Against The Theology of Inevitability

A Rebuttal of Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Manifesto

Just FYI, Sinéad (definitely not Alex) writing this! The following is a complete rebuttal of Peter Thiel’s Antichrist manifesto from as-first-principles as you can get.

Yes, it’s long. But I will also use the intellectual skeleton of the Theory of Inevitability in my next article to discuss what seems to be a distant topic, but is not: that of competition, monopolies and capacity in China (sounds exciting, I know).

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Alright. So if you haven’t heard, Peter Thiel is out there giving lectures about the Antichrist.

A billionaire with stakes in the world’s most powerful surveillance company is now touring universities and think tanks to warn that global unity itself is satanic, etc etc. Which would be funny if it weren’t so… weird.

The theology behind his lecture series runs deep. I mean, Thiel isn’t just dabbling in esoteric Christianity for some aesthetic; he’s trying to build a cosmology that justifies his politics (and man, is he really doing this).

Scott Anderson

So what does he actually believe?

Thiel’s theology is built on paradox. On the surface, he’s a venture capitalist, a man who has spent his career funding the technologies that define modern life (PayPal, Palantir, early Facebook). But beneath that résumé lies a conviction that genuine technological progress has stopped. The liberal order, he says, has lost its nerve: the West has traded invention and discovery for regulation and debate.

Thus, he invests not to expand the future but to secure it.

You see, technology, in Thiel’s theology, is nothing more than a containment mechanism. It’s an elaborate firewall against the very future it claims to advance. His ventures are not bets on abundance but on control: systems of surveillance, data, and intelligence designed to preserve order.

And this makes sense if you consider that he imagines the world as an unstable machine: fragile, overheated, perpetually close to collapse. Thus, he believes it must be managed carefully (by a chosen cohort of technocrats of his choosing, of course). Only those disciplined and discreet enough are able to hold this civilizational chaos at bay.

It is a theology of, very importantly, progress without liberation.

Innovation, for Thiel, is not creation but defense: the careful engineering of restraint. Beneath the metaphors and exhausting doctrines of… whatever… lies a moral code drawn directly from biblical scripture.

His “restrainers,” the katechons, are those who delay the apocalypse through vigilance and control. Salvation, in this view, lies not in building a new world but in preventing the current one from disintegrating.

And herein lies the strange brilliance, and the moral rot, of Thiel’s philosophy:

It is doctrine of power as prevention; a managerial faith that measures success not by what it creates, but by what it can avert.

In other words, the goal is not to build new worlds but to insure against collapse, to use technology as a shield rather than a tool. It’s the logic of Palantir, of surveillance and control, recast as stewardship.

And yes, the obvious: it is part mysticism, part risk-management strategy, designed to sanctify and empower those already in command.

But Thiel didn’t invent this cosmology. He simply rebooted the oldest heresy in Western thought: the idea that history moves on its own, and that our duty is not to shape it but to interpret it. His is the ideology of inevitability, dressed in Girardian frameworks with an abundance of venture-capital confidence.

And it is, quite simply, stupid.

Not stupid in the intellectual sense, because Thiel is far too calculating for that, but in the moral sense: a willful blindness that mistakes paralysis for wisdom. It is a theology built to excuse power, to inflate fear, and to give cynicism the dignity of realism. It convinces us, the proletariat, that nothing can be changed, only managed; that agency is arrogance; that the future belongs to those prudent enough to stop believing in one.

This essay is written strongly against that theology, against the faith of inevitability, against the ideals of restraint, and against the peculiar comfort of men who call despair truth.

What follows is perhaps less a rebuttal, and more of a dismantling of the so-called theology that made Thiel’s faith possible.

The Quietest Radicalism in the Room

The most destabilizing idea in modern life isn’t populism, or climate, or even artificial intelligence. And it doesn’t come from Greta Thunberg.

Instead, it’s the calm, managerial voice that says: the future is inevitable.

You hear it everywhere, delivered with the serenity of data:

• You can’t stop AI.

• You can’t stop automation, or globalisation, or the market.

• You can’t stop the runaway train of capitalism.

• You can’t regulate without killing innovation.

Each phrase extends itself as if it were a natural law, as if something was discovered instead of decided.

And together, these phrases make up the catechism of a new secular faith: a belief that treats technology as neutral while human choice is nothing more than interference of a predetermined order.

Consider that what were once political debates are now presented as engineering problems. Likewise, what once required judgment is reframed as optimization. The societal “we” is recast as nothing more than mathematical noise.

That logic is absolutely everywhere, even in the admiration Dan Wang shows for China’s engineering culture. For example, Wang’s argument that the country’s rise stems from its ability to build captures something real: competence, capacity, the dignity of making tangible things again.

Let me be clear here. The problem isn’t the building-of-stuff itself, but rather the theology that grows around it; the assumption that what can be constructed must therefore be correct. We do of course need construction. But what’s at stake is whether building serves design, or something more sinister like building creates our destiny (I’ll elaborate more soon).

It’s an elegant delusion, of course. The powerful find comfort in it because it baptizes consolidation as efficiency. The rest of us are forced to accept it because it flatters our fatigue, telling us that resistance isn’t a noble act, just a wasteful one.

Over time this logic has moved from the boardroom into daily life. We no longer ask whether something should happen, only how quickly we can adapt once it does.

Shoshanna Zuboff’s work here displayed this well:

• Citizens = users;

• Policy = product design;

• Politics = the lag between software updates.

This is the ideology of inevitability, the operating system running beneath the language of progress.

The History of Inevitability

To understand where Thiel’s theology comes from, we have to step back to before Silicon Valley, before capitalism, before even the Enlightenment.

His Antichrist lectures aren’t just some eccentric sideshow; they’re a modern performance of an ancient story about how history moves. And his worldview makes a lot more sense when considered through this context!

In Thiel’s cosmology, “global unity” itself becomes the Antichrist. History is imagined as a self-driving machine, a countdown toward collapse, and the only salvation lies with the restrainers, the few who can manage the chaos through vigilance and control.

Agency is replaced by supervision. Thiel’s perspective is that the fact of inevitability towards the apocalypse requires intervention as a moral duty.

The entire crux of my rebuttal lies here:

There is nothing inevitable about the apocalypse at all.

However, if history is not preordained, then Thiel’s theology collapses. His moral universe depends on fatalism; if you remove inevitability, then the obligation to “restrain” becomes not duty, but delusion.

So first, a bit of historical context. Then back to Thiel.

How did we arrive at believing in inevitability in the first place?

That core belief about the inevitability of outcome has deep roots. The Western conviction that history advances, that it has a direction, wasn’t discovered by Thiel, or by modern technologists. It was invented, centuries ago, as a theology itself.

The Western conviction that history moves (that it advances, improves, changes) was an invention. (And I have to thank Jamie Gull for introducing me to this idea some time ago).

For most of human civilization, time was not a straight line, but rather circular.

Ancient cosmologies did not think about their lives in terms of progress but recurrence: summer yielding to autumn, empires rising and falling in the same worn pattern, human nature repeating its errors across generations. Which makes sense, if you consider that ancient civilizations were agrarian in nature.

Likewise, the Greeks imagined the cosmos as a series of eternal returns; and the Stoics as a divine fire that burns the world down only to rebuild it again. In these systems, to be virtuous meant to achieve balance within the cycle, not to own a victory over it.

That perspective, of course, has disappeared entirely.

Enter the Judeo-Christian era, in which the ancient belief in repetition gave way to a new one: that history moves forward. Time was no longer a cycle of recurrence but a linear narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Through this lens, history became a single continuous story:

• Creation marks the beginning of time itself (when God brought order out of chaos).

• The Fall explains the origin of suffering and moral failure (and thus humanity’s separation from the divine).

• Redemption promises restoration through Christ’s sacrifice (a bridge back toward grace).

• Apocalypse foretells the final reckoning (when history simply “finishes” and something called justice would be fulfilled).

Each stage points toward the next, giving every moment a place within a larger plot. So what had once been an endless cycle of seasons now became a single road with a single direction.

Providence (God’s will made visible in the unfolding of events) was the mechanism that moved the story forward; and redemption was its destination.

And so, the first time in our civilization, the world was not simply turning endlessly. It was heading somewhere.

That change altered everything, simply because it gave moral significance to history itself. Wars and famines could be folded back into the choreography of “god’s will”, their pain justified by purpose. Suffering became meaningful because it was moving us closer to salvation. The cosmos no longer demanded acceptance; it demanded endurance.

By the time the Enlightenment arrived, the deity had become optional. But the motion, this idea of the world as a self-advancing mechanism, remained.

The idea of “progress” replaced Providence in the same way that intellectualism and reason have replaced biblical revelation. Faith migrated from churches into laboratories, parliaments, and capital markets.

Then came the upgrades. The ideas that secularized Providence, replacing God and destiny with “design”.

Let’s call them the Laws of Automatic Order:

1. Determinism which made time mechanical.

In the eighteenth century, Pierre-Simon Laplace described a universe in which every atom followed the same laws of motion. If a mind vast enough could measure all positions and velocities, it could calculate the entire future like an equation. Freedom, in this model, was merely ignorance of the data. The world, stripped of miracle, became a solvable problem.

2. Positivism which made time developmental.

Auguste Comte argued that societies pass through three predictable stages: the theological, the metaphysical, the scientific. His successors—Hegel with his dialectic, Marx with his materialism—rewrote the Christian narrative of fall and redemption as a secular ascent from irrationality toward reason. The divine plan was re-coded into social law. Progress was no longer a hope; it was an algorithm.

3. Mechanical proof, added by the Industrial Revolution.

The factory became a parable of inevitability: inputs became outputs through processes that seemed almost moral in their efficiency. Steam, electricity, capital. The nineteenth century’s great faith was that complexity and coordination themselves were evidence of virtue.

4. Cybernetics which turned metaphysics into mathematics.

Welcome to my field of work: complexity science. So by the mid-twentieth century, Norbert Wiener and his peers conceived of systems that could sense their own errors, feed information back into themselves, and self-correct. The idea of equilibrium without intervention. Claude Shannon’s information theory added a new chapter to this faith: uncertainty could be quantified, disorder could be measured, and communication itself could be engineered into order. Entropy, once a metaphor for decay, became a problem that could be solved by signal and feedback. In this worldview, systems no longer needed God (or even government) to maintain balance; they could regulate themselves.

From there, the idea metastasized.

Economists spoke of the “invisible hand,” sociologists of self-organizing systems, technologists of artificial intelligence. Each field absorbed the same underlying conviction: that complexity tends toward balance, and that interference only slows the process.

Thus, a society’s highest moral calling was to let the system run.

So if you fuse these frameworks together (linear time, deterministic physics, developmental sociology, cybernetic feedback), you will arrive at the master narrative of the modern age: a metaphysics of automation disguised as… common sense.

And so, complexity came to stand for truth: if a system was intricate enough, it was presumed to be intelligent.

Scale became a stand-in for virtue: what operated at vast size or speed was assumed to carry moral authority. The bigger and smoother the mechanism, the less anyone questioned its purpose. Indeed, its very functionality became its proof of rightness!

That assumption built the architecture of our world.

Markets were imagined as self-regulating organisms. Democracies as self-correcting equilibria. Algorithms as neutral arbiters.

The idea of direction hardened into policy:

Progress is inevitable, and those who stand in its path will be run over by it.

In this new cosmology, technology inherited the role of Providence. And we see this clearly:

• Engineers = priests;

• Entrepreneurs = prophets;

• Venture capital = church;

• Growth = grace (proof not of holiness but of alignment with the universe’s flow.)

We stopped asking what our machines were for. They were working, and that was enough.

Hence our inventions no longer need to be justified. They justify us.

This, finally (!), is the world Peter Thiel is preaching to.

His Antichrist theology isn’t an eccentric departure from the modern age. Au contraire, it’s its most feverish expression. The idea that history moves under its own momentum, that intervention is a sacred duty, that the system must be both feared and managed… these are not new.

They are simply the old religion of Providence, rewritten in a contemporary language of capital and AI.

The Five Rhetorical Moves of Inevitability

To understand how the ideology of inevitability sustains itself, and how Thiel’s Antichrist theology draws power from it, we need to look at its language.

There are, broadly, five recurring ways of speaking that keep this worldview alive in public life; linguistic habits that allow complex systems and moral abdication to disguise themselves as some sort of a biological or neutral truth.

Thiel’s Antichrist lectures in fact are more than just theoretical; you have to understand them as a performance of these rhetorics.

And like all religions, the theology of inevitability doesn’t endure because people believe it. It endures because they keep speaking its language!

1. Naturalization: policy becomes physics.
“Automation will eliminate jobs; adaptation is our only option.”
Every contested decision is translated into a law of nature. In a single breath, responsibility dissipates: layoffs are not the result of managerial choices or political design, but of gravity, entropy, or the turning of the seasons. When everything is natural, nothing can be negotiated.

2. Temporal foreclosure: compress debate.
“We can’t pause; China won’t.”
The most effective way to silence dissent is to declare it untimely. Urgency becomes inevitability in the key of geopolitics. The future is always arriving faster than deliberation can catch it, and so even reflection itself is framed as recklessness (!). History becomes a race no one remembers entering.

3. Moral inversion: resistance becomes irresponsibility.
“Regulation kills innovation.”
This is complex. But in the new moral order, caution is cowardice, and prudence a threat to progress. The reformer becomes the skeptic; a saboteur. Even ethics is redefined as throughput: the good is what scales. The more quickly an idea can circulate, the more virtuous it appears.

4. Heroic fatalism: elites as responsible surfers of destiny.
“Builders can steer what you can’t stop.”
Those with the most to gain cast themselves as stewards rather than beneficiaries. They are not monopolists but guardians; instruments of our collective future. Their power is framed as service to a force greater than themselves (the algorithm, the market, the march of innovation.) To question them is to question destiny itself.

5. Technocratic eschatology: salvation by code.
“AI will solve climate, disease, inequality.”
My most “ugh”. Because at the end of every sermon lies the promise of redemption. The machines that displaced us will also deliver us to heaven. The same logic that produced the crisis will, if accelerated, abolish it.

Together, these rhetorical moves form the language of inevitability, the same logic that animates Thiel’s Antichrist theology, where history is imagined as a machine headed toward collapse and power justifies itself as the act of holding the end at bay.

The Seduction of Destiny

For a small number of people, such as the architects of the new order (Thiel, Altman, Musk, the Collisons), inevitability isn’t cynicism but comfort.

It relieves them of uncertainty, of responsibility, of moral debt. If the world is self-propelling, then they are not monopolists but rather stewards of history. If progress is unstoppable, then whatever happens is necessary. In this vein, displacement becomes efficiency while inequality becomes the price of speed.

Through this calculus, risk is moralized upward and externalized downward.

The winners are those positioned to privatize volatility while us, the losers, are told to “adapt.” The theology of inevitability converts every structural asymmetry into proof of natural order. It is, in essence, a story that justifies compounding returns, both financial and moral.

The beneficiaries are easy to name.

• For financiers, inevitability is a hedge; nothing more than moral hazard disguised as realism.

• For technologists, inevitability legitimizes monopoly as benevolence: we aren’t controlling the future; we’re guiding it. (Yeah, right.)

• For politicians, it offers a ready alibi: we didn’t choose this; the system demands it. (There’s a certain truth to this)

What unites these beneficiaries is the power to convert decision into fate. In economic terms, it’s a form of rentier theology: returns and authority without labour or accountability.

To everyone else: automated layoffs, rent spikes by algorithm, platform governance without recourse. Consider that:

• We were promised connection; we got surveillance.

• We were promised agency; we got terms of service.

• We were promised empowerment; we got dashboards.

What looks from above like progress feels from below like administration: an endless sequence of permissions granted or revoked by systems we don’t understand.

Giovanni da Fiesole (1431)

As Max Weber warned, once the capitalist spirit sheds its Protestant ethics, what remains is an “iron cage” of technical necessity: bureaucracy mistaken for destiny.

Philip Mirowski later described the same dynamic in the neoliberal age: markets reimagined as omniscient information processors, where human judgment can only distort truth. Thiel’s theology is the endpoint of that lineage: a capitalism so abstracted from people that it begins to sound like God.

The irony is that this worldview flatters both hubris and helplessness. The elite gain absolution for their power; the rest are promised the peace of surrender (and my god, don’t we all want that peace and quiet right now). It produces two compatible emotional states:

Control and exhilaration at the top, fatalism and exhaustion below.

That is why techno-optimism feels so curiously… spiritual. It offers a secular liturgy for an anxious age in lieu of any other capable gods: bow to the machine, trust its momentum, and your sins (greed, negligence, fear) will be transformed into innovation.

Cracks in the Myth

Ok, so with the background explainer behind us, now for the part where I explain how we know that Thiel is full of shit.

And here it is:

Thiel’s Antichrist theology only makes sense if you believe history moves in straight lines; an illusion the West has cherished for centuries.

But that world never truly existed; it was nothing more than a story we told ourselves to make chaos bearable, to give disorder a plot when we didn’t have science to tell us otherwise.

And what’s changed today is not the structure of history but our ability to see through the fiction.

In fact, the narrative of linear destiny, of progress marching toward redemption or ruin, has broken under the weight of its own evidence.

The contradictions are now everywhere.

Climate refuses to obey the growth equation. The Enlightenment’s favorite bargain, that innovation would redeem expansion, has collapsed on a warming planet. We built an economic ideology of infinite growth on finite matter, and the biosphere is calling bullshit. Can we get more-from-less? Sure. But is that “more” infinite? No.

Artificial intelligence promised omniscience but delivered better cat memes. What was sold as transcendence turned out to be nothing more than recursion: algorithms trained to predict the past more efficiently. In fact, Claude Shannon’s dream of information as order has inverted; the more data we generate, the less we know what to believe! The systems that promised to make us gods have reduced us to their dependents.

Globalization, once advertised as the secular form of providence, is gone. Supply chains buckled, energy routes splintered, while “open” systems are choking on their own interdependence. Complexity was supposed to be self-regulating. Spoiler alert: it instead revealed itself as too brittle.

Even the prophets of inevitability themselves don’t believe their nonsense today (if they ever did…). They buy bunkers, second passports, Senate seats, hedge funds. If the future were automatic to the extent that only they could save us from it, they wouldn’t would need to hedge their own futures and keep selling us this idea, right?

The endless roadshows, abundance manifestos, and apocalyptic lecture circuits are not signals of conviction but symptoms of the opposite.

Philosophically, Thiel’s worldview is not innovative. In fact, it’s regressive.

Unsurprisingly, his Antichrist theology is a medieval metaphysics repackaged in Silicon Valley syntax.

Its logic belongs to Augustine’s City of God, not to a world of networks and nonlinearity. He imagines history as a single, teleological script, divinely or technologically authored, culminating in either salvation or destruction (and only he gets to decide which). It’s a comforting story for people who cannot tolerate contingency.

But contingency is the essence of the modern condition. Complexity theory, evolutionary economics, even thermodynamics have dismantled the fantasy of linear causation. Ilya Prigogine’s non-equilibrium dynamics showed that systems move through disorder toward new forms of order; Hannah Arendt described the human capacity for natality (for beginning anew) as the antidote to fatalism.

Thiel’s theology? Denies both. It is a worldview allergic to emergence and incapable of imagining creation without control (ideally, his).

Economically, his theology is as dated as it is disingenuous.

Thiel still describes capitalism as a moral partnership between builders (those who create) and restrainers (the katechons who protect civilization by controlling change.)

But… the economy he actually inhabits no longer works that way.

In today’s post-global, re-industrializing world, the same financial class that made its fortunes by speculating on volatility is now buying the means of production outright: chip foundries, data centers, launch pads, logistics networks.

Value has migrated back into the physical, but under the same financial logic: control first, creation later.

The goal of course is not to make things, but to own the platforms and resources that everyone else must use (a modern neofeudalism where the new landlords collect rent on infrastructure instead of farmland.)

Thiel, of course, is one of those landlords.

His stakes in Palantir, SpaceX, Anduril, and countless defense and data ventures make him less a “builder” or “restrainer” than a landlord of the digital and military frontier.

He preaches a theology of restraint (salvation through vigilance) while participating fully in the financialized empire of surveillance and control.

His Antichrist paradox therefore collapses under the weight of his own portfolio: if the system he warns against is truly apocalyptic, why is he investing in every mechanism that sustains it?

Benjamin West (1796)

Most of all, Thiel’s Antichrist theology is intellectually lazy.

It borrows the tropes of high philosophy (Girard’s scapegoat, Schmitt’s katechon, Nietzsche’s will to power) without grasping their arguments or contradictions. It drags theological language into economics and mistakes metaphors for method; using imagery where reasoning should be, letting poetic flourish stand in for actual thought.

You can see this slippage everywhere in his worldview:

• He quotes Girard to argue that competition breeds violence, yet funds markets and technologies (Palantir, SpaceX, Anduril) built on competition and militarization.

• He invokes Schmitt’s katechon to praise restraint and the preservation of order, yet bankrolls projects whose explicit aim is disruption.

• He cites Nietzsche’s will to power, but confuses the philosopher’s creative overcoming with his own instinct for hoarding control.

• Even his core claim that “global unity” is the Antichrist collapses under scrutiny: in a world defined by interdependence, disunity is not protection but fragility.

The result is not philosophical theater: a collage of borrowed gravitas, engineered to sound profound to an audience that mistakes name-dropping for knowledge.

The Antichrist, for Thiel, is the symbol of total unification: a world that finally becomes one and therefore ends.

But that is simply the old Cold War nightmare of the “one-world state” reheated for the information age. It confuses coordination with tyranny, and is little more than the theology of a man who fears connection because he cannot imagine equality.

In truth, Thiel’s Antichrist is not a metaphysical figure at all.

It’s a projection; a billionaire’s psychodrama, an elaborate allegory for losing control. What’s slipping isn’t his fortune or his reach, but the cultural world that once made his worldview feel inevitable. He mistakes the waning of that authority for the end of history itself.

And that, finally, is the measure of how philosophically small his apocalypse really is.

The End of Inevitability

History isn’t pre-programmed. It moves through the choices we make through the permissions we grant, to systems we mistake for destiny.

But withdraw those permissions and the machinery slows; redesign them, and the world turns another way.

That, in the end, is the truth Thiel’s theology cannot face.

His Antichrist depends on inevitability: a world so predetermined that supervision becomes salvation.

But history has never been a closed loop. It bends and reconfigures itself around every collective act of will. The story of humanity is not one of restraint, but of reinvention.

The ideology of inevitability was the last great product of industrial modernity; a metaphysics built for assembly lines, for nation-states, for machines that could be predicted because they were simple.

But the world we inhabit now is complex, adaptive, and co-created. It can no longer be governed by a few custodians promising to hold back the end. Its logic is networked, plural, and recursive: a field of relations that demands imagination, not fear.

Economically, this means abandoning the fairy tale of the self-regulating market and returning to the question of design.

Every algorithm, every market, every platform is a political artifact: a map of who counts, who profits, and who decides. As the incredible Dani Rodrik reminds us, “the trilemma of globalization” is not a natural law; it’s a policy architecture. Change the architecture and you change the outcomes.

Philosophically, it means restoring contingency, the fact that things could always be otherwise, as the ground of human freedom.

At its core, self-consciousness is the refusal of inevitability.

It is the mind’s capacity to step outside instinct, to see itself choosing, to recognise that nothing (not desire, not system, not history) is fixed in advance. To surrender to inevitability is therefore to wound consciousness at its root: to let the reflective part of being collapse back into reflex.

Theology calls that fate; psychology calls it repression; politics calls it obedience. But whatever the name, the result is the same: humans reduced to spectators of their own becoming.

Spiritually, of course, it means outgrowing the need for guardians at all.

The katechon is a completely exhausted archetype: the patriarch who mistakes protection for purpose.

What our interconnected age needs is not the abolition of authority, but its redefinition: sovereignty that designs and directs while remaining transparent and accountable; that is exercised through stewardship rather than domination.

Power has to remain, yes, but diffused and accountable: mechanisms of thoughtful direction that are open to revision, systems that learn and adapt in public view.

Hence the task at hand is not to abolish authority, but to replace command with composition, rule with responsibility. Some forms of governance are already beginning to do this: participatory budgeting in cities like Porto Alegre or Paris, where citizens allocate resources directly; citizen assemblies in Ireland and France, where deliberation replaces decree; open-source software communities, where decision-making is distributed and reversible; climate compacts like the Montreal Protocol, which show that coordination across borders need not mean domination.

Each is a small rehearsal of what democratic design could look like, where authority is exercised through iteration and consent rather than fiat.

Importantly, the end of inevitability is not the end of order. It’s just the beginning of accountability.

When we stop pretending that systems run themselves, we can finally ask who they serve. Likewise When we stop treating the future as something that simply happens to us, we regain the right to shape it.

The future is not something to be endured; it’s a language to be learned. And, like any language, its grammar can be rewritten.

We are not the restrainers, à la Thiel. We are the authors.