This is just hokum. Collapse of art and literature? Soft totalitarianism of political correctness? The "sordid worlds" of popular entertainment? Thiel sounds likes just another rich guy losing all connection to reality and morphing into a know-it-all railing against popular tastes. What does he know? And all of this "nature red in tooth and claw" shit - "most human beings through the millennia have existed in a naturally brutal, unchanging, and impoverished state" - who is he to spit on thousands of generations of living, breathing people, and say their lives were shit? What gives him that right?

The other thing I find strange is his talk of a still-to-come "energy revolution." Thiel sounds like just another false prophet of growth. I'm pretty sure we already had an energy revolution - fossil fuels. Massive reservoirs of stored energy that we discovered, learnt how to extract, process, and utilise, leading to a bewildering array of techniques and technologies. Does it dissapoint Thiel that the fruits of these achievements have gone to relatively simple things - more homes, cars, appliances, holidays and health care for more people. Does it disappoint him too that population and desire expansion soak up our technological advances? We live in the most resource-intensive society in history - and apparently it's still not enough. We need to grow some more. It hasn't worked before, but next time, it'll be enough, for sure.

So what does Thiel want? Science to break the fundamental rules of physics? Science to break the fundamental principles of living species? Seems like Thiel is pretty uncomfortable with human eistence. He wants that 50s vision - clean, pristine, glowing, perfect, anxiety-free (a vision invented to sell vacuum cleaners to the most anxious generation in history, if I recall correctly.) Thiel is the classic modern: living in the most disease, conflict, death and accident-free society of all time, terrified of the physical realities of human existence, callously dismissive of 99% of all that humans have experienced on this planet, bitterly dismissive of the achievements of modern technology, blithely dismissive of popular tastes, wanting to have his cake (liberal human rights and the free market system) and eat it (techno-transcendence and mass adoption of his political views) too.

My advice to Thiel would be to decide exactly what it is that he wants (more fundamental physics research, better solar/wind/algae, more noble pop culture, authoritarian domination by a cultural elite, space resource extraction, better education, better sci-fi novels), figure out what's at the heart of his chosen problem and (just like a good hacker) go and come up with an innovative solution to transform the problem himself. Either research or advocate or fund or all three. But he should stop trying to preach like this on the failures of our civilization, because he is just talking out of his ass.