A comment on one of my recent reviews was:
Soo…. would you recommend it?
Seems like a pretty glaring omission for a book review. But I avoid mentioning such things pretty intentionally, the same reason I avoid a rating system.
I don’t think any of us can speak too much on why we like things – you can try to explain why you prefer chocolate to cauliflower, but try doing so without sounding like a child. When you study enough philosophy, you learn that most people, including yourself, struggle to really explain the why of a lot of very quotidian things. I could be wrong, but I see two possibilities for reading: an aesthetic joy from reading, and to gleam knowledge. Both of these turn out to be thorny topics in their own way, and would need a lot more than this blog to go into in depth.
The moment I finished reading this, I asked myself whether I would be recommending it. And for some reason it felt like a really weird question. I have had issues with the perenniality of non-fiction books for some time. Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival rested on a bookshelf for almost 20 years till I dug it out and read it despite the fact that the Bush era urgency the book was written for had long since defused. Having parents that bough more books than they ever read, we had a house lousy with non-fiction books from the 90’s that all lost their relevance.
Will this turn out similarly?
A worthy alternative title to this book might be Peter Thiel is a big fat cunt, and so are his mates. I could pretty easily say ‘if you have a passing interest in learning why Peter Thiel is a cunt, grab this book,’ and let it be at that. But is that good enough?
If Donald Trump is a bad case of AIDS, Peter Thiel is the regretful drunk night of unprotected sex that let the HIV in.
In 2026 as we sit here and watch the world order become increasingly destabilized, Gil Duran wrote a book about some people who wanted to destabilize the world order because they figured that they could, and by being exceedingly wealthy they stand to benefit from it. Silicone Valley is producing a certain brand of right-wing power broker, and they are reshaping the world for their own ends. Except they aren’t confined to California or the United States.
If you consider your nation politically stable enough to withstand the mechanization of Silicone Valley’s elites, or if you think that global warming is going to wipe us all out before then can get to you, then maybe give this a skip. I am gonna guess that it’s not the case. Frankly, if you moaned about prices in the past 6 months, you can trace a causal chain to one of the cunts this book gets into.
I suppose that is an endorsement of this book. It’s a gamble no matter how you look at it, but my money is on Peter Thiel and his band of Silicone Valley fascists are going to be a pain in the ass of anyone who believes in the rule of law and democracy.
