DATALAC & The Future’s Outcome (P1)
In the masterpiece “Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World,” French philosopher Rene Girard explored the core mechanism that governs social interactions: human behavior is largely based on imitation (mimetic theory), and this process leads to the accumulation of conflict (mimesis crisis), which then escalates into fierce “violence.” At this point, the solution to returning to balance is to have a scapegoat. This mechanism has contributed to the formation of institutions, rituals, and culture of human beings in general along the course of history.
Specifically, we mostly do something just because someone else is doing it. This leads to everyone jumping into a competition to grab the same thing: a position in school, a job at a certain company, or a target market. There are two reasons for this: (1) competitors are overly obsessed with each other, causing the important goal to be obscured, and (2) the intensity of competition is so high that we don’t know much about the underlying values. Competition can escalate to a violent level, leading to violence. It is very difficult to completely escape the desire to imitate, but if we understand this mechanism, the way we approach everything will change. This is the philosophical foundation for Peter Thiel’s book “Zero to One,” which discusses how to build the future.
Peter Thiel gives a humorous example at Silicon Valley in his book “Zero to One.” When the payment platform Square innovated a compact and efficient credit card reader, competitors immediately jumped in to imitate and make similar things, only slightly different in shape: triangle or half-moon instead of square. Another dangerous phenomenon that comes with this is the competition for positions in start-ups: small scale, fast movement, flexible roles, and hidden conflicts of interest. For the “scapegoat,” we can imagine the anti-trust battle with Microsoft, where Bill Gates was blamed by the entire software industry (or with Facebook later).
Peter Thiel is a tech billionaire in Silicon Valley, a member of the PayPal Mafia, a group behind a range of tech companies that deeply affect our world today, including PayPal, Tesla, Inc., LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, Affirm, Slide, Kiva, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer. He is the son of Klaus Friedrich Thiel, a chemical engineer from West Germany who worked in the mining industry. Klaus took Peter to South Africa and Southwest Africa (now Namibia) in 1977 when he participated in a uranium mining project there (uranium is a material used in the nuclear industry, and Namibia is one of the countries with the largest reserves of uranium in the world). Elon Musk, Peter Thiel’s important partner later, also had a family background similar to Peter’s. Elon was born in South Africa 6 years earlier (1971) (while Peter Thiel was born in 1967 in Germany). Errol Musk, Elon’s father, is an electromechanical engineer also involved in the mining industry. Specifically, he owned half of an emerald mine near Lake Tanganyika, South Africa. Therefore, both of these figures who later shook the tech industry went through their formative years under the harsh apartheid regime, a severe racial segregation system between the white minority and the black majority population. Peter Thiel was controversial when he argued about the economic effectiveness of the apartheid system despite moral issues (equality). Of course, it is clear that thanks to their involvement in the apartheid machinery, their families were able to bring Peter and Elon to Silicon Valley. When he ventured into the VC world, the initial $1 million line of funding that flowed into Thiel Capital Management in 1996 was called by his own family and close friends. This resource was poured into a series of startups he encountered at Stanford, including Confinity (1998), the predecessor of PayPal. The PayPal Mafia formed from this money, paradoxically, partly due to apartheid.
Although he was very good at math, Peter Thiel chose to pursue philosophy at Stanford. At the famous school, he was strongly influenced by the “individualism” of writer Ayn Rand (author of the famous novel “The Fountainhead”) and philosopher Rene Girard, specifically the work “The Hidden Battle” (as mentioned above). In the work, the philosopher made efforts to trace the philosophical sources from many books, myths, and cultures. This is a different approach from contemporary academia, which is divided into two directions: (1) research that is too specialized, sometimes revolving around ordinary questions or problems, and (2) choosing large topics that are considered impossible to touch. Girard goes against both directions: he promotes debates on big questions from a global perspective. From this, Girard concludes that imitation (or competition) is the origin of human behavior.
Peter Thiel has applied what he learned from Girard in his personal life as well as in venture capital (VC) investing. He noted that “the big problem with competition is that it makes us too focused on the people around us, although competition helps us to be better, it also makes us forget what is truly important, meaningful, and transcendent in perception”. Peter believes that we are living in an age of technological stagnation. The public is too distracted by flashy phone versions, such as the iPhone’s flatness or screen size changing every year, and equates that with technological progress. This is the main message in Peter Thiel’s recent talk on “The End of the Future” at Stanford University’s “Freedom of Academia” conference.
In this 50-minute talk, Peter shared his concerns about the current flow of technology and the reason for the existence of venture capital (VC), under the intellectual influence of Rene Girard. Below is a brief summary:
Peter starts with a contrast between two seemingly unrelated concepts, diversity and university, to illustrate the threats to academic freedom. Next, he recalls the cultural war that took place in the 1980s, through the Stanford Review, the newspaper he founded, believing that he indirectly brought Guatemalan activist Rigoberta Menchu to the Nobel Peace Prize. Stanford is famous for its culture of debate, but the tone of the debate has changed over time, from technical to more humanistic. The quality of the debates is linked to both the development of technology and science, which, according to Peter Thiel, has slowed down. He quoted his famous quote, “after promising things like flying cars, all we get are 140 characters (referring to Twitter, now increased to 280).” Most VC funds today only focus on capital rather than venture. Instead of investing in ambitious projects with the potential to transform many people’s lives, such as flying cars, they bet on safer options (such as investing in Twitter, although Peter also invested in Facebook’s competitor, but he has since divested). The current trend has made technological progress in the public eye mostly revolve around the “bits” world, referring to the computer science field rather than a wide range of industries such as electronics, rockets, green agriculture revolution, ultrasound, or aviation. No matter how advanced the iPhone is (flat or widescreen), humans still cannot reach Mars.
Before the 1960s, science fiction books often portrayed a very positive future of technology, like a civilization that had reached a higher level and brought benefits to humanity. Since then, these works have gradually shifted to dystopian forms, a form of society that is inhumane, decadent, authoritarian, and full of disasters (such as the environment). Why are positive images of the future gradually disappearing? A prime example is George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It seems that the religious belief in the apocalypse has flowed into the technology field. Fear of the dangers of AI/AGI (artificial intelligence/general artificial intelligence) often stems from the Darwinian (evolutionary) or Machiavellian (considering everything without moral glasses but only as a game of chess with established rules) perspectives. Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University specializing in existential risk research, believes that AI is particularly dangerous to humans. The popular concept of superintelligence emphasizes that “we are like children playing with a bomb (AI).” Therefore, Bostrom believes that there must be policies to limit AI development before it reaches the level of superintelligence. According to Peter, any technology, no matter how cool, faces the problem of “dual use”: for good and bad. This is not something we should be afraid of, because it cannot help civilization move forward. Look at the global effort to nonproliferation (Peter’s father works in this field) when this weapon appears. Similarly, the appearance of mRNA will save us from virus weaponization. Humanity will always know how to balance the risks. Peter believes that the level of social stability can only be maintained when science and technology develop.
By Quan Nguyen Ha
