Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,33

broadly in happy recognition.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Jacinda,” he said.

“You know her?”

“We know quite a lot of the same people. We met for a drink a couple of times back when she was Labour’s arts spokesperson.”

“Really?”

“Well, yeah,” he laughed, “there’s only so many of us.”

* * *

—

“The endgame for Thiel is essentially The Sovereign Individual,” said Anthony. He was driving the rental car, allowing me to fully devote my resources to the ongoing cultivation of aesthetic rapture (mountains, lakes, so forth). We were on our way to see for ourselves the part of New Zealand, on the shore of Lake Wanaka in the South Island, that he had bought for purposes of post-collapse survival. We talked about the trip as though it were a gesture of protest, but it felt like a kind of perverse pilgrimage. The term psychogeography was cautiously invoked, and with only the lightest of ironic inflections.

“And the bottom line for me,” he said, “is that I don’t want my son to grow up in that future.”

I had met Anthony’s son, a clever and charming and prodigiously chatty seven-year-old, and I didn’t want him to grow up in that future either. This was one of the things we had bonded over, Anthony and I, the fact that we were both fathers of young boys, had similar concerns about their future. It was supposed to be an inevitable part of life that you drifted gradually but perceptibly rightward when you had kids. You got older, you began to think of yourself as a “centrist.” You took up golf, maybe started laying down bottles of wine. But both of us had been radicalized by parenthood. Having children had brought into horribly lurid focus the predatory face of contemporary capitalism.

Symbolically speaking, this face was Thiel’s.

“The thing about Thiel is he’s the monster at the heart of the labyrinth,” said Anthony.

“He’s the white whale,” I suggested, getting into the literary spirit of the enterprise.

We were joking, but also not. Our shared fixation occupied a kind of Melvillean register, yearned toward a mythic scale. For Anthony, it colored his perception of everything, including his immediate environment. He admitted to a strange aesthetic pathology whereby he encountered, in the alpine grandeur of the South Island, not the sublime beauty of his own home country, but rather what he imagined Thiel seeing in the place: Middle-earth. Thiel’s Tolkien fixation was itself a fixation for Anthony: together with the extreme libertarianism of The Sovereign Individual, he was convinced that it lay beneath Thiel’s continued interest in New Zealand. It was his view that, on some level, the place in which he planned to spend his radically extended postapocalyptic life span was not New Zealand at all, but Middle-earth.

The effect of Peter Jackson’s films on the country was strangely all-consuming. The previous evening in Anthony’s kitchen in Auckland, we’d been looking up locations we wanted to hit in the South Island, the routes we’d take between them, when we’d discovered that Google Maps allowed you to search for fictional Middle-earth locations—Isengard, Mordor, Hobbiton, the Dead Marshes, Fangorn Forest, and so on—thereby providing you with the outline of a real place on top of which an entirely fictional region had been mapped. It was, in this sense, an uncanny revisiting of the original sin of the colonial encounter. I thought of Borges’s story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in which the discovery of a hoax encyclopedia from an invented distant world causes the “real” world to give way beneath the pressure of fiction. (It struck me then that the company owned by Curtis Yarvin—the neoreactionary extremist whose software platform Thiel had funded, and whom Simon had told me about sitting beside at dinner in San Francisco earlier that year—was called Tlön, and that its stated aim was “to build a new internet on top of the old internet.” He may have wanted to abolish democracy and create a system in which America had a CEO rather than a president, but at least his literary references were superior to Thiel’s.)

As he drove, Anthony talked of how he’d come to see Thiel as a representative figure of our time. He was feeling his way toward a kind of grand unified system he’d tentatively started referring to as “Thielism.” This had arisen out of Silicon Valley libertarianism, he said, and encompassed a range of convictions about technology and the human future. A belief in monopoly capitalism. The mining and exploitation of personal data. Radical extension of life spans