Secrets -> Optimism -> Acceleration
There are many secrets left to discover in the world, they are just very, very hard to find.
Last month, I read Peter Thiel’s Zero to One for the first time. My biggest takeaway from the book is his conviction that tremendous secrets remain undiscovered. Defined by Thiel as important truths about the world that other people don’t yet realize, secrets contain incredible opportunities to make incredible things.
However - in the recent Atlantic article about Thiwl, it seems these secrets are increasingly hard to find.
The article explores Thiels recent turmoil, his lack of enthusiasm after donating to Trump’s 2016 campaign, and his encroaching doomerism.
Thiel likely saw secrets in Trumps unorthodox campaign, but it turns out he didn’t find a secret here at all, and it left Thiel feeling burnt out from politics as a whole.
His fund, Founders Fund, was created to discover key scientific and technological secrets. But as Thiel said in his interview, “if you’re the something of somewhere, you’re the nothing of nowhere,” and it seems right now Founders Fund is left with many somethings of somewheres. Despite being able to deploy billions of dollars, Thiel has begun to meet the wall of whats possible.
I have been under the impression that there currently exist a powerful stagnation in society - something that collectively inhibits our ability to imagine a *far* greater future. But the more I look around, the more I notice again and again how often I take technological progress for granted. The world, while fucked up in many ways and very slow in others, is improving and getting better.
Progress *is* happening. Rockets are launching, AGI is coming soonTM, but there does seem to be an acceptance among the general crowds that progress is harder, and slower, than initially thought. The perpetual doomerism of a natural or artificial disaster happening “very soon” continues. It seems people love to speculate that WW3 is right around the corner, an uprising will happen next week, or the US dollar will implode next quarter. There is unjustness and unrest in the world, but the important contrarian belief these days might be that the world is, in fact, getting better.
Movements like e/acc are a reaction to doomerism, declaring that a “post-scarcity technological utopia” is coming, and that we should let the LLM’s rip and get to the promised land as soon as possible. But, as Vitalik questions in his recent piece on techno-optimism, what are we accelerating towards? As he writes, direction matters too.
Reading the Atlantic piece on Thiel inspired me. It reminded me how much humans are capable of achieving, and how easy it is to find complacency when things fail and don’t work out. If you look around closely, you see the sign of technological magic everywhere. From eye glasses to nutritional science to operating systems, if you view the world with the right lens you’ll see it improving everyday.
The only path forward is to keep searching for secrets, remain ambitious, be intentional, and work incredibly hard to build a better world. Progress isn’t inherently good, you can progress quickly on bad things, but we have the tools and the opportunity to build an undeniably better and more flourishing future.
