Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue

by Ryan Holiday

Seneca is the author you read when your life’s work has been destroyed, as Denton’s undeniably has.

Machiavelli said that a proper conspiracy moves through three distinct phases: the planning, the doing, and the aftermath. Each of these phases requires different skills—from organization to strategic thinking to recruiting, funding, aiming, secrecy, managing public relations, leadership, foresight, and ultimately, knowing when to stop. Most important, a conspiracy requires patience and fortitude, so much patience, as much as it relies on boldness or courage.

Nick’s instincts were captured and compounded by the economics of his instruments: twenty-something writers with school debt and little income. Overeducated children of Boomers, the children of parents whose idealism became materialism, the writers believed they had something to say because those same parents had told them they were special and important and talented.

Most people, when they find something they don’t like, do that. They call it names. They complain. They make it bigger than it is, make it representative of some larger trend. They think someone should do something, but never them. Not me. It’s a classic collective action problem: we know things are bad, but they only affect each of us a little bit. So who is going to take care of it for us? Plenty of people believe in the theory of so-called great men of history, but who believes I am that great man? There is ego in that, silliness even.

He venerated privacy, in creating space for weirdos and the politically incorrect to do what they do. Because he believed that’s where progress came from.

What he fears is a culture that would deprive him of the freedom to think, to articulate his strange views, and what that might mean in Silicon Valley with its inestimable collection of strange people with equally strange views that have produced some of the greatest technological innovations and accumulations of personal wealth in the history of the world.

These are the essential beginnings of a conspiracy. First, a slight of some kind, which grows into a larger dissatisfaction with the status quo. A sense that things should be different, and will be different, except for the worse, if something doesn’t change. But then comes a second step, a weighing of the stakes. What if I do something about this? What might happen? What might happen if I do nothing? Which is riskier: to act or to ignore?

Girard’s theory of mimetic desire holds that people have no idea what they want, or what they value, so they are drawn to what other people want. They want what other people have. They covet. It’s this, Girard says, that is the source of almost all the conflict in the world.

Peter Thiel’s friend, the mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein, has a category of individual he defines as a “high-agency person.” How do you respond when told something is impossible? Is that the end of the conversation or the start of one? What’s the reaction to being told you can’t—that no one can? One type accepts it, wallows in it even. The other questions it, fights it, rejects it.

Ross Ulbricht,

In a sprint he codes out the rudiments of what would become the Silk Road, a libertarian-inspired bazaar on the deep web where a man in Ohio can buy ecstasy from a dealer in Odessa.

This is the nature of the American legal system, and of conspiracy as well. It’s slow, adversarial. Moral quandaries and personal issues are reduced to brief moments and decided on small points of law.

Machiavelli wrote that fortune—misfortune in fact—aims herself where “dikes and dams have not been made to contain her.” Clausewitz said that battle plans were great but ultimately subject to “friction”—delays, confusion, mistakes, and complications.

There is a story that Herodotus tells in The Histories about a war between Sparta and Tegea. In it, the Spartans were “so confident of reducing the men of Tegea to slavery” that they literally brought chains with them. But they lost, having dreadfully underestimated their enemy, and with poetic justice the prisoners were “forced to wear on their own legs the chains they had brought.”

And here some New York blog was humiliating him by parading his best friend’s betrayal across the world wide web and putting his naked, aging, balding body on display in a sex tape he had never asked to be in. He was a man with little to lose. The kind of person to whom you wouldn’t want to give a singular obsession, and the kind of person whose singular obsession you likely do not want to be.

“The things that I think I’m right about,” Thiel said, “other people are in some sense not even wrong about, because they’re not thinking about them.”

Transparency carries now in the modern mind the weight of moral imperative.

The less the conspirators know about the leader’s plans, the less likely they are to expose them—the less likely they are to undermine or question them.

Yet let us not confuse the need for secrecy with a blanket justification of any type of behavior. The conspirators remained committed and seem to have observed their self-imposed limitation of legal behavior—perhaps out of moral goodness or perhaps simply because they wanted a clean victory. There were plenty of illicit or untoward things they could have done secretly, but to what end? At what cost?

In practice, they are aiming the brunt of their anger at Gawker because they are mad at the online media conglomerate for years of real and imagined abuses in video game journalism, for political correctness, for the rise of female influence in the industry, and for any other slip-up or mistake they can use to vent their rage.

The line attributed to the management guru Peter Drucker is that culture eats strategy. It’s a truism that applies as much to conspiracies as it does to businesses. It doesn’t matter how great your plan is, it doesn’t matter who your people are, if what binds them all together is weak or toxic, so, too, will be the outcome—if you even get that far. But if the ties that bind you together are strong, if you have a sense of purpose and mission, you can withstand great trials.

“Creeds, like streams, gather strength as they narrow, thriving on bigotry,”

he was courageous and unflinchingly honest, as well as, in the words of his own colleagues, “a colossal asshole” and a “broken shitheart.”

Culture eats strategy.

But to apologize they would have had to see themselves from another perspective, an unbiased and human one that was capable of wrongdoing and meanness, and they couldn’t. Instead, their intransigence only serves to bind Hogan and Harder and Thiel closer together.

“It became very clear that the kind of jurors we wanted were overweight women. Most people can’t empathize with a sex tape, but overweight women are sensitive about their bodies and feel like they have been bullied on the internet. Men don’t have that problem. Attractive women don’t have that problem. They haven’t been body shamed,”

He had proven that “nothing you can do about it” is just what people who don’t want to do anything about it like to say to make themselves feel better about their inaction.

There is no question that what Thiel did over those years was brilliant, cunning, and ruthless. It is equally true that Gawker mostly beat itself.