Peter Thiel: The Online Privacy Debate Won’t End With Gawker

Re:Peter Thiel: The Online Privacy Debate Won’t End With Gawker by harshreality on Monday August 15, 2016 @08:57PM (#12294759)

My take on Thiel is that he sees himself trying to help navigate between Scylla and Charybdis. On one side, I think he agrees that too much surveillance and data gathering is a problem. He calls himself a libertarian, after all. He just sees the other side as being just as much of a problem, as in this quote (mostly relating to his involvement in Palantir):

"As a libertarian, I don't think we should have had the response [to 9/11] we did to those buildings blowing up. But all the mass movements, all the consciousness-raising in the world did not stop us from getting the Patriot Act. The ACLU is always good at talking about civil rights, but [despite that] once something happens, protections go out the window right way. I think there's something to be said for trying to figure out some ways to stop another attack which will be used to curtail civil liberties even more. A company like Paypal could not get started in the post-PatriotAct world, because we would be accused of money laundering [based on how we operated] in '98-'99..." (from a discussion with David Graeber hosted by The Baffler, Fall 2014)

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Re:Peter Thiel: The Online Privacy Debate Won’t End With Gawker by alphonsegaston on Monday August 15, 2016 @10:54PM (#12295229)

I have a hard time taking his libertarianism as anything other than a cynical maneuver to clear the way for corporate autocracy. He writes manifestos arguing against democracy, sits on the board of not one, but two private surveillance firms, and wrote a book about how the best business to be in is monopolies. It's like some negative image of Leninism, where the vanguard party is venture capitalists so the revolution is sabotaged before it begins

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Re:Peter Thiel: The Online Privacy Debate Won’t End With Gawker by jacobolus on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @03:14AM (#12296004)

Not to mention promoting Trump at the GOP convention.

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Re:Peter Thiel: The Online Privacy Debate Won’t End With Gawker by Senji on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @08:10AM (#12296873)

The term you're looking for is Anarcho-Capitalism. Or just plain old Capitalism in Thiel's case.

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Re:Peter Thiel: The Online Privacy Debate Won’t End With Gawker by mindslight on Monday August 15, 2016 @10:18PM (#12295097)

And therein lies the heart of the phenomenon. Much evil has been done by good people telling themselves that they can prevent evil by wielding evil's power themselves.

Crime can never be totally prevented. Building a tool that attempts to do so will not stop politicians clamoring for even more totalitarianism when the inevitable does happen.

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