Fifteen years ago, I was on a reporting trip in Silicon Valley and heard something that seemed too crazy to be true. Peter Thiel, who was then on the board of Facebook and was already one of America's richest people, wants to build a completely new island nation. It would be a "Waterworld"-like archipelago in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where he would create an ethno-nationalist fantasy world, freed from claw-fingered bureaucrats, wealth taxes, gun regulations and other things that must have made everyday life as a California billionaire in the early 2000s hard to bear.
It sounded like an infantile dream, but it actually turned out to be true. Thiel poured millions of dollars into the project and personally scoured the ocean, hundreds of miles west of the California coast, in search of the perfect area for the island nation's base.
The project only collapsed when Thiel realized that not many other billionaires actually wanted to live with him on an island, isolated from the outside world. But the vision never went away. Instead of building a new island nation, Thiel is now trying to create a kind of archipelago of bunkers around the world, where he can live undisturbed by the problems going on outside.
Thiel is the person who best embodies a new, openly anti-democratic nationalism where economic, media, technological and political power is combined with a force unparalleled in modern history.
He is today openly hostile to democracy and humanitarian values. In an interview with the New York Times, he could not even answer the question of whether it would be a positive thing for humanity to survive. Today, Thiel is not only one of the world's richest people, but also one of the most politically powerful, as the bridge between Trump's Washington and Silicon Valley.
A series of new books attempt to analyze this worldview - most clearly in Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's "End times fascism. And the fight for the living world" (which will be released in Swedish this autumn under the title "Undergångsfascismen", Ordfront förlag). There, the authors show how Thiel and dozens of other billionaires, most of them with fortunes from Silicon Valley, want to replace democracy with a new global kleptocracy, which should not have to worry about political elections, science, climate research and humanitarian commitments.
The tone is set in an opening paragraph about Alex Karp, CEO of the technology company Palantir, which was also founded by Thiel. Karp, who recently figured in the Swedish media since he bought up 15,000 hectares of land in Härjedalen and Jämtland, now builds software and AI for, among other things, the US defense industry and the migration police's surveillance system, and he says with satisfaction that his company "is built for bad times, because bad times are good for us financially".
The authors also describe Thiel's collaboration with billionaire and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein before the 2016 US presidential election, when Epstein encouraged Thiel to wholeheartedly campaign for Trump. Even then, Epstein saw a future where sectarianism and group loyalties return to the right, where global collaborations are opposed and where "incredible new alliances" can be created between Silicon Valley and nationalist anti-democrats.
Today we see how Thiel's hand-picked favorite politician JD Vance campaigns to weaken Europe's democracy, while Thiel's old colleague Elon Musk tries to influence European election campaigns to strengthen Eurosceptic and pro-Russian right-wing nationalists.
The extremism of these men is out of proportion to the cautious attitude of politicians and policy makers who continue to do business with them, as if everything is business as usual. Many media houses also do not seem to understand what is at stake, or they allow themselves to be opportunistically swept along by the nationalist contemporary. The conservative German billionaire Alex Springer, who owns one of Europe's largest media houses, with the news outlets Bild, Die Welt and Politico, was not only content to recently present an annual honorary award to Peter Thiel, but also conducted a servile interview with the billionaire, who was allowed to rage unopposed against all other news media, which he claimed were "left-wing factories of hate".
In American Gil Durán's new book "The nerd reich", we get more vivid examples of the alliance between the oligarchs of the technology sector and openly anti-democratic ideas. He shows that Thiel's old island nation was not a distraction from the billionaire's other work, but part of the same vision for a new future where the oligarchs live a bunker existence.
One problem with these men is that they often express themselves in such banally sadistic terms that people cannot believe they are serious. Peter Thiel is one of many Silicon Valley billionaires now waging an open war against "empathy," which he sees as an insidious self-harming behavior of Western civilization. Being evil, he says, is, on the other hand, "kind of good".
There were also plenty of benevolent voices who, naively or opportunistically, stepped forward to excuse Elon Musk's Hitler salutes at Trump's inauguration, because they simply could not accept that the world's richest man could have such sympathies. They ignored that Musk had already spent five years spreading gross anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and collaborating with right-wing extremists, such as Britain's Tommy Robinson.
Musk's Nazi salutes were neither conjuring nor ambiguous symbols, but confident declarations of war against democracy and open society. The longer it takes to admit it, the greater the risk that we can no longer stop the development.
In literature and art, many have been better at understanding the anti-humanitarian core of this new world view. It is telling that the acclaimed Italian Giuliano da Empoli, author of the book on Putin's Russia ("The Wizard in the Kremlin", 2022), has now written a novel about Peter Thiel in particular. In an interview, the author says that Thiel understood before most others that "technology could become an alternative to politics", i.e. replace democracy.
That Sweden is now selling out forests to these men and letting authorities contract their companies for security policy services, at a time when Washington is openly talking about weakening European democracy, appears as pure self-sabotage.
So, did it really have to be this way?
At the Book Fair in Gothenburg, I meet Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, and am reminded of what the internet could have developed into. When he launched his idealistic, user-generated encyclopedia 25 years ago, skeptics warned that chaos would ensue – users would exploit the platform's openness to spread conspiracy theories, lies, hate and ideological projects.
Instead, the opposite happened: the rest of the Internet became just like that, but Wikipedia in particular remained an oasis that manifested the most beautiful of the early Internet's promises of new forms of global cooperation.
The difference is that Wikipedia is a foundation, not a for-profit company. Instead of hiring psychologists like Meta and Google to optimize the platforms to make 13-year-olds more addicted, they implemented a rigorous strategy to build trust and create trust, which actually works to this day.
Wales never got as rich as Thiel and Musk, but he seems to be doing a lot better. He didn't take ketamine for breakfast, I didn't see a frenzied cold sweat or veins of pulsing anger on his forehead during the conversation, as in every interview where Peter Thiel is asked something like a critical question. Wales didn't even seem to have to tame any impulses to do Nazi salutes.
Taiwan's former digital minister Audrey Tang, who was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize (also called the "alternative Nobel Prize") for her work on digital democratization, has talked about how AI and technological development are currently moving along two different axes - a vertical axis, where private companies in the US and China compete to build increasingly dangerous systems, and a horizontal axis, where governments, civil society and defected whistleblowers from the tech giants work together to create responsible products that do not lead to civilizational breakdowns.
If democracy is to survive, I think we have to start there, with the attempts to create a completely new digital public.
