Dialog
Peter Thiel & Co.
There is a new secret society in town. Well actually it isn’t new, it was set up in 2006, twenty years ago, by Peter Thiel (of Palantir and ex co-founder of PayPal) and Auren Hoffman. If it is so secret, how do we know about it? Well, recently some key information about the secret society was leaked. Ironically, the website of the man who set it up was hacked. This is the same man who heads up the pulling together and storing of our health, key defence and business data at Palantir. The hacker, maia arson crimew, a Swiss hacktivist and cybersecurity researcher, found the directory hidden in the website’s publicly accessible source code. The website was wide open to attack. It is unclear whether this front door was left open deliberately as crimew was tipped off by anonymous sources of the website security failure. The leak contained the names, addresses and other personal details of the members and other invitees.
The Society seems to be made up of high profile people who are graded in importance according to the society’s internal assessment criteria. The grades A, B and C are allocated to those attending Dialog’s meetings. ‘A’ being the lowest grade and ‘C’ being the highest. Net worth and earning capacity seem to be markers that increase an attendees level of importance. The members and other invitees are also graded according to their ‘Value-Add’. If their Value-Add is considered to be too low then the invitee can be uninvited. The grades that attendees achieve also dictate what each of them will pay to attend an event, which can be in the tens of thousands of dollars. The more important a member is the less they have to pay. The guest list for secret gatherings includes politicians, entrepreneurs, academics, Silicon Valley founders and actors.
The next gathering is slated to take place in August in an undisclosed location in Dublin. Topics are broad ranging, sometimes surprising and include discussion about World War III, how people’s sex lives are going and even how to create a cult. Other titles include “Disinformation and Deepfakes”, “Contrarian AI Takes”, “Democracy Under Surveillance” and “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness.”. The Society also endeavours to match-make single people amongst their members. Keeping it in the family as it were. A couple of attendees were matched because they were “both in New York and work in government”.