giorgio cesarale & matteo pasquinelli, the algorithm and the antichrist — review
what cesarale and pasquinelli need to ultimately answer is the following question: is thiel supposed to be an actual actor in the world the way a philosopher in ancient greece could be a lawmaker, elite circle leader, agricultural capitalist, folk wisdom teller? cause clearly, he was a random student of girards, now hes running private military intelligence, and the article starts him off as an actual important intellectual addition to schmitt, but later demotes him to "this guys a random idiot who doesnt understand anthropology" it doesnt make any sense. either thiel doesnt have enough biography, or his intellectual forray was incidental, or only serves to feed back into his own fantasy of world order that he actually is economically governing, or he actually is an increasingly rare simultaneous world actor but with actual ideas and not just driven by abject forces but one who hides his actual philosophy once it matters most, even though they stress the strauss angle against the schmitt aspect (hide the information from your enemies to preserve the kathechon, avoid featuring phones during the speech etc) i cant help but feel like philosophy doesnt amount to strategy anyways, whilst he has already and already is in the basic position of having been had his basic philosophical narrative exposed anyways? (therefore mounting to the idea that he could hardly leak any real strategy through this practice even if his corporate position forbids him from any real contact with anything risky like that anymore), but this overstates the influence philosophy has over information as valuable vs. "random actual strategy leak" as a basic problem of navigation for anyone in thiels spot. right around the end of the article, they use arrighi to show how world systems analysis casually collapse the schmittian frame anyways in the modern era, and that the basic, essentially tribalistic framework that reactionaries have developed is essentially a power game rather than a real philosophical position within planetary globalism, or, its a framework that at the very least could be and likely already is casually reworked by schmittian scholars they dont seem to mention in the text, or, a framework they themselves could spend longer developing rather than using as a basic counter-crutch once the basic explanatory root of the text has already taken a hold of the point and been prostituted as the central historical curiosity of the article
in the first half, thiel is treated as a serious intellectual actor. not necessarily a philosopher of schmitt's caliber, but someone whose ideas matter because they are attached to institutions. in this reading, what matters isn't whether thiel's interpretation of the katechon is philosophically sophisticated, but that a billionaire with intelligence contracts, political influence, and access to state machinery is actively using those concepts to orient elites. in the second half, the article shifts register. suddenly thiel is not a thinker but a symptom and thiel's ideas are reduced to ideological expressions of those deeper dynamics. but the real problem with treating him like a symptom is that theres this big really annoying gap between 2004 where he gave some casual interviews and inspired some girardian studentry critique or published something and the fact that "the year after where he founded all the evil corps" seemlessly blends in with "now 20 years after that point" with basically no biographical explanation into his point, and no seperate synthesis in the schmitt line. because in the article schmitt is simultaneously the main philosophical voice and basically the only thinker saying anything interesting whilst also being "just this guy that influenced thiel" even if his philosophy ends up being way weaker. it's also even funnier because the article is philosophically almost exclusively about schmitt whilst being narratively almost exclusively about thiel, which makes it so that the more interesting proposal - schmitt's actual narrative - has to be sidelined by anyone's real critical account of this article, partially as a by-product of having to argue against the implications drawn out in the paper itself.
the real answer to what thiel actually is, outside of what the article wants to present him as, is that he's closer to something that existed historically but which modern people often forget: the court intellectual. yet, at the same time, it is natural that people forget this archetype, precisely because this very archetype shouldn't naturally exist in this world. in that sense, you actually see a return of archetypes that are being propagated by the logic of the algorithm itself, propped up to serve as something more. there is hardly anything interesting in being a scholar of schmitt under girard's wing, and hardly anything genuinely interesting about owning everyone's data. it becomes interesting when there's an assumption - mind you, a false assumption, that since the politico-theological mythology thiel funded his way into makes him seem interesting, that somehow structurally this actually validates his position as intrinsically interesting on the one hand, and also as a "symptom" even worth looking into, rather than the more basic thing - that it is someone in power who wants to get even more of it.
the read of the actual geneological history undermining the current twitter-influenced mediation between technocratic undertaking of institutions and the intellectual discourse that accompanies it is the following: philosophers are wise curiosities for technocrats, and technocrats are economists, merchants and politicians who have risen into a new class position by manipulating the market coincidentally in a way that coincides with what the upper middle class is doing rather than the other way around. the upper middle class is 5-8k out of every 100k in any single population cluster in nearly the entire world but especially the big west. and technocrats win when they accidentally co-align with this movement, and sometimes get the resources to basically minimize its power by stripping insitutitons, privatizing or creating propaganda loopholes or whatnot. but the sheer mass and power of the white collar even with its ai toys that coincidentally or paradoxically remove some of its ideological persistance actually dominates over technocrats narratives, mostly around budgets and contracts and corporate decision making influencing political decision making. but past this point, technocrats dont just need propaganda sources like basically mythologizing themselves endlessly, but also have a weird relationship to spastic eccentric or bizarre intellectuals especially rich, niche or interpretatively heavy ones, cause they need to extract a bit of symbolic capital away from them and to learn how the cathedral operates in basic terms so they can cosplay, perform or create networks of influence in spaces that can then serve that aspect of power for them, basically plugging into more languages of power. if the technocratic west wants to defeat the UN (the enlightenment remnant west essentially, or some like older-power model of post monarchy universalist establishment, a remnant maybe of even various absolutist ideologies all cohering in one emptied out form) to do this, they have to paradoxically literally learn all of its protocols and ways of behaving, downstream from the politics and into the basic ways of thinking about the world and so on. in a sense the technocrat is a baby who has amassed a bunch of things and is in a comfortable position, the same one the bourgeoise post marxist intellectual in the middle-late 20th century was - to start debating their own contradictions so they can narrativize themselves not just for political gain but to try and fight their own class fate. theres this weird extraction going on, one one side intellectuals know oddly too much about technocrats and the distinction between public folk jester and private monarch temporarily collapses in the same communication channel, and status-signifying communities all go to shit, everyone is trying to rip off one another, meanwhile the urban middle class all communicate through emptied out internal scripts that they have to enact, they dont need to behave like proper unique subjects in the world, their markets do it for them, whilst at the same time, the technocrat needs UN's basic code of legibility and of understanding the world, but the translation "reveals" them as extremely niche and generally emptied out people who are forced by their own corporations to learn buddhist practice or like basic culture or to enter the same status games that the fake intellectual market is already playing from their own names, creating a disgusting feedback circle. some feudal distinctions such as "jester" "monarch" etc unironically partially return, because theil becomes an actual archetype of a schemer due to the fact real influence actually does exist from passive backhanded re-shaping of influence that could have never truly occured through such a blatant direction in the hyper-militarized and stingy 20th century, whilst at the same time, "corporate philosophers" and so on actually become a real economic class even if its only like a half dozen real people scripted into the job, and nobody knows if its a backhanded authorization ritual or actually doing something, but everyone believes its only maybe truly the algorithm that does anything at all
ultimately this goes back to plato, around the time when rhetoric became politically relevant rather than philosophically amusing, it became politicized by the sophists, then socrates and his gang started polemicizing and influencing people around them, it became a political issue, and the explanation in the apology almost feels like its one about being faithful to your own self-reasoning and not making political compromises, but the real reason shows up in the georgias, and that is around the question of truth as something genuinely political. in this same sense, the politics of truth (as in good faith but also often actual truthfulness and truth with a big t as well) characterizes philosophy the way it cant merchants, because merchants, when entering the symbolic economy of philosophy actually end up turning it into yet another form of bureaucracy. if it is bureaucratic or becomes managerial, then it coincidentally becomes another proxy of institutional existence, of that abstract meta-world that doesnt need to hold itself to any ideals to exist at all, which is like the real ontologization or empiricization of truth into physical practice. or in other words, if thiel actually weaponizes philosophy so he can weaponize symbolic economies to aid in his governmental procedures, then this practice either way does not replace the world of philosophy towards itself. surely it could replace the function of philosophers, in the blink of an eye all that could remain from intellectualism in this historic epoch are symbolic merchants and "sophists" in the vulgar sense and not any philosophers actually concerned with their own practice as an end in itself, but just because economically the practice of philosophy in its basic sense is fulfilled in everyone elses mind, this would not get them any nearer to the real object or eidos that philosophy already has within it
the question is not how intellectualism gets functionalized, or what the operation serves. an administrative network may try to figure out how to "ritualize" philosophy, as in, to force it to repeat certain sigils the way agirculturalists have forced wheat to self-reproduce endlessly re-harvested non-self-reproducing crops. the function a philosopher has does not answer whether the philosophy is valid, but only the orientation. if in a fully bought-out environment, you happen to be a philosopher and you want to philosophize, your questions could be endlessly administrative. they wouldnt have to look like what heidegger is asking. even his questions answer other people's administrations, like the administrations of anyone in the 20th century who is bored of too much administrational rhetoric - which is yet another administration. but the question of orientation is simpler, and all it has to ask is whether the goal is the sincere orientation around the product of experience correlated with the act. this way, a philosopher need not produce a product, network, ideal, or anything capturable at all. if the philosophical action itself happens due to a self-sincere interest in doing it and for no other reason, regardless of what it actually does apart from this, thats a sincere philosophical undertaking. it is also an undertaking that often times produces symbolic worlds and zones of nuance, ambiguity, complexity and detail, partially because as a craft, the natural inclination towards it would have the intellectual almost freely strive towards advancement in the craft itself, rather than there being some ideal shape this action permits or requires from them. in this sense also, philosophy could be killed best when on the one hand its instrumentalized, but still poorly killed when the assumption starts being that non-philosophers can suddenly replace the critical thinking that only those who serve intellectualism properly can execute. the problem here really is that the more interesting question besides asking what thiel can do for philosophy is whether contemporary technocratic society can actually even at all distinguish philosophy from its own administrative simulation of philosophy. if you were to walk into one of those tedtalk rooms and attempt to explain how conceptual or theoretical thinking even unfolds, would they be able to understand the difference between musk and thiel, or thiel and chomsky, or thiel and schmitt, or schmitt and marcuse, or marcuse and deleuze? in much the same way that the article abuses the image of the algorithm for no good measure, "the antichrist is born, this time, from the ruins of the algorithm.", in this way, the algorithm gives birth to the death of all the distinctions that actually make it possible to question whether thiel should even be evaluated by philosophers at all or not, when anything you use him to say when contrasted against schmitt just looks depressing.
it doesn't matter how many cartoonishly evil corporations thiel raises from the ground or whether he studied under girard, he will not become philosophically relevant just by increasing how politically scary he is