I'm convinced him doing the talk on the Antichrist was to misdirect search results in the same way Beyonce made a song called "Bodyguard" that overshadowed a controversy about an affair with her bodyguard
I'm convinced him doing the talk on the Antichrist was to misdirect search results in the same way Beyonce made a song called "Bodyguard" that overshadowed a controversy about an affair with her bodyguard
Or when GitHub launched the Svalbard "artic code vault" to misdirect results about its involvement with ICE.
Yeah, there's always a twinkle of conspiracism that lights up inside me when I see something like that, and I do try to think rationally about it, but I end up coming to the conclusion... that it may not actually be that unlikely!
Naming things is easy: Why not hold a talk about the Antichrist when people have been calling you one? Why not name a single song (or even write one from scratch) to cover up some controversy. Or, of course, why not name a movie "Frozen" when there are rumors about what happened to your founders body.
I feel like the PR benefit, even if maybe intangible or purely hypothetical, is so easy to justify given the low amount of effort involved in it.
Though I do think it's rather gauche to hold a public talk about the Antichrist in Thiels situation, I think that doesn't really dispell the rumors, it just brings him and the topic closer together? No? Maybe he's just trying to tell us something. :)
I'm not saying he's trying to deflect accusations of being the Antichrist
The actual PR issue is that his interest in the Antichrist highlighted his adoration of Carl Schmitt, a Nazi philosopher and jurist who was responsible for enshrining Führerprinzip as German law