
Even if Thiel wants to argue that Owen Thomas’s 2007 notorious “Peter Thiel is Totally Gay, People” post had a cataclysmically negative emotional toll for him, trying to destroy the entire business via abuse of the U.S. legal system still seems so epic in its vindictiveness that I couldn’t help but wonder whether this kind of asymmetrical reaction is just part and parcel of what you can expect in Thiel’s orbit generally, if you choose to do business with him.
I’m struck by the fact that Thiel’s been an obvious screwball for a long time, and some of the oddest things he’s said haven’t reemerged in this contretemps. Thiel wrote a ‘personal statement’ for the Cato Institute where he wrote,
I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
He also suggests that woman’s suffrage was a bad thing:
Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.
If you’re interested in that thread, see Jacob Weisberg’s What’s Wrong With Silicon Valley Libertarianism? , and my Peter Thiel, Techno-Utopian and Beware Peter Thiel.
But this mindset not limited to Thiel. He’s just the most unabashedly aggressive member of the techno-utopian lunatic fringe. Here’s ex-Facebooker and angel Chamath Palihapitiya being interviewed by Jason Calcanis in 2013:
Palihapitiya: The government, they’re completely useless.
Calacanis: The government got shut down today and the stock market went up 1 percent.
Palihapitiya: We’re in this really interesting shift. The center of power is here, make no mistake. I think we’ve known it now for probably four or five years.
it’s becoming excruciatingly, obviously clear to everyone else that where value is created is no longer in New York, it’s no longer in Washington, it’s no longer in LA. It’s in San Francisco and the Bay Area. And when you look at sort of, like, how markets react to things like that, and when there’s no reaction, it should be taken as a very subtle signal that the power dynamics have changed. Because markets value meaningful events, markets discount meaningless events. And so the functional value of the government is effectively discounted to zero …
Companies are transcending power now. We are becoming the eminent vehicles for change and influence, and capital structures that matter. If companies shut down, the stock market would collapse. If the government shuts down, nothing happens and we all move on, because it just doesn’t matter. Stasis in the government is actually good for all of us. It means they can neither do anything semi-useful nor anything really stupid.
So why not highjack the courts for a personal vendetta? What’s to stop you, if you’re a billionaire with an ax to grind?
from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/145054478467
