> Is it likely that what Peter Thiel has to say about the antichrist is in any meaningful way predictive out-of-sample? No, not very likely > Does his recent schizophrenic detour still serve a massively integral (primarily aesthetic) role within the broad "tech-right" ideological ecosystem? Yes, obviously If you don't get this you have nonviable intuitions on this stuff. Any intellectual movement that wants to remain sticky for an extended period needs an esoteric underbelly that's largely incomprehensible & unapproachable for the "normies" among the ranks It doesn't necessarily matter whether the ideas on which this canon is built are in their own right functional, what matters is that the canon is sufficiently off-putting and impossible to parse for the masses, which in turn makes it alluring to the ambitious strivers with refined taste who have it as a top priority to keep distance from the plebeians These (yes, largely high IQ -- yes, usually 2std+) minority strivers are those who ultimately settle in positions "upstream" of public discourse and their attraction is what determines whether your ideology can remain entrenched But you do need the normies on board to some extent, you need your ideology to be popularly legitimized. Those upstream of the discourse still need the stream to be accepted by the downstream... So yea any successful ideological project also needs a "tip of the iceberg" that "the people" like: slogans, pamphlets, memes, simpler media, etc You end up needing to set up a bifurcated distribution channel -- "the exoteric and the esoteric", for the masses, and not for them... Clearly the successful interpreters across history, all sides of the spectrum, understood this reality: look at Strauss, Gramsci, Ellul, Weber, Pareto How did the communists maintain dominance for so long? In many ways, exactly through this bifurcated distribution -- they had the pamphlets AND the "monastery", precisely because they maintained alluring esoteric canons "nobody" read Obviously nobody read Marcuse, but without the aesthetic legitimacy he lent, the depth he signalled, "woke" wouldn't have worked Obviously very few bother parsing Land, Yarvin, nobody understands what on earth Thiel is talking about -- but that's why they're going to be so integral! What's Palantir's market cap in an alternative universe where Alex Karp is an MBA instead of a stuttering esoteric Freudian social theorist? How many Palantir holders have gone through Aggression in der Lebenswelt? Do they need to? Everytime I meet someone with the explicit aim of astroturfing these post-internet religious-ideological movements they all complain about being unable to arrest the "normiefication" of their stuff... having it inevitably turned into low-brow memes the second containment is broken -- highest profile example of detriment from this is probably "effective accelerationism" failing to gain traction in important places despite virality The way in which this NEEDS to be addressed: be more like Peter Thiel, less memes, more deep work nobody reads, more complicated syntaxes, more transgressive showings, less virality, less optimization for the algorithm, more 4 letter organizations publishing 30 page PDFs getting 10 clicks, and so on-- surely stop ignoring the necessity of the development of an esoteric canon (your 10k like meme about how you're an esoteric Kabbalistic eboy is NOT esoteric, it's quintessentially exoteric, and if you keep doing this everything you touch will continue to have a 2 week shelf life)...