Silicon Valley's contribution to the US Republican Convention: Gayness

Peter Thiel – the great contrarian

Umm

Unfortunately, while entertaining and full of interesting detail, Thiel's platform is far from coherent, reflecting the same contradictions as the man he just vouched for as president.

While attacking Wall Street and bemoaning the fact that Silicon Valley is only a small enclave, he ignores the fact that a huge amount of tech activity in Silicon Valley is in a bubble. The success rate of new businesses in Silicon Valley is the lowest in the country – great if you are someone who uses their fortune to take bets, not so great if you want a functional economy without huge peaks and troughs.

Bemoaning the failure to go to Mars is a little odd, given that just last week NASA announced it would be sending a successor to the Curiosity Rover in 2020. We have already gone to Mars. Maybe Thiel thinks we should go each year? Or perhaps take a leaf out of Silicon Valley's playbook and send ten Curiosity Rovers to see which one the "market" prefers.

Such distorted thinking is also apparent in his attacks on the Obama Administration and Hillary Clinton – blaming her for wars in the Middle East and conveniently forgetting which administration made the decisions that led to the current situation in the region.

That approach is of course nothing new in blinkered partisan American politics, but it is also the kind of unthinking status quo response that Thiel purports to hate.

Where Thiel is right is in the fact that so many of the country's resources – intellectual and financial – are spent and mostly wasted on creating largely unused weapons of destruction rather than on technology that moves the country forward.

No JFK

Painting a bright future and the means by which to achieve it would indeed have been a terrific speech to have given at a national meeting of the political party currently in control of Congress.

As a highly successful entrepreneur, Thiel could have channeled JFK and his man on the moon within a decade speech – a speech that, coincidentally, was given in the exact same era that Thiel now looks back at so fondly. Such a speech coming from someone who has actually built remarkable new technologies would have come with a punch.

Thiel could have put a call in to his old Paypal colleague Elon Musk and asked for a few pointers, because Musk is literally doing what Thiel complains isn't happening, with his efforts at Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity.

But this is the era of Trump and so rather than paint a positive picture of what can be done, Thiel simply railed at how terrible the present is and how much better the past was.

But don't worry: Thiel and Trump are going to make it better – they just won't tell you how. You'll just have to trust them. ®