{"id":3025,"date":"2025-08-07T14:43:27","date_gmt":"2025-08-07T12:43:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lab.the-bunker.it\/rubrica\/humanity-according-to-peter-thiel-and-why-we-should-be-worried\/"},"modified":"2025-11-26T14:35:28","modified_gmt":"2025-11-26T13:35:28","slug":"humanity-according-to-peter-thiel-and-why-we-should-be-worried","status":"publish","type":"rubrica","link":"https:\/\/lab.the-bunker.it\/en\/rubrica\/humanity-according-to-peter-thiel-and-why-we-should-be-worried\/","title":{"rendered":"Humanity According to Peter Thiel (and Why We Should Be Worried)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Do you want humanity to survive? It’s a question that should prompt an immediate, clear, and confident yes. And yet, Peter Thiel \u0097 billionaire investor, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, Trump backer, and financier of Silicon Valley\u0092s boldest startups \u0097 hesitates. He falters. He stalls. He pauses for several seconds, as if weighing the pros and cons. Only when pressed does he finally answer, half-heartedly: yes.<\/em> But that yes isn’t enough. Because someone like Thiel is<\/em> interested in the future \u0097 just not in the way we, ordinary people, might expect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the interview published last June 25 by Ross Douthat for the Interesting Times<\/em> column in the New York Times<\/em>, Thiel lays bare his worldview: nihilistic, apocalyptic, obsessed with stagnation and decline.
To him, we\u0092re too timid, too unambitious. Progress stopped around 1970: \u0093we haven\u0092t done anything truly great since then,\u0094 he claims. The only real exception to this paralysis is artificial intelligence, a field into which he has poured billions, dreaming of a \u0093supertechnological cascade\u0094 that will let us cure dementia, conquer Mars, and live forever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thiel believes in transhumanism \u0097 the idea that humanity can overcome its biological and mental limits through technology.
But behind this futurist ideology lies a deeply elitist and dystopian vision. For Thiel, humanity is worth saving only if it can become something else entirely: enhanced, evolved, fused with machines.
The average human being \u0097 weak, inefficient, mortal \u0097 holds less and less interest for him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Douthat asks for his opinion on the \u0093Antichrist,\u0094 Thiel responds with a provocation that sounds like a revelation: \u0093It could be Greta Thunberg.\u0094<\/em>
The young Swedish activist, in his view, embodies the ideology of \u0093anti-growth,\u0094 a form of environmental authoritarianism that, in the name of saving the planet, seeks to halt scientific and technological progress. A new green totalitarianism ready to sacrifice humanity on the altar of CO?.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Thiel\u0092s thinking, there\u0092s a tragic and inescapable binary: either humanity submits to an Antichrist who will govern it in a totalitarian fashion to save it from disaster, or it faces Armageddon.
No middle ground. No compromise.
And those who propose alternative models \u0097 less accelerationist, more sustainable \u0097 are dismissed as enemies of progress, charlatans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But who is Peter Thiel, really?
He is one of the oligarchs of our time.
And no, we\u0092re no longer talking about the archetypal oligarchs \u0097 the Russian ones. After Donald Trump\u0092s re-election to the White House, the term \u0093oligarch\u0094 has begun to take on a new meaning: it now refers to the U.S. financial and tech elite \u0097 from Musk to Bezos, from Zuckerberg to Thiel himself \u0097 who wield a power that goes far beyond democratic institutions, capable of influencing wars, elections, markets, algorithms, and even dreams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u0092s in this context that transhumanism has stopped being a fringe philosophical current and become a functional arm of power.
A secular religion with its own dogmas: death is just a technical problem to be solved; the human body is outdated hardware to be upgraded; consciousness can be uploaded to the cloud.
Its prophets? Thiel, Musk, Altman, Kurzweil.
Its laboratories? Silicon Valley, but also Dubai, Singapore, and floating islands where societies are being tested without taxes, without laws, without democracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But all of this \u0097 one must ask \u0097 in the name of what?
For the good of humanity? Or for the narcissistic dream of a narrow elite that wants to save itself from<\/em> humanity?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A vision of the future that presents a deep paradox: the tech magnates are obsessed with the future, yet seem to have forgotten the present.
Colonizing Mars, living forever, building autonomous cities in space\u0085
But meanwhile, here on Earth, climate change advances, inequalities grow, wars disrupt global balances, while millions of people lack access to water, education, and healthcare.
What\u0092s the point of imagining how to live forever if we can\u0092t even live decently right now<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps it\u0092s time to remind the Thiels and Musks of the world of a basic truth: before trying to save humanity, you need to care about it.
And before searching for new homes among the stars, we should take care of the only one we have.
Because if we treat Mars the way we\u0092ve treated Earth, not even AI will be able to save us from ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alessandro Mancini<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Is a graduate in Publishing and Writing from La Sapienza University in Rome, he is a freelance journalist, content creator and social media manager. Between 2018 and 2020, he was editorial director of the online magazine he founded in 2016, Artwave.it, specialising in contemporary art and culture. He writes and speaks mainly about contemporary art, labour, inequality and social rights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":2302,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false},"rubriche_category":[48],"class_list":["post-3025","rubrica","type-rubrica","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","rubriche_category-bias"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lab.the-bunker.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rubrica\/3025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lab.the-bunker.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rubrica"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lab.the-bunker.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rubrica"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lab.the-bunker.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lab.the-bunker.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lab.the-bunker.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"rubriche_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lab.the-bunker.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rubriche_category?post=3025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}