No, that sounds about right for many Catholics I know in the US. I was trying to be charitable towards the intent of the practice and use it as an example of something similar to occult practice in mainstream religion. Of course it’s diluted in content and commitment compared to more intense cults, otherwise their base of adherents would only be shrinking. And don’t forget, the veneration of saints is something the weirdo Protestants hold against the Catholics, accusing them of idolatry! So I’d say it does stand as a lightweight form of “inner door” teaching, especially as the saints are pointed out as examples of how to live in accordance with the church’s teachings here on the mortal plane.

an exoteric doctrine out front and an esotetric doctrine once you are committed.

What you are describing here is the definition of occultism. There’s different lessons for the “inner door” students, and getting there requires buy-in to the group’s differentiating ideas. The Xenu story in Scientology’s OT3 is a galvanizing popular example, the Catholic practice of adolescent confirmation is a more mainstream example that we’re more likely to have encountered in daily life. To summarize my spiel above with this context, I would say that Chapman’s problem is he thought he could replace the harmful occultisms coming to predominate in Silicon Valley and associated spaces with a kinder, gentler, more scientifically informed occultism. It ain’t worked yet, you gotta give up the whole idea of progressing to a “higher level” or “deeper truth.”

Kurz “We’re Sorry for Summarizing a Pop-Sci Book” Gesagt

Geshundheit

I was somewhat influenced by Chapman myself, so naturally I find it hard to call his efforts a complete smokescreen. I think it’s more a matter of the subculture he’s addressing simply being too damned insular and full of itself. A little less than a decade ago, he seemed like one of the few people trying to help the extremely online think past Yuddite rationalism, EA longtermism, and the incipient weirdo cryptocurrency cults that were springing up. He has expressed being somewhat baffled and bemused by “TPOT,” such as it was, but I think it’s fair to say that his writings were one very important nucleus around which the TPOT social graph coalesced. That said, my impression of TPOT quickly became, and has since always been, that it’s mainly a bunch of people with advanced degrees and/or technical training and experience who are resentful that all that hasn’t given them greater status and influence. Hence the commitment to pseudonymy among many of the bigger personalities; that ship may still come in one of these days. Alex Karp is what TPOT people would become if they had the power they thought they deserved. Thus, up until the current rules-free era, the Bay Area moneymen have been careful to fund very very few of these guys, because they risk bringing the whole edifice down with their severe personal instability.

The “Geeks, Mops, Sociopaths” article is what’s most commonly passed around, but the foundational material of Chapman’s project is this developmental psychologist Robert Kegan: https://vividness.live/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence Kegan builds on theories of childhood psychological development from people like Jean Piaget*, and seeks to extend them into adulthood. As Chapman says:

Most Western adults reach stage 3—the ethics of empathy—during adolescence. However, one needs to be at stage 4—the ethics of systems—to fully meet the demands of modern society. Unfortunately, getting to stage 4 is difficult, and only a minority of Westerners ever do. Kegan suggested that it’s critically important for our society to find ways to support the transition from stage 3 to 4—and I agree.

Stage 3 in this model finds one conceiving of one’s identity relative to communal relationships such as family, cohort, and local community, while stage 4 has one conceiving of oneself relative to rationally-designed systems of laws and processes, i.e. a modern professional organization. Stage 5 is something that both Kegan and Chapman seem to be conjecturing about and actively seeking, rather than living or cultivating in others. Its ideal is for one to be able to hold the rules of various social systems and modes of interpersonal relation as objects separate from the self, rather than something in which one is irretrievably subjectively embedded, and to be able to gracefully transition between these systems as a given situation demands. Chapman’s Meaningness project is all about building a framework for people to transition from a stage 4 personality to a stage 5 personality, even though the stage 5 personality is as yet loosely defined.

On Chapman’s suggestion, I read Kegan’s “The Evolving Self,” and at the time it did in fact help me make sense of people I knew who had gone to prestigious schools and attained advanced degrees, but nonetheless allowed themselves to be heavily influenced by woo and toxic spiritualism. But herein lies the pebble under the mattress of Chapman’s program: I was able to understand and deplore these people as stuck in a “less developed” “stage 3” personality and that they simply hadn’t made the most of the opportunities they had with the “stage 4-scaffolding” institutions they had been associated with. But you see, I had the key now, I was able to understand myself as a “stage 4” personality who wanted to make sense of the world via necessarily flawed rational systems, and I’m going to transcend beyond that any day now!

Better understanding of myself came later; suffice it to say that I’ve gotten more out of the material on resentment and personal accountability in 12-step programs than I have from Chapman and Kegan. The last fucking thing I, or any of these other weirdos, needed was another progressive framework for personal development. The in-built ability to hold oneself up as more advanced or more capable is a fatal flaw for the people Chapman was trying to reach, who already had plenty of excuses to see themselves as superior. Chapman’s biggest vulnerability is that he insists on practicing empathy for people who are at best selectively empathetic, and at worst have abandoned empathy entirely. If he wants to hold onto that as a core spiritual commitment, fine, but it’s been long enough now to reflect that his project so far has basically been a failure. I don’t think he’s lived in the Bay Area for a while now, so I have to imagine his direct interaction with a lot of the big-name “stage 4” personalities he was implicitly criticizing has been limited, but it’s pretty plain to see that there has been no progress towards spiritually reforming the scene that he and they both influence.

*Jean Piaget was really influential on a lot of the early computer-interaction thinkers like Alan Kay and the Macintosh design team, so having that link is another big “in” for savvier Silicon Valley types.

Awkwardly reimplementing formal logic through obtuse fan fiction seems to be a core faith practice of these folks, so I think you’re onto something here

There’s maybe still a concise social history to be written of how all this crap congealed together. I’m particularly interested in the overlap between the AI doomers, the ancap libertarian weirdos who wanted to nail down their economics as capital-S Science™, and even the online poker grinders of the 2000s who aspired to become statistical-thinking robots. I hesitate to say any of this is undocumented, because the reams of posts are still out there, but a Michael Lewis-style pop history of it all would be a hoot. I understand Elizabeth Sandifer has it all well-covered from the ideological angle, and Adam Becker’s new book looks good too, but having something covering it from the forum/feed-poster angle might end up being the epitaph the movement deserves.

I would say that the in-group jargon is more of a retention tactic than an attraction tactic, although it can become that for people who are desperately looking for an ordered view of the world. Certainly I’ve seen it a lot in recovering Scientologists, expressing how that edifice of jargon, colloquialisms, and redefined words shaped their worldview and how they related to other people. In this case here, if you’ve been nodding along for a while and want to continue to be one of the cool guys, how could you not glomarize? Peek coolly out from beneath your fedora and neither confirm nor deny?

I will agree that the ratsphere has softer boundaries and is not particularly competently managed as a cult. As you allude to, too, there isn’t a clear induction ritual or psychological turning point, just a mass of material that you’re supposed to absorb and internalize over a necessarily lengthy stretch of time. Hence the most clearly identifiable cults are splinter groups.

I understand where he probably got the neologism “glomarize” from (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer) but his willingness to beat you in the face with it until you accept it is a big part of what makes his writing style so offputting. And, uh, this level of enthusiasm for specialized jargon continues to fail to overcome the cult allegations.

Two cases that are a bit less clear, but still show some structural similarities: Peter Thiel, Sam Altman.

A bit less clear because these two have a bit more money to throw around, and damn would it be good if they started throwing some in our direction again

The man just can’t get a normal hobby. We tried Labubus, but he just sat there sweating all over everything and ranting about how it’s the inevitable scapegoat for the collapse of Western aesthetic sensibilities

more EA on EA violence

these fools can’t successfully whack each other because they’re too busy whackin’ off

Anybody want to pitch in to get him a basic e-bike and a solar charge setup? He could probably fund his egress the rest of the way by posting a travelogue, that might turn into some choice content around the time he hits El Paso

can we come up with a way to tag posts as “infohazard”

You must be one of those strange people who Paul Graham and Thiel get all excited about, who communicate entirely in memes

other worldbuilding conceits I won’t get into here

My invite-only internal prediction market is offering good odds that this is referring to either math pets or tentacles, and a solid parlay opportunity on it being both combined

You thought a right-and-proper Communist Five-Year Plan couldn’t also be a self-insert fanfic? Hold Yud’s beer

I grew up nearby the hometown of one of the Rick and Morty creators, I think the one that got fired for excessive drunkenness and harassment. And when I found that out, my immediate reaction was, “yup, of course a guy from Manteca would make a cartoon about having an alcoholic grandpa”

Kayfabe.

Although one of the mortal risks of kayfabe has always been that the performers begin to buy too deeply into the performance, cf. Macho Man Randy Savage’s rap album

A lot of this is complaints we’ve heard from Thiel before that are starting to get pretty tired, i.e. everything stagnated during the 1970s and the lack of immediately applicable Big Science since then means that there is no more Progress. But it is important to remember that Thiel and his fellow venture capitalists are in the business of selling money, and the most important price they attach to that money is not interest or equity, but ideological compliance. (I credit Del Johnson on Twitter for laying this out clearly and simply, and I dearly wish he would expand and diversify his platforms.) Thiel is enacting a pro-wrestling-style kayfabe performance to try to rotate the market into which he is selling his money.

It is most interesting that Thiel’s position here is essentially “how do you do, fellow Christians,” and he offers very little if anything to people of a more technical bent. In fact, if this was your first encounter with Thiel, you would be forgiven for thinking he was essentially against technology. The only meaningful message here is that Thiel no longer has any upside in investing in technical enterpreneurs, and instead wants to preserve his wealth and infleunce by throwing in with the remnants of the evangelical movement as the Trump era draws to a close. In a sense, he’s trying to salvage his investment in Trump by pivoting to explicitly Christian rhetoric and downplaying his prior career.

Two notes stand out to convince me that Thiel is using (and perhaps trapped in) the logic of kayfabe:

Oppenheimer lamented, “We need new knowledge like we need a hole in the head.” Nick Bostrom has proposed “preventative policing” and “global compute governance” in his Vulnerable World Hypothesis. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s latest book is If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.

Two out of three of these people have taken money from Thiel or his close associates. Thiel helped to create the condition he is describing here. Vince McMahon may have shot up 'roids and stepped into the ring 30 years ago (something which turned me off to WWF/E programming during its golden age), but he was also ultimately the guy signing everyone’s paychecks and dictating the storylines.

Q: How do you view Silicon Valley’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”?

It represents a kind of corporate utopianism. In the 1990s, there was a broad cultural optimism that technology would solve everything. But by 2025, that optimism has shrunk. Today’s visions are narrower, less inclusive, and far less confident. The grand, utopian projects have given way to incremental gains, overshadowed by fears of collapse.

Thiel is essentially “cutting a promo” on Andreessen’s prior screed, and part of that is conflating it with the relatively unambitious, unaccomplished startup market that continues to exist in its wake. But there is surely no effective acrimony behind the scenes. We will continue to see A16Z money invested right alongside Thiel Capital, Founders’ Fund, etc. We will continue to see smaller A16Z and YCombinator startups attach themselves as limpets to Thiel-funded platform companies. We will continue to see plenty of Silicon Valley cash on deposit with Thiel’s whatever-the-hell-LOTR-reference-it-is-this-week bank. As there is no real enmity, Thiel’s likely focus going forward is as the main salesman getting Midwest and Southern MAGA money into the SV ecosystem, while giving these people a figleaf of deniability that they are still “conservatives” and not funding all the things they have been programmed to hate about California.

Lastly, I find that Thiel reveals what will likely be his fatal flaw:

Q: Is the Antichrist an individual person, or an institution?

Early Christians thought it was Nero. Lutherans and Anglicans pointed to the Pope. But until the modern age, humanity lacked the power to destroy itself. That has changed. Because our era uniquely possesses this destructive capacity, the Antichrist today can only be understood as an individual, not merely an institution.

I cannot take most of Thiel’s 20 years of whining about “no progress since 1971” seriously; it simply ignores all the technological benefits that have primarily accrued at an individual level. Thiel ignores all this because it does not offer an easy place for him to slot himself in as a rentier. But I am willing to consider that he sincerely, durably believes in Rene Girard’s theory of the scapegoat as central social figure. Moreover, he implies here that he still believes in the social media he has funded as a tool to “focus fire” on these supposedly necessary scapegoats. That is very likely part of his sales pitch behind closed doors if you’re, say, a franchisee magnate from Alabama looking to diversify into alternative investments. And while Thiel himself has wisely stayed above the Twitter fray, he’s seen how his colleagues can use it to manipulate the public dialogue.

However, as I argued in another forum earlier this week, I firmly believe that short-form social media as the “public square” is dying. Facebook’s properties are at best plateauing and at worst stagnating, Twitter is a financial disaster (and really always has been), Bluesky is burning runway. People are retreating into more private settings with barriers to entry like Discord servers, and fitfully grasping towards healthier boundaries in online behavior. Partly due to abuses incited by Thiel’s colleagues.

This is why I wonder if Thiel is trapped in the logic of kayfabe. Like the aging wrestler, he needs something to be true that just plain isn’t. And though he remains a feared and reviled figure this decade, each time he steps into the ring from here on out will be on ever weaker footing.

I don’t know why they decided to put an AI slop image right up top in their banner and then repeat it later.

I’ve written off otherwise informative newsletters because of this. It’s, quite literally, filler with less information than the prompt typed in to generate the image. So what else are they bullshitting me about?

You don’t have endless agency over your impact on the world. Actually, you have vanishingly little control here, and not much more over the contents of your inner life.

That whole paragraph is on the money, really. It dovetails with my perspective that EA, even though it’s billed as a higher calling, is just an extension and redirection of consumerism. As it’s a libertarian ideology, it assumes the primacy and pursuit of more satisfactory “customer service” as the only effective model for societal adaptation. And that carries an implicit demand for an engineered control and feedback loop. It seems to me that EAs like to think they’re avoiding top-down social engineering by states, but really…