The Tale of the Grumpy "Angel" from 'WIRED' VOL. 3
HTTPS://WIRED.JP/BUSINESS/ BUSINESS In an article titled "The Tale of the Grumpy 'Angel' from 'WIRED' VOL. 3," the founder of PayPal and prominent venture capitalist/hedge fund leader, Peter Thiel, challenges the notion that the internet is a significant industry. Is this the lament of a fallen "angel" or a prophetic statement ahead of its time? Thiel's skepticism is captured in an image of a grumpy angel. Image Link Born in East Germany in 1967, Thiel attended multiple elementary schools in seven different countries due to his father's job transfers. He excelled as a chess player in his youth and went on to study 20th-century thought at Stanford University, where he founded the student newspaper Stanford Review, known as a stronghold of libertarianism. He was influenced by the works of Tolkien, Solzhenitsyn, Ayn Rand, and René Girard. Thiel's manifesto, titled "I Wanted a Flying Car, But All I Got Was 140 Characters," begins with a satirical jab at Twitter. Surprisingly, this manifesto is from Founders Fund, a venture capital firm led by the acclaimed investor Peter Thiel. Thiel is one of the co-founders of PayPal. He sold PayPal to eBay in 2002 and became the first external investor in Facebook with a $500,000 investment in 2004. His 7% stake in Facebook is now estimated to be worth $500 million. He also invested $30 million in Palantir Technologies, a company that developed software for tracking terrorists and criminals, which has become indispensable to US government agencies. The estimated value of this company reached $25 billion in 2011. Thiel's foresight is the reason he is called a "genius." While information technology has undoubtedly made Thiel wealthy, it has also been a source of disillusionment for him. In an interview with The New Yorker in 2011, he expressed his dissatisfaction, stating, "The Internet is ultimately a plus, but it's not as big as people say."
Why is Thiel so pessimistic? His argument is that the information society has not led to increased employment, innovation in manufacturing, or productivity improvement. He laments the decline of the concept of "the future" in America, a country that once produced assembly lines, skyscrapers, airplanes, and computers. He names this phenomenon "Tech Slowdown." The collapse of the concept of "the future" can be seen vividly in the decline of science fiction. What happened to the flying cars we dreamed of as children? Thiel's pessimism is deeply influenced by the remnants of the techno-utopia of the 1950s and 1960s.
Some may attribute Thiel's pessimism to the impact of the Lehman Shock, which caused him to lose assets continuously. However, Thiel continues to engage in active investment activities, albeit with a broader focus beyond IT. His targets now include nanotechnology, space exploration, robotics, rejuvenation biotechnology, and a non-profit organization founded by the grandson of economist Milton Friedman, which envisions floating cities at sea.
Ultimately, Thiel concludes that the prescription for the "Tech Slowdown" lies in the emergence of powerful individuals. He believes that a free and independent libertarian, detached from both fundamentalism and social democracy, will save the world. "The fate of the world depends on the efforts of one person to create a device of freedom to protect the safety of capitalism." He also predicts that the next bubble in the American economy will be caused by education. Higher education has become nothing more than an expensive insurance policy and fails to teach anything about entrepreneurship. As a result, Thiel, who has always been anti-elite, launched the Thiel Fellowship in 2010, providing funding for promising startups and researchers. The "grumpy angel," driven by a combination of anti-establishment Sci-Fi sensibilities and radical libertarianism, is not simply pessimistic about the state of the world. He states, "We know that the world is rotten. The situation is much better than thinking it's a good place even though it's rotten." Indeed, that is something to be optimistic about.
