Grifters Gonna Grift

Over and over, Thiel has voiced his discontent with what’s become of the grand dreams of science fiction in the mid-20th century. “We’d have colonies on the moon, you’d have robots, you’d have flying cars, you’d have cities in the ocean, under the ocean,” he said in his Seasteading Institute keynote. “You’d have eco farming. You’d turn the deserts into arable land. There were sort of all these incredible things that people thought would happen in the ’50s and ’60s and they would sort of transform the world.”

None of that came to pass. Even science fiction turned hopeless—nowadays, you get nothing but dystopias. The tech boom brought us the iPhone and Uber and social media, none of them a fundamental improvement to the human condition. He hungered for advances in the world of atoms, not the world of bits…

In Thiel’s Los Angeles office, he has a sculpture that resembles a three-dimensional game board. Ascent: Above the Nation State Board Game Display Prototype is the New Zealander artist Simon Denny’s attempt to map Thiel’s ideological universe. The board features a landscape in the aesthetic of Dungeons & Dragons, thick with monsters and knights and castles. The monsters include an ogre labeled “Monetary Policy.” Near the center is a hero figure, recognizable as Thiel. He tilts against a lion and a dragon, holding a shield and longbow. The lion is labeled “Fair Elections.” The dragon is labeled “Democracy.” The Thiel figure is trying to kill them.

Thiel saw the sculpture at a gallery in Auckland in December 2017. He loved the piece, perceiving it, he told me, as “sympathetic to roughly my side” of the political spectrum. (In fact, the artist intended it as a critique.) At the same show, he bought a portrait of his friend Curtis Yarvin, an explicitly antidemocratic writer who calls for a strong-armed leader to govern the United States as a monarch. Thiel gave the painting to Yarvin as a gift…

One night in 1999, or possibly 2000, Thiel went to a party in Palo Alto with Max Levchin, where they heard a pitch for an organization called the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

Alcor was trying to pioneer a practical method of biostasis, a way to freeze the freshly dead in hope of revivification one day. Don’t picture the reanimation of an old, enfeebled corpse, enthusiasts at the party told Levchin. “The idea, of course, is that long before we know how to revive dead people, we would learn how to repair your cellular membranes and make you young and virile and beautiful and muscular, and then we’ll revive you,” Levchin recalled.

Levchin found the whole thing morbid and couldn’t wait to get out of there. But Thiel signed up as an Alcor client.

Should Thiel happen to die one day, best efforts notwithstanding, his arrangements with Alcor provide that a cryonics team will be standing by. The moment he is declared legally dead, medical technicians will connect him to a machine that will restore respiration and blood flow to his corpse. This step is temporary, meant to protect his brain and slow “the dying process.”

All that will be left for Thiel to do, entombed in this vault, is await the emergence of some future society that has the wherewithal and inclination to revive him. And then make his way in a world in which his skills and education and fabulous wealth may be worth nothing at all.

Thiel knows that cryonics “is still not working that well.” When flesh freezes, he said, neurons and cellular structures get damaged. But he figures cryonics is “better than the alternative”—meaning the regular kind of death that nobody comes back from.

Of course, if he had the choice, Thiel would prefer not to die in the first place. In the 2000s, he became enamored with the work of Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist from England who predicted that science would soon enable someone to live for a thousand years. By the end of that span, future scientists would have devised a way to extend life still further, and so on to immortality.

A charismatic figure with a prodigious beard and a doctorate from Cambridge, de Grey resembled an Orthodox priest in mufti. He preached to Thiel for hours at a time about the science of regeneration. De Grey called his research program SENS, short for “strategies for engineered negligible senescence.”

Thiel gave several million dollars to de Grey’s Methuselah Foundation and the SENS Research Foundation, helping fund a lucrative prize for any scientist who could stretch the life span of mice to unnatural lengths. Four such prizes were awarded, but no human applications have yet emerged…

In the HBO series Silicon Valley, one of the characters (though not the one widely thought to be modeled on Thiel) had a “blood boy” who gave him regular transfusions of youthful serum. I thought Thiel would laugh at that reference, but he didn’t.

“I’ve looked into all these different, I don’t know, somewhat heterodox things,” he said, noting that parabiosis, as the procedure is called, seems to slow aging in mice. He wishes the science were more advanced. No matter how fervent his desire, Thiel’s extraordinary resources still can’t buy him the kind of “super-duper medical treatments” that would let him slip the grasp of death. It is, perhaps, his ultimate disappointment.

“There are all these things I can’t do with my money,” Thiel said.

It’s worth reading the whole article, for a comprehensive biography of our modern Ozymandias. For in one man, encapsulated like a malignant cyst, is the tragedy of extraordinary privilege, enabled by democracy and capitalism, attempting to destroy the whole world because it is larger than his own mean little existence.

Peter Thiel wants to be cryogenically frozen so someday he can wake up and argue with Jean-Luc Picard about space socialism. pic.twitter.com/2YZ9H8zM5w

— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) November 12, 2023