#Wrought flesh steam series
Part two of this series will comment on Thiel’s second and third claims, and offer some observations on the changing place of science in American culture. My main criticism of Thiel’s view is that he is not pessimistic enough in his account of scientific achievement. This post is about technology, innovation, and scientific advance. Here I focus on the first of these claims. Finally, he argues that the central reason we do not recognize all of this is because progress (similar to words like “freedom” or “equality”) is a notion so fundamental to our culture that we cannot admit its erosion. His second claim, which is explored in greater depth in the rest of Harrington’s interview, is that this stagnation is the root cause of most American social strife. Thiel’s first claim is that scientific and technological progress has stagnated since at least the ‘70s. Mary Harrington, “ Peter Thiel on the Dangers of Progress,” Unherd (25 July 2022). As he puts it, “the iPhone that distracts us from our environment also distracts us from the ways our environment is unchanging and static.” And in this culture, economy and politics of chronic self-deception, as Thiel sees it, we tell ourselves that we’re advancing because “grandma gets an iPhone with a smooth surface,” but meanwhile she “gets to eat cat food because food prices have gone up.” 1 In his view, much of what passes for “progress” is in truth more like “distraction”. And against this backdrop of cross-party denial, institutions and the wider culture are increasingly shaped by real-terms stagnation.
He’s been making the case for real-terms tech stagnation for 15 years now, he tells me, against a mainstream Left and Right that doesn’t want to know: “it was always striking how much it went against the stated ideology of the regime.” Perpetuating the fantasy of progress, against a backdrop of its actual stagnation, is at the heart of delusions on both Left and Right, he argues: “the Silicon Valley liberals don’t like it, because they think they’re driving this great engine of progress”, while social conservatives “have conceded the ground to the liberals, because they believe the Left-wing propaganda about how much science and technology are progressing”. ” Over the same period, he tells me, “there’s been limited progress in the world of atoms.” And it’s been more interior, atomising and inward-focused. “We’ve had continued progress in the world of computers, bits, internet, mobile internet, but it’s a narrow zone of progress. In Thiel’s view, this has been the case since the mid-20th century, except in digital technologies. Thiel… offers a strikingly different framing : we’re consuming ourselves not because the fixation on progress is inevitably self-destructive beyond a certain threshold, but because material progress has objectively stalled while we remain collectively in denial about this fact. Here is Thiel’s description of the problem, as written up by Harrington: Both also see technological and material stagnation as the root source of myriad ills tearing at America’s social fabric. The Thielites and the Progress Studies folk take this shared premise to different end points, but both deem scientific inertia as the defining feature of the 21 st century. In many ways it is the starting point for the entire “Progress Studies” movement. Much of her article centers on Thiel’s conviction that meaningful technological progress stopped a good half century ago.
Last week Mary Harrington published a long interview with Peter Thiel in the online magazine Unherd.
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