been thinking about why some people seem uniquely obsessed with Thiel, hanging on his every word he performs a type of intellectual transparency that’s relatively rare at his level. feels like he’s letting you in on his 4D chess game, exposing the deep roots of his ideology
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i think people have the sense that most public figures are only sharing the tip of their belief iceberg. he makes it seem like he’s sharing the 90% that’s below the surface it’s the type of macro talk that you imagine happens behind closed doors, when nobody’s watching
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it feels like the sort of tell-all memoir that people normally only write when they’re *done* playing the game i think Bannon is doing something similar for people who are further right. he’s explicit about where his beliefs come from, the deep-rooted narratives he’s advancing
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i‘m curious whether this species of transparency will launch a race to the bottom, where public figures compete to see who can be most explicit about the game they’re playing if Thiel’s approach works and gains him credibility, i imagine others will take notice and jump in
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Replying to @aaronzlewis
this only works if you are clearly playing a deeper game and are giving interesting info but still clearly holding back some key insights, which is thiel's or bannons aura per se. cant do the same with, say, kamala, pete, trump, etc. theyre just playing for power. boring
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Replying to @similaralterity @aaronzlewis
pulling back thiel's curtain and you get something interesting pull back buttigieg's or Jeb!'s and there's going to be a CV with all the boxes ticked. i suspect its hard to fake this
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Replying to @similaralterity
agreed! and that’s what is so interesting to me about this game. if it’s successful, it’ll exclude all the wizard of oz people who are only pretending to have something behind the curtain
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Replying to @aaronzlewis
its also quite interesting how thiel is basically a rorchasch test (like so many things these days). if you eat up all his words, like you said above, then you're likely SF/Tech diaspora if you think hes a vampire, your probably NY/DC/LA media elite etc
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Replying to @similaralterity
genuinely curious if there was a before time when things weren’t rorchasch tests
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Yes and no--objectively that's always been true, but what's shifted is that the lens of seeing everything as ingroup/outgroup dynamics has become more common, i.e. people are less likely to be unreflectively tribalistic. This is the silver lining of the Internet context collapse
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