Тем временем выяснилось, что папик боруна за белые консервативные традиционные христианские ценности жи ди ванса гомосексуалист и давний партнер Моссада и ЦРУ Питер Тиль уважает отечественное фанфикостроение:
The second data point is Thiel’s obsession with The Last Ringbearer: “In The Last Ringbearer Sauron is the hero and the elves, I think the elves are like fascists, like anti-tech fascists or something.”
The message, always, was simple: College and traditional careerism was pointless at best, and, at worst, it was an intellectually bankrupt exercise in debt accumulation. Your ambition—to change the world, and, as a consequence, to be rich—was good. It was Objectivism, in other words, and no less appealing to young strivers than it had been when Thiel had read Ayn Rand as a young man.
Across the United States and beyond, teenagers schemed to get close to Thiel. They responded to and amplified the blog posts that his surrogates published. They stalked his inner circle on Twitter and adopted his own language as their own. A young army of Thiel acolytes—most of whom simply wanted to start companies and get rich, ideally with Thiel’s money started talking like techno-utopians or contrarians.
They had their own language—many identified as “rationalists”—and their own literary canon. It included Tolkien and Rand, of course, along with arcane texts that venerated technology, among them Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a 600,000-word fan fiction epic that adapted J. K. Rowling’s wizard story by imagining that Harry incorporates the scientific method into his magic. Another favorite: The Last Ringbearer, which was part of the ever-growing corpus of Lord of the Rings fan fiction, and which seemed apt for the founder of Palantir. In the book, which was first published in Russia in 1999 and then translated into English on the web in 2010, Tolkien’s good guys—Gandalf and the elves—are warmongers who tryto destroy Mordor because its peaceful progress threatens their feudal rule. “Gandalf’s the crazy person who wants to start a war,” Thiel told Details. “Mordor is this technological civilization based on reason and science. Outside of Mordor, it’s all sort of mystical and environmental and nothing works.