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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.
if there is a 20 percent chance that Gawker will cost me $1 billion, then it makes perfect sense to spend up to $200 million trying to prevent that from happening.
But if he looked beyond Gawker’s potential cost to him in dollars to the cost to society in total, the math changed. What are the potential risks to his partners and friends? To the global economy? What is the societal cost of the “Gawker jitters”? If the continued effect of Valleywag is that it makes Silicon Valley 1 percent less ambitious, what is that cost? If one suicide is prevented and that person could have been a great founder or could have had one great idea? For every dollar in revenue that Gawker makes, how much economic value is it destroying, for Peter and for other people?
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 needed to say they were sorry. If they had done that, they would’ve survived. Instead, they insisted on the right to be evil,” Thiel explained.
Machiavelli warns conspirators that the most dangerous time is after the deed is done.
Peter had gone after Gawker because he believed that he was a private person and deserved a private life, but the great irony of his victory over Denton was that it had made him a celebrity—one whose every action was now, by definition, news.
Thiel is once again in the catbird seat, having taken the world by surprise one more time. He had proved not only that we live in a country where a person can conspire to put a publication out of business, but that we live in a country where the media would give literally billions of dollars of free publicity to a candidate they despised and were then shocked when the man ended up being elected.
Less than one-third of 1 percent of his net worth—that’s what Peter Thiel spent going after Gawker. A fraction of the interest his fortune would earn in a few days if it were in a bank account
