Sunday Reads (revisited): ChatGPT panic, Peter Thiel apocalypse posturing and Taylor-Travis cuteness
some observations from my trip back to Australia
I’m on a flight back to Australia and I'm already missing a lot of things about Paris. I think it’s the longest stint in my life in which I’ve not felt a profound loneliness. As I said to a new Parisienne friend, I’m far from having found my feet in the city, but I feel the ingredients for building a good life are there: an easy human flow (everything is walkable/ride-able); a culture of socialising in communal places with strangers; a people who like to argue and argue well (fairly); robust male-female dynamics; a culture in which older people are not rendered invisible; ostensibly and often rather odd socialist principles; etc.
I didn’t post on Friday because I was herding a broken suitcase I saved from the garbage across Paris, onto a Eurostar (that was 90 minutes late due to a socialist-principled strike), then through the centre of London to the WeAre8 offices (to do a podcast interview with the philosopher Alain de Botton), then back out to a friend’s place in 1C temperatures (just loving on my French-unfashionable sleepingbag jacket), then out to Heathrow via the bloody horrible Tube.
But I’m now on the flight with a screaming baby to the left of me and another to the right of me and I’ve been doing some longreading and sifting through messages and screen grabs on my phone and I thought I’d share a few goods ones in a vibe reminiscent of the Sunday Reads I used to do here.
Peter Thiel is just after for a meaningful life
This mad romp over at
by Tara Isabella Burton is everything all at once. It dissects billionare “techno-vitalist” Thiel’s modus operandi. And it’s frighteningly god-complexy. As the author writes:Many of us are not just hungry for, but desperate for, a world where things matter.
I agree.
Thiel, apparently, is attending to this. Here are some grabs from the mad romp…I recommend working your way through the whole read. It touches on all kinds of stuff I’ve covered in various Wild episodes - Rene Girard’s mimetic desire theory, transhumanism, the tech-bro apocalypse imperative (see the Doug Rushkoff episode) and how all roads in this worryingly narcissistic corner of the world lead to Musk and Trump.
At its core, techno-vitalism is as much an aesthetic mood as a political one: liberal democracy has just made life plain boring…It is a conflation of libertarianism, reactionary sentiment, and instinctive anti-wokeism
[Thiel condemns] our present “zombie period” of neoliberal modernity as a "low testosterone world" of dysfunctional “modern gender dynamics" and nihilistic solipsism of "amus[ing] ourselves with memes and TikTok videos,”
I’m not sure how many of you follow this intersecting space? Your thoughts? It’s about tech billionaires almost entirely lacking in EI who think of themselves as messiahs. They genuinely love the idea of an apocalypse because, in their libertarian eyes, it will be every man (literally) for them(him)selves(self) and they (the cashed-up bros with the bunkers and the rockets to Mars) will win.