Standard Game

Peter Thiel, cast as Lord Tybalt in a riff on the board game Descent. Last month in an art gallery in Auckland, New Zealand, I stood in front of Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel’s likeness cast in plastic, as a tiny board game figurine raising a shield and arrow in battle with democracy, portrayed as a snarling dragon. Fair elections, depicted as a fierce lion, was coming at him, too. This little plastic Thiel, who is so often depicted in news coverage as a villain and a foe of democracy, was dressed in a cape and thigh-high boots and looked a little like an extremely buff, green Daniel Craig. All this was the work of New Zealand artist Simon Denny, who rendered Thiel’s techno-libertarian philosophies as a board game in his exhibition, “The Founder’s Paradox.” The narrative of Thiel has always had the glossy sheen of fiction—a wealthy futurist who imagines utopia as government-free, man-made islands in the sea where we all live forever. From this absurd vision of...