You go to Yale, or you go to jail.

Peter Thielには不気味さを感じながらも、痛快さも同時に覚えます。例えば、大学の学位を宗教改革時代の免罪符に例えている大学教育批判のところ。

College is corrupt as the Catholic church was 500 years ago. They’re chargintg people more and more. You have this system of indulgences, you have this priestly that doesn't do much work. And then you basically tell people that if you get a diploma you’re saved, otherwise you go to hell. You go to Yale, or you go to jail. That's sort of ... And what I think is we need to push back on this idea that only way you get saved is the Catholic church 500 years ago, or today the only way to get saved is by getting a diploma from college. I hope that in the future there will be many different kinds of productive things for people to do.

TOEICkerも無縁ではないですよね。5000円の本を買うのは一大決心が必要ですが、一回の公開模試ならなんてことなく感じてしまう。TOEICサークルに入ってしまうと、900ないと存在価値がないのではないかと不安になってしまう。まさにYou go to Yale, or you go to jail. です。

彼の不気味さはやはりよく引用される以下の部分ですね。まあでも、この頃は政治に距離をおこうとしていたのに、10年経って、政治にも関わり、保守メディアも立ち上げるのではと噂されるようになっているようですが。。。

The Education of a Libertarian

By Peter Thiel April 13, 2009

The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

In the face of these realities, one would despair if one limited one’s horizon to the world of politics. I do not despair because I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.”

冒頭の動画でPeter Theilの聞き役を務めていたブルームバーグの記者がシリコンバレーの女性蔑視文化を取り上げた本を書きました。

In ‘Brotopia,’ Silicon Valley Disrupts Everything but the Boys’ Club

By Jennifer Szalai

Feb. 7, 2018

How nerds became bros is one of the central stories in this book. But the technology industry didn’t always skew so male. As Chang explains, women played a formative role. The mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer program in 1842; the navy admiral and mathematician Grace Hopper helped create the Cobol programming language. Women received almost 40 percent of computer science degrees in 1984, but even though they continue to work in the field and make essential contributions, today that number is a measly 22 percent.

This is more than a work force issue, and “Brotopia” is more than a business book. Silicon Valley holds extraordinary power over our present lives as well as whatever utopia (or nightmare) might come next. “If robots are going to run the world, or at the very least play a hugely critical role in our future, men shouldn’t be programming them alone,” Chang writes. “The scarcity of women in an industry that is so forcefully reshaping our culture simply cannot be allowed to stand.”

この本ではPeter Theilも登場しているようで、彼らが能力主義という名の下に女性を排除していることを指摘しています。

The book includes a blistering chapter about the venture capitalist Peter Thiel and the self-styled PayPal Mafia — an all-male clique of company alumni who fund one another’s business ventures. Thiel and a group of mostly conservative classmates from Stanford later founded PayPal and boasted about their entrepreneurial success, casting it as a vindication of their hiring strategy. None of the company’s first engineers were women. As one founder admits, “We didn’t know any.”

In other words, they hired their buddies, and their buddies were all men. Yet they insist that such cronyism was just the meritocracy at work. Keith Rabois, another member of the PayPal Mafia, describes the company as a “perfect validation of merit”: “We went from complete misfits to the establishment in five years.” (Complete misfits? A Stanford degree apparently amounts to bubkes.) The absurdity of this logic is too much for Chang to bear. “The idea that these men just happened to be personally connected to the most talented people available is simply ridiculous.” As she points out, “privilege accumulates.”

AI時代になってシリコンバレーの役割は減ることはないでしょう。そうなると彼らの価値観に基づいた設計がなされてしまうのは危険だという彼女の警鐘は説得力があります。　これは「読解力」とやらに問題を限定する前に問わなければいけないものかもしれません。