Last month, the British Museum gave shiny-faced tech billionaire Peter Thiel a private viewing of the Bayeux Tapestry.

This was before the exhibition had even opened to the public. Staff reportedly had concerns. Not only about Thiel getting special access, but about Thiel himself.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of ordinary people were queuing online for tickets. You could say Thiel had discovered a more efficient allocation mechanism.

And, irritatingly, I sort of understood.

Whatever we think of Peter Thiel, there are not many billionaires capable of making a private museum visit feel like the opening scene of a theological argument about the end of civilisation.

Fortunately, the British Museum is equipped for that.

Thiel’s politics and theology are unsettlingly right-wing. Most recently, the AfD leadership in Germany quite explicitly regarded Thiel as a sympathetic model or potential ally.

He has long been suspicious of democracy, and more recently he has become preoccupied with the Antichrist—a figure he actually connects quite seriously with technological stagnation, apocalyptic politics and, ultimately, the emergence of a “one-world state”.

And some of the museum’s invigilators might have had a few questions about Palantir, too.

So let’s imagine—for the purposes of playful, perhaps even insightful, conjecture—Peter Thiel getting lost while inside the British Museum.

Perhaps he even starts walking around the Bayeux Tapestry the wrong way.

It is, after all, a 70-metre embroidery about eleventh-century information warfare: a succession crisis, broken oaths, military bits, ominous signs in the heavens, regime change and the successful violent acquisition of England.

And unlike the rest of us mere mortals out here, the tapestry benefits from a pretty carefully funded life-extension strategy.

Whichever way Thiel walked, he must have stopped in front of William the Conqueror.

Because, viewed from a certain angle, William was basically doing venture capital, wasn’t he? His venture just happened to be England.

The astute Norman raised locomotion money from wealthy backers, assembled a fleet, crossed the Channel at remarkable speed for the eleventh century, got rid of the incumbent and installed an entirely new management structure—all without regulatory approval.

Thiel would likely have appreciated that.

There was only one problem. William’s victory had depended on precisely the thing Thiel’s recent Antichrist lectures seemed most suspicious of: centralisation.

Census-taking. Taxation. Redistributing land. Castles. Local surveillance. And, eventually, the Domesday Book—the medieval state’s enormous database of who owned what.

Thiel would have moved on. The tapestry had legitimised the invasion of William the Conqueror.

Next stop: Anglo-Saxon England.

There, the Sutton Hoo helmet, recovered from a seventh-century ship burial.

Thiel’s first existential crisis of the afternoon?

The helmet had an uncomfortable look that parts of the contemporary online Right found almost irresistible: warrior aristocracy, pagan Germanic England, heroic masculinity.

Not a million miles from the black-clad anti-migrant protester chic turning up in their teenage hundreds at weekends to blockade the Port of Dover.

Just then, a museum attendant notices Thiel looking confused.

“I’m looking for England.”

“Which one, sir?”

By now he has wandered into the Assyrian galleries, where huge human-headed winged lions once guarded the palace of Ashurnasirpal II.

“We collect information from every province,” Thiel might have been told. “Population movements.”

A nod from Thiel.

“Potential rebels.”

A slightly longer pause.

“Foreign enemies.”

“Obviously.”

“We integrate all available intelligence and present, um, actionable information directly to the sovereign.”

Thiel stares, in that particular way of his.

“What was the company called?”

“Assyria.”

Then Egypt.

Now this should be promising.

Pharaohs pouring enormous resources into avoiding death. Specialised technologies for preserving the human body. Finally, something familiar.

THIEL: So the objective was radical life extension?

CURATOR: Immortality.

THIEL: Excellent.

CURATOR: Through religion.

THIEL: Less excellent.

He rounds another corner.

Athens.

This is bad.

There are the Parthenon sculptures, which once belonged to the temple of Athena on the Acropolis.

Admittedly, there remains the awkward matter of how they ended up in Bloomsbury. The Museum tends to prefer the word “acquired”. Greece has traditionally favoured a different vocabulary.

But Thiel now has another problem.

He tries not to make eye contact with democracy.

Democracy makes eye contact with him.

Perhaps a fifth-century Athenian escapes from a vase and starts asking questions.

Or is that going too far?

“Are you a king?”

“No.”

“An aristocrat?”

“No.”

“Then the demos rules?”

“It’s complicated.”

The Athenian looks puzzled.

Thiel did, after all, once put $15 million behind JD Vance’s successful campaign for the US Senate—which is an unusually expensive way of participating in the demos.

Interestingly, since Ukraine, Thiel has increasingly viewed Russia as a weakened client or junior partner of China.

The Athenian continues.

“Who chooses your rulers?”

“Technically—“

“So the demos?”

Thiel starts walking faster.

The Athenian follows.

Eventually, Thiel yomps all the way to the Enlightenment, roughly 1680 to 1820.

Explorers. Experiments. Encyclopaedias.

And the slave trade.

Was this, perhaps, Silicon Valley’s real origin myth? Knowledge freeing humanity while at the same time making humanity easier to measure and rule?

By now, Thiel might have begun to appreciate the danger of museums.

Every political idea eventually runs into an inconvenient object.

Perhaps it’s fortunate there isn’t a Falklands gallery.

Thiel had recently moved his family to Argentina, where his political soulmate Javier Milei had been making noises about the islands again.

He checks the museum map.

South Atlantic.

Of course.

He walks faster.

By now, it’s long after closing.

Then Thiel hears footsteps.

A sinister figure approaches across the Great Court.

The figure is carrying a tablet.

It appears to know his name.

“Peter Andreas Thiel?”

It knows exactly where he has been.

It knows how long he has spent in every gallery.

And—because this is how things work today—it has joined together different sources of information to tell where he is likely to go next.

Thiel backs away.

“Who are you?”

The figure glances down at the screen.

“Visitor Experience.”

It has been tracking his museum pass.

The British Museum itself.

Local and planetary. National and universal. Scholarly and, well, imperial.

It’s also wearing extremely natty polished black shoes.

You might say the Museum resembles the conceptual monster haunting those Antichrist lectures again: the whole world gathered together into one giant, digestible system.

Except there is no sovereign.

Instead, the place is bolshy, incomplete and forever contested.

History simply refuses to organise itself into a neat binary choice between—deep breath—decentralised freedom and the Antichrist world-state.

Empires produced cosmopolitanism.

Religion produced science.

Markets produced liberty and domination.

States produced violence and public goods.

Eventually, Thiel finds himself standing beneath the roof of the Great Court.

Morning has arrived.

A cleaner spots him.

“Did you enjoy the museum?”

Thiel looks around cautiously.

“Is this a one-world government?”

“No, sir. It’s a public institution.”

“Where’s the exit?”

She points towards Great Russell Street.