Peter Thiel and Eric Schmidt teamin’ up to steal $1 billion from the Pentagon

 July 22, 2022

Let's talk about Peter Thiel, aspiring tech overlord, and Eric "Don't be Evil" Schmidt's tech startup to "prevent Chinese Ideology from dominating the world", which I believe was also recently called by someone in the realm of journalism "teaming up to steal $1 billion from the Pentagon".

The ridiculous slide into techno-dystopia continues apace, it seems.

It's not really clear what our most hated vampire spylord Peter Thiel is actually planning on doing with this money, but nonetheless the CIA-aligned hedge fund In-Q-Tel gave him a big chunk of money when he and former Google techno-robber-baron Eric Schmidt proposed to them to do some sneaky spy stuff in China.  This absolute filibustering, by the way, apropos of nothing, brought to you by two members of the Bilderberg Steering Committee. Now, of course, to be fair, I'm a proponent of the quote from some cartoon or other that, "most conspiracy theories are actually just capitalism." It's just that this seems to be exactly the sort of conspiracy theory that is, in fact, capitalism.

Practically, yes, the US and intelligence community is having a Dickens of a time actually figuring out what's going on in China. This has a lot to do in fact with the simple problem that the Chinese written language is pretty hard to read and write, perhaps the hardest, and the CIA can't use most of its traditional bag of sneaky tricks to subvert the Chinese state with the power of language.  The poor guys sitting in the basement with a pad and a pen may never recover.  

The fact of the matter, unfortunately, is that we can't effectively continue our intelligence gathering operations in China based purely on orality.  I mean, the cab drivers in China have got that strategy figured out.  I rode in a couple cabs in North China about eight years ago while I was working a summer job at the US Consulate, and you can see in those cabs the cab drivers using dictation to text each other back-and-forth. In Chinese that is. It's already become part of the background noise. Continuing to have most of our intelligence gathering activities with respect to China based on not enough literate intelligence and diplomatic personnel who can write Chinese is, in fact, putting us in a bad spot. 

So Peter Thiel does make the impression that he is trying to address a need. And by lugging Eric Schmidt along he's got the impression that he's got power on his side because he's got "tech". But let's assume that he was actually trying to solve the problem seriously. He would absolutely be going about it the wrong way. Trying to brute-force the "answer" to "Chinese ideology" out of India, Japan, and Australia using "tech power", is really far from serving the US national interest in the most efficient way.

"Chinese ideology" if you want to call it that, is, really, based on the Chinese written language to an inseparable extent. If you want to figure out the "Chinese mind", you have to go through the Chinese written language to get there. But that is, you have to admit, ridiculously assuming that "the Chinese mind" is some monolithic thing. We have allies in the Chinese-speaking world and instead of grappling with that, Peter Thiel and Eric Schmidt would rather waste themselves on some stupid kamikaze strategy running right at China with no context.

Not to mention, they are trying to do this with "tech" only. Look – to be honest, they are going to break through pretty quickly into something more or less equivalent to the highly-policed Chinese social media sites like Weibo, and quickly start putting out useless and confused intel from there.  We've been there. It's not a serious endeavor for national security. It is, actually, nothing more than Peter Thiel and Eric Schmidt teaming up to steal $1 billion from the Pentagon.

It's not serious because they're not going at the problem of our intel deficit at the level of language. We need to seriously address the language deficit in this relationship of semi – competition with China, and to do that, we need the help of our allies in Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia too.

The latest hijinks from Peter Thiel, in "stealing $1 billion from the Pentagon", is, looking more and more not like hijinks but the evidence of the nascent kleptocracy of our techno-dystopian robber barons.
If we seriously want to address the intel deficit vis-à-vis China, let's do that, seriously. But this Peter Thiel-led money grab is not the way. All they're going to do after stealing their $1 billion from the Pentagon is to "not do the job and say we did." What a waste of a billion dollars.  

If you want to follow along with "Peter and Eric go to White Castle", feel free. But Chinese social media is not that good.