Author’s Note: This was originally submitted to Amazon.com as a review of the recently released book “The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto” and rejected on the basis of having been determined to have violated community guidelines there. While I attempt to rework it to have it accepted by Amazon, I am posting the original submission here. C’est la vie. Mercury is in retrograde. (It’s a principality.)
The voice of the review is written with the audience of a potential buyer of the book in mind, rather than to you all who are more familiar with my positions on these matters, and it was also written to adhere to Amazon’s 20,000 character limit for reviews. I’ve kept the original text of the review but added some more links here and images for ease of reading and interest.
Addendum: I had thoughts about my thoughts, as I do, and wanted to focus more on the book’s portrayal of Peter Thiel. The nature of what I wanted to write was more suited to posting on X: read my thread here.
Technofuturism and transhumanism are some of my favorite topics, and a whole book dedicated to it caught my interest. I happen to have a much more favorable, optimistic disposition toward the project, believing it is possibly a suitable answer to a wide variety of social ills, but I certainly believe that there are a lot of open questions that deserve serious consideration and engagement. So, I came to the book with an open mind, even maybe a little eager to read the arguments. The book title I thought was enticing, and the cover is absolutely excellent.
I was much less enamored with the book’s subtitle. For one, I don’t necessarily see that describing a future as a “fantasy” is necessarily an indictment in and of itself, but the author immediately postures it as such without delineating further. Isn’t the future always in some sense, fantastical, because it represents a reality that doesn’t yet exist? A six-year-old girl doing cartwheels out in the yard of a ramshackle house in South Dakota may have as a “fantasy future” of one day being an Olympic gymnast performing before the entire world, but is it always categorically impossible for a fantasy to be realized? I wouldn’t think so. We realize fantasies of buying a house, getting married, having a child, seeing Paris, all the time. To me, it is much less a question of whether the future is a fantasy than it is a question of whether the future can be realized.
Second, I dislike the subtitle’s focus on people as opposed to ideas. It’s not that I object to including this particular set of men, and certainly it’s very far from outlandish to sweep in their views and their work in the context of the book, but the issue is that the book doesn’t take the posture of discussing the men in context of the ideas, but rather the ideas in the context of the men. In my view, this may have been a fatal mistake of the book, because it both unnecessarily limited its scope and turned the argument into a backwards posture where the understanding of the men’s biographies needed to inform the author’s judgement of the ideas. This results in a straitjacket for the author that he had no need to put himself in.
This is too narrow a scope in my view to treat the ideas of the book fairly. There is no reference to a single executive officer of TikTok, which does billions of dollars more a year in revenue than Palantir and is arguably the U.S.’s most influential social media platform. TikTok itself, literally headquartered in one of the most authoritarian nations in the world, is only referenced a cursory number of times, and is never given the treatment it merits in a book of this scope.
Facebook and healthy political dialogue is certainly important, but TikTok’s influence has resulted in very real, day-to-day harm on many levels; the “Kia Challenge” comes to mind, which has significantly increased vehicle theft of car models much more frequently purchased by people who are lower-income. It’s easy for us writing and reading reviews on Amazon about technofuturist billionaires to understand this in one abstract sense, but in another sense this is a very real experience for low-income people like single mothers who are then forced to shuffle their small children and themselves between jobs, childcare, doctor’s appointments, vocational classes, the grocery store, and depend on the graces of others and the schedules of public transportation and the weather. The people who suffer from these sorts of mimetic contagions that directly harm their quality of life through outright theft might willingly trade TikTok for all the Palantirs in the world. There are questions that TikTok needs to answer, and the author missed a good opportunity to frame them without even explaining why TikTok escapes the book’s expansive gaze.
Taplin attempts to tackle the technofuturist project very broadly: he sweeps in biographies of four men, Ayn Rand, Paul Volcker, Murray Rothbard, a history of libertarianism, transhumanism, space colonization, the Singularity, Ray Kurzweil, virtual reality, cryptocurrency, QAnon, and then his own perspective and recommendations at the end. This is a lot for a book that is under 400 pages. I credit Taplin for taking so broad a view, and I don’t necessarily object to it, but to do all of this well requires an extremely targeted, surgical approach and careful, precise editing, both of which were still needed in the book. In the alternative, Taplin would need to write considerably longer. Neither of those things having occurred here, the book feels throughout too overly ambitious and the arguments don’t feel fully fleshed out and fairly explored.
Near the opening of the book, as Taplin sets up the framing for the four men, he briefly touches on Jobs. He states that Jobs “became an icon because he truly believed he was inventing tools that would transform people’s lives—and maybe even the world” — contra the subjects of his books. It’s not clear to me why Taplin flatters Jobs, who had his own troubled life and well-known for being brutal and even outright abusive to his employees, but he does seem to cast Jobs’ LSD use in a relatively positive light, and one wonders if Taplin is predisposed to be more sympathetic to Jobs because they may share a similar Boomer counterculture milieu, while the four men who are the subject of the book are three Xers and a Millennial.
Interestingly, Taplin does give a considerable amount of leeway to Elon Musk, calling him “a seminal figure of our age” who has taken “extraordinary risks […] and with his own funds”. Taplin comments: “[…] [I]n space [Elon] broke the monopoly of Lockheed-Martin on rocket production, and for that alone he deserves credit”.
Taplin quotes the journalist Kara Swisher on Mark Zuckerberg, who describes him as an “an intellectual lightweight […] very easily swayed by Andreessen or Peter Thiel”. But Peter has told the story of Yahoo’s $1 billion offer to buy Facebook in 2006, when Mark was just 22 years old. The board was just three people then — Mark, Peter, and Jim Breyer, the latter two of whom were distinguished VCs in their own right. Per Peter, Mark immediately wanted to turn down the offer, when Breyer and Peter clearly felt a sense of responsibility to guide a 22 year old college dropout around significant, life-changing decisions few ever even face. Mark held firm in his conviction, and Peter’s philosophy is always to back founders — even with his own investment in Facebook at stake — so the board voted with Mark to turn down the $1 billion. It’s difficult to glean from this story, or anything else that I’ve seen from Mark in his public life, that he is an “intellectual lightweight” who is “very easily swayed”. For all the criticisms one could make of Mark or Facebook, I do imagine that running a global company with a market cap of over half a trillion dollars that is constantly in the center of one political quagmire or another, if not many at the same time, isn’t for the faint of heart.
Similarly, Taplin quotes a writer who proclaims that Mark “sits at his celestial keyboard” and “can decide day by day, hour by hour, whether people are going to be more angry or less angry, whether publications are going to live or die.” I am unclear on how true this is, and it postures Mark as if he sits on Mount Olympus in a toga, ready to rain down lightning bolts on the Karens in a mom group who have descended into a Bacchanal frenzy over formula feeding. I just have difficulty believing without further evidence that Mark spends his days that way, and it also undermines the argument that he is such an intellectual lightweight.
Marc Andreessen gets off fairly lightly in comparison, appearing here and there as an zealous opportunist (shadow crew forever, I suppose); although, there were attempts to extrapolate on personal incidents from Marc’s childhood that have not been publicly discussed by Marc as influencing his views an adult which felt a little too voyeuristic, like suggesting that Marc’s childhood is the reason he is conceptually open to the Metaverse. Maybe this is all true, I have no way of knowing, but it feels a little too personal without first-hand information and perhaps unfair to Marc.
Then, there is entrepreneur-investor Peter Thiel, who is actually discussed first in the book. Taplin explains that he starts with Peter first because “even though he is not the richest […] he is certainly the most influential.” Peter in Taplin’s view has “such outsized political influence in the Republican Party” that “he can influence legislation and policy.” (And yet, the FDA at least does not seem to look anything like what Peter would prefer.)
I am really not that familiar with Marc, Mark, and Elon, but I’m fairly knowledgeable about Peter Thiel’s public intellectual life and career. I’ve listened to at least some hundreds of hours of public speeches by him; some of his speeches or interviews I’ve listened to more than 20 times.1 Not only have I read everything I can get my hands on that he’s written, but I’ve also read in and around books and philosophers that he recommends or alludes to, like Strauss and Girard, because I wanted to understand him better. I listen to Palantir’s quarterly earnings calls for fun. When it comes to Peter, I am definitely far more informed than the average person.
To build up his argument on Peter, Taplin relies to a considerable degree on Max Chafkin’s 2021 biography, “The Contrarian”, which may present a set of facts about Peter but still ultimately portrays him as this shadowy, nebulous character who may or may not have nihilistic, malevolent intent, and that is just not at all the proper way to understand Peter in my view.
At times, Taplin almost seems to skate right next to some of Peter’s arguments, seemingly without realizing it. At one point, he discusses Peter’s criticism of the FDA (which is accurate) as a “worthless agency” that '“would not be able to invent the polio vaccine today”. Taplin elaborates that Peter “has never retracted this opinion, not even after the Covid-19 vaccine was developed in record time”. But that development exactly proves Peter’s point: Operation Warp Speed was only able to mass-produce the vaccine in record time because it bypassed or accelerated all of the FDA’s normal processes and procedures. I really have to imagine that Peter would prefer more FDA processes like Operation Warp Speed, not fewer. Elsewhere, Taplin makes a side comment that the “downwardly mobile working class has often looked for a scapegoat”. This is my entire theory of Peter’s concern for economic growth, though: he emphasizes it so much because he wants to avoid conditions by which scapegoating processes become more rampant. Peter’s mentor, arguably the biggest influence of his life, René Girard, wrote whole books on the scapegoat mechanism, including one even called “The Scapegoat”, but Girard doesn’t get a single mention in “The End of Reality”. Taplin also comments that Peter “seems immune to human rights concerns in his ceaseless pursuit of his technological aims”, but it seems to me that Peter actually does have at least some concern for human rights and individual liberties, which is the entire reason for the founding of Palantir, which expertly provides the simultaneous protection of civil liberties and the continued Offenheit of the West that has uplifted the marginalized and given space for those whom mobs would crucify. Taplin writes that Peter “contemplates eternal life” while “the life span of many on Earth is getting shorter.” But Peter brings up the shortening life span in America all the time! He always frames it as a categorically terrible thing that is an ominous commentary on our socio-political system and its culture.2
Taplin also mentions a story from Peter’s time at Stanford, when Peter’s friend and later colleague, Keith Rabois (also a gay man), shouted a gay slur outside a dorm room. Taplin only briefly treats this in a posture of curiosity as to whether they were “both closeted and militantly homophobic” at the time, but I don’t think that is the proper way to understand the story. Peter himself actually covers the events of this night in his book “The Diversity Myth” (also never referenced in “The End of Reality”) which provides far more background and context to this story than the vague suggestion made here that Keith was temporarily seized with some sort of repressed-gay-man-Tourette-Syndrome.
Again, Taplin also asks: “Let’s consider where Thiel’s ideas could go in a society without a Bill of Rights. In China today 1.4 billion people are under constant surveillance.” Peter has few kind words for the authoritarian government of the Chinese Communist Party. Palantir refuses to do business in China and again, the goal of Palantir is to minimize, not increase, surveillance while ensuring catastrophic events like terrorist attacks are thwarted.
The entire chapter on cryptocurrency feels like an awkwardly displaced argument. The grift in some parts of crypto is certainly real and certainly it is a totally new technology of money that merits serious consideration, but all of it has to be contextualized against its alternative: the Federal Reserve. Taplin talks about how the “control of Bitcoin is extremely centralized” with only “five or six whales”, but yet the U.S. dollar is controlled by a single entity that meets in cloistered offices and emerges like Punxsutawney Phil to tell the entire world if there will be six more weeks of winter. When Taplin unfavorably attempts to compare crypto to the Beanie Baby bubble — “people with hundreds of Beanie Babies put away for their retirement couldn’t give them away” — my first thought was Robert Mugabe, not Shiba Inu. Crypto is still a tiny fraction of the total currency transactions in our economy, but the strength of the U.S. dollar is incredibly important to say the least, and we take our eye off the ball at our very mortal peril. Conversations about crypto must have some reference to the Federal Reserve, or we will fall victim to distraction as we drive off a cliff.
Then, there is the author’s approach to transhumanism — a fascinating topic to include. Taplin comments: “I don’t think we have to wait for the Singularity to see the moral downside of the transhumanist project —the idea that humans should transcend their current natural state and limitations through the use of technology.” This was honestly the biggest surprise for me in the book: it really adopts some very Christian arguments against transhumanism, but without any direct Christian references. Almost all practicing Christians are skeptical of transhumanism, and a majority of Christians are culturally anti-technological if you ask them. Much of this is tied up in Christian understandings of the Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis and the Mark of the Beast system in the Book of Revelation.
And then, there are people who have disabilities whose quality of life and ability to meaningfully participate in society is greatly improved by technological advances. Breakthroughs are being made in assisting people who are nonverbal communicate, literally giving voice to the voiceless. Yet, it will require man merging more with the machine, but in my view, toward a positive end. This is another area where I would have appreciated some more discussion on why transhumanism more broadly should be opposed or questioned but whether these technological advances for people with disabilities should be supported and if so, on what grounds? Christians generally oppose transhumanist-adjacent advances on the basis of the sanctity of the body, which is why some oppose in-vitro fertilization and a vast majority oppose pornography, surrogacy, and abortion, but Taplin doesn’t offer these grounds or others, or explore these thornier issues.
Toward the end, Taplin does acknowledge that he isn’t necessarily anti-technological per se: “I am not saying that technology has no role to play in our future; rather I argue that it is time to slow down and repair things.” I’ve heard an Orthodox Christian priest make almost the exact same statement. It’s a perfectly acceptable position, but then questions arise such as what are the alternatives (euthanasia for the terminally ill instead of a cure?), what is the moral standard for technological adaptation, and who judges it?
Then, there is the question of the promise of the book’s title: “The End of Reality”. It’s never touched upon in the book, but in my view, “The End of Reality” didn’t start in Silicon Valley, but rather in Athens. It was the ancient Greeks who first began to separate out ritual (and its sacred violence) from daily life and explore it in the context of the theater. For millennia, of course, theater was circumscribed by all sorts of prohibitions that kept it from bleeding over into the rest of reality, and even as late as Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” (which features a play within a play as well as all sorts of Straussian commentary on ritual as discussed in Girard’s “A Theater of Envy” ), sees a reminder to the audience at the end that, if the “shadows have offended”, they should think only that they “have but slumbered here / While these visions did appear. / And this weak and idle theme, no more yielding but a dream”.
Even Taplin’s lead copy suggests that the four men who are the subject of the book are the ones who “pay for the most blinding lights” — the “blinding lights” being, I believe, in his conceit, the topics of the subtitle — but when I conceive of the phrase “blinding lights”, I imagine Athens’ modern-day successor, Hollywood. Hollywood, today’s theater, of course, is far less circumscribed by prohibitions of any kind, and, in my view, has quite a bit to answer for in the question of the destruction of reality.
As Rob Gordon asks in Nick Hornby’s novel “High Fidelity”, “Which came first, the music or the misery?” Taplin’s extensive experience in and around the world of Hollywood and music would make him a natural to offer insights and well-grounded criticisms from a very unique insider’s perspective on how media, with its roots all the way back to the Theater of Dionysus in Athens, has changed and shaped our understanding of what “reality” is. If I listen to the entirety of a mainstream pop artist’s tortured breakup album and I’m sad afterward, am I really sad, or has all that been engineered in some way?
In the months leading up to the most famous mass shooting in the world, two teenagers sat in a basement in Colorado and recorded themselves on a camera contemplating what the movie of their lives leading up to that fateful day would be like, and they imagine the videos that they’re making in that very moment one day being shown. “Directors will be fighting over this story,” one says. (In a strange twist of fate, Taplin himself cites in his biography his work with the director Gus Van Sant, who went on to direct “Elephant”, a film directly inspired by the events of that day, in a manifestation of the nightmarish dreams imagined in that basement.) There’s a lot of interesting questions to ask and explore about the role of the theater from Athens down to Hollywood in mediating our experience of reality, whether the expansiveness of the theater facilitated by the technology of the camera has become a means by which we all become both the actor and the audience in our own lives, down to carefully selecting an accompanying score and chasing the nostalgia of the foreshadowing that hasn’t even happened yet, and what effect those dynamics have on how reality actually unfolds. And, of course, one would be remiss not to address Susan Sontag’s excellent 1977 essay about this phenomenon, “On Photography”. Taplin would be incredibly well-positioned to write that book, and it would be a fascinating read.
My some 15,000 word post on Peter, posted here previously: “Mr. Thiel’s Appeal”. As a note, since the drafting of that post last November in which I mentioned in a footnote that Peter had hardly ever discussed “The Diversity Myth” in great detail, Peter has actually gone on to talk quite a bit about it: in April 2023 at The New Criterion (text; video) and in August with Founders Fund VP Mike Solana (video). Solana went on to discuss the interview some more on the “Moment of Zen” podcast here.
In his January 2020 interview with Eric Metaxas, Peter states: “Life expectancy is not going up anymore. One way to measure progress in medicine would be how fast life expectancy is going up. The last three years, it’s actually been going down. Even someone as pessimistic as me would have never predicted that it would actually go backwards.” (Apologies for no timestamp; this is about ~13 minutes in to the video.)