Why Peter Thiel Fears Star Trek

What is anathema to Thiel in “Star Trek” is the notion, drawn from Isaac Asimov's fiction, that the market is but a temporary solution to imbalances in supply and demand, and that technology and plenty will eventually make it obsolete. “Star Trek” replicators are nothing but Asimov's robots disguised as coffee machines, let loose on the world as a public good. They dissolve the need for a pricing mechanism. They represent the logical endpoint of the Industrial Revolution, when all human labor has been offloaded onto machines. “Star Trek” and Asimov remind us that the market and all the behaviors associated with it are temporary and historically contingent. If that is so, then what Thiel thinks of human nature and motivations—that people are competitive, acquisitive, greedy—is temporary and contingent, too.