What journos never get right about Thiel with all the reverential mysticisation of his antipolitical ideology is that it is really all claptrap: like all the SV giants he made his dime from the State. The libertarian schtick is really post hoc bleating, a coverup, a stated rather than revealed preference. There is functionally little difference between the historical development of the American and Chinese tech sectors: they both have a "real" infrastructure underpinned by the state command economy (less explicit in the US because meted out in the form of public contracts) and a virtual, speculative dynamic of marketised (but not free market) competition and investment. However it is all essentially a controlled or configured economic environment due to path dependencies and capital concentration. In China this is at least explicit, whereas American tech sector "capitalists" won't admit the (well-documented) degree of their imbrication in the state.

Theoryslop shillers like Ganz & Kriss love to pounce on the Girard angle because they can approach him on their own terms: in terms of reviewing books and tiresomely curating taste. Yet you just have to look at the facts to see that there is a major performative contradiction.

This bourgeois motivation is also the source of the flawed theory of neoliberalism popular amongst academic socialists. They so badly want the period to be the work of their true "enemy", the laissez faire ordoliberals, however the reality was a complex form of statecraft

Suggested initial readings on the state origins of SV (just saw an especially jejune reply): - Yasha Levine, Surveillance Valley - Margaret O'Mara, The Code - Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture