The Wordcel Struck Dumb

The beginning of the end for Silicon Valley

There are no good guys among this crew. If you must, the best thing to root for as they turn on each other is maximum damage to all. We’ve had quite enough.

The way the deep state usually handles organized crime is to turn a few of them, and get them to spark conflicts between each other. Then you have a gang war, and ideally the gangsters kill each other. Where the PayPal mafia is concerned, the same principle applies, though hopefully violence can be kept to a minimum.

There is very little to separate a bad magician from a clown. Take away the mystique, the prestige, the shadow, and shine a bright enough light, and with one bad trick, that’s what he’ll look like.

The thing that ended Pico della Mirandola’s career, the foremost renaissance defender of magic, was that everyone realized he was really just a sophist. That’s what people will conclude from Peter Thiel’s latest interview with Ross Douthat. And the only thing worse than a sophist is a sophist with nothing to say.

One way the PayPal mafia harnesses its nerds in service of various foreign interests, almost like a bug zapper, is by appealing to the stories nerds hold dear, like the Tolkien mythos. But St. Paul says there comes a time to put aside childish things.

Scam Altman gets to boast of the first stock trade on the blockchain for OpenAI today, at the same time he’s lost his best team to Meta. This is not a sign of strength, for either Meta or Altman.

Joe Lonsdale was on CNBC last week, having gone whole-hog for the position that suits his Russian partners—regime change in Iran, no doubt for the Mossad-backed Pahlavis. Naturally this is a dynasty the Russians would prefer on the Sun Throne, because the legitimate Turkic house would pose more problems for Russia and China in Central Asia. The only difference between him and a clown is his bad wig was surgically installed in his scalp. Lonsdale has joined an Israeli defense tech VC firm, a sector increasingly on the outs with the defense industry everywhere else because of how much stealing and killing Israel does.

Lonsdale and David Sacks are in hock to the Russian gangster Vadim Moshkovich over funding Elon Musk’s Hyperloop. And Musk’s other tube-based innovation, the Boring Company, has succeeded only in building a tunnel between Las Vegas casinos. Nothing new under the sun.

Elon Musk is a dead man walking. The macro of his companies is no longer viable, and the man of no nation is in danger of no longer being of use to any, either. The obvious criminals have fled into actual employment by the feds, the last refuge of the scoundrel, or the last cover to wait out a recession. Most of the big companies are hedging in this way, criminal or not.

All of them would like you to believe they speak for the government in the sense of being in line with its strategy for innovation or industry, but it isn’t true.

What the ones who still have big plans have in mind is a massive effort to power AI with new data centers and nuclear power, but none of the people who have proposed it are fit to be trusted with a project of this sensitivity and magnitude. A little like Moses, if Moses were a false prophet, they imagine themselves leading their nation to a city they will not be allowed to enter, many also with blood on their hands.

You can call it the logic of karma, or hubris, but one way or another, we all leave the world as naked as we came. It would be one of God’s best jokes if these people, many of whom wanted to transcend every human limitation, had to spend more time than the rest of us in that proverbial airport waiting room.