Activity

Disruption depends on regarding people as participating in the business cycle who insist that they’re doing no such thing—another aspect of creative destruction that actually retains a lot of the idea’s Marxist DNA. And it depends on an extension of the sense in which the terms “monopoly” or “oligo…

The rhetoric of disruption frequently creates solidity, stability, and uniformity where they didn’t exist. Just as kvetching over political correctness often requires the invention of the restrictions and pieties which it sees itself as engaged in a titanic struggle against, so the disrupter portra…

But the concept of disruption also tells a more covert and fundamental story about continuity and discontinuity, and it concerns capitalism. Are the changes the tech industry brings, or claims to bring, fundamental transformations of how capitalism functions, or are they an extension, perhaps a bit…

Girard’s ideas are another flyby between tech and the academy. The Girardians may lament the marginal status of his theories within the academy; even Thiel may lament it. But secretly, or not so secretly, that marginality is what draws a man like Thiel to Girard. For in Girard you get your own intu…

The Thiel Foundation, set up in 2006, has taken an active role in disseminating Girard’s “mimetic theory”—it is one of the foundation’s three central tasks, along with the Thiel Fellowships and an incubator program for small companies. The Imitatio group within the foundation funds book series, per…