That NYT interview with Ross Douthat is just a lame attempt by Thiel to rehabilitate his image. From the interview, regarding how we as a society entered into a state of technological stagnation, and his subsequent support of Trump in 2016 as a way to "redirect the Titanic from the iceberg it was heading to, or whatever the metaphor is, to really change course as a society":
"I didn’t have great expectations about what Trump would do in a positive way, but I thought at least, for the first time in 100 years, we had a Republican who was not giving us this syrupy Bush nonsense. It was not the same as progress, but we could at least have a conversation. In retrospect, this was a preposterous fantasy."
Really? You, arguably the most influential and successful inventor of the modern age, couldn't foresee that Trump is just going to leverage his populism to further cement the power structures that brought him into power? How was that ever going to lead to societal level change in a way that would bring about an explosion of science and technological innovation?
Nah, I'd believe that Thiel (correctly) sensed that Trump was a vessel through which he could accumulate much more power and wealth, due to Trump's brazen cronyism and corruption.
So now Thiel needs to somehow distance himself from Musk, Trump, and everyone else to try and recover whatever dignity he can. The only good news I can see is that, if he truly has any sort of crystal ball, he senses the winds starting to shift and the political power of MAGA waning.
I sincerely hope this is his best attempt at dignity, it's so quotable:
Thiel: Man, these things are so hard to score, but I think environmentalism is pretty powerful. I don’t know if it’s absolutely powerful enough to create a one-world totalitarian state, but man, it is ——
Douthat: I think it is not — in its current form.
Thiel: I want to say it’s the only thing people still believe in in Europe. They believe in the green thing more than Islamic Shariah law or more than in the Chinese Communist totalitarian takeover. The future is an idea of a future that looks different from the present. The only three on offer in Europe are green, Shariah and the totalitarian communist state. And the green one is by far the strongest.
[...]
[Tiel:]And when Charles Manson took LSD in the late ’60s and the murders started, what he saw on LSD, what he learned was that you could be like an antihero in a Dostoyevsky book and everything was permitted.
Of course, not everyone became Charles Manson. But in my telling of the history, everyone became as deranged as Charles Manson and the hippies took over ——
Douthat: But Charles Manson did not become the Antichrist and take over the world. We’re ending in the apocalyptic, and you’re ——
Thiel: But my telling of the history of the 1970s is the hippies did win. We landed on the moon in July of 1969, Woodstock started three weeks later and, with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress stopped and the hippies won.
This sounds less to me like MAGA dying as it does the last gasps of the libertarian compromise most conservatives tried to make with the liberals a decade or two ago.
That NYT interview with Ross Douthat is just a lame attempt by Thiel to rehabilitate his image. From the interview, regarding how we as a society entered into a state of technological stagnation, and his subsequent support of Trump in 2016 as a way to "redirect the Titanic from the iceberg it was heading to, or whatever the metaphor is, to really change course as a society":
"I didn’t have great expectations about what Trump would do in a positive way, but I thought at least, for the first time in 100 years, we had a Republican who was not giving us this syrupy Bush nonsense. It was not the same as progress, but we could at least have a conversation. In retrospect, this was a preposterous fantasy."
Really? You, arguably the most influential and successful inventor of the modern age, couldn't foresee that Trump is just going to leverage his populism to further cement the power structures that brought him into power? How was that ever going to lead to societal level change in a way that would bring about an explosion of science and technological innovation?
Nah, I'd believe that Thiel (correctly) sensed that Trump was a vessel through which he could accumulate much more power and wealth, due to Trump's brazen cronyism and corruption.
So now Thiel needs to somehow distance himself from Musk, Trump, and everyone else to try and recover whatever dignity he can. The only good news I can see is that, if he truly has any sort of crystal ball, he senses the winds starting to shift and the political power of MAGA waning.