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PayPal and Palantir inventor, Peter Thiel flew to Rome — steps from the Vatican — to tell hand-selected billionaires that climate scientists and AI regulators are literally agents of Satan. No press. NDAs. A Nazi legal theorist as his theological blueprint. We are looking at exactly what he's selling, who's buying it, and how to make sure it's not you.

Systems are built to solve massive problems and can accumulate power in ways that become permanent and hard to unwind.

Here are your Cary Harrison Files Six Steps On How to Not Get Trampled By Tech. You can think of yourself now as a member of this six step program.

Here’s the thing about Peter Thiel’s little Revelation Roadshow in Rome that nobody in the invitation-only palazzo is going to tell you: it only works if you don’t see it coming. The entire architecture of this grift — and let’s call it what it is, it’s a grift wearing a doctoral robe — depends on you being too busy, too exhausted, or too algorithmically marinated to notice that someone just repackaged “don’t regulate my AI” as the Word of God. The moment you can name the trick, the trick stops working. So let’s name every single one of them.

Step One: Learn To Spot When Policy Gets Dressed Up As Prophecy.

This is the foundational con and it’s older than Thiel, older than Schmitt, older than the Vatican itself. Whenever someone tells you that a political position is cosmically ordained — that their preferred tax rate is divinely sanctioned, that their deregulation agenda is literally fighting Satan — your first instinct should be the same instinct you’d have if a stranger at a bus stop told you God personally wanted you to wire him four hundred dollars. That instinct is called skepticism and it’s free, it works on any operating system, and no billionaire can patent it.

Ask yourself one question. Just one. Who benefits materially from this theological position? If the answer is “the guy delivering the theology, to the tune of several billion dollars,” you’ve found your con. Thiel doesn’t want AI regulated. Thiel has enormous financial stakes in AI being unregulated. Thiel has now declared that AI regulation is the work of the Antichrist. This is not a coincidence requiring a theology degree to decode. This is a man putting his thumb on the scale and calling the thumb Jesus.

The Vatican — which has seen some things, let’s be honest, the Vatican has been around for two thousand years and has watched emperors, plagues, Borgia popes, and the Reformation come and go — looked at Peter Thiel doing his little Antichrist lecture series in a Renaissance palazzo around the corner and said, with the weary authority of an institution that has literally excommunicated kings: quote “That man is the dark side of technology.” The two Catholic universities that were originally attached to the event backed away so fast they left brown skid marks on the travertine.

Mr. Thiel is sketching a world where only powerful elites with tools and nerve can steer history. This isn’t random Silicon Valley eccentricity. You’re hearing an echo. A very old, very loaded echo that once marched in jackboots. He isn’t out there goose-stepping through Rome or calling for a Fourth Reich. That’s not the game. The game is subtler, slicker, dressed in Patagonia vests instead of uniforms. It’s about borrowing the structure of thought without the branding. The skeleton without the skull.

And that’s what makes it unsettling in a way that’s less “comic book villain” and more “quiet guy at the table who’s a little too comfortable with extreme ideas.” It’s not loud tyranny. It’s intellectual permission for it. These TECH billionaires love framework. And why wouldn’t they? It’s got everything: conflict as inevitable, protests are irrational, stability is only achieved through identifying and isolating “the problem” – which is code for you.

Step Two: Understand That “Too Complicated For You” Is A Power Move, Not A Fact.

One of the great unspoken hustle techniques of the oligarch class is the deliberate cultivation of complexity — the sense that whatever they’re doing is simply too sophisticated for regular people to evaluate, question, or govern. Thiel does this with technology. He does it with theology. He does it with references to Carl Schmitt, who you haven’t read, in the original German, which you don’t speak, in a palazzo you weren’t invited to.

Here’s what you actually need to know about Carl Schmitt: he was a Nazi. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. You don’t need to read The Concept of the Political to evaluate whether Peter Thiel building his worldview on Nazi legal theory is a good or bad development. You already have that answer. It came with you from the factory.

The complexity is the product. They want you to feel unqualified to have an opinion. Don’t cooperate with that. An unregulated AI industry that consolidates power in the hands of a dozen men isn’t complicated. A billionaire saying regulators are demonic isn’t sophisticated. It’s a man not wanting to be told what to do, dressed in a thousand-dollar philosophical suit.

Step three: Read The Actual Primary Source Before The Algorithm Reads It For You.

Thiel’s entire operation — and this goes for the whole class of oligarchs currently redecorating democracy — runs on mediation. He wants to be the one who tells you what the news means. He wants his funded media properties, his underwritten think tanks, his theological lecture series, sitting between you and reality like a very expensive toll booth. The solution to a toll booth is going around it.

This means reading primary sources. Not “content.” Not a hot take. Not a newsletter written by someone who read a tweet about someone who summarized a paper. The actual bill. The actual study. The actual transcript. It takes longer. It’s worth it. Because when you read the actual thing, you’ll notice — with some regularity — that the hot take version has been quietly rotated forty-five degrees away from what the primary source actually said. That rotation is not accidental. That rotation is the product.

Step Four: Treat Urgency And Apocalypticism As Red Flags, Not Accelerants.

One of the consistent features of authoritarian grifts — and Thiel’s is one, dressed in eschatology and Silicon Valley zip codes — is the manufactured sense that there’s no time. That we’re at a civilizational inflection point. That the Antichrist is literally here and we’ve got to move now, which means there’s no time to deliberate, no time for democratic process, no time for the boring grinding institutional work of self-governance. We’ve got to act. Decisively. And the decisive actor, conveniently, already knows what to do.

Whenever someone is selling you urgency, ask who benefits from you not thinking. Urgency is the enemy of judgment. It’s why car salesmen tell you the deal expires at midnight. It’s why apocalyptic theology has been used to move populations since before the printing press. “The end is near” is the oldest marketing slogan in human history, and it’s never once been true on the schedule advertised.

Take your time. The Antichrist, if he exists, has been running late for two thousand years. You’ve got a few minutes to check the footnotes.

Step five: Build Horizontal Relationships And Local Knowledge.

Here’s the most important and least glamorous piece of this. Thiel’s power — like all oligarchic power — depends on vertical information flows. He broadcasts down. You receive. His platforms, his funded media, his theological lecture series, his think tanks, all of it flows in one direction: from him, to you. What disrupts that is horizontal connection — you, talking to your neighbors, your community, your local institutions, people you can actually look in the eye.

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s structural. A community that talks to itself is much harder to manipulate than a collection of isolated individuals each staring alone at a screen curated by an algorithm Thiel’s class built and owns. Go to the city council meeting. It’s terrible and boring and it’s democracy. Subscribe to your local newspaper if one still exists. Join something. A union, a congregation, a neighborhood association, a book club, anything that requires you to negotiate reality with other humans in real time. The tech oligarchs have spent twenty years systematically replacing those horizontal relationships with vertical, monetized, surveilled substitutes, because horizontal relationships are the one thing their platforms can’t fully replicate and can’t fully control.

They got rid of your town square and replaced it with Twitter and called it progress. It wasn’t progress. It was a land grab.

Step Six: Know That You Are The Product And Act Accordingly.

Every free platform you use, every algorithm that curates your news, every AI assistant that answers your questions — know what it is, who built it, who profits from it, and what it’s optimizing for. It’s probably not optimizing for your epistemic independence. It’s probably optimizing for your engagement, which is a polite word for your addiction. Engaged users are profitable users. Outraged users are very engaged. This is not a conspiracy. It’s a business model. It’s printed in their SEC filings.

Use the tools. They’re useful. Just don’t let the tools use you. There’s a difference between picking up a hammer and becoming the nail.

None of this requires a palazzo. None of it requires an NDA or a theology degree or being invited to a lecture series in Rome. It requires only the oldest and most subversive technology available to any human being with a functioning cerebral cortex: paying attention on purpose, to things that matter, with your own un-outsourced brain. Prove him wrong. It’s free. And it’ll drive him absolutely insane.

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