The Politics of Dissolution

You can’t get much further apart on the socio-economic ladder than Peter Thiel and Ray Kachel. The former is a Silicon Valley billionaire entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and hedge-fund manager, with sharply conservative-libertarian views; the latter is, currently, a homeless man in New York City, with left-wing politics and about two dollars to his name. It was coincidence, not the urge to make an obvious point about inequality in America, that landed my Profiles of Thiel and Kachel in successive issues of the magazine. Yet these men have something to do with each other, something beyond the fact that both made a living, in very different capacities, in Web technology. (Thiel, who is something of a technophobe when it comes to digital devices and social media, co-founded PayPal and helped Facebook and other companies get started; Kachel, whose computer hardware and software became his last source of capital before he went broke, and whose main connection to the world is Twitter, was a journeyman video and audio editor in Seattle.) Or that both are pleasant, thoughtful, unafraid interview subjects, easy to converse with over many hours of talk. Or that they both like sci-fi.

Thiel and Kachel embody what could be called the politics of dissolution. In different, almost antithetical ways, they represent a political experience that would have made little sense fifty or sixty years ago. Each in his own way is alienated from the established order. Neither has any faith in traditional American institutions and élites. Thiel isn’t part of the corporate establishment, and he’s moved away from the Republican party. Kachel has no connections to organized labor; his main political affiliation is his devotion to the Rachel Maddow show. Neither of them puts much store in elections, or conventional politics generally. (For example, the subject of the 2012 Presidential race rarely came up in conversation with either of the two.) Both of them have a fundamental sense that things in America are not working. Both of them entertain fantasies of an alternative polity where things might work better: for Thiel, a floating city-state on the high seas where the long arm of national and international government can’t reach (he’s the largest supporter of the libertarian Seasteading Institute); for Kachel, a park in lower Manhattan where, for two months, a self-organizing community took root.

Half a century ago, Thiel would have been a Goldwater Republican, a churchgoer, and a paid-up member of a local business group. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to launch a fellowship program in order to induce young entrepreneurs to leave college. Education wasn’t one more “bubble” back then. Kachel would have been a Kennedy Democrat and perhaps, like his late father, an employee of the city of Seattle, living on a salary that could support a family of four. Neither would likely have felt a strong urge to escape from politics, like Thiel, or to join in the creation of a new community, like Kachel.

But the past few decades have destabilized and eroded the institutional identities that used to bind Americans. The information economy is atomizing; so is the age of cable news and social media. Kachel was so isolated that he turned to Twitter in order to enrich his social life. Last year, I got myself in trouble by questioning the ultimate value of the data flood that pours through our phones. I’m no closer to going on Twitter and Facebook myself, but I have gotten a little soft on social media now that I’ve followed Kachel around for a few weeks, and seen how sending and downloading tweets keeps him connected to the world. Twitter, Zuccotti Park, Seasteads: some of the improvised communities that have risen up in the rubble of failed institutions.

I don’t want to make too much of the comparison. The obvious difference between Thiel and Kachel is also the one that still counts for the most in our society: the latter has no money, the former has an enormous amount. But if Thiel were a conventional libertarian billionaire, he would spend his money on 501(c)4 advocacy groups and lobbyists and strategic communications firms, not on the Methusaleh Foundation and the Singularity Institute. If Kachel were a conventional homeless man, he would be entirely focussed on finding a place to keep warm and a square meal. Instead, Thiel is devoting much of his fortune to finding a cure for aging, bursting the education bubble, and jump-starting space travel and artificial intelligence. Kachel is devoting much of his time to finding out where the next phase of Occupy Wall Street is being discussed. Something about the turbulence of this age, the deep sense of dissatisfaction with things as they are, prompts people to discard the stale verities and invent new ones. Which, after all, is a very old way to respond to distress in this country. Whatever you think of their ideas and causes, both Thiel and Kachel represent something of the restlessness, the openness to the future, that has gotten America through other troubled times.

Origin
Source: New Yorker