There is an interview with Peter Thiel in Wired, in which the PayPal co-founder and first Facebook investor makes an interesting case for new outlets of invention, new growth vehicles in a global economy that is in jeopardy for lack of growth. These new fields, according to Thiel, can no longer be Internet reliant because the Internet is tapped out. Thiel’s perspective is notable, especially in the context of the last hundred years of economic evolution. “The Internet may be culturally important,” he says, “just as the automobile was culturally more important in the ’50s than the ’20s, as we got suburbia and built the Interstate Highway System. But the last successful car company started in the US was Jeep in 1941… Obviously we’ve done well online. But how much more progress is there going to be? How many big new Internet companies are there? In the ’90s we had Netscape, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon. In the past eight years there have been only two: Google and Facebook. [Possibly Twitter.] Still, the numbers suggest a maturing industry.”
With this in mind, Thiel has been thinking about the next stage of evolution, a necessary and urgent undertaking in his view. According to Thiel’s perspective, it is imperative that the historically unprecedented growth of the past century continue, not only for economic reasons but also for political stability. Such new growth areas, he believes, are to be found in the science fiction novels of the mid-20th century, and he is currently looking into space programs as an example. (I am reminded of a blurb from William Burroughs, who preceded Thiel by several decades: “The only thing that could unite the planet is a united space program…”) But anyway.
This Wired interview, though very brief, and probably incomplete in capturing Peter Thiel’s philosophy, was nevertheless thought-provoking on many levels. The maturation of the web sector and considerations associated with such maturation have been observed in this column often, most recently here and here. Two even more interesting ideas, however, which Thiel’s comments bring to mind, are that the breathless pace of innovation and expansion must continue, lest we suffer consequences more dire than a stagnating economy, and that we have put ourselves in this predicament. I don’t know if such a perspective is valid or excessive, but I hope it is the latter because acceleration cannot continue into perpetuity, and it would be unhealthy, I think, for most of us to try.
We have, nonetheless, lived through an era from which such notions, such enormous perspectives, ambitions, and the suggestion of mind-numbing consequences, can emerge. (Whether or not venture capitalists should try to “change the world” is actually a subject of debate today.) It is difficult, in contrast, to imagine a discussion about the necessity of space travel and investing to change the world in, say, the 1970s, let alone the 1870s, let alone the 1470s. Stepping back for perspective: It took millennia for Machiavelli, Spinoza, and other Renaissance thinkers to build upon the lessons of ancient predecessors, while it’s been a mere hundred years since we were driving in horse-drawn carriages and did not know about typewriters. And yet, here we are, feeling the urgency of space travel because we have come up with PayPal.
Perhaps there is a more plausible path to the future than one that involves enormous goals for which we may not yet be ready. Perhaps a more sensible path, rather than trying to climb swiftly onward to some ever-higher rung before we have even had a chance to absorb our own progress, may be to perfect that which remains only half-finished. Surely there is tremendous growth potential in that alone. Consider: PayPal is still known to malfunction, Facebook is still burdened by snags, venture capital is still a broken asset class, Toyota cars are unreliable, and the “great American novel” has not yet been written, not even by the visionary Burroughs.
I will throw this out there only as a thought – because the subject is far too complex for any definitive conclusion in a little blog article – but perhaps the thing that will lead us more naturally and more manageably into the future, is more pedestrian than conquering the universe: Maybe the solution lies simply in a job well done. We still have a very long way to go.
