If civilization meant anything at all, I thought, it was this. It was non-Muslim families crowding into a mosque the day after an act of fascist terrorism. It was a group of Māori men performing a war dance in the name of inclusion and solidarity and collective grieving: the precise symbolic opposite of fascism. It was not the building of bunkers beneath private land that would allow us to survive the catastrophes we faced, but the strengthening of communities that already existed.
* * *
—
In Queenstown, before we set out to find the former sheep station Thiel had bought, we went to look for the house he owned in the town itself. This place, we speculated, must have been purchased as a kind of apocalyptic pied-à-terre: somewhere he could base himself, maybe, while whatever construction he had planned for the sheep station was under way. We found it easily enough, not far from the center of town, and recognized it right away from one of the paintings in The Founder’s Paradox. It was the sort of house a Bond villain might build if for some reason he’d been forced to move to the suburbs: ostentatious in a modest sort of way. The front of the building was one giant window, a glazed eye staring blankly at the town and the lake below, a home befitting a billionaire in the business of surveillance technology.
There was some construction going on in the place. I wandered up the drive and asked the builders if they knew who their client was. “No idea, mate,” they said. They were just doing some renovation on contract. There’d been a fire in the place a while back, apparently. Nothing sinister, just a wiring issue.
The next day, we made our way to Lake Wanaka, where the larger rural property was located. We rented bikes in the town and followed the trail around the southern shore of the lake. It got rockier and more mountainous the farther we pursued it, and by the time we knew for certain we were on Thiel’s property, I was so hot and exhausted that all I could think to do was plunge into the lake to cool off. I asked Anthony whether he thought the water was safe to drink, and he said he was sure of it, given that its purity and its plenty were a major reason a billionaire hedging against the collapse of civilization would want to buy land there in the first place. I swam out farther into what I had come to think of as Thiel’s apocalypse lake, and, submerging my face, I drank so deeply that Anthony joked he could see the water level plunging downward by degrees. In truth, I drank well beyond the point of quenching any literal thirst. In a way that felt absurd and juvenile, and also weirdly and sincerely satisfying, I was drinking apocalypse water, symbolically reclaiming it for the 99 percent. If in that moment I could have drained Lake Wanaka just to fuck up Thiel’s end-of-the-world contingency plan, I might well have done so.
I suggested I might take a rock, a piece of the place to bring home and keep on my desk, but Anthony warned me that to do so would be a transgression of the Māori understanding of the land’s communal sacredness. We scrabbled up the stony flank of a hill and sat for a while looking out over the calm surface of the lake to the distant snowy peaks, and over the green and undulating fields unfurling into the western distance, all of it the legal possession of a man who had designs on owning a country, who believed that freedom was incompatible with democracy.
Later, we made our way to the far side of the property, bordering the road, where we saw the only actual structure on the entire property: a hay barn. It is the opinion of this observer that Thiel himself had no hand in its construction.
“There you have it,” said Anthony. “Eyeball evidence that Thiel is stockpiling hay for the collapse of civilization.” I wish to state categorically that we did not steal so much as a single straw from that barn.
* * *
—
We had made it to the center of the labyrinth, but it was elsewhere in the end that our monster materialized. In early December, a couple of weeks after I’d left the country, Max Harris, the young Kiwi author whose book Simon and Anthony had used as a counterpoint to Thiel’s ideas, was home for Christmas and went along to the gallery to see the exhibition.
Down in the basement, in the central chamber—with its low ceilings, its iron vault door, its Führerbunkerishly oppressive vibe—Harris encountered, staring intently downward into the glass case containing the Founders game, a man in shorts and a blue polo shirt, surrounded by a group of younger men, likewise polo-shirted. The older man was doughier and less healthy-looking than he appeared in photographs, Harris told me, but he had little doubt as to his identity.
Harris, who was aware that Peter Thiel had not been seen in New Zealand since 2011, asked the man whether he was who he thought he was. The man smirked and, without raising his eyes from the board game toward Harris, replied that a lot of people had been asking him just that question. Harris asked the man what he thought of the exhibition, and the man paused a long time before saying that it was “actually a work of phenomenal detail.” He asked Harris if he knew the artist, and Harris said that he did, that he himself was in fact a writer whose work had formed part of the conceptual framework for the show. Of the sheer improbability of these two men—one for whom New Zealand was a means of shoring up his wealth and power in a coming civilizational collapse, one for whom it was home, a source of hope for a more equal and democratic society—just happening to cross paths at an art exhibition loosely structured around the binary opposition of their political views no mention was made, and they went their separate ways.
Thiel left his contact details with the gallery, suggesting that Simon get in touch. He did, and Thiel responded quickly: he’d been intrigued by what he had seen but claimed to be a little disturbed by how dark his cyber-libertarianism appeared when refracted through the lens of The Founder’s Paradox. In any case, the conversation continued, and they made arrangements to meet on Simon’s next trip to the United States.
Simon was eager to keep talking, if only because he was determined to reach a deeper understanding of Thiel’s vision of the future. Anthony, the more straightforwardly political in his antagonism toward Thiel and what he represented, was bewildered by this unexpected turn of events, though strangely thrilled by it, too. For my part, this came as a disorienting rug-pull ending—partly because the monster had materialized, and he was therefore no longer merely a human emblem of the moral vortex at the center of the market, but also an actual human, goofily got up in polo shirt and shorts, sweating in the heat, traipsing along to an art gallery to indulge his human curiosity about what the art world thought of his notoriously weird and extreme politics. A sovereign individual in the same physical environment as us ordinary subject citizens. But it also deepened the mystery of what Thiel had planned for New Zealand, for the future.
There was one mystery that did get solved, though not by me: the admittedly frivolous enigma of what sort of renovations those builders were working on at the apocalyptic pied-à-terre in Queenstown. Nippert, in a recent New Zealand Herald article, had published the architect’s plans for the place. Thiel was making some alterations to the master bedroom. He was putting in a panic room.