Tech Bros Would Rather Risk Chaos Than Bet on Their Fellow Human Beings

Why billionaires shouldn’t get to decide society’s tolerance for risk

Since 2016 I’ve heard a lot of strange arguments in favor of Trumpism, but maybe the most bizarre comes from tech billionaire Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and Palantir.

In a recent interview with Ross Douthat of the New York Times, Thiel argued that society had become stagnant and decadent, and only by taking a lot more risks could we possibly claw ourselves out of the rut we’re in.

We should be doing a lot more. And I can go through all these different verticals. If you look at biotech, something like dementia, Alzheimer’s, we’ve made zero progress in 40 to 50 years….

Culturally, what I imagine it looks like is early modernity, where people, they thought we would cure diseases. They thought we would have radical life extension… there were at least a few Boomers who still believed science would cure all their diseases. No one who’s a Millennial believes that anymore.

Thiel strikes me as one of these folks who rewatches Back to the Future II, and then grouses that we would’ve had flying cars 10 years ago if it weren’t for meddling bureaucrats and their endless spools of red tape.

It’s easy to caricature a person like that as just another cranky Boomer or Gen Xer yelling at the kids to get off his lawn. But is he on to something?

In short, I don’t think so. I don’t think society has become technologically or culturally stagnant, decadent, or irrationally risk averse. And even if to some extent it has, I don’t think Trumpism is the prescription for reversing that trend.

Finally, I think it’s quite telling that Thiel and other tech billionaires would find Trumpism a lesser risk than social democracy. Theirs is a very narrow political project, aimed at removing restraints on the billionaire class, but without any thought for the constraints holding back the mass of humanity.

And yet, isn’t it possible that those constraints — poverty, homelessness, childhood diseases, illiteracy — have done more to hold back the pace of technological innovation, and its widespread adoption, than any regulatory hurdles that folks like Thiel might justifiably complain about?