Vitalik subtly criticized Peter Thiel behind it is the factional struggle of technological thought.

Written by: Eric, Foresight News

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A direct confrontation between cyberpunk and Silicon Valley tech elites.

On the morning of October 3rd, Beijing time, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted a screenshot of an article written by Peter Thiel in 2009 on X, with the caption: “Reminder that Peter Thiel is, to put it mildly, not a cypherpunk.”

If two months ago Vitalik's concerns about Ethereum DAT leading to over-leverage risks were merely a “good-natured reminder”, then this time pointing the finger directly at Peter Thiel, a supporter of the two Ethereum DAT listed companies BitMine and ETHZilla, can be seen as a “positive challenge”. However, this challenge does not seem to be entirely aimed at DAT companies. Vitalik's real concern may be related to Peter Thiel's extremely radical political views, which stand in stark contrast to the cypherpunks who uphold decentralization as a principle.

Peter Thiel: No longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible.

In October last year, Polymarket rebutted the politically biased reporting by The New York Times, stating in its response that although Peter Thiel is the founder of Founders Fund, an investor in Polymarket, his political leanings do not affect the platform's operations.

Peter Thiel's extreme political leanings are no longer news, but it seems to be widely discussed in the world of Web3 for the first time.

The screenshot published by Vitalik comes from an article titled “The Education of a Libertarian” written by Peter Thiel in 2009. In this article, Peter Thiel expressed his extreme disappointment with politics, believing that libertarians at the time should find a way to escape from various forms of politics. He stated, “Since there are no truly free places in our world anymore, I suspect that the way to escape must necessarily involve some entirely new method that has never been tried before, leading us to some unknown realm; for this reason, I am committed to studying new technologies that could create new spaces for freedom.”

The new technologies mentioned by Peter Thiel include three possible areas: cyberspace, space, and the ocean.

The publication date of this article coincided with a time shortly after Bitcoin was launched, against a backdrop of a global financial crisis brought about by greed on Wall Street. Peter Thiel advocates for the use of technology to bypass politics and create an absolutely libertarian utopia, but he does not adopt the idea of “technological utopianism,” which holds that technology has its own momentum and will. Instead, he believes that technology should confront politics to create a new world not controlled by politics.

Under such a description, it seems that Peter Thiel's claims are similar to those of the early cypherpunks, who believed that technology could create a better world and that the development of technology would one day break the shackles of politics, giving rise to a truly free nation.

Founders Fund, led by managing partner Peter Thiel, has invested in many types of Web3 projects, including recent ones like Polymarket, Avail, the parent company of Pudgy Penguins, Igloo, and the rollup-as-a-service platform Caldera. While Peter Thiel shares the belief with crypto fundamentalists that “technology changes the world,” he takes a different extreme in the way of achieving it.

In “The Education of a Libertarian,” Peter Thiel's expressed disappointment in democracy is actually a disappointment in “egalitarianism.” Since the expansion of universal suffrage in the United States in the 20th century (especially with women gaining the right to vote) and the expansion of the welfare state, “capitalist democracy” has degenerated into a self-contradictory fantasy. In his view, the average voter tends toward egalitarianism, which hinders a true free market; therefore, liberals should “escape politics” rather than try to persuade the majority of voters.

Peter Thiel, who has a superior understanding of technology and insights into future development directions, along with his followers, trusts that society should be governed by “the best people,” namely the technological and capital elites, rather than relying on one-person-one-vote democratic procedures. The companies he invests in, such as Palantir and Anduril, heavily undertake government surveillance and border enforcement projects, which have been criticized as “replacing democratic decision-making with algorithms and big data,” essentially outsourcing public power to opaque high-tech private enterprises.

Peter Thiel, born in Frankfurt, has a reading list that includes works by the Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt, the civilization decline theorist Oswald Spengler, and “The Sovereign Individual.” The commonality among these ideas is a disdain for universal suffrage, an admiration for strong authority, and a belief in historical cycles and “states of exception.” Peter Thiel combines Carl Schmitt's political view of “distinguishing friend from foe,” Oswald Spengler's fatalism of “good times - bad times” dictatorship, with Silicon Valley's discourse of “technological acceleration,” forming a hybrid ideology of “hyper-liberalism + anti-democracy,” which scholars refer to as carrying the risk of fascist variants.

In his new book “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voice on the Left,” published in February of this year, renowned American journalist and historian Eoin Higgins describes: After Trump's victory in 2016, leaders in the tech industry rushed to curry favor. On December 14, 2016, Thiel attended Trump's campaign meeting. The billionaire investor also brought along allies Elon Musk and Alex Karp, even though their respective companies, Tesla and Palantir, were not on the same level as giants like Google, Microsoft, and Apple.

During Trump's second term, Vice President Vance, the White House's cryptocurrency and AI director, and David Sacks, known as the “Crypto Tsar,” were both influenced by Peter Thiel. Meanwhile, Musk, a disciple brought into the White House during the first term, became another representative of Silicon Valley elitism. The world's richest man, who even studied whether rocket launch noise would affect the mood of seals, developed an almost insane hatred for the government, or more precisely, for the bureaucracy. This hatred also transformed into a frenzied liquidation of DOGE against certain government departments. Clearly, this extreme ideological opposition made Vitalik feel a twinge of unease.

Whose freedom is true freedom?

Similarly advocating for changing the world through technology, Peter Thiel chooses to let elites control technology to dominate “mortals,” while Satoshi Nakamoto and Vitalik believe more in technological equality, forming an absolute ideological opposition. What Vitalik truly worries about is a group of tech elites holding massive capital using their capital and discourse power to turn Ethereum into a formally decentralized network controlled by extreme authoritarian regimes. At that time, Ethereum may still be the world's computer, still carrying the majority of transactions for stablecoins and tokenized RWAs, but it will no longer resemble what the cypherpunks envision Ethereum should be.

Vitalik's direct motivation for developing Ethereum stemmed from Blizzard weakening his favorite character in World of Warcraft. However, Vitalik does not oppose the nerf; he just believes that such decisions should be made in a more democratic manner. Even if the final vote results in a nerf, it is still acceptable to him. The same situation applies to Peter Thiel, who would unilaterally choose not to nerf. This may be the biggest difference between the two.

In the comments section of this tweet, Vitalik expressed agreement with the view that “Ethereum ultimately needs to stop development or minimize maintenance at some point like Bitcoin.” He supports a gradual stagnation and, after short-term scaling, streamlining Ethereum and cleaning up technical debt, takes a more cautious approach to significant changes to the protocol.

This viewpoint actually corresponds to the “technological utopianism” mentioned by Peter Thiel, but for Peter Thiel, who embodies a denial of democracy, technological authoritarianism, and capital usurpation, which exceeds the boundaries of conventional conservatism or libertarianism, his notion of freedom seems to restrict the freedoms of the majority for the absolute freedom of a minority. This claim, which carries an absolute sense of “right” and “wrong,” seems to lead the notion of “absolute political control” to another extreme of “absolute technological elite control.”

Interestingly, Vitalik received a $100,000 grant from Peter Thiel in 2014 to develop Ethereum. Eleven years have passed, and although the once naive young man no longer overly insists on crypto fundamentalism, he has become one of the spiritual leaders of the decentralized world. Peter Thiel, however, still clings to an extreme ideology that is difficult for me to find suitable adjectives to describe.

In the next ten years, will Ethereum become an absolute weapon of freedom for a small number of people, or a relatively free tool for the majority?