Peter Thiel and his friends feel they no longer belong to our species.
  • agent_nycto@lemmy.world
    29·
    6 个月前

    Thiel has worried that Western civilization had entered a period of long-term stagnation in the 1970s which will continue unless there is a radical shake-up. This stagnation has many dimensions: lower economic growth, fewer world-changing scientific discoveries, and a general cultural malaise.

    Imagine looking back at the proud of time where there was literally the most advances in the wildest technology and thinking it’s stagnation. It was from a time period where people remembered refrigeration as new and exciting to the time where your phone has more computing power than the ones that put people on the moon, and it’s in your freaking pocket, and say that technology stagnated.

    As for the lower economic growth and the “stagnating” culture, that’s squarely on the shoulders of corporations, and therefore, billionaires.

    • Match!!@pawb.socialEnglish
      18·
      6 个月前

      man who hoarded and centralized wealth from software companies concerned about decay of entrepreneurship

    • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
      6·
      6 个月前

      interestingly, i get the sentiment that the economy has stalled since the 1970s from a surprising number of people, and i figured out that it’s probably because blue-collar jobs have stagnated since the 1970s, and that’s what most people feel. That sentiment coming from Thiel, who invests in software, is very weird though.

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
        3·
        6 个月前

        The thing is that while people struggle harder and harder for a smaller chunk of scraps, they still have a lot of quality of life improvements over the standard of living back in the 70s.

        You almost certainly have decent access to passable air conditioning, which was far from a given back then. Even if you can’t afford decent health care, the sporadic health care you can get is still better than the standard of care then. You can have a 60 inch television and more content provided to it than you could imagine… You can instantly engage with people all over the world.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
      2·
      6 个月前

      On the scientific discoveries, we have gotten the low hanging fruit. The twentieth century was remarkable, but the limitations of physics are harsh. A lot of excitement as we went from barely pulling off heavier than air flight to a moon landing in under 50 years. Media naturally imagined space exploration to be just a matter of time. Alas everything is exponentially harder and any further loopholes are supremely elusive.

      Probably the one area with a great deal of unrealized potential would be biology, because the ethical easy forward is slow.

  • wabafee@lemmy.world
    13·
    5 个月前

    “If the billionaires are so determined on quitting humanity, perhaps it would be best to give them what they want and sponsor a mission to Mars so humanity can rid itself of them.”

    +++

  • aesthelete@lemmy.world
    34·
    6 个月前

    Peter Thiel and his friends feel they no longer belong to our species.

    Hard to argue with that actually. I’m going to go with they’re some terrible type of worm, slug, or parasite rather than human beings.

  • Rooskie91@discuss.online
    14·
    6 个月前

    They abandoned humanity the second they decided to exploit their fellow man for profit. Fuck them and fuck anyone ignorant enough to believe that they ever had anything but ill will towards the rest of the world.

    • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
      1·
      6 个月前

      i think it’s not even explicit ill will, just absence of a sense of understanding that humans shouldn’t be killed for profit. some kind of not-recognizing the value in life.

    • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
      1·
      6 个月前

      well yeah, it seems to be a karmic thing. the pattern repeats life after life, age after age, until it splits off the main-stream and becomes its own thing, independent, permanent.

  • Allemaniac@lemmy.world
    16·
    6 个月前

    as a german I am very sorry to the world for Peter Thiel, Trumps bloodline, Hitler and a shit ton more. We are bad exporters as it turns out

  • Snapz@lemmy.world
    13·
    6 个月前

    Steps to become a billionaire:

    1. Abandon humanity
    2. Step-on children’s smiles
    3. Fund a feasibility study on turning poor into fuel
    4. Second study to prove those idiots in the first study wrong
    5. Replace gym equipment in second home with dogs you can kick and hit for exercise. The dogs must be trained service animals in active service to people who need them. You bankrupt those people at great personal expense and then you buy their dogs for pennies.
    6. Lunch
    7. Become billionaire
    8. Take cool pictures with swords. Don’t show nobody.
    9. Abandon humanity
    10. Something kardashian related