Enhance all the games

Feb 3rd, 2024 | By Ophelia Benson
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Arwa Mahdawi on the malign influence of Peter Thiel:

He, along with a group of other venture capitalists, is currently deploying part of his vast fortune to help bankroll a pro-drugs version of the Olympics called the Enhanced Games. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a sporting competition in which participants are encouraged to take as many performance-enhancing substances as they can get their steroid-enlarged hands on. All in the name of science and innovation, naturally.

Much science! Peak innovaty! Artificial enhancements are good at artificial enhancement. Who knew?!

Honestly? It sounds amazing. I would 100% watch. It’s a real shame Thiel, who currently runs spy tech firm Palantir, doesn’t spend all his resources on reality TV ideas masquerading as science instead of his many other dystopian projects. Thiel, you see, isn’t just a guy who really likes the idea of bionic boxing: he’s a libertarian and ideologue who has an exerted an oversized and pernicious influence on American politics and culture.

For all his obsession with innovation, Thiel has some stone-age views on the world. He doesn’t seem completely sold on the whole women-having-rights thing, for example. In 2009, for example, he published an essay lamenting that women being given the right to vote had dealt a blow to libertarianism. His exact words: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

By “libertarian” of course Thiel means “letting billionaires do whatever they want all the time.”

4 Responses to “Enhance all the games”

#1
Screechy Monkey
February 3, 2024 at 2:35 pm

This reminds me of the SNL “Weekend Update” joke in the 80s about the “All-Drug Olympics”
#2
Arcadia
February 3, 2024 at 5:54 pm

I fear that allowing athletes open access to performance enhancing drugs and accolades for sporting achievement will lead to entirely foreseeable harms and deaths.
#3
Sackbut
February 3, 2024 at 6:09 pm

This reminds me of Goldman’s dilemma.

Goldman’s dilemma, or the Goldman dilemma, is a question that was posed to elite athletes by physician, osteopath and publicist Robert M. Goldman, asking whether they would take a drug that would guarantee them overwhelming success in sport, but cause them to die after five years. In his research, as in previous research by Mirkin, approximately half the athletes responded that they would take the drug, but modern research by James Connor and co-workers has yielded much lower numbers, with athletes having levels of acceptance of the dilemma that were similar to the general population of Australia.
#4
Blood Knight in Sour Armor
February 3, 2024 at 9:57 pm

If it keeps them out of the real Olympics more power to them… I’m with Mahdawi; if he keep his supervillainy in the realm of transhuman sports we’d be much better off.