Peter Thiel is a grump, but a special kind of grump. He is a dystopian utopian (if such a person can exist). The investor who wrote the first check for Facebook both believes in the power of technology to transform our lives, and is perennially disappointed by it.
A lengthy profile in the November 28, 2011 edition of the New Yorker (summary here) states: “his main lament is that America—the country that invented the modern assembly line, the skyscraper, the airplane, and the personal computer—has lost its belief in the future.”
Peter Thiel loves telling us how disappointed he is...how we are wasting too many resources on stupid shit rather than focusing on opportunities for meaningful progress.
Clay Shirky takes the contrarian point of view, noting that even lolcats are a sign of progress. The technology that allows us to engage in puerile activities like lolcat-ing, is the same technology that empowers deeply creative acts. If you condemn the former you risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
This is a debate that has already been thoroughly hashed out in the context of biological evolution:
(Stephen) Gould favored the argument that evolution has no inherent drive towards long-term progress. Uncritical commentaries often portray evolution as a ladder of progress, leading towards bigger, faster, and smarter organisms, the assumption being that evolution is somehow driving organisms to get more complex and ultimately more like humankind. Gould argued that evolution's drive was not towards complexity, but towards diversification. Because life is constrained to begin with a simple starting point, any diversity resulting from this left wall will be perceived to move in the direction of higher complexity. But life, Gould argued, can easily adapt towards simplification, as is often the case with parasites.
In the context of technological progress, this argument suggests that the type of progress that Thiel desires necessarily comes about through diversification. The process of evolutionary diversification that brings impactful change, carries with it a perpetually expanding ecosystem of increasingly cynical "waste". The same processes that created human intelligence also created viruses and dung beetles.
If Thiel's prodding leads to the invention of miraculous new technologies, say for example free energy...he will have done a great service to humanity. He will also have created a wellspring of new abundance that many people will learn to squander in shockingly asinine ways. Two sides of the same coin...
[update 2/25/2012 - I should add that there is a relatively new theory that contradicts the perspective offered by Gould quoted above. The constructal law posits that all "flow systems" evolve so as to facilitate flow more efficiently. From this perspective, biological evolution does exhibit a distinct direction - towards increasingly high-flow "designs". However, the contstructal law still points to an experimental evolutionary process with plenty of dead ends and "waste" along the way to those high-efficiency designs.]
