At a cryptocurrency conference in Miami, Peter Thiel unloaded on the perceived enemies of bitcoin. In a stem-winding speech, the contrarian called Warren Buffett the “sociopathic grandpa from Omaha” and dubbed J.P. Morgan chief exec Jamie Dimon and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink a “financial gerontocracy” restraining a crypto-inflamed youth uprising. He also inveighed against ESG — the mindset of investing with socially conscious criteria like environmental impact, social justice and good governance.
“ESG is just a hate factory,” Thiel said. “It’s a factory for naming enemies, and we should not be allowing them to do that… When you think ESG, you should be thinking CCP [Chinese Communist Party].”
Coming from Thiel, the PayPal and Palantir Technologies co-founder who will soon leave the Meta Platforms board to spend more time with his right-wing political candidates, the comments weren’t particularly surprising. And I might have missed them, if they weren’t gleefully retweeted by fellow Meta board member Marc Andreessen.
Over the last two weeks, the co-founder of Netscape and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has tweeted a startling 350 or so times. The posts are framed mostly in elliptical but condemning terms that refer to “the current thing,” a meme popular among members of the extremely-online right.
“The current thing is eternal, yet utterly of the moment,” goes one Andreessen Zen koan. “The good of society demands that opponents of the current thing be fired and ostracized,” went another. And a third: “Does the current thing speak truth to power, or power to truth?”
There are now forum threads devoted to making sense of Andreessen’s quixotic ramblings. But his quarry appears to be the usual bogeymen of the far right, like “cancel culture” and excessive “wokeism,” as well as the frenzied rush to support suddenly fashionable causes like war-torn Ukraine. (The nerve.)
And then there is the internet’s chief rabble-rouser: Tesla’s chief Elon Musk. In a winding series of high-drama moves, Musk bought a 9.2% stake in Twitter, then declined to join its board on Sunday, perhaps in part because it would have limited his ability to post inflammatory things about the company. He is, of course, a prolific online instigator. Earlier this month, he claimed in a tweet that he had refused to enter Berlin’s renowned Berghain nightclub because a sign on the wall apparently had an upsetting message. It read: “Peace.” (He has also tweeted repeatedly in support of “the current thing” meme.)
So what’s going on? Here are three high-profile, exorbitantly wealthy technologists, apparently finding midlife satisfaction in shitposting — the act of writing “deliberately provocative or off-topic comments on social media, typically in order to upset others or distract from the main conversation,” according to the Oxford dictionary. They also seem to be firmly enmeshed in the crypto-Twitter world’s flywheel of Narcissus — a self-reinforcing loop where only the most outlandish gestures draw that sweet, gratifying drug that is excessive online attention.
But something about their contrarianism is starting to feel mean-spirited. Calling Buffett, 91, a “sociopathic grandpa” is pretty out there, even for Thiel. One of Andreessen’s frequent targets is San Francisco, a bête noire of right-wing media outlets like Fox News.
It also feels like these guys are employing demagoguery to advance their own personal interests or financial agendas. Thiel, for example, is long on bitcoin and has said his biggest mistake was getting into it too late and too modestly. He’s well positioned to add to his $8.3 billion fortune by pumping up the frenzied animosities of the bitcoin bros. Musk has already parlayed his bet on Twitter into at least $1 billion in profit on paper, riding a wave of hypothetical optimism about the changes he might bring to a social network plagued by low engagement and a failure to cultivate a mainstream user base.
Andreessen’s descent into this pool of self-serving provocation is more surprising. He once carved an even larger public profile for himself by writing essays on how “software is eating the world” and why it’s “time to build” a way out of the Covid-19 pandemic. His current thing about “the current thing” feels churlish and childish in comparison. (So does his ongoing spate of blocking journalists and tech executives on Twitter.) And he’s frequently crossing over into the absurd. “Misinformation (noun): Anything I don’t like. Conspiracy theorist (noun): Anyone who disagrees with me,” he proclaimed in a tweet. I guess he’s satirizing conventional thinking? I’m actually not sure.