This time, Daniel is joined by special guest Corey Pein, author of Live Work Work Work Die, to talk about Silicon Valley Nazis. Content Warning as ever. Notes / Links: Live Work Work Work Die at Powell's: https://www.powells.com/book/live-work-work-work-die-9781627794855 Corey Pein Twitter: https://twitter.com/coreypein Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press: https://www.netflix.com/title/80168227 News From Nowhere Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/newsfromnowhere The Portal with James O'Keefe: https://player.fm/series/the-portal/ep-26-james-okeefe-what-is-and-isnt-journalism-in-the-21st-century The End Newsletter: https://t.co/jHnbFuSMVs?amp=1 Neoreaction a Basilisk: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Neoreaction-Basilisk-Essays-Around-Alt-Right/dp/1981596518
Hello, and welcome to I Don't Speak German, the anti-fascist podcast in which I, Jack Graham, and my friend Daniel Harper have conversations about the far-right's conversations.
Every episode comes with a big content warning.
Okay, and welcome to I Don't Speak German, episode 47.
You're hearing my voice which means that Jack is not here and normally I would have some Snarky comment to make about how he's being lazy, but actually he's just suffering from coronavirus related issues I would encourage everyone to to go and send him some love on Twitter and donate to his Patreon because he is not doing well in some complicated ways that I'm not at liberty to discuss.
But I do have a wonderful guest who hopefully we will have a very nice conversation.
I am joined by Corey Pine, who is the author of the book Live, Work, Work, Work, Die.
I believe I have the right number of works in there, and an amazing journalist and an amazing Twitter follow who has his own kind of work that he's working on, and we're going to be talking about, like, tech-ogliopoly, I hate saying that word because I can never pronounce it, and fascism and whatever else kind of comes up in this conversation.
So, Corey, welcome to the show!
Thank you for having me, Daniel.
You did get the number of works correct, and I don't know how to pronounce that word either.
I would just say tech fascism.
Sure, sure.
Because it's more concise, fewer syllables, and I think conveys enough about what the general agenda and philosophy are that I talk about in the book.
No, absolutely.
I really enjoyed the book and I'm just gonna, like, this will be a little bit more of a kind of casual chat as opposed to kind of a more organized episode that we normally do because I really just wanted to kind of sit and talk about the book and recommend it to people and get people to buy it because, like, I sort of, you know, I'll admit I was a little bit skeptical, like, sort of like, oh, another book about the tech industry, yada yada, you know, like, I feel like there are a lot of those kind of
You know, like almost a kind of gonzo journalism style, like, oh, I went inside the tech industry and look at, you know, look at what I found.
But I found this one to be really interesting and profound, particularly in its kind of last sequence.
So why don't we just kind of start there and tell people about the book and about the process by which you came to write it and what it is?
Oh, wow.
Okay.
Can you summarize years of your life in 18 seconds, Corey?
It would be nice.
Well, it is a hard book to summarize.
I mean, I think that's maybe why it's maybe not Burning the shells underneath it as people snatch it off.
Well, it starts off as kind of a Silicon Valley safari in a way.
It's sort of like, oh, I went on the inside of Silicon Valley.
And I think that's sort of the selling point.
But I feel like the book kind of goes to some places that I was not necessarily expecting.
I don't want to damn you with fake praise.
I feel like the book is very, very good, but I feel like it's not necessarily the book that I thought I was buying, necessarily.
Well, I hope that's for the best, because I really didn't want it to be another tech book.
I mean, by the time I was even to the point of finishing my reporting and starting to write, I was so sick of everything that had been written about tech and Silicon Valley, and I just wanted nothing to do with the subject.
Anymore, because, you know, in some ways the book is just everything I wanted to say about the tech industry and the politics of it and what it's doing to the economy.
And I said as much of it as it fit into a book that got published.
And it was sort of pitched as a safari because that was the easiest way to touch on every aspect of tech that I wanted to approach.
And the reason I even wanted to write about it is I was, you know, career newspaper reporter, did investigations mostly for all weeklies for, you know, 10 or 15 years.
And 2008, you know, it was a recession.
Probably not as bad as the one we're about to experience now in 2020, but pretty bad.
And it hit newspapers pretty hard because a lot of them relied on short-term credit to make payroll, and those were the markets that froze up immediately.
You know, I got laid off and bounced around, met my wife, which was great, and we moved to London, and I launched a website, because that seemed like a good thing to do.
I mean, I couldn't help but notice, as all the newspapers sort of collapsed, you know, it was like my whole newspaper career was just one long burning bridge sequence.
Or like, if you ever saw that movie, 2012, about the Mayan apocalypse prophecy, John Cusack is basically constantly running away from volcanoes and things sinking into lava.
And that's kind of what it felt like to be in newspapers.
And I looked over at tech and everybody was happy and making money.
They seemed very optimistic and had a lot of ideas.
And so I thought I could do that because I was pretty good with computers.
And, you know, it didn't work out great.
I learned a lot of hard lessons kind of launching a website.
And then when we were in London, I ended up working for a proper startup, you know, like with investors and stuff.
Because I was just raising money to do investigations online.
It's not very profitable.
And everything that would have made it had a successful business model, I resisted.
You know, I was covering the defense industry and profiteering.
And, you know, whenever I would talk to smart tech advisors, business advisors, you know, people in the nonprofit world, dealt with grants and stuff, like all the ideas to turn it into a bigger enterprise were like, you know, take money from defense contractors, which is exactly what I didn't want take money from defense contractors, which is exactly what I didn't want So, you know, some of these problems with the press are kind of built into the business model.
And it's all the more so in tech.
I mean, that's kind of what got me thinking on the subject.
Then I went to go work for the startup and they brought me on to be editor in chief for this new startup.
It was called Demotics.
I mentioned it in the introduction of the book.
And it got bought by Bill Gates and he destroyed it immediately.
And in such a way that I thought it was going to endanger people's lives because we had freelancers all over the place, Syria, Egypt, India and Mali, which was, you know, just sort of kicking off then.
And, you know, they want to do these cuts that would endanger journalists, and so I resigned, and I got a lot of, uh, new feelings, uh, about, um, not just the state of journalism, but the tech industry, which had, I'd approached as, uh, an optimist and a kind of a booster, you know?
Uh, I was what that guy sort of reading Hacker News and trying to figure out how to optimize my SEO and all that kind of shit.
And, you know, after seeing what happens when you deal with actual major players and things are really happening, it was uglier than I imagined it could even be.
It was much more like, oh, I don't know, oil or finance or, you know, consulting or any of these trades that we sort of think of as harmful or prone to evil.
And I started thinking about why.
And that was the genesis of doing a deep dive into, or a safari into Silicon Valley.
So you kind of approached it as a journalist.
You're already a journalist.
You kind of approached it... And this was something that I kind of ran into.
I kind of went back and forth a bit, like read the book, like, you know, just the degree of like, oh no, I'm actually doing this.
I actually think I might make a billion dollars or, you know, make the next big thing.
Or is this just sort of like I'm pretending at doing this.
I'm LARPing at it.
in the process of making a book.
And I feel like the answer is both, right? - It was honestly both.
Yeah, I mean, part of doing the book was sort of purging myself of that mentality where you've gotta be a getter, and a winner, and a hustler, and all of these things, which, as a writer, you're expected to be.
I mean, you know, when I think about some of the things I was paid to do as a staff writer at a newspaper, only say 10 years ago, you know, more like 12 years ago at this point.
It's been a while.
But, you know, I used to get paid to go sit in the courthouse for a couple of days every week and just see what cases were coming through and see what was interesting and like what might be newsworthy.
You know, my friends that have newspaper jobs don't have that kind of luxury of time anymore.
You know, everything is sort of built around the demands of the Internet, so we're finding out less about our governments and how things work, what's happening in our communities, and, you know, the things I saw happening in the startup world were equally destructive.
I mean, I only mention it maybe in passing in the book, but one of the things I found myself doing as the editor-in-chief of a website dealing in breaking news photos was coming up with a way to sort of like automate copy editing, like make sure the sentences and captions that people but one of the things I found myself doing as the editor-in-chief of a website dealing in breaking news photos was coming up with a way to sort of like automate copy editing, like make sure the sentences and captions that people were writing and headlines for their like make
And I was like, wow, I'm automating my old job.
Like I do, I'm trying to automate something I used to get paid for.
And I felt pretty dirty about that because I knew that it would never replace the skills that I had, you know, when I was editing or a good, any good editor has, - Yeah.
But it would be deemed sufficient as a replacement by a capitalist because they don't really care about, you know, the craft of anything or whether something is communicated artfully or truthfully, for that matter.
So, you know, both of those experiences kind of made me think about what was happening with tech and the way it was sort of taking over journalism, colonizing journalism in a way.
That was already kind of rattling in my head, but I was still sort of trying to cope with the reality of making a living and as things were sort of transitioning, you know, and I guess the tone of the book and sort of like I went to my guys and going to Silicon Valley was that I had another startup to pitch, you know, that was my sort of the way I was going to use to open doors, get meetings with people.
about which I only make success, but I still saw a lot of interesting things.
And so that guise was it was a bit tongue in cheek, the approach I used, because I'd already had some critical ideas about the place I was going, but also, you know, I I was kind of doing when in Rome, right? I I was kind of doing when in Rome, right?
I mean, even, you know, the stuff.
Nothing in the book is made up.
If there is anything that's a flight of fantasy, I definitely telegraph it or say so.
But it really happened that one of the first ride shares I got into, this lift at a hostel in San Francisco that picked me up, the lady starts giving me her start-up pitch.
It was sort of an attempt to capture just what it was like in the gold rush there too.
Are you in Cali?
Remind me where you're based.
Cold weather place.
Well, so the whole Gold Rush thing is kind of over now in a lot of ways, but, you know, the tech industry is sort of the permanent
Well, I feel like there's this moment, and there's a lot of stuff that you just said that I'd love to touch on, and I don't know how much time we have, but one of the things that really I think the audience here will be interested in is this kind of nature of the journalism industry.
Because particularly some of our younger listeners may not even remember a time in which there was, you know, actual local news reporting in places in which, you know, the, you know, everything wasn't kind of built directly bait.
And I remember very clearly that kind of, like, because I kind of came out of the blogosphere.
This is something I think you and I had a little back and forth on, on Twitter, like a week or two ago.
I kind of come out of that blogosphere era of I was in my 20s in the W. Bush administration and sort of getting my news through that medium and people kind of talking back and forth in kind of mid to long form.
And it feels like even at that time there was a sense that that was starting to kind of take away from local journalism, something like Huffington Post, which for whatever our issues with it today, like in the beginning was literally just an aggregator.
They were just like stealing other people's content and like throwing it up there and just for clicks.
Yeah.
And BuzzFeed kind of doing kind of similar things with like the listicle format.
And then, you know, even before the financial crash in the mid 2000s, you were seeing these Yeah, definitely.
It's journalism.
I mean, I don't think there's much of a question about that.
You know, it's journalism.
You don't need to be.
of um you know journalism and you know i don't really necessarily consider what i'm doing here to be journalism but it's certainly you know i spend hours and hours of preparation to make one podcast obviously you know there's yeah definitely it's journalism i mean i don't think there's much of a question about that you know it's it's journalism you don't need to be yeah if you want it to be i mean you know in some ways
uh the label is is because people don't have the memory of when there was like you were saying there was actually like good local journalism all over the place in the u.s um you know it is more of a uh a polarizing term Sure, yeah, yeah.
And I don't mean that it necessarily even lines up with, you know, left-right opinions, but you never know who's going to consider, who's going to, if you say you're a journalist now, you never know how people are going to react.
Uh, I guess I use it because it describes, you know, my method.
But I think when the general public uses it...
You know, it dawned on me years and years ago that people didn't know the difference between what I was doing at a local newspaper and what Rush Limbaugh did or, you know, somebody on TV, you know, whether they were on the local news or on Fox News.
People just, it's all sort of mysterious and the number one question I would get like, you know, in a bar or sometimes interviewing people would be like, so, you know, how do you How do you decide what to write or do you get told what to write?
I mean, people just don't have basic knowledge about what's involved.
So that was even the case, you know, before there were things like the Newmark School of Journalism, which I still, you know, you're talking about all these companies from that early 2000s era that helped sort of destroy the media as we knew it. you're talking about all these companies from that early 2000s You know, that still kind of boggles my mind.
Well, and of course there were issues with that kind of old model of, you know, when you have, you know, three television stations and, you know, like cable news and, you know, when everything gets kind of goes through this sort of like capitalist enterprise.
And so there are advantages to having a more variety of news sources, but there is a problem when there's no monetization model because everything gets, you know, kind of filtered through a handful of like giant companies that just suck up all the ad revenue essentially.
I think there's a Marxist sort of Marxist analysis to be applied to it.
And that, you know, having no functioning business model is a huge problem because then you get the kind of crap just like it's all, it's people are just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks now.
You know, there's no consistency and nobody knows who to trust.
And it's totally fragmented.
I mean, but Marxist, More accurate to say I think that whatever the funding model is, whatever supports the media or a particular organization that's putting out information is going to sort of dictate what its biases are and the approach that it takes and what it doesn't talk about, you know?
Right.
So a lot of the stuff in my book is stuff that the tech press which was by and large funded by the tech industry and essentially functioned as a PR wing of the tech industry, did not talk about for 15 years while there was a post-Web 2.0 economic or financialized boom, I should did not talk about for 15 years while there was a post-Web 2.0 economic
So everything that people were hearing, all the things that I'd heard to help form a positive impression in my head of what they were doing, was filtered through advertising, essentially.
No, absolutely.
I mean, you run into this over and over again, and this is something that we kind of come back to on the show.
Um, at least a bit is the sense that, uh, you know, the, uh, not only the medium is the message, but it's sort of like the people funding it.
It's not so much like, you know, that there's some like explicit agenda that's being kind of taken from on high, but the kinds of people who get to ask the questions and the kinds of questions they can ask are ultimately controlled by, um, the, the capitalist press and by the people funding the organization.
Like, you know, Jeff Bezos owning the Washington Post.
There are brilliant people writing for the Washington Post.
There are also some shitty people writing for the Washington Post.
But certain questions are just never going to be asked by the Washington Post, because Jeff Bezos owns it, like, fundamentally.
Yeah, after he bought it, I was still in sort of a tinkering mentality with computers, and I did a It was never a proper browser extension.
It was like a JavaScript tool that would highlight any conflicts of interest in the Washington Post because it was having to do with something that Jeff Bezos also had an interest in.
And it was just, you know, some stories were just all yellow, more or less.
I mean, it is, you know, it was a problem with the Graham family, which was the previous owner of the Washington Post.
However, their side businesses were like Kaplan test prep.
I think is really what paid the bills there and That's not that consequential ultimately when it comes to all the things now I guess you can say it's gonna affect their coverage of education policy and this and that Probably they'll add that they would take from Lockheed and still do and the likes of those companies I mean you can see the results in The Washington Post, but you're absolutely right that they have some of the best journalists in the business and
Um, you know, it's just going to be surprising if at this point they, uh, not who I'd look to first to break a major story about Amazon, for instance.
Right.
Um, and you know, they never would have been who I would have looked to first to break a major story about, like I said, Lockheed or something, uh, because they know where their bread is buttered.
And in some ways it is a K street paper.
So.
There's that, and you've got to go through the same process with pretty much anything you're reading.
I did a journalism class before I left Portland, and that's pretty much how we start.
It's like, how do you assess the sources of news that you're getting?
And ownership is really the first place to look, because if it's not going to dictate what they're telling you about necessarily, assuming there's any integrity to it, Although, depending on the ownership, there might not be.
It's definitely going to influence what they decide not to tell you about.
And that's why the main challenge of staying well informed now is how many different sources you need to consult.
And there's a lot more, but a lot of them are lower quality.
Because, I argue, part of the reason is the influence of the tech industry.
Is another thing that's happened.
It's been further consolidation as all of those sort of family-owned newspapers around North America have been bought up by conglomerates and those conglomerates in turn are under more pressure to do business with like Facebook, you know, and everybody goes to Twitter to make sure that they're you know, they're getting traction among media and political people and
So these platforms have tremendous power and they're just, aside from maybe a couple of dozen journalists who are sort of most, for the most part, eking out livings here and there, you know, they just don't get covered properly.
We're talking about companies that, you know, in Facebook's case, Facebook probably the number one example.
I mean, Amazon is tremendously powerful.
But Bezos doesn't seem as committed to swinging elections as Mark Zuckerberg and his partner in crime Peter Thiel do, for instance.
Oh, don't worry.
I hope we talk quite a bit about Peter Thiel here in a moment.
Sure, yeah.
Because I think that's what people are really waiting for in this episode.
You can't talk about tech fascism without talking about Mr. Thiel.
That's right.
Is it teal or theal?
I actually don't know.
It's teal.
Okay, it's teal.
It's teal.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, I mean, I feel like there was that era of, like, kind of consolidation among, you know, again, newspapers when, like, Gannett started buying everything.
And, like, I never worked in journalism.
I mean, I don't describe myself just because I never did it professionally.
And I don't like to kind of take the mantle of something, whatever.
Like, I know that, whatever, it's not, it's no, I didn't want to, like, stand aside from that, whatever.
But, you know, like, I've known people who, like, worked for, like, the local hometown paper who, you know, covered, you know, the storm that came through and knocked down power lines, you know, for 40 hours a week.
And there's this moment in which, like, all that just shut down.
And suddenly it was all taken from the Associated Press.
It was all just, and, like, any kind of, like, local reporting just completely disappeared.
And this is a problem in terms of, you know, so much of the kind of, like, you know, Nazi dipshittery is happening.
In local, like, state legislatures and local council members and that sort of thing.
So much like right-wing shit gets passed because nobody's paying attention, because there's just no local reporting going on anymore.
And this is one of the big stories of, you know, the kind of last
10 or 15 years as far as I'm concerned is just the degree to which there's just no oversight and there's nobody kind of doing the as you said like sitting in a courthouse for two days a week just to see kind of what's going on and there's nobody who has those kind of relationships to sort of understand it and that's why I really try to reach out I actually contact quite a few journalists in terms of my you know kind of local journalists people reach out to me and I reach out to people when there is a story that I kind of that goes on my radar and I'm like hey can you
Let me know if I can help you or, like, whatever, precisely because, like, you know, I have, like, the subject matter knowledge of, like, kind of this big picture stuff, but, like, it's so much more useful if it comes from a, you know, kind of a local journalist in that way.
And local journalists are often, you know, they're working, you know, 15-hour days for five bucks an hour, effectively, trying to, you know, turn out this copy.
They don't have the time to kind of do the big, like, research that, like, I've just made my time to do.
I don't know it's like there's just such this kind of like it's that's not directly connected to the tech industry but it's definitely like set the stage for when like suddenly Facebook and Twitter and Amazon kind of come up and suddenly they and Google just suck out all the all the advertising dollars just suddenly go to a handful of companies, and it just obliterated an already kind of dying thing.
And it wasn't dying out of a lack of need for it.
It was dying because of the existence of it existing within a capitalist system, ultimately.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the thing is if you look at – this is part of the argument that the book makes is if you look at what the tech industry does in a very systematic way.
We spend a lot of time now just talking about what it's done to the media, which is how I experienced it, but it's done similar things to all kinds of industries.
Yeah.
I mean, cab drivers, I'm reading this book super pumped, I don't know if you've read that one yet.
Yeah, I heard about it.
I'm about halfway through it, it's very good, and I would put it as a companion piece to your book.
Yeah, and you know, all the way down the line to logistics.
I mean, you mentioned retail earlier.
kind of telling that story.
But it's a kind of similar narrative in some ways.
Anyway, but yeah, that's a story of Uber.
- Yeah, and all the way down the line to logistics, I mean, you mentioned retail earlier.
Retail is definitely not the same as it used to be. - Well, and even now, like workers in Instacart started to bring up the coronavirus.
No, that's alright.
Like, you know, workers in Instacart are striking as we speak, you know, on this day, because they're being fucked over by their bosses, because, like, they're being required to go above and beyond, because suddenly everybody needs carry-out and delivery.
Which is, I mean, yeah, that's great to see, frankly, that they're striking.
I mean, part of the reason these companies, this whole gig economy thing, was devised as a way to break labor.
And I talk about that in the book, too.
I don't think I give away too much to say, you know, the startup I was pitching as I was going around Silicon Valley, and this would have been in like 2014, 2015, was It was called Laborize, and the idea was you would hire us to organize union and labor action at your competitor's company.
It's one of my favorite sections of the book, honestly.
It's brilliant and absurd, and I only wish you had been able to make it work, honestly.
Oh, man.
I mean, yeah, I got a mix of reactions.
I mean, it's sort of like you.
A lot of people didn't know what to make of it.
And, you know, the most common thing, positively, was just crazy enough to work.
Although, if it had taken off and I'd become a billionaire, I suppose that.
I would have somebody sort of dealing with my mics and stuff for me when I did my podcast.
Right?
I wouldn't have to sit here and wait for the computer to update.
I would just buy a new computer and then have an assistant sort of tell me when it's time to start talking.
Yeah, and you probably wouldn't be talking to me, that would be the flip.
So, two positives for you, if you were a billionaire.
No, it is a delightful section of the book, and I was reading that I think at like three in the morning one night when I couldn't sleep, and I'm just like, dear Jesus, That is, like, the height of tech industry absurdity.
Like, it felt like an absurdist fantasy of, like, a thing that you would see in an Armando Iannucci movie about the tech industry, as opposed to something that you actually tried to do.
And I mean that as the highest compliment.
I mean that as the highest compliment.
Well, thank you, yeah.
That's why, I mean, you know, that's the kind of journalism that I've always believed in was, you know, journalism that didn't try to pretend like you're a transparent observer, you know, as contradicting the laws of physics.
You know, you always affect things when you're there observing.
So, you know, I decided that, you know, if my guise was to be a startup person, I might as well do something deliberately provocative to draw people out on what I saw as the, you know, the number one issue around Silicon Valley, which, as we discussed, was like what it's the number one issue around Silicon Valley, which, as we discussed, was like what it's doing to labor No, absolutely.
All very bad.
I can't look around anywhere and say that, you know, Silicon Valley has had a good result for labor, especially in the last 20 years.
Yeah.
Even like, you know, like think about how much people complain about Microsoft Word, for instance.
I mean, it's something that we would probably go into the benefits column because look at how productive it helps you be.
But, you know, before Microsoft Word, a lot of more people might have been paid to be typists or to work Word processors and printers and, you know, maybe you can say, well, we don't need those things.
It's good that they're gone.
But is it?
It's helped to give us this attitude to automating every aspect of labor.
I mean, the one that made me very uneasy when we started, you know, when we started talking.
I can't really look at it and say that it's made the world better in my lifetime.
So I'm not sure if you went back 100 years how true it would be.
Uh, either.
Well, it, you know, something like, again, Microsoft Word makes it easy to make, uh, you know, type that looks fine, that has, you know, funky fonts and everything.
Like, I remember, like, 95, when I, 1995, when I, you know, first kind of got a word processor, I was like, I could do italics, because I used to write on, like, an electric typewriter, right?
And, like, suddenly, like... Yeah, I had one of those, too.
Yeah.
Pretty cool.
To type on a computer keyboard.
We're old men now.
We're talking about, like, electric typewriters when we were teenagers, right?
But, like, I feel like there is this sort of element of, you know, I agree.
I agree.
I definitely agree with what you're saying is that it has been a mixed bag.
But I think that the paradox is that it makes it easier for someone independently to sort of make something that looks professional.
But then takes away both the sort of the labor that like sort of makes that happen and removes jobs, but also removes this sort of like oversight and makes it like anybody like, like, take it from me, anybody can make a podcast that sounds Okay, right?
That doesn't mean that that podcast is well-researched and well-produced.
Anybody can make a newsletter that looks pretty professional.
That doesn't mean that the actual text that's in that newsletter has any kind of validity whatsoever.
And so we have these sorts of guidelines in our heads of Uh, you know, like something that kind of looks glossy and has a shiny finish, um, is supposedly something that's kind of been, care has been taken with, but that's just not necessarily true.
And to a certain degree, it was never true.
I mean, you know, these things always had their biases, but you know, it is sort of the, one of those things that like, were it not for sort of like smartphones and the tech industry, like this podcast wouldn't exist and I wouldn't be able to talk about the things that I need to talk about.
At the same time, I wouldn't have to, you know, Well, look, here's the thing.
There's nothing about the tech that allows you to do this podcast that wasn't there in 2002, or even probably 1998.
Sure.
Or even probably 1998.
So this whole last, you know, call it a bubble, call it a, I think it's more like a reordering of the economy that's happened since 2004 around the tech industry.
All they've done is privatize tech that was pretty much open source, you know, and just waiting for somebody to sort of develop it into a more usable form for people.
So some companies got first mover, that's the thing about internet stuff is like first mover advantage becomes everything.
It's not just like an advantage, it becomes really key and i guess not even having it first but having the financing so it gives tremendous power to venture capital and that's the world that peter teal comes from yeah which and you're going exactly where i was going so so please tell so the last chapter of your book or the last uh chapter or two
it's been a little while since i've read it is very much like you kind of go on like the silicon valley safari and then you kind of create your own startup for a while and that kind of peters out and then you really kind of dig into what i think this audience is going to be more interested in And that is the explicitly fascistic parts of the tech industry.
And there is no kind of bigger bullseye on that mark than Peter Thiel, who I'm just going to throw this tidbit in now.
I was listening to Brett Weinstein's podcast.
I don't know how much you follow the intellectual dark web.
I'm well aware of who he is and what he does, and I can't say I listen to his podcasts.
Yeah, you shouldn't.
It's remarkable to me that it's successful enough that I still hear about what's on his podcast.
He interviewed James Damore.
Not James Damore, James O'Keefe.
He interviewed James O'Keefe on a recent episode.
Okay.
It's weird, they kind of look the same now that you mention them.
Right, sorry, my brain just kind of went, like, I'm sure he will bring James Damore on, except James Damore is kind of a nobody at this point.
But he brings on James O'Keefe, and I could do a whole hour just talking about the nonsense in that podcast.
But there's a moment.
There's a moment in which Weinstein says like, oh yeah, you and I are both funded by Peter Thiel.
Like you and I both get money from Peter Thiel.
And just they kind of acknowledge it.
They kind of both kind of nod and then they just kind of move on.
And it's like, no, this is more important than the rest of the bullshit that you guys are talking about.
The fact that you both get money from Peter Thiel and you broadly agree on things and just want to kind of talk about optics for two hours, that's the fundamental thing, you It's way more important than anything else you have to say.
So for the audience who may not know, tell us who Peter Thiel is and tell us how awful he is.
Peter Thiel is a extremely wealthy man now.
He is a multi-billionaire.
He's on the board of Facebook.
He is... Wasn't he one of the original PayPal guys or do I have him confused with someone else?
Yeah, he was in a group called the PayPal Mafia along with Elon Musk and Pierre Omidyar.
PayPal is, like, working backwards is actually pretty good with Peter Thiel because not only, you know, is he this Facebook billionaire who's affiliated with PayPal, big in Republican politics now, he was a key Trump supporter back in 2016 and before that.
Uh, he put Gawker out of business.
People probably are familiar with that story at this point.
Uh, had a, funded a lawsuit in secret.
There's a great Netflix documentary.
Yeah, the Netflix documentary is really good, and I think it's only an hour, or 90 minutes or so.
It's like 90 minutes, yeah.
No, it's a full documentary, but it's worth it.
It's worth your time.
And more importantly, they got the story right.
I mean, it's pretty engaging to watch, but they got the story correct, which I could easily have seen going wrong, and they correctly focused on Teal.
So if you want to know a lot about why Peter Teal is not a good person to be enemies with, go watch that Netflix documentary, because it shows how he connived and conspired to put Gawker Media out of business pretty much permanently, and then Even the poor writers who are like, you know, semi-freelance.
One guy, you know, wound up like with a slow cooker and a tea kettle and a cot basically after losing his job at gawker uh because peter steel put it out of business uh then in the in the bankruptcy proceedings uh and the the legal proceedings that followed uh teal's representatives are basically trying to take this guy's uh slow cooker so no you know
which vindictive character sure uh conspiratorial character and more importantly i mean he is uh one of the key funders of that intellectual dark web that you mentioned which i think is too nice of a term for it i mean there are every people debate endlessly and i'm not really too interested in getting into this uh uh what is neoreaction what What is, you know, Intellectual Dark Web and all these semantics.
Alt-right, all of that stuff.
I mean, most of those terms were coined by people who they purport to describe.
Teal is the key founder and funder, not founder, but funder, of Many, you know, tech-oriented fascist propaganda organizations, some of which are in the guise of startups.
So, I would even argue that PayPal is one of these companies.
one of the things I did for researching the book was go back and look at PayPal back in the late 90s, early 2000s.
And Teal brought to it this hardcore ideology that was partly derived from his reading of authors like Ayn Rand and partly derived from his reading of science fiction.
And PayPal was sort of like Bitcoin in its ideological conceptions was an attempt to undermine That's what they're calling it, but what do they mean by that?
It was an effort to privatize currency because it would advance what he was then calling a libertarian agenda.
Although more recently he's saying he's not a libertarian, but he won't really say what he is.
He's moved a little bit more towards neo-reaction from what it like.
That's what they're calling it, but what do they mean by that?
And I do get into what they mean by that in the book.
Teal, one of the websites he was funding was this character, Menchus Moldbug, whose real name is Curtis Yarvin.
He's sort of a first, I guess, 90s wave dot-com millionaire.
Anyway, made enough money to sort of buy himself a nice property in San Francisco and sort of do nothing but blog.
And blogged a lot of fascist stuff.
I can't say that he praised Anders Breivik, but he wrote a post condemning Anders Breivik for basically being too ineffective in advancing his sort of neo-Nazi agenda.
This guy's a friend with Thiel who's been funded by Thiel and parties with Thiel, and it sort of gives you an idea of what neo-reaction means in their mind.
Yeah, Mencius Mobug would absolutely be sort of on the radar of people that we would cover if, you know, if we get that far.
Let's put it that way.
But yes.
Yeah, so that thread, I mean, that's initially what I tugged on to sort of start unraveling the fascist connections in Silicon Valley.
And it just so happens that Moldbug and Teal was quite a shortcut because Teal is really important in that scene.
And he's been really important to advancing those ideas and that agenda.
But he's certainly not the only one.
And another person I talk about in the book is Ray Kurzweil, who, you know, is, I could never call a fascist.
I don't believe is a fascist.
But he is a eugenics promoter.
Uh, he is, you know, extremely libertarian in his ideology.
Uh, and I guess has more of a utopian spin on a, uh, future that in a, in a lot of ways looks very similar to what Thiel promotes.
And Thiel, you know, Kurzweil, uh, I mean he, his, um, you know, his parents, uh, fled the Holocaust.
He comes from a very prestigious family in terms of the kinds of people that they knew in Vienna and the connections that they maintained in New York.
His academic credentials are pretty impeccable.
I have a lot to quibble with his ideas, but I don't believe that he is a Hitler apologist.
I'm not so sure about Thiel.
Well, Kurtzwell is more of a singularitarian, right?
Like he's more that sort of, you know.
Yes, he believes in the singularity.
Yeah, yeah.
I've read a couple of his books like in the 2000s or whatever.
I talk a lot about the singularity in the book, but the short version is it's a religious idea essentially that eventually our computers are going to get so good that we're going to turn into gods and merge with them.
And it's going to be like The Matrix or like Terminator, but we're Skynet, so it's good.
I mean, it's like, it's...
I think it's ridiculous, and I get into why I think it's ridiculous in the book.
Well, I feel like there's this sort of soft singularity.
This is an aspect of the ideology.
Yeah, this is an aspect.
There's a lot of different versions of it.
Yeah, there's kind of a soft version of, like, at a certain point society changes enough that we can't predict it from here, which feels like a kind of reasonable sort of thing, but then that gets, like, sort of, like, smeared into this, like, and then the entire universe is going to be built out of computronium.
Well, they both mean it literally in that way of Werner Wynne, who was a science fiction writer that really kind of coined the idea of a tech singularity, and that's the one that both Thiel and Kurzweil build on, and that's sort of how I connect them in the book.
I mean, they are also connected through their involvement in certain organizations related to promoting the idea of a singularity.
although less so lately, because some of their mutual associations have become out-and-out fascists.
I mean, you know, flirted with this stuff called neoreaction and really talk more like skinheads these days.
Well, some of the fasci people I kind of follow kind of came through that neoreaction phase.
Like I feel like it's less relevant in 2020 than it was, you know, in 2015 or so.
A friend of the pod, Elizabeth Sanford, wrote a very nice book, Neo Reaction to Basilisk.
which I would recommend to anybody who kind of wants the deets on the Neo Reaction crowd.
Like, I feel like, I don't have to cover it, she took care of that for me, you know, sort of thing.
She was very early on that and doing good stuff.
So, yeah, I second that endorsement.
But, you know, T.O.
is a... He's very coy on certain questions that I don't think he would be able to be coy about, were he not a billionaire who intimidates the hell out of people because he's litigious.
Well, do you think, and this is something... Sorry, I keep interrupting you.
I apologize.
I'm just trying to... No, that's all right.
You got me worked up about Teal.
No, no, no.
It's fine.
Go ahead.
What's your question?
I feel like we could sit for like six hours and just compare notes.
One of the things that we run into, one of the things that I run into all the time is like, where does the money come from from this?
You know, I've spent many, many, many hours listening to these people talk.
In particular, I'm thinking about people like The Right Stuff, The Daily Show, and Fascination, and these kind of guys.
And I guarantee you there's some money coming in from somebody.
They're not just making money off of $10 a month subscriptions, right?
You know, like, the numbers just don't add up by any reasonable stretch of the imagination.
They'll talk about oh we got a $5,000 donation from somebody and my thought is always like you know there's some guy there's some Nazi dick who owns a car dealership who's like has a few million dollars and throws him five grand every you know six months or whatever.
And there are enough of those guys kind of doing it.
Do you get the sense that like Teal or let's someone like Teal, do you think that there is actually like some billionaire out there like feeding money into like explicitly like genocidal organizations?
Well, I can tell you, you know, speaking as a journalist, I can tell you what...
And let's just allegedly goes out upon all of this because none of us want to be sued by this.
This is purely speculation and opinion here.
So I apologize for putting you in that spot, Corey, but...
No, it's fine.
I mean, you know, I had at one point in the research of my book, I had a very crazy, what's that internet meme with the guy with all the pins up on the wall and the lines between them?
I mean, I had something very much like that.
And one of the reasons I did end up honing in on Teal so much is that a lot of the lines were back to Peter Teal.
And so I can tell you as a journalist the kind of things that he's funded, what he's funded.
And that's why I say I don't mind calling him one of the bigger promoters of fascist-friendly, tech-focused stuff around.
And a lot of it's under the guise of the singularity stuff.
A lot of it's under the guise of neo-reaction or whatever terms they think are fashionable.
But, you know, you scratch a lot of these people and you wind up finding Holocaust deniers and Nazi sympathizers.
And that was the thing that I realized about this guy Yarvin that Thiel was funding is that, I mean, the core of his ideology about which he spent, you know, untold thousands of words expounding on was that, untold thousands of words expounding on was that, you know, maybe the U.S.
supported the wrong side in World War II.
And that's really what it all came down to.
And why, you know, why Teal would fund somebody like that or multiple people who thought that way?
You know, it's really on Thiel to explain.
I mean, his dad was not old enough to be a Nazi.
He did work for a German mining conglomerate that was operating in South Africa, mining uranium.
German industry was dominated by the Nazi Party during the war and after the war wound up being run by people who were essentially picked by Nazis to be in the positions that they were and you know the Allies just kind of you know what they called it denazification but they just kind of went along with who was in charge tried to find the least compromised people.
So we're told and so we thought, but I don't think it worked out that way in every case.
So when you say, it doesn't seem like all these half-wit Nazis could be running successful internet businesses enough to fund all their travel and their production and their output.
I completely agree.
I think, you know, at this point, I don't think it's all Teal's money I don't think it's all the Mercer family's money.
That's another one you could mention.
Yeah.
You know, they funded Breitbart, Steve Bannon, all kinds of shady garbage.
I mean- Or Eric Prince and- Regnery is one.
Regnery is one that we know for a fact.
Regnery.
I mean, it's like, take your pick.
There's a lot of people, I mean, this is what I think, there's a lot of Americans and You know, we'll just keep it to Americans for now.
Who do think, as Curtis Yarvin did, oh, there's a lot of people who agree with that basic idea that the U.S. backed the wrong side in the Second World War.
I think there's more of them than we were sort of educated to believe there were growing up.
and And, you know, I think there's a lot of members of the Bund who had kids who were rich for one reason or another, and they fund this stuff.
I mean, I think it could be a spectrum of people.
Some of them, for all we know, could be, like, stay behind fucking Nazi networks who got smuggled out of Iraq lines and have fortunes and estates in South America.
We don't know where the money's coming from.
I mean, that's the kind of thing that was going on in the 60s, 70s, throughout the post-war period.
And, you know, there's newer generations in charge now.
But when we see who took over in Bolivia in the recent coup there, I mean, it looks a lot, you know, a lot of people pointed out how much like an 80s coup it looked like that the U.S. elements of the U.S. intelligence were involved in.
But not to mention like descendants of Croatian Nazis.
And these are the kind of networks and the kind of ideological networks that support fascist propaganda today. - Okay.
And, uh, you know, Teal is particularly successful at promoting the kinds of things that he does, but he's just one character, and he's one person that we know, and he's famous, and he was famous before people really knew that much about his political beliefs.
It was famous before he got involved with Trump.
I think there's a lot of others that we don't know the names of and are not famous.
Yeah, that's always the thing is like it's it's you know there's a lot of like you know in like sort of left or even like liberal circles there's a lot of kind of like focus on like the Koch brothers and like you know like well yeah but they're like the tip of the iceberg like they're bad like let's not pretend they're not but like that's ultimately
Those are the names we know and there are a whole lot of names we don't know at all different levels and this kind of goes back to sort of the local journalism thing is that is you know there there are people working not not necessarily billionaires but people kind of like pushing your local chamber of commerce to you know push certain kinds of policies and your kind of local state representatives and all that sort of thing and like it is it does feel like this kind of consolidation of media this consolidation of stuff
into You know a handful of outlets that are just not interested in you know, what's kind of going on in Paducah, Kentucky or whatever, you know You know that all news is national news now does kind of contribute to this You don't sense it like yeah, anything goes until it gets bad enough that somebody with the ability to say something says something or
Uh, you know, 10 years from now, somebody kind of does the deep dive and goes like, oh yeah, there was some real shit going on there.
Um, but that's not really useful.
And I feel like this is ultimately, again, like, uh, you know, not to, not to put words in your mouth, but it is fundamentally a failure of capitalism.
Uh, it is fundamentally just like, you know, the capitalist system isn't working.
And in particular, it isn't working in terms of like informing the public, uh, with regards to like, What's going on in your in your in your government in your in anything that you care about in your life?
Yeah, well, I mean, we're certainly at a point where, you know, whatever evolution or devolution or however you prefer to think about it of capitalism where it's no longer in the interest of capital to have uninformed public or any kind of transparency in terms of corporate affairs.
Increasingly, you know, the business of the state in terms of the public sector as well.
So, you know, yeah, it's harder to get away with a lot of this Nazi BS when there is a group of sort of watchdogs in every community like looking out for corruption and things like that.
We just, to the extent that we have it, I can't say we don't have it anymore because I still have a lot of friends who are sort of scraping by in local news.
But it's not like what was even 10 or 15 years ago and right now it's hard to see how we get it back.
It seems like everything is kind of tied up in this, you know, struggle against capital because, you know, everything that sustains
The general public, the non-capitalist, the person who doesn't have connections to major industry, except to the extent that they might work for it, is deprived of power and increasingly threatened by the state and threatened by You know, the prerogatives of people who are holding all the power.
So, you know, journalism is becoming more of a dissident activity, and it used to be considered something that was, you know, the fourth estate, like another branch of government, like a vital function of the society and the democracy.
So the extent to which journalists have been forced to be dissidents, it's, you know, Um...
It's a measure of how fucked we are.
I'm a working class person.
I grew up poor and I sort of squeaked my way into newspapers, magazines at a time when there were fewer and fewer working class people, fewer people of color in the business.
And I can tell you most of the people who are famous in any capacity or even have staff jobs to a certain point
Anymore after so many cuts and crises in the business They're often not people who go out of their way to be Opposed to the government who go out of their way to be, you know troublemakers That's like the romantic positive stereotype of journalists in a lot of ways It's like people who are evidence to be troublemakers, but there's also a lot of star fuckers in there and you know
Even those kind of people now are in the position of being forced into being dissidents just by how much of a crackdown is coming from the Trump administration, the state in general, not just in the U.S., but all over, because capital is under threat and the survival of the power structure is under threat.
Absolutely, I agree.
You know, I feel like that's a... I know we're under kind of limited time.
You and I could probably talk about these issues for long, long hours.
I do have to bounce in a minute, but I'm happy to come on and pick up where we left off sometime.
No, no, definitely.
I would love to have you back at some point in the near future.
Is there anything else you would like to send out to the I Don't Speak German audience before we have to let you go?
Yeah, I mean, you know, thank you for listening to programs like this, for one.
You know, those of us who make them, you know, we do have a close connection to our audiences, but they're often not big audiences.
So, you know, the people that are doing the work to keep themselves informed of these kind of issues, you know, pat yourselves on the back.
Like, it's important.
You know, it's important to have people wherever you are that know about this stuff.
Which doesn't mean, you know, you gotta explain stuff to everybody and be a dick or whatever, but it's, you know, it's good what you're doing.
Like, and it is exhausting to keep informed of these kind of things.
So thanks to your audience.
Yeah, you mentioned the book Live, Work, Work, Work, Die.
If you do decide to buy it after listening to this, go buy it from powells.com, not Amazon, because Powell's, my favorite bookstore back in Portland, is closed.
I mean, they kind of laid everybody off and closed, they say temporarily, because of coronavirus, but after you lay off, you know, that many people and close the store it's kind of i don't know how they're going to come back so i mean just you know throw a few bucks their way and we'll put the link to powell's uh in the in the show notes yeah and you know i also do i i'm about to do another episode of my show which is news from nowhere also on patreon um and
And I started a newsletter with my next guest on the show, Jason Wilson.
Friend of the pod, by the way.
Yeah.
Guardian journalist, and we have a newsletter together that we just recently launched called The End, which is at Substack.
So there's the book.
Absolutely.
We will put all those links in the show notes.
Thank you so much, Corey, for being on the show, and please go follow him.
What's your Twitter?
substack called The End with Jason Wilson and myself.
So thanks a lot, Daniel.
Absolutely.
We will put all those links in the show notes.
Thank you so much, Corey, for being on the show.
And please go follow him.
What's your Twitter?
Is it Corey Pine?
It's just, yeah, Corey Pine, C-O-R-E-Y-P-E-I-N.
Awesome.
On Twitter.
Yeah.
And all my, you know, website stuff is, you can find through that.
Yeah.
And I will highly recommend both the newsletter and the book.
I do not listen to the podcast because I'm not a Patreon subscriber, and I feel very embarrassed about that at this moment.
But, you know.
That's okay.
I mean, you know, we can sign up for each other's.
We can do a little log rolling here.
A blog rolling.
We could do some pod rolling.
Let's give each other a few dollars a month to feed the Patreon dollars upwards.
That's clearly the best way to do this.
Feed the VCs, yes.
It is it is ironic to like, you know, oh, yes, let's complain about the tech industry.
Also, my patreon is you know Well, yeah, I feel very conflicted about this Well, absolutely.
Anyway, thank you so much for being on We would love to have you back at any time.
You want to come back and I hope everybody enjoyed it So, thanks a lot.
Cheers, and I will see you next time That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
We're on iTunes and show up in most podcast catches.
You can find Daniel's Twitter, along with links to pretty much everything he does, at at Daniel E Harper.
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