Soundtrack:
“History Lesson Part II” by the Minutemen
On June 26th, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat released a new episode of his podcast “Interesting Times”: an interview with venture capitalist and co-founder of mass surveillance platform Palantir, Peter Thiel.
During their free-wheeling — often confusing — conversation, they dart between topics ranging from the pace of technological innovation to the viability of artificial intelligence to conspiratorial fears of one-world totalitarian government and the nature of the Anti-Christ. There are moments where it comes off like an interview on Coast-to-Coast AM.
At one point, when discussing AI accelerationists and transhumanists that hope to merge man-and-computer, to create an almost divine machine, Douthat asks Thiel a simple question:
“You would prefer the human race to endure, right?”
Thiel visibly hesitates to what most would consider a lay up. Douthat calls him out on this hesitation and he eventually replies, “There’s so many questions implicit in this.” Finally, after receiving the question for a second time, Thiel answers, “Yes, but I also would like us to radically solve these problems.”
For context, “these problems” refers to the “problem” of immortality, namely that it is impossible. Thiel is concerned that society doesn’t spend enough time dwelling on the issue of radical life extension. He then turns on a dime to discuss how Orthodox Christianity views transhumanism as not taking things far enough, that the body, soul and whole self must all undergo a complete transformation.
Setting aside that that the Bible never once mentions transhumanism, Thiel’s answer is muddled, ambiguous and woven together with arcane – maybe even heretical – religious justification. It’s an affront to both science and spirituality.
While I think this clip was taken slightly out of context as it has circulated throughout social media, it is nonetheless frightening to hear one of the world’s richest men, a major military contractor and provider of mass surveillance technologies, waffle when asked about the value and survival of the human species.
A tepid, uncertain “Yes, but…” is hardly a comforting answer.
Simultaneously, an ad has been making the rounds on YouTube for Meta’s new AI app. A father makes his toddler a meal, but the child pushes it off the table. He asks the AI: “How can I get my two-year-old to eat his breakfast?”
Meta’s AI responds in a calm, feminine voice: “He likes it when you make silly faces.”
This ad suggests that Meta is paying closer attention to the man’s son than he is. Some tasks should never be outsourced to AI, and at the top of that list should probably be parenting. Especially when the commercial provides no details on how Meta knew this information or why the father wouldn’t know it innately from spending time with his own child. It’s an odd commercial and does little to sell the product. Why should AI be involved in such an intimate, human-specific moment?
These clips may seem disconnected, but they both suggest a disturbing truth underlying much of modern thought and culture: there is a prevalent, sometimes subtle, strain of anti-humanism that plagues both online and in-person spaces. This way of thinking is having disastrous consequences on our discourse, politics, quality of life, our ability to solve problems and the defense of basic human rights.
To further define this anti-human strain, I would suggest it encompasses three distinct, but inter-related lines of thought:
- A disregard for the human species as a whole.
- A disregard for the complexities and contradictions in human life that bring about purpose and meaning.
- An obsession with optimization and efficiency that would essentially allow us to exceed the bounds of our humanity.
Thiel’s argument falls squarely within the first and third categories. In the interview, his discomfort with his own mortality is evident. He seems to resent that he will likely die some day and holds in contempt a scientific orthodoxy that has not done enough to push for radical life extension. While death is always tragic and we should prevent it for as long as possible, it’s also a part of the cycle of life, unavoidable, a core aspect of our humanity. To live is to know that there is an end. Thiel’s search for immortality is an attempt to both reject and overcome his own humanity.
This would not be altogether awful if this was a personal philosophy that Thiel imposed on himself. But as a man with out-sized influence on our economy, our government and our society as a whole, I can’t help but wonder the damage this anti-humanism could do to all of us.
Fear of Death, False Immortality
After all, Thiel is not alone in this belief. In his own more brazen quest for immortality, tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson has engaged in an intense experiment on his own body, attempting to reverse the process of aging. While he often adapts and changes his regular routines, in the past Johnson has followed more than 100 daily protocols ranging from light therapy to nerve stimulation to the consumption of more than 54 supplements and 34 pills, as well as a strict diet of exactly 1,977 calories per day. Johnson has even swapped blood plasma with his teenage son to achieve his goals.
Again, like death, aging is difficult to come to terms with. We should do everything we can to minimize the suffering that comes with getting older, to treat and even cure diseases like dementia and arthritis. But to suggest that we can reverse the aging process, indeed to preach that human beings need not die, requires a perverse assumption that these natural stages of existence are somehow wrong. Does age bring added troubles? Certainly, but it also brings experience, confidence and hopefully wisdom. It can be beautiful, motivating us to slow down, live fully and to find our purpose within the time that we’ve been granted. There’s nothing wrong about it.
What’s more, Johnson’s lifestyle is extremely restrictive and requires rigid scheduling that seems to prevent him from doing much other than sleep, eat, workout, take pills and visit a myriad of doctors and specialists. By dedicating himself so completely to living forever, he seems to have stopped living at all – or at the very least ceased to engage in the substance of life. Who has time for concerts or art shows or gatherings with friends when every minute of the day is tracked and reported?
Perhaps his lifestyle brings him satisfaction, but for most people, Johnson’s methods would only bring detachment from the very things that make human life joyful and worth extending in the first place.
The Arrogance of Reality Privilege
Other powerful people are less obsessed with the body and more interested in the mind and the experience of being human. Venture capitalist Mark Andreessen (are we sensing a pattern here?) speaks of a dystopian concept called “Reality Privilege”.
“A small percentage of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date,” says Andreessen. “Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege – their online world is, or will be immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.”
He goes on to say: “Reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don’t think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build – and we are building – online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.”
To be clear: Andreessen is arguing that those with power, money and connections – the Reality Privileged – should continue to live lavish, hedonistic lives in the real world, while everyone else plugs into a simulation of the good life.
Maybe you would prefer to enter the Matrix, but to me, this suggests that Andreessen views those with Reality Privilege as almost superhuman, deserving of the tangible, of full sensory experiences, of even the light of the sun. The rest of us, apparently, aren’t fascinating enough to talk to, work with, or date, so we must be unworthy of such things. It would be “better” if we locked ourselves away in a more advanced version Second Life or the Sims.
There are many arguments against this wild anti-human theory.
First and foremost, it’s a cop out. If Andreessen and his rich friends were willing to share their wealth with society as a whole, far more people would be able to engage with the “glorious substance” of existence. Reality has greatly improved in the last 5,000 years and that improvement accelerates when wealth inequality decreases and when personal liberties, along with human rights, flourish for all – and not just the rich.
Lastly, not everyone wants to live like a tech CEO or a venture capitalist. Most people want comfortable lives of meaning, they don’t need yacht parties or a private jet. I’m at my most satisfied when I’m hiking a mountain or sitting around a picnic table with my closest friends. That is my glorious substance and it’s insulting that anyone would think I’d rather exist in fake but luxurious virtual reality than my plain, beautiful, true reality.
Andreessen’s way of thinking denies the simpler joys of a human life. I suspect this is because people in his cohort (billionaires) are never satisfied with what they have. They require ever more of everything. Money yes, but power as well. Perhaps most of all, they’re often desperate for recognition. When they witness people who they view as below them finding quiet moments of satisfaction – a warm cup of coffee before the kids wake up, a walk at night under the stars, shared laughter with a loved one during a movie – they feel threatened. Because those people have something they never can: enough, even if just for a moment.
A Fundamental Misunderstanding of Challenge and Expression
They also can’t seem to fathom that challenge and reward are a core part of that satisfaction, especially when it comes to things like achievement and expression. So many technology products that come out of Silicon Valley in 2025 aim to to make life “easier” or “more efficient”. But that doesn’t necessarily equate to better.
Sure it’s easier to flirt with an AI girlfriend who is purpose-built to flatter you, but it can never compare to a fulfilling relationship in the real world with a real human being who is really connected to you. Even the hardships of dating and love, up to and including break-ups, help us to grow into ourselves, to become more self-realized. Without challenge, we wither, we lose our identity. It’s one thing to make food delivery easier, it’s another thing entirely to try to replace that which makes us who we are: from social interaction to creativity to critical thinking and other deeply human pursuits.
For example: I think a lot about an interview with Mikey Shulman, founder of music generation company Suno AI, in which he said, “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now…It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”
As a thirty-something punk kid with music in my blood, this is fucking preposterous. Human beings live to make music, it’s part of the core of who we are. There are arguments that music is older than even language. We’ve found paleolithic flutes that are at least 40,000 years old.
On its face, I reject the notion that it must take a lot of time or skill to make music. I’m of the firm belief that everyone has a right to song. You can stamp your feet, hum a tune, sing in a chorus, beat on pots and pans and all of that is music. Pick up a guitar, learn three power chords and you can start a garage band.
As with so many of his brethren, Shulman assumes that the only value to creativity is in money and recognition. But legions of bar bands, church choirs and outsider artists suggest otherwise. Music, at all skill levels, is about self-expression above all else. That expression – regardless of the form it takes – is the primary value one receives.
Even at a professional or highly-skilled level, I disagree with his premise. Sure, to really learn your instrument, you have to practice, and even once you’ve gotten good enough to play or write music, it takes an inordinate amount of time. I would be lying if I said it was always enjoyable: it can be very frustrating. But as with many human endeavors that take a level of dedication and discipline, all that frustration leads to something beyond enjoyment. All the practice, all the studying, all the concentration builds until making music becomes transcendent.
Even with a thorough AI prompt, a song produced by an LLM can never provide the long term gratification of self-expression because it is not an expression of the self, but rather a simulation of expression using references only to what came before it. AI can’t invent a new genre, style or individual sound, nor can it read a person’s heart. By removing the factors that make music difficult, products like Suno AI simultaneously remove everything that makes it valuable to the human spirit, stealing that transcendent feeling of creation.
If Thiel and Johnson deny aging and death and Andreessen denies our simplest pleasures, than Shulman and others with his mentality deny the complex contentment that comes with self-actualization and achievement.
Doomerism: Our Part in the Spread
Much of the anti-human strain is coming from the top-down, perpetuated by the wealthy and the powerful, anyone who considers themselves outside or above the rest of us. This exclusion breeds contempt. But lest we believe that we are immune to its effects, the impacts of this line of thinking are not exclusive to out-of-touch billionaires and tech barons.
Its effect on the general population can be felt in the rise of doomerism: a feeling more than a philosophy, that posits the paralyzing notion that the world has gone to hell and that there’s nothing that can be done to stop it.
Given the state of things, it can be easy to fall down a rabbit hole of hopelessness, but this type of nihilism only serves to strengthen the problems we face as a society, and worse, it alienates us from those with whom we might find kinship. People, in general, start to feel like a threat, so we place blame on everyone, causing the very distrust that prevents us from finding solutions. If you spend any time discussing climate change online, you’re bound to run into pessimists who say things like, “Humans are a cancer on the world.”
This narrative is poisonous and only serves to propagate and justify the anti-human strain in the eyes of its adherents. Worse, it can entrap you, seeming like logic when it’s actually driven by emotion, seeming organic when it’s really subtle manipulation.
Don’t get me wrong, there are a myriad of reasons to be pessimistic, but if that leads you to isolation and stagnation instead of connection and action, you may be swept up in the very belief system that is causing your despair.
We must not fall into doom or we risk rejecting our humanity as well.
On an individual level this is bad enough, leading to detachment and depression, but on a societal scale it’s truly devastating. Eventually, anti-humanism transforms into dehumanization.
Once you begin to look at yourself as above your own humanity, it becomes exceedingly easy to strip others of their own. You can perceive other people as pieces on a chess board, slabs of meat or “NPCs” – a far-right slang reference to non-player characters in video games, who behave on a loop and cannot think or take any actions for themselves. Actual human beings start to seem like pedestrians in Grand Theft Auto or zombies in Night of the Living Dead, making them inconsequential, or more terrifyingly, disposable. The longer you spend dwelling in the anti-human strain, the closer you get to the horrors of history.
It is no coincidence that the rise of anti-humanism amongst the wealthy and influential, as well as in the broader population, has occurred alongside a swell of xenophobia, racism, misogyny, classism, homophobia, and transphobia. To hate the human experience, even if directed inward at first, is a gateway to the targeting of specific groups, which can only lead to harassment, oppression and violence.
This is why the anti-human strain cannot be tolerated.
What Can We Do?
Unfortunately, such a pervasive problem does not have a simple solution. There is no law or statute that can stop its spread. Any cure will require a multitude of approaches, all of which must be applied to changing culture and to embracing our shared humanity instead of rejecting it. This means working on ourselves as individuals – acknowledging our own susceptibility to doomerism and dehumanization so that we can push back against these false instincts. It also means re-engaging at a community level, connecting with the people around us, learning to build trust and social capital.
No doubt, some discomfort will come with these changes, but as stated above, it is often the difficult things that are most rewarding, that are most transcendent.
Let us shift towards a pro-human approach to society, one that flips the anti-human strain on its head:
- A reverence and appreciation for other human beings, their inherent rights and their needs.
- An acknowledgment of the complexities and contradictions in human life that bring us purpose and meaning.
- A balance of humility and ambition that allows us to continue to grow as a species while still remaining part of the whole and retaining that which connects us together.
This is but the start of a long conversation that we must have. We do want the human race to endure, long into the future, to live and die with dignity, to share in real world joys, to create and express our thoughts and feelings, to exist side-by-side in community. A better existence is available than the one offered by Thiel, Andreesen and their compatriots, but we must create it ourselves.
Yours,
Rob the Protopian Punk
Previous Work: Bill Moyers, Living Democracy
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