"Enough people have asked me about the Peter Thiel-Dialog story that I think it's worth saying what it is, or at least what I saw it to be. So:
–Dialog is a conference. I went once in 2018 and once in 2022. No one ever asked me to keep it or my presence a secret.
–My understanding was Thiel was one of its founders but no longer involved by the time I went. I never saw or talked to him in connection with Dialog.
–Nor did I see the other names I’ve heard mentioned, like Ted Cruz or Elon Musk or Joseph Gordon-Levitt or Jared Kushner. Dialog was not sold to me as a bunch of big names, which is part of why I went. I don’t need to go to a conference to hear what Ted Cruz thinks.
–You could be a Dialog member, but I wasn’t. I don’t think joining got you much except guaranteed invitations to future Dialogs. There were occasional dinners and webinars, but I never went to one. I would not have described it as a secret or a society.
–The panels were largely self-organized, so people would propose panels and hold them. I went to one on being a working parent and another on whether crypto had any real use cases and another on how to accelerate scientific breakthroughs. You’d usually have 8 or 10 people in a room. It was all very TED-talk adjacent.
–In 2018, I found it very optimistic, with an idealistic hacker-ish vibe. In 2022, I found the conversations and vibe more curdled and resentful. I didn’t enjoy it, and I didn’t go back. (That did prove a pretty good signal of where tech’s politics were going though, maybe I should’ve paid more attention.)
> a shared preoccupation with artificial intelligence, longevity, and the near future
There are strong historical trends (going thousands of years) associating obsession with those three items (human mimicry, living forever, predicting the future) with terrible outcomes for those who pursue them. In stories, religion, myths and all sorts of blurry ancient ruins of people who exist no more.
I don't know if there's a cabal or not, but there's always a bigger fish (and it's often some unforseen social dynamic).
I guess Esquire didn't read far enough into the Wired article to discover that this is a tech industry version of similar gatherings like Bilderberg or various WEF side events that have long been known to exist. They're not generally called "cabals" (you'll note Wired did not use this term) because, as far as we know, they don't seem to be much more than glorified social clubs.
Yeah I probably should have linked the Wired article instead if it hasn't already been here. I spotted it a couple days ago but didn't get around to reading it.
Plus the Carlyle Group, Temple Emanu-El in NYC, the Rothchilds...
If any of them are running the world, we're not seeing the results. The current level of competence at world-running is very low. Putin, Trump, Netanyahu, Xi, and whomever is running the UK this month are all worse than average for their job.
> The current level of competence at world-running is very low.
Yes? If by "running competently" you mean the prosperity of the general population and peace, sure, it's not that competent. But why'd you think that'd be their goal? If anything, Orwell's "1984" shows the mindset perfectly: keep the general public in misery, while skimming whatever cream there is; no need to try and grow the pie, there is enough for them, and the rest of the world can go buck itself.
If you read "1984", then you'll note that the elites there were barely better off than the middle class now. While living in constant fear of purges.
Russian "elites" are now getting the political-science-101 education. In 2000-s, they traded their political rights in exchange for the right to skim off the state income. They were thinking that their personal connections and money would always get them out of trouble, so why bother fixing corrupt courts and the rubber-stamping parliament?
Well, now their assets are just fodder for the new generation of the "elites" from the FSB and a few of Putin's closest friends. And the former all-powerful elites can't do anything but wait in fear.
Somehow, people like Thiel and never understand that until it's too late.
If they are "running the world" they are certainly not doing so for your benefit.
(There is also a great deal of distance between "running the world" and "influencing some events for the benefit of a select few, no matter what the costs to the rest of the world". Personally, I find the latter far more likely, but also undesireable.)
The logic is that the world we see is chaotic in a way that’s difficult to reconcile with the idea that it’s all being masterminded behind the scenes. There does not seem to be any one group of people who always win every political dispute they engage in.
Yet there is a group that reliably loses in the United States: average citizens. From "Testing Theories of American Politics" (Gilens & Page 2014)[1]:
"These results suggest that reality is best captured by
mixed theories in which both individual economic elites
and organized interest groups (including corporations,
largely owned and controlled by wealthy elites) play
a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the
general public has little or no independent influence."
I guess this result doesn't seem surprising to me? A majority of the general public can't even identify how long Senate terms are (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/11/07/what-amer...); they simply don't have the required knowledge to meaningfully influence politics without mediation through interest groups. (Anecdotally, it’s a truism in political circles that you will drive yourself insane trying to understand the median voter’s theories of politics.)
It’s even weirder I think? Because the people in power are clearly incompetent AND making the average persons life shitty, they clearly can’t be in power due to a conspiracy.
When if anything, that seems to support it being the result of shenanigans?
All the rich guys who aligned themselves with MAGA/Trump are even richer now, so I’d say they’re quite successful. Their goal isn’t creating a stable, pleasant world. It’s solidifying their power, largely through acquisition of obscene wealth.
Plus just about any kind of invitation-only meeting of people who can Get Shit Done. Many years ago I was at one of these and one of the discussions was how you'd shut down all network comms in a country in a manner where it'd take weeks if not months to restart things, by people who were in a position to actually do it. Was this a cabal? Yes, if you report it as such, but no if you report it as a threat-modelling exercise by the defenders.
I think the incompetence is the point. I imagine what "running the world" really looks like is making bank off international loans and reconsutruction projects after one useful idiot bombs the country of another.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It's actual documented evidence. The Epstein files also shed light on this, Bannon traveling around Europe to fortify alt-right alliance and seed unrest.
Was he trying to seed unrest or was he sabotaging organic right wing movements that have less dumb shit in their program?
EDIT: Keep in mind that the right wing movements on which you have trained your impressions are almost always by definition the popular ones. Do people typically dig into niche groups that don't get traction for ideologies they already disagree with? Probably not, right?
The less dumb shit gave him a platform for his dumber shit. Which is why sane people try to stop the right wing shit at the less-dumb-shit level, before it gets out of hand. It's the clearly marked path to hell on earth. An inch in that direction is the WRONG WAY.
Everyone is pretty clearly paranoid about "the right wing shit" due to being inculcated with the story of WW2 in school.
Think about the political policies of Britain immediately prior to WW2. If a party today advocated just rolling back to those policies verbatim, they would be called Nazis immediately.
Just stop for a second before reacting - that's pretty weird, right? The policies of the heroes of the story who literally fought the Nazis, would today be put in the same bucket as the Nazis. Huh?
Same with American policies immediately prior to WW2. If a party wanted to roll back to that, literally Hitler! But that America fought Hitler. But that America would be lumped in with Hitler. Weird, right?
IMO, neither the UK not the US went to war over moral objections to Nazi or other imperialist ideologies. They themselves were imperialists.
They went to war to fight Germany's, Japan's, and Russia's attempts at geostrategic hegemony. If Germany, USSR, and Japan had stayed in their geostrategic lanes, they wouldn't have invited a war on them.
> If a party today advocated just rolling back to those policies verbatim, they would be called Nazis immediately.
This seems to imply a social ideology rather than a geostrategic one. The term "Nazi" is used for a specific brand of social ideology, not a general term for imperialist policy.
It would be irresponsible in the extreme for the wealthy and powerful to not unite in common cause for extending sway into the future even while still competing with each other in the present. It's what social units from families to small businesses to trans-national businesses to countries do all the time. This is just another example, and since the tendency of co-operative behavior even among competing interests extends into the distant past of life's evolutionary history it's unlikely we'll see it go away.
I guess if it comes full circle the trend among conspiracy theorists will have them touting how there's no possible way there can be a "cabal" of any kind.
I don't buy this personally.
The leaks of Peter Thiel's 'Dialog' society demonstrate to me that the bell curve™ (or normal distribution as cool cats refer to it) exists at every level of wealth and society. (Look up the banality of the topics if you're curious as to what I mean here)
What this means to me personally is that there is a certain level of baked-in/read-only reaction to being in certain types of social circles, and those circles tend to act according to Nature™ and try to preserve themselves while spreading.
Practically the upshot here is that what we interpret as a "cabal" is actually the self-preservation of a system that is not publicly available for observation. Moreover, in many cases, the only means of admission to this class is purely by luck/chance/birth into a certain family group.
In many ways these systems are counter-intuitive; wealth is typically used as a means to have a "nice life", while forcing the rest of the world into a state of decay, which ruins of the value of the wealth. As one group continues to grow in their ability to extract resources, they also place pressure upon their own relationship between themselves and those extracting the resources for them as the pyramid scheme breaks down with less people to pull into it over time. (Chasing infinite gains in terms of corporate stock or private gains from equity investments IS a pyramid scheme, however legal it may be.)
Thus, what's interpreted as a "dangerous cabal" is more like the relationship between animal groups, and new elements in the natural hierarchy have displaced resources between the groups, which will cause a correction to slowly occur in terms of the overall patterns.
Ideally, these groups would recognize the signalling occurring and attempt to bring things back into a natural stasis pattern. (i.e. many people are complaining about wealth/billionaires, it may be strategic to invest in bettering society and creating homogeneity so that things remain as an enjoyable Epcot™-esque collective as opposed to a globally-connected & self-hating/billionaire-hating slave class)
You're getting hung up on the idea of a "cabal" being some kind of formal thing that has explicit membership rules. But what we're talking about is simply the collusion of hyper-wealthy people in their various schemes. That's the cabal.
The concept of wealth is predicated upon the idea that one may "play at the table in the Casino and win". In reality entry to this system is barred but it only exists in such a way because people believe in the promise/concept that they will be allowed to succeed if they continue to try.
What you're defining as a "Cabal of Wealth" is an allowance by the people because they believe in the concept of joining it. If this isn't clear I'm happy to expand upon it.
I absolutely agree. You might be interested in Paulo Freire who wrote a whole book on something like what you're arguing, "the pedagogy of the oppressed".
That said, the crimes of "the cabal of wealth" are still on those responsible.
I don't know if this is true any more, but esquire used to have an extremely good journalistic reputation. If someone said the the sun rose in the east, they would verify the sun rose in the east before printing it.
Related
https://www.wired.com/story/how-peter-thiels-private-dialog-...
There always has been. The only people discrediting it are those that don’t want you to know it exists.
Anyone check in on Ezra?
"Enough people have asked me about the Peter Thiel-Dialog story that I think it's worth saying what it is, or at least what I saw it to be. So:
–Dialog is a conference. I went once in 2018 and once in 2022. No one ever asked me to keep it or my presence a secret.
–My understanding was Thiel was one of its founders but no longer involved by the time I went. I never saw or talked to him in connection with Dialog.
–Nor did I see the other names I’ve heard mentioned, like Ted Cruz or Elon Musk or Joseph Gordon-Levitt or Jared Kushner. Dialog was not sold to me as a bunch of big names, which is part of why I went. I don’t need to go to a conference to hear what Ted Cruz thinks.
–You could be a Dialog member, but I wasn’t. I don’t think joining got you much except guaranteed invitations to future Dialogs. There were occasional dinners and webinars, but I never went to one. I would not have described it as a secret or a society.
–The panels were largely self-organized, so people would propose panels and hold them. I went to one on being a working parent and another on whether crypto had any real use cases and another on how to accelerate scientific breakthroughs. You’d usually have 8 or 10 people in a room. It was all very TED-talk adjacent.
–In 2018, I found it very optimistic, with an idealistic hacker-ish vibe. In 2022, I found the conversations and vibe more curdled and resentful. I didn’t enjoy it, and I didn’t go back. (That did prove a pretty good signal of where tech’s politics were going though, maybe I should’ve paid more attention.)
....
"
first half of his comment about it from X
Link: https://xcancel.com/ezraklein/status/2068479476309151771
> a shared preoccupation with artificial intelligence, longevity, and the near future
There are strong historical trends (going thousands of years) associating obsession with those three items (human mimicry, living forever, predicting the future) with terrible outcomes for those who pursue them. In stories, religion, myths and all sorts of blurry ancient ruins of people who exist no more.
I don't know if there's a cabal or not, but there's always a bigger fish (and it's often some unforseen social dynamic).
I think it hurts more knowing that it's in the public, but nothing will be done and they'll continue to smother the general public all the same.
Ha Ha! That's funny 8-)
> "Turn's Out..."
There's been a psycho cabal of the idiot wealthy trying to run the world since the invention of currency...
Before that, there was a murderous cabal of warlords. They haven't gone away, they've just been joined by the idiot wealthy...
I guess Esquire didn't read far enough into the Wired article to discover that this is a tech industry version of similar gatherings like Bilderberg or various WEF side events that have long been known to exist. They're not generally called "cabals" (you'll note Wired did not use this term) because, as far as we know, they don't seem to be much more than glorified social clubs.
Yeah I probably should have linked the Wired article instead if it hasn't already been here. I spotted it a couple days ago but didn't get around to reading it.
Author is primarily a sports blogger and political pundit. Esquire’s lead political blogger since 2011.
Charles P Pierce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Pierce
Bilderberg, the World Economic Forum, and Bohemian Grove are also cabals of elite crazies trying to run the world.
Plus the Carlyle Group, Temple Emanu-El in NYC, the Rothchilds...
If any of them are running the world, we're not seeing the results. The current level of competence at world-running is very low. Putin, Trump, Netanyahu, Xi, and whomever is running the UK this month are all worse than average for their job.
> The current level of competence at world-running is very low.
Yes? If by "running competently" you mean the prosperity of the general population and peace, sure, it's not that competent. But why'd you think that'd be their goal? If anything, Orwell's "1984" shows the mindset perfectly: keep the general public in misery, while skimming whatever cream there is; no need to try and grow the pie, there is enough for them, and the rest of the world can go buck itself.
If you read "1984", then you'll note that the elites there were barely better off than the middle class now. While living in constant fear of purges.
Russian "elites" are now getting the political-science-101 education. In 2000-s, they traded their political rights in exchange for the right to skim off the state income. They were thinking that their personal connections and money would always get them out of trouble, so why bother fixing corrupt courts and the rubber-stamping parliament?
Well, now their assets are just fodder for the new generation of the "elites" from the FSB and a few of Putin's closest friends. And the former all-powerful elites can't do anything but wait in fear.
Somehow, people like Thiel and never understand that until it's too late.
If they are "running the world" they are certainly not doing so for your benefit.
(There is also a great deal of distance between "running the world" and "influencing some events for the benefit of a select few, no matter what the costs to the rest of the world". Personally, I find the latter far more likely, but also undesireable.)
I don't follow the logic - because incompetent people are running the show, some other group of incompetent people can't be running the show?
The logic is that the world we see is chaotic in a way that’s difficult to reconcile with the idea that it’s all being masterminded behind the scenes. There does not seem to be any one group of people who always win every political dispute they engage in.
Yet there is a group that reliably loses in the United States: average citizens. From "Testing Theories of American Politics" (Gilens & Page 2014)[1]:
"These results suggest that reality is best captured by mixed theories in which both individual economic elites and organized interest groups (including corporations, largely owned and controlled by wealthy elites) play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the general public has little or no independent influence."
1. https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th...
I guess this result doesn't seem surprising to me? A majority of the general public can't even identify how long Senate terms are (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/11/07/what-amer...); they simply don't have the required knowledge to meaningfully influence politics without mediation through interest groups. (Anecdotally, it’s a truism in political circles that you will drive yourself insane trying to understand the median voter’s theories of politics.)
It’s even weirder I think? Because the people in power are clearly incompetent AND making the average persons life shitty, they clearly can’t be in power due to a conspiracy.
When if anything, that seems to support it being the result of shenanigans?
They can be effective at acquiring power and bad at wielding it.
But it seems to me like they're enriching themselves just fine.
Peter Principle strikes again!
My point is ‘bad’ at using power is relative
The carlyle group is a publicly traded company that mainly invests pension funds.
Isn’t the point to be in charge regardless of competence or popularity? That is real power.
Those things are far more necessary for an Employee than an Owner.
All the rich guys who aligned themselves with MAGA/Trump are even richer now, so I’d say they’re quite successful. Their goal isn’t creating a stable, pleasant world. It’s solidifying their power, largely through acquisition of obscene wealth.
Plus just about any kind of invitation-only meeting of people who can Get Shit Done. Many years ago I was at one of these and one of the discussions was how you'd shut down all network comms in a country in a manner where it'd take weeks if not months to restart things, by people who were in a position to actually do it. Was this a cabal? Yes, if you report it as such, but no if you report it as a threat-modelling exercise by the defenders.
I think the incompetence is the point. I imagine what "running the world" really looks like is making bank off international loans and reconsutruction projects after one useful idiot bombs the country of another.
We are seeing results. The rich have it better than ever. That's the results.
Yes. To be clear they think they are running the world because all the ass kissers around them told them they are.
Reality is a lot less forgiving of their delusions.
This sounds a lot like the Deus Ex (2000) plot.
Title sensationalism
The most surreal part of this from the Wired article [1]:
> The records sit in Airtable
A secret cabal running the world. On AirTable.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-th...
This is not a conspiracy theory. It's actual documented evidence. The Epstein files also shed light on this, Bannon traveling around Europe to fortify alt-right alliance and seed unrest.
Was he trying to seed unrest or was he sabotaging organic right wing movements that have less dumb shit in their program?
EDIT: Keep in mind that the right wing movements on which you have trained your impressions are almost always by definition the popular ones. Do people typically dig into niche groups that don't get traction for ideologies they already disagree with? Probably not, right?
The less popular the right wing group, the more dumb shit they have. And the popular ones are already so so full of dumb shit.
The less dumb shit gave him a platform for his dumber shit. Which is why sane people try to stop the right wing shit at the less-dumb-shit level, before it gets out of hand. It's the clearly marked path to hell on earth. An inch in that direction is the WRONG WAY.
Everyone is pretty clearly paranoid about "the right wing shit" due to being inculcated with the story of WW2 in school.
Think about the political policies of Britain immediately prior to WW2. If a party today advocated just rolling back to those policies verbatim, they would be called Nazis immediately.
Just stop for a second before reacting - that's pretty weird, right? The policies of the heroes of the story who literally fought the Nazis, would today be put in the same bucket as the Nazis. Huh?
Same with American policies immediately prior to WW2. If a party wanted to roll back to that, literally Hitler! But that America fought Hitler. But that America would be lumped in with Hitler. Weird, right?
IMO, neither the UK not the US went to war over moral objections to Nazi or other imperialist ideologies. They themselves were imperialists.
They went to war to fight Germany's, Japan's, and Russia's attempts at geostrategic hegemony. If Germany, USSR, and Japan had stayed in their geostrategic lanes, they wouldn't have invited a war on them.
Sorry can you point out where I said the thing you’re disagreeing with? I didn’t say anything about the reason they fought the Nazis.
> If a party today advocated just rolling back to those policies verbatim, they would be called Nazis immediately.
This seems to imply a social ideology rather than a geostrategic one. The term "Nazi" is used for a specific brand of social ideology, not a general term for imperialist policy.
Which policy rollbacks were you talking about?
It would be irresponsible in the extreme for the wealthy and powerful to not unite in common cause for extending sway into the future even while still competing with each other in the present. It's what social units from families to small businesses to trans-national businesses to countries do all the time. This is just another example, and since the tendency of co-operative behavior even among competing interests extends into the distant past of life's evolutionary history it's unlikely we'll see it go away.
I feel like based on the amount of power these people wield in the world I should be afraid of them, but then I read this:
> registrants returned again and again to the same theme: that AI will reorder work, war, education, and belief within a few years.
lmao. nvm. they're idiots.
It’s basically just a large circular hand job of people who have been told they are visionaries by sycophants.
> registrants returned again and again to the same theme: that AI will reorder work, war, education, and belief within a few years.
These things are already happening, whether we want them to or not. Elites will no doubt benefit from the destruction of all of it.
I guess if it comes full circle the trend among conspiracy theorists will have them touting how there's no possible way there can be a "cabal" of any kind.
Oy vey, delete this blatant anti-semitism
No shit, Sherlock.
I don't buy this personally. The leaks of Peter Thiel's 'Dialog' society demonstrate to me that the bell curve™ (or normal distribution as cool cats refer to it) exists at every level of wealth and society. (Look up the banality of the topics if you're curious as to what I mean here) What this means to me personally is that there is a certain level of baked-in/read-only reaction to being in certain types of social circles, and those circles tend to act according to Nature™ and try to preserve themselves while spreading. Practically the upshot here is that what we interpret as a "cabal" is actually the self-preservation of a system that is not publicly available for observation. Moreover, in many cases, the only means of admission to this class is purely by luck/chance/birth into a certain family group. In many ways these systems are counter-intuitive; wealth is typically used as a means to have a "nice life", while forcing the rest of the world into a state of decay, which ruins of the value of the wealth. As one group continues to grow in their ability to extract resources, they also place pressure upon their own relationship between themselves and those extracting the resources for them as the pyramid scheme breaks down with less people to pull into it over time. (Chasing infinite gains in terms of corporate stock or private gains from equity investments IS a pyramid scheme, however legal it may be.) Thus, what's interpreted as a "dangerous cabal" is more like the relationship between animal groups, and new elements in the natural hierarchy have displaced resources between the groups, which will cause a correction to slowly occur in terms of the overall patterns. Ideally, these groups would recognize the signalling occurring and attempt to bring things back into a natural stasis pattern. (i.e. many people are complaining about wealth/billionaires, it may be strategic to invest in bettering society and creating homogeneity so that things remain as an enjoyable Epcot™-esque collective as opposed to a globally-connected & self-hating/billionaire-hating slave class)
You're getting hung up on the idea of a "cabal" being some kind of formal thing that has explicit membership rules. But what we're talking about is simply the collusion of hyper-wealthy people in their various schemes. That's the cabal.
The concept of wealth is predicated upon the idea that one may "play at the table in the Casino and win". In reality entry to this system is barred but it only exists in such a way because people believe in the promise/concept that they will be allowed to succeed if they continue to try.
What you're defining as a "Cabal of Wealth" is an allowance by the people because they believe in the concept of joining it. If this isn't clear I'm happy to expand upon it.
I absolutely agree. You might be interested in Paulo Freire who wrote a whole book on something like what you're arguing, "the pedagogy of the oppressed".
That said, the crimes of "the cabal of wealth" are still on those responsible.
I liked my take better. News outlets are hypersensationalizing this and running with it.
https://youtu.be/CSJUnm_rGKo
I don't know if this is true any more, but esquire used to have an extremely good journalistic reputation. If someone said the the sun rose in the east, they would verify the sun rose in the east before printing it.
I have attracted the downvote bot, it seems.
again
Sook. You're too fragile for the internet. Log off.