"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.)
I've always considered it to be some marriage of convenience moreso than some kind of formal thing. And at any rate arguing over whether there's an explicit cabal or not very badly misses the point.
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 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."
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.
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.
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.
Ah shut up. Newest trend is to tell us the tech billionaires are the ones controlling the world. We all know the truth already but most of us are too afraid to admit. The real evil always finds a Sündenbock.
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 liked my take better. News outlets are hypersensationalizing this and running with it.
https://youtu.be/CSJUnm_rGKo
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
Given Sam Harris was also on the list and the 2 guys loath each other, I very much doubt the reality of this "cabal."
a cabal isn't a social club.
Isn’t it literally one though?
I've always considered it to be some marriage of convenience moreso than some kind of formal thing. And at any rate arguing over whether there's an explicit cabal or not very badly misses the point.
Plenty of people who hate each other manage to form orgs. Stalin and his cronies. The Nazis. The Trump White House. Back stabbing abounds.
The narcissism of small differences
There always has been. The only people discrediting it are those that don’t want you to know it exists.
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.
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 sounds a lot like the Deus Ex (2000) plot.
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...
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.
We are seeing results. The rich have it better than ever. That's the results.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
No shit, Sherlock.
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.
Ah shut up. Newest trend is to tell us the tech billionaires are the ones controlling the world. We all know the truth already but most of us are too afraid to admit. The real evil always finds a Sündenbock.
What's the "real evil?"
Those trying to seed hatred.
How is "those trying to seed hatred" a truth we all know but are afraid to admit? Who's afraid to admit something so generic and pedestrian?
You mean the billionaires?
Probably the Trillionaires. Haha.
Why use a German word for "scapegoat"?
Because millions of people lost their lives because all followers of a particular religion were blamed for the problems. Bit meta — I know.
Exactly. This is a complete conspiracy theory as these billionaires actually all care about our wellbeing and are here to save us. /s
I’m just drunk and don’t care about what people think of me anymore. But you didn’t get my sarcasm.
Yep, that's the alcohol talking, in the morning you'll be sober and you might.
I think it's too late for that
What are you sipping on?
Fine wine.
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