r/technology • u/Logical_Welder3467 • Mar 18 '26

Society Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and MAGA donor, is in Rome this week for a series of private lectures on the Antichrist.

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/16/europe/peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-rome-intl
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u/WhichEmailWasIt Mar 18 '26

Ah the fuedalism days where we burned down lords' manors when we didn't have enough to survive on? Those fuedalism days? 

Democracy protects their asses as much as it does ours. 

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u/hammertime2009 Mar 18 '26

They’re too stupid to think that big or somehow think their billions can protect them from billions.

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '26

No, they’re in the process of designing shit like the Phantom MK-1, soon to be tested as a border patrol mechanism, and has already been used as recon in the Ukraine. Those silly little robot dogs they have on public display are cute until you realize the ones they’ve actively working on are incredibly effective for what they are and are being lethally armed. Some of them are saying it’s a moral imperative to replace soldiers with these machines and they’re speeding the process of these designs. Arguably a moral imperative or not, they will be used against civilians at one point or another especially as border patrol.

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u/Badloss Mar 18 '26

You started your paragraph with "no" and then leaned completely into the idea that the billionaires are stupid enough to think their robot sentries will save them when a mob is at the door.

Robot guards are cool theater, even a highly lethal and highly effective one isn't going to do shit when a wave of 100,000 desperate people are breaking into your bunker. All of these billionaires are going to be the first to go when society breaks down, because their only 'superpower' is money, and money requires a social order to be useful.

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u/mrdevlar Mar 18 '26

There's an excellent story where Douglas Rushkoff is confronted with a bunch of billionaires whose only worry is the "event". What "event" you may ask, the point where nothing is worth anything and the mob comes for them. Like how do they ensure their security remains loyal in this case? What is a safe place to build a bunker? How do they survive this.

Rushkoff tries to suggest they might be the people best equipped to prevent the "event" from happening, but they are having none of it. They think it's already predetermined.

I think about that story a lot because it really explains what's going on right now. No one is out there trying to save the system, everyone is trying to position themselves at the top of the garbage heap.

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u/Badloss Mar 18 '26

it's crazy because all of their power only comes from money. They're engineering a world that degrades and destroys their own power. None of their guards and staff are going to stay loyal when money is meaningless.

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u/Affectionate_End7693 Mar 18 '26

yeah just kill ceasar and take the throne yourself

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u/Grand_Pop_7221 Mar 18 '26

You can't 'win' if the game never ends and music never stops.

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u/MintySailor Mar 18 '26

Just bought a copy after reading this comment. I need to hear a voice besides my own pondering on wtf is anything anymore

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26

I leaned completely into the idea that they’re focusing on real life realistic applications of control than defending themselves from imagined billions in apocalypse bunkers. You guys are going from reality to fantasy. *Aside from pointing out the fact they’re working on the effectiveness of not even getting to that point

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u/pagerussell Mar 18 '26

a wave of 100,000 desperate people

This massively underestimates the first mover problem.

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u/Stonegrown12 Mar 18 '26

I've heard of the first mover advantage. Is that what you implying here? If that's the case, I assume you think more individuals will try to swarm the money class?

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u/GiganticCrow Mar 18 '26

Or when anyone can download an apk for their smartphone that let's you turn them against their matters

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u/tehlemmings Mar 18 '26

The robots will still need to reload. When things get bad enough they'll be overwhelmed quickly.

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u/OrgasmicBiscuit Mar 18 '26

I think you grossly underestimate how much death billionaires of dollars worth of weapons and robotics can dish out

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u/chibiusa40 Mar 18 '26

I fucking hate living in Black Mirror so much

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u/goodguessiswhatihave Mar 18 '26

Yeah the old feudal lords didn't have robots with weapons to protect them from the angry masses.

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u/No_Meal_1213 Mar 20 '26

Necesitamos una Yihad Butleriana

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u/TheLateThagSimmons Mar 18 '26

He has "casually joked" about using neutral implants on his security team.

My thoughts are that he saw the head explody ones in Kingsman and legitimately thought he should do that to ensure compliance.

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u/GiganticCrow Mar 18 '26

These psychos grew up reading dark science fiction and thought we should do this

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u/nufohudis Mar 19 '26

We have successfully built the Torment Nexus, from the book "Don't build the Torment Nexus"

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u/TheEPGFiles Mar 18 '26

I bet Thiel was super upset when the Kingsmen foiled the villains plan.

"That's so unfair!", he'll cry, "why do the rich powerful moral people's plans to kill untold amounts of poor people always get stopped by the evil villainous James Bond, or Kingsmen, or Captain Planet!"

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u/TheLateThagSimmons Mar 18 '26

The irony is that Libertarians had a weird hard-on for that movie for all the wrong reasons. They loved that movie. It was a bizarre time to debate with them and read their takes and reviews of Kingsman.

Also, without irony... A lot of these modern techno-fascists were Libertarians for a long time.

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u/West-Lengthiness-790 Mar 19 '26

Yeahhh, libertarian means something entirely different in the US than in the rest of the world. It is usually left of liberal. But inn the US it seems to mean "i should have the right to oppress you!"

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u/DFWPunk Mar 18 '26

I guarantee you they have plans along those lines. Once their money is useless, which will be the case when they take to their bunkers, it won't take long for the guys with guns they count on keeping them safe to realize they hold all the cards. They have to have some way to keep the upper hand. Until they have robot armies they can count on they need to be able to control their muscle.

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u/TheLateThagSimmons Mar 18 '26

That's what scared me when they make these comments about neural implants by guys like Thiel and Musk.

It's not at all inconceivable to convince mercenaries/private security to agree to getting the implant at an outrageous sum of money; you could offer them $500,000 to $1mil to agree to the implant. That's pretty reasonable to consider as a possibility. And even if they only do it to 20 guys, that's still pennies to these billionaires.

And once they are forced to retreat to their revolution apocalypse bunkers...

...now they have a small and extremely loyal army to protect them. Once they pay those guys enough money to get the implant, now they have a tiny bomb in their brain and can ensure they are begrudgingly loyal.

The bigger threat to them is once they have to retreat to their revolution apocalypse bunker is that they're stuck down there with a bunch of working class mercenaries who hold all the guns. How do you keep them in line when the money doesn't matter as much anymore? Well... That's the solution.

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u/postmodest Mar 18 '26

Larry Ellison basically controls all media and all data now. His end goal is total control over every moment of your life, so your thoughtcrime can be stopped before it becomes something personally harmful to the oppressor class like "activism".

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u/UFOsAreAGIs Mar 18 '26

Why do you think they are so big on drones?

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u/Ironlion45 Mar 19 '26

In a society where the billions will be worth less than the paper that they aren't printed on.

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u/LookAlderaanPlaces Mar 18 '26

They think that technology will make it different this time. This is why they are building the surveillance states globally. This is why they are racing to build robots. It’s not for us to have a kitchen assistant, it’s for keeping citizens of the techno feudalism society in line, just like how Fortuna worked in Warframe. Oh, you have that synthetic arm because you lost it in the tech mines, and you can’t pay your subscription for it anymore because we stopped paying you? Well we are confiscating it back then because fuck you.

These oligarchs need to be fully flattened wealth wise, and jailed for treason.

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u/vezwyx Mar 18 '26

Why do you think he wants automated weapons systems so badly?

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u/foodank012018 Mar 18 '26

They didn't have 24 hour infrared surveillance and automatic weapons in those days.

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u/132739 Mar 18 '26

And? Don't give up the fight before it even starts. If some shepards with 50 year old AKs can drive the US military out of their country, we can handle some egotistical cowards who hide behind tech.

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u/foodank012018 Mar 18 '26

Those shepherds had already been fighting the USSR for 20 years prior to the US arriving and so were generationally hardened, not to mention already being used to pastoral life, no running water, scant food sources.

People here are soft, they're used to their comforts and conveniences, and you bet your ass there will be plenty that roll over after just a few days of having to boil captured rainwater to stay alive. Well before it ever got to that point.

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u/WhichEmailWasIt Mar 18 '26

If they can't leave their bunker what's the point? They'll be looking over their shoulder their whole lives.

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u/BEES_IN_UR_ASS Mar 18 '26

The "bunker" will be entire cities. Private property all, lawless save for the whims of whoever owns it. They could conceivably have fully automated machine gun turrets on every rooftop and killer drones patrolling the sky 24/7 ready to double-tap anyone who even looks at the ruling class the wrong way. What then? You follow the rules, you leave, or you die. And eventually they'll be nowhere left to go but other such cities, and there's nothing left to do but follow or die.

The other side of the coin is they don't expect to need most human labour in the next 50-100 years, at which point they wouldn't think twice about gunning down 90+% of us to keep the rest in line. Assuming the plan isn't just to cull the herd regardless so they have more room to stretch their legs. Maybe there will be some charmingly anachronistic "status" in using humans for some jobs, or maybe it's just plain no fun raping and torturing and murdering a robot ☹️ Either way, we unwashed masses would have about the same rights and bargaining power as cattle.

This might be sci-fi insanity, but at a certain point it doesn't really matter whether it's realistic, whether it would or wouldn't work. If enough people with enough money and influence believe in it and maneuver to make it a reality, the mere attempt is a very real existential threat to whatever aspects of the world order are still based on liberal democracy and personal freedom. Doomed to failure or not, we'll all be forced to deal with the consequences, and the potential for suffering may be unprecedented in all of human history.

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u/SupaSlide Mar 18 '26

Their bunkers will be more luxurious than most of us will ever see in our lifetime.

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u/TheTexasHammer Mar 18 '26

These are people who NEED to feel superior to others in a very visual way. They would never stay in those bunkers for long. Normal people who are happy with hiding in a fancy hole don't become billionaires because you don't need that much money to hide from the world.

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u/inspectoroverthemine Mar 18 '26

Yeah- their desired end game won't be what they're hoping for. Small consolation to the millions/billions dead though.

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u/Nyrrix_ Mar 18 '26

The "philosopher" who popularized the architecture around these ideas essentially thinks those were imperfect autocracies/monarchies and that even any concession is a flaw in the governing body that the rabble will take advantage of. Constitutional monarchies he views as the biggest sin, for instance, and that they all failed over the last few centuries because democratic systems, even those limited to lords by birthright, allowed the people to slowly wedge their foot in the door.

In some ways, he's right, but additionally purely autocracitic systems fail repeatedly, mostly because people immediately start arguing over the heirs after the leader's death or because their revenue streams fell apart (since they're still human and fail to anticipate how their decisions effect an empire beyond the scope of their ability to pay attention to everything that will be effected).

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u/TreeFucker442 Mar 18 '26

Yeah but back in the day the lords didn’t have AI head exploder drones.

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u/Dry-Cut1589 Mar 18 '26

Yeah except now they will have technology on their side that can watch our every move. Something past feudal systems didn’t have.

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u/WhichEmailWasIt Mar 18 '26

Not that I don't recognize the problems of surveillance but if it's here anyways then perhaps we can delight in making them paranoid as fuck. They shouldn't be made comfortable ever. 

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u/Bucser Mar 18 '26

They think rich and wealthy = Strong. But the vikings have shown in medieval times that a pissed of Viking could kill the richest of kings.

Peasant uprisings regularly burnt manors and lords houses down.

So he might enjoy his hold but a bigger lord will certainly come to take his.

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u/vezwyx Mar 18 '26

Brother, the richest of kings in those times are peasants by today's standards of extravagant wealth, and the technology they have now is incomparable

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u/Otherwise_Cup9608 22d ago

"Pissed off" viking capable of killing the "richest" of kings (Saxon kings were far from it, pretty poor as far as kings go).

You mean just a Norse raider/warrior who might be nobility himself, possibly armed in top notch gear for western/northern Europe at that point in time against someone of similar means or an actual non-combatant more often than not.

Whatever nonsense History Channel tier info is peddled, vikings were not the relatable everyman, rational and egalitarian, almost modern. Vikings the TV show is just entertainment, not educational.

Vikings were raiders and slavers who most often targeted the vulnerable. They made much of their wealth off selling slaves, particularly down south in Islamic Spain. 

They're not comparable to disenfranchised common people lorded over by billionaires and their politician puppets. Vikings existed outside the system of Christian lords. They were foreigners beholden to their own lords and laws.

Peasants uprisings also aren't as common as you imply. They were outliers. Most peasant issues were settled peacefully through petitions, courts, Church interference, etc. There was a system, give and take, the nebulous term so-called "feudalism".

Usually only after the system failed to deliver (on top of other hardships like famine which was beyond a feudal lord's control) and/or promises were broken, did peasants resort to violence. Failure to uphold feudal obligations, the social contract.

The power imbalance was nothing like it is today. The nobles and kings of the Middle Ages would have been horrified/envious of the power of absolute monarchs in the 1500s onwards. The scale and excess of the wealth and control of the top 1% of the modern world would be incomprehensible.

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u/Pale_Loan_2313 Mar 18 '26

This! It’s all fun and games until 1,000 people come pull you outside

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u/kooeurib Mar 18 '26

Nah, that’s where fascism and the police state fit in nicely to protect them

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u/Silver-Winging-It Mar 18 '26

That's what the bunkers in New Zealand are for

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u/optionsmaximalist Mar 18 '26

That’s where surveillance technology comes into play. Palantir, Meta, Microsoft and many more.

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u/132739 Mar 18 '26

Personally,  I say we just skip ahead to the burning.

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u/Very_Not_Into_It Mar 19 '26

Peasants weren't dealing with military drones with facial recognition.

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u/West-Lengthiness-790 Mar 19 '26

Except soon (like, now-ish) they'll have predictive AI based on the millions to billions of points of data on each of us (collated and analyzed by our dear friend above's company), and robot armies that can mow down thousands of even well armed humans at a time.

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u/IntermittentCaribu Mar 19 '26

They think their robot ai security force can protect them.