Editing Blog/2025-10-12/Word Magic (section)

=== What I Understood of Thiel ===

Perhaps there are many out there (surely Sam Wolfe is hopefully among them) who can take Thiel's essay and its allusions and inferences and slot it into their minds such that it aids their decision-making in a real sense. For my part, I can draw something from it but not very much perhaps due to the incompatibility of our respective minds. In the end, all I got from Peter Thiel's Antichrist works are reinforcements of things I already believe: that ossification is always imminent. 

I understand his claims to be that crises (both manufactured and otherwise) will provide an opportunity for heavy regulation of individuals under the guise of fighting those crises; and that AI doomerism, rampant environmentalism, climate change and so on are examples of these crises. One could see the Antichrist structure to either be a rhetorical flourish<ref name=unlikely-rhetoric/> or a deliberate technique to win approval among a group more willing to hear it in these terms than in the drab language of "regulation ossifies development and encourages centralization of power". But I choose to see it as this: a glimpse into the internal thought structure of a mind capable of effective market prediction which has generally illegible intermediate states.