Мое открытое письмо Питерю Тилю после статьи-интервью от Barton Gellman в The Atlantic “Peter Thiel is taking a break from democracy. It’s one of his many disappointments”


Dear Peter,

You are too important for us to lose your, as you say, determinate optimism. If not you, then what should feel we, ordinary people? Your interdisciplinary synthesis & taking into account complexity of society is staggering among techno-optimists.

First, extremely interesting to see what kind of future you want in details, other than your famous negations like “we wanted flying cars but got 140 characters”. Something specific like “humankind should be interplanetary species” of Musk etc. What is your vision for ideal world/ideal society?

By the way, curious to hear your stance regarding longtermism (cross-generational optimization) or e/acc (effective accelerationism) or effective altruism. Or is it something else? Then what?

You did 11 unicorns from 270 Thiel Fellowship recipients, but maybe you should also disrupt how scientific process is done? Especially in the world of atoms, not bits. Business simply distributes some tech across populations with economic & other limitations, but anyway it roots from science, from solved puzzles of physical reality. Any impact on science?

About longevity: even if this computationally irreducible brainteaser will not be solved during our lives (& provide us truly complicated optionality), it anyway will improve how comfortably we age, no? Plus your kids

Also, capitalism (a system which extracts the most motivation from peoples’ souls) is quite young, but maybe you know how to upgrade/reinvent it into something new? Maybe capitalism is outdated?

Or not outdated? Elon Musk gave up on expansion of NASA’s budget of $5 bln/year for launches (not even mentioning unimaginable today level of resources allocation like Moon program $1 trln in 10 years 60 years ago) & decided to do every tech in dual (space, not military) use:
- Starlink for $30 bln/year revenue in 2030 to build Starships for Mars at scale,
- The Boring company (under-earth living due to Mars radiation),
- Hyperloop (failed here on Earth to sustain vacuum but will be fine on Mars with 100x smaller athmosphere pressure),
- Tesla bot for radiation etc.

I see you somewhat kinda tired of democracy. But maybe it is just about the crisis of presidential democracies (discussed by people like Gaspard Koenig)? Or it is just a capture by bureaucracies?

Or maybe it is just about people’s biology, of all 8 bln. as of now? I mean, any ideas how to live in the world under attack of populists? People do indeed have pre-installed referential adaptations, so they always seek annual incremental improvements of their consumption? And we have growing leverage almost in any country & with any per capita GDP.

How should we live with such insatiable people’s expectations? How to live if people usually prefer 1 marshmallow today instead of 2 tomorrow?

And so on.

Many important questions.

Peter, missing your contrarian & sophisticated optimism within our technological civilization.

Your big fan,
Victor Osyka