February 25, 2026
Listen to the silence.
Can you hear the eggs scramblin’?
Peter Thiel has gone to cash. One hundred percent liquid. The founder of Palantir, the architect of the modern surveillance state, the seed investor in Facebook and the patron saint of the “based” tech right, has liquidated his entire equity portfolio—including a catastrophic 95% loss on his Ethereum treasury holdings—rather than remain exposed to the market for one more trading day.
When the man who built the infrastructure of digital control decides that Treasury bills are safer than the AI revolution he helped midwife, we are no longer discussing market volatility.
We are witnessing evacuation.
The Enshittification of Financial Markets
The technology sector has reached the terminal stage of what writer Cory Doctorow terms “enshittification.” Just as Facebook degraded its platform to extract value from users and advertisers until both revolted, the financial markets have been degraded by the very actors who depend on them. The result is a post-reality economy where valuation no longer reflects productive capacity, but rather the recursive hype of large language models and synthetic data.
Thiel’s exodus signals the end of the AI bubble’s suspension of disbelief. The $85 billion data center buildout—funded by convertible notes and junk bonds—assumes a customer base that does not exist. The “customers” are unprofitable AI startups, hyperscalers building capacity solely to satisfy Wall Street growth mandates, and a federal government that is about to be paralyzed by the political fallout of the Epstein document scandal. When the administrative state enters cardiac arrest, who pays the invoices for all that GPU capacity?
The Convergence of Crises
The timing is not coincidental. Thiel’s cash position aligns with the public unraveling of the DOJ’s Epstein file release—a disclosure that has somehow omitted the most politically radioactive interview summaries, including those tied to the President. FBI Director Kash Patel’s subsequent revelation that he was surveilled by his own Bureau, and his preemptive declassification of his own records, reads not as transparency but as defensive positioning before the subpoena cycle begins.
We are watching the intersection of two unstoppable forces: the collapse of the AI valuation mirage, and the collapse of political legitimacy. J.D. Vance’s Medicaid freeze in Minnesota—announced alongside Dr. Mehmet Oz, whose name appears in the same flight logs that the DOJ somehow “misplaced”—demonstrates the desperation of an administration that must manufacture fiscal enemies to justify its own solvency. When the capos start confiscating healthcare from blue states while the don’s name is being scrubbed from sex trafficking files, the mafia logic is transparent: loot the treasury before the indictment.
The Epistemological Trap
But the danger is not merely financial.
It is ontological.
The same AI infrastructure that powered the market bubble now powers a regime of synthetic reality. When Patel claims his own victimhood, when Oz denies his documented presence on the Lolita Express, when Vance claims “fraud” as a justification for political punishment—these claims no longer exist in a realm where evidence can adjudicate truth. They exist in a mediated space where deepfakes and “deep denials” cancel each other out, leaving only power and exhaustion.
Thiel understands this better than most. He built the tools of surveillance and narrative control. He recognizes when the machine stops serving the operator and begins consuming him. His flight to cash is an admission that the ledger is no longer legible. When the FBI cannot release documents without “losing” the most important pages, when the President cannot staff his administration without appointing figures who are simultaneously defendants and prosecutors, the “market” ceases to be a pricing mechanism and becomes a confidence game with no players left to fool.
What Comes Next
This is a liquidity singularity: the moment when all synthetic value—crypto, AI equity, debt instruments, political capital—attempts to convert back into reality simultaneously, and reality reveals itself to be insolvent.
The warning is not to buy gold or Bitcoin or farmland in New Zealand. The warning is to fortify your epistemology. When the margin calls begin—and they will begin, likely synchronized with the next revelation from the Epstein files or the next pre-emptive martyrdom from within the administration—the hallucination will fight back. The numbers in your account will become unreliable narrators. The news will become indistinguishable from its synthetic counterfeits. The state will become a racket run by men who know they are one indictment away from prison, and who will burn the administrative state to ash rather than face the courts.
Mental Preparation as Survival
Prepare your mind, not your portfolio. The Enshittifinancial Crisis ends not when the Fed cuts rates or the AI bubble reinflates, but when we collectively stop believing that the DJIA is a vital sign rather than a fever dream. The “market” has become a consensual hallucination maintained by algorithms that Thiel himself helped architect—and he has just voted with his feet that the dream is over.
Trust your senses over the feed. When the red light blinks—when Patel claims persecution while withholding evidence, when Oz lectures on public health while hiding from his own flight logs, when the VIX spikes on news that cannot be verified—stare back. The machine hates the unpredictable. It hates the aware.
The fascists built systems they no longer understand. Thiel’s cash position is the admission that the golem has turned on its creators. The only currency that will survive the contraction is consciousness: the ability to parse the real from the rendered, to love through the noise, to know that when the simulation collapses, what remains is what we can hold in our hands and verify with our own eyes.
The hollow men have stopped trading. Listen to the silence.
Can you hear the eggs scramblin’?
Gnosis Under Fire 