The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [72]
In 1998, Thiel cofounded the company that would become PayPal, which he sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. Today Thiel runs a multi-billion-dollar hedge fund, Clarium, and a venture capital firm, Founder’s Fund, which invests in software companies throughout Silicon Valley. Thiel has made some legendarily good picks—among them, Facebook, in which he was the first outside investor. (He’s also made some bad ones—Clarium has lost billions in the last few years.) But for Thiel, investing is more than a day job. It’s an avocation. “By starting a new Internet business, an entrepreneur may create a new world,” Thiel says. “The hope of the Internet is that these new worlds will impact and force change on the existing social and political order.”
His comments raise the question of what kind of change Thiel would like to see. While many billionaires are fairly circumspect about their political views, Thiel has been vocal—and it’s safe to say that there are few with views as unusual as Thiel’s. “Peter wants to end the inevitability of death and taxes,” Thiel’s sometime collaborator Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton) told Wired. “I mean, talk about aiming high!”
In an essay posted on the libertarian Cato Institute’s Web site, Thiel describes why he believes that “freedom and democracy are no longer compatible.” “Since 1920,” he writes, “the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” Then he outlines his hopes for the future: space exploration, “sea-steading,” which involves building movable microcountries on the open ocean, and cyberspace. Thiel has poured millions into technologies to sequence genes and prolong life. He’s also focused on preparing for the Singularity, the moment a few decades from now when some futurists believe that humans and machines are likely to meld.
In an interview, he argues that should the Singularity arrive, one would be well advised to be on the side of the computers: “Certainly we would hope that [an artificially intelligent computer] would be friendly to human beings. At the same time, I don’t think you’d want to be known as one of the human beings that is against computers and makes a living being against computers.”
If all this sounds a little fantastical, it doesn’t worry Thiel. He’s focused on the long view. “Technology is at the center of what will determine the course of the 21st century,” he says. “There are aspects of it that are great and aspects that are terrible, and there are some real choices humans have to make about which technologies to foster and which ones we should be more careful about.”
Peter Thiel is entitled to his idiosyncratic views, of course, but they’re worth paying attention to because they increasingly shape the world we all live in. There are only four other people on the Facebook board besides Mark Zuckerberg; Thiel is one of them, and Zuckerberg publicly describes him as a mentor. “He helped shape the way I think about the business,” Zuckerberg said in a 2006 Bloomberg News interview. As Thiel says, we have some big decisions to make about technology. And as for how those decisions get made? “I have little hope,” he writes, “that voting will make things better.”
“What Game Are You Playing?”
Of course, not all engineers and geeks have the views about democracy and freedom that Peter Thiel does—he’s surely an outlier. Craig Newmark, the founder of the