Several years back, around the time my first book was published, I received an invitation via my Italian publisher to speak at a large cultural festival in Rimini. Not knowing much about the Italian literary or cultural world, I had little sense of what the festival was – only that it was large and would be a “very interesting” event. I tended then to take whatever opportunities came along to promote the book, and it seemed hard to object to a couple of days on the Adriatic coast, in Fellini’s hometown. I said yes.
I was visiting Italy fairly often at the time, and whenever the Rimini event came up with my Italian publishers it was described in slightly veiled terms as something very Italian, Catholic, conservative and something I, with my interest in power, would find “very interesting”. Aware I knew little about Italian politics, and slightly uneasy I might be drifting into some kind of quasi-fascist milieu, I did some cursory googling. I found that, though organised by a conservative Catholic organisation, the festival seemed like a fairly broad church, intellectually and politically. Over the years, everyone from the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas to Mother Teresa of Calcutta had taken part. Why, even Noam Chomsky himself had spoken there a few years previously. How bad could it be, I thought, in my pre-Epstein-revelations innocence, if Noam Chomsky had chosen to associate himself with it? And so I went and gave my little talk about technology and the future, met some interesting people and learned things I didn’t know about Italy, and came home.
The day after I returned, I mentioned the trip to an Italian acquaintance, who reacted with genuine alarm. It was strange, he said, that I had aligned myself with such ideological company. The people behind it were hardly less objectionable than Opus Dei, and in their way just as enmeshed in conservative politics. It turned out that he was not alone among the Italians I knew in feeling this way about the event I’d attended. I didn’t regret going, but I did wonder whether if I’d known a little more about the organisation and its political affiliations, I’d have thought twice about accepting the invitation.
I found myself thinking about this again last weekend, when the news broke that a group called Dialog, cofounded by the controversial tech billionaire Peter Thiel, is holding a secretive invitation-only retreat at Powerscourt Estate in Co Wicklow. Wired magazine published a partial list of invitees after the information was leaked by a hacker. The list included people ranging from Hollywood stars Josh Brolin and Joseph Gordon-Levitt to liberal darling New York Times columnist Ezra Klein to White House staff secretary Will Scharf to Elon Musk.
READ MORE
The list also included six Irish members, only one of whom has been publicly named: Independent Senator Lynn Ruane. Like many of the public figures named in the leak, Ruane said that she regrets not learning more about the organisation before accepting the invitation. “In agreeing to attend,” she told RTÉ, “I did not maintain my usual standards of due diligence. I take full responsibility for this error of judgment. It has reinforced the importance of thorough scrutiny.” She now plans not to attend. Brolin, who starred in No Country for Old Men and the Dune films, similarly pleaded ignorance, telling the Hollywood Reporter via a representative that he would very much “like to know what the f**k he got himself into”.
For the reasons hinted at above, I find these pleas in mitigation more or less plausible – or at least I’m less inclined to judge them harshly. When people are invited to these events, Thiel is not mentioned anywhere in the invitation. Granted, a quick Google search would likely have revealed his involvement in the group’s early days – never a good sign for anything – but even so, I don’t think we should necessarily be sharpening the guillotine for this or that notable person because they decided, for whatever reason, to attend such a thing.
The involvement of Thiel has been the main point of interest and contention in the media, both here and internationally. It’s hard to imagine anyone caring much about it if he was not in some way connected to the organisation. An early investor in Facebook, and a cofounder of PayPal and of the data surveillance firm Palantir, Thiel has long been one of the most powerful and influential of Silicon Valley venture capitalists. He is also known for his anti-democratic views and, increasingly, for his role in the rightward drift of American politics and culture in recent years. He was the first Silicon Valley figure of any prominence to openly support Trump, and was instrumental in JD Vance – his former employee at the venture capital firm Mithril Capital – embarking on a career in politics.
Thiel is also infamous for his apocalyptic beliefs. During the late 2010s, he was the most prominent of a group of Silicon Valley billionaires believed to be making preparations for civilisational collapse. Last year, he delivered a series of apocalypse-themed private lectures, whose content was eventually leaked to the media, in which he speculated on the possibility that Greta Thunberg might be the literal Antichrist.
Dialog, which Thiel cofounded two decades ago with fellow venture capitalist Auren Hoffman, should be seen as part of a broad project to reshape politics in the West. If the aim of Thiel and his cohort is to kill off for good an ailing global liberalism and replace it with something more openly hyper-capitalist and elitist (and you’d have to say he and his fellow travellers have been doing pretty well there in recent years), Dialog was likely conceived as a kind of Davos for a post-democratic world order.
Dialog is, in many ways, exactly the sort of thing that gives rise to conspiracy theories. There’s the secretiveness around attendees and its off-the-record private conversations, certainly, but also the revelation that, according to the Wired report, it runs a matchmaking service for its members, pairing them for networking and dating. It seems, in this sense, like a Silicon Valley version of something like the Bilderberg Group, whose members have for decades met in secret to discuss furthering the interests of free-market capitalism, and which has been a focus of conspiracy theories on both the left and the right.
But the reason conspiracy theories are such a frustrating phenomenon is that they distract from the extent to which we already know how power operates – that there is nothing worth hiding that we don’t already know. Thiel has spent years airing his anti-democratic views, while using his immense wealth to cultivate networks of power and influence. The significance of Dialog is not that it reveals some hidden plot, but that it represents a process taking place largely in the open: the convergence of money, technology and political power.
