David Graeber vs. Peter Thiel on Innovation, Academic Research, & the Future

Graeber: "The old bureaucracies, whatever you want to say about them (they were big and stifling in their own ways), could actually cultivate their eccentrics and weirdos."

David Graeber and Peter Thiel

A remarkable debate took place in 2014, between the late anthropologist and social theorist of debt David Graeber and Silicon Valley entrepreneur (PayPal founder and early Facebook investor) Peter Thiel. The whole thing is worth a listen, especially from the vantage point of 2020. Would a debate like this even be possible this year (even a “socially distanced” Zoom version)? As I noted in an earlier post, the general ecosystem of core issues Graeber and Thiel cover here—debt, finance, the loss of “production” industries, technological stagnation, freedom vs. bureaucracy, matters of “political economy,” etc.—was receiving far more emphasis in public discourse in the early 2010s than today. From the mid-10s onward, a very different set of issues, especially pertaining to matters of identity and pertaining to the question of power dynamics between identity groups, became publicly amplified. Some may find it tempting to point to Trump as the explanation for the shift, but I think 2014 was really the last year that something like a Graeber-Thiel debate would have been possible. This is something I will try to demonstrate empirically and systematically in a future post, but I think the mass-discursive shift towards a different set of emphasized issues (and away from high-concept debates of the type Graber and Thiel are engaged in here) was already well underway by 2014 and 2015—when Trump was nothing more than a failed 2012 GOP candidate and successful reality TV star. (I’m probably going to make myself rather irritating towards friends over the next few decades, because I don’t plan to unremember this chronology.)

Early in the debate, Graeber says quite a lot pertaining to the relationship between academia and innovation (or, between academia and stagnation). The monologue below, from Graeber, especially jumped out to me, as did one of Thiel’s later responses regarding universities:

David Graeber [5:50]: Even the things they have been pouring resources into, we never got anywhere near to what we thought we were going to have. Why is that? And the conclusion I finally came to is, you can only understand this in terms of bureaucracy. But not just the ‘bureaucratization’ of research—because there had always been largely bureaucratized research; in fact, the Manhattan Project, NASA, were giant bureaucracies which were incredibly productive of innovation—but it was a shift in the nature of bureaucracy, which happened in the 70s, and has accelerated ever since. This is a kind of corporatization of the bureaucratization of research. It happens in universities, it happens in government, it happens in corporations themselves, where the whole bureaucratic direction shifts away from an emphasis on production to more an orientation towards finance.

The old bureaucracies, whatever you want to say about them (they were big and stifling in their own ways), they could actually cultivate their “eccentrics.”  If you look at the kind of people who were involved in the Manhattan Project, they were almost all weirdos of one kind or another. Even the people who set up NASA. Jack Parsons, the guy who set up the jet propulsion laboratory which actually made the rocket engines, was actually a Thelemite follower of Aleister Crowley, who used to have ceremonial orgies in his house. That was in the 50s! A lot of it was apparently organized by Parsons’ wife’s sister—the orgies—who then ran off with L. Ron Hubbard….causing Parsons to become so extreme he was eventually kicked out of NASA, becoming a special effects guy who eventually blew himself up. But: these were the kinds of people who set up NASA!  Can you imagine people like that being employed by government bureaucracies nowadays? I find it hard to picture.

Almost any functional society, almost any society which has ever existed, has something which they do with brilliant, imaginative, but extremely impractical people. We don’t know what to do with them anymore. They’re all living in their mothers’ basements saying weird things on the internet, and you can’t tell which are crazy and which actually have something to contribute.  You used to put them in academia, but now academia is all about self-marketing.  Being in academia, I can see very easily what’s happened in my own discipline where any kind of new thinking is really discouraged. Take social theory—basically what we’re doing is we’re writing endless annotations on French Theory of the 1970s, late 60s or maybe early 80s. I call it the ‘classic rock phenomenon,’ still doing the intellectual equivalent of listening to Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin and thinking they’re cool. This kind of endless recycling is typical of disciplines which really seem to be opposed in principle to radically new paradigms and new thinking.

If you want to have maximized possibilities of unexpected breakthroughs, it’s pretty obvious what the best policy is. You get a bunch of creative people, you give them the resources they need for a certain amount of time, you let them hang out with each other, but basically you leave them alone. Most of them are not going to end up coming up with anything at all. But a few of them will come up with something that will even surprise themselves.  If [instead] you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, take those same people, and then tell them they’re not going to get any resources at all unless they spend the majority of their time competing with one another to prove to you they already know what they’re going to create. Well, that’s the system we have. And it’s incredibly effective in stifling any possibility of innovation.

Peter Thiel [a bit later, around 20:30]: I agree that the eccentric university professor is a species that is going extinct fast. We have, you know, a ‘Gresham’s Law’ inside these universities at work, where the bad currency is driving out the good, and in effect where the people who are nimble in the art of writing for grants are displacing the idiosyncratic thinkers who, one suspects, are generally much less nimble at that sort of activity…Like yourself I’ve been a big critic of the university system. And I used to believe that the right way to do it was all sorts of lobbying for internal change…or I thought of starting a new university and doing everything right, and concluded I couldn’t even do that (the last hundred years, people have generally had a bad history of trying to do this)…I concluded it would be much more effective to just encourage talented people to leave [i.e. to become entrepreneurs]…We should start acting as though we are already free. Yes, there are some things you absolutely can’t do. You probably can’t get a tenured position at Yale [Graeber laughs]; I can’t get a tenured position at Yale. But there are lots of other things we can do, and instead of beating our heads against brick walls, we should try to go down the various paths which are actually still available.

David Graeber [22:30]: Again, speaking from the perspective of anti-authoritarian movements, this is always a big debate. To what degree can you work inside existing institutions, to what degree can you say to hell with it and create things on the side? Or, to what degree do you try to create things on the side within the nooks and crannies of the existing institutions where they’re not looking? Because, most of us are not in possession of a billion or two dollars—so you kind of have to do that.

Some follow-up thoughts:

• Graeber’s “classic rock phenomenon” is surely referring to the continuing emphasis—not just in his discipline of cultural anthro but throughout the humanities and humanistic social sciences—on the particular theoretical frameworks of post-structuralism and deconstruction. More generally, this seems to me to be a reference to the strikingly long lifespan of “critical theory” as an intellectual paradigm. The paradigm has lived much longer (around 40 years thus far, with no sign of slowing down) than did several of the dead horses (e.g. structuralism) which it was designed to beat.

• As I noted in an earlier post, Graeber was denied tenure at Yale; hence Thiel’s comment (partially a joke, but also something of a dart) about this. I think what’s at stake in this moment of the exchange is Graeber’s desire that academia receive better non-grant resources, and that it organizationally orient away from the “grant complex”; vs. Thiel’s desire to pull talent away from academia and presumably towards entrepreneurial hubs. Thiel offers a $100,000 fellowship for college students to drop out of college and do something more start-upish instead.

• I considered putting a somewhat shorter Graeber quote above, without the Jack Parsons and Aleister Crowley stuff. But I think that specific examples like this, from the Manhattan Project / NASA era of Big Research, shouldn’t be lede-buried. Such examples are necessary to spell out what Graeber is getting at when he says that something big in the whole sociological organization of research and innovation has fundamentally changed. I think there’s a strong degree to which today’s entire grant complex, across the academic disciplines, is something of a personality test. A certain kind of personality looks at the idea of writing 5-10 short essays whose only intended readership is one or two anonymous readers, for the sake of a grant award one has a low-percentage chance of getting, and which comes with many kinds of irksome strings attached, and simply drags the entire grant application PDF to the “Trash” folder. Another kind of personality takes a deep breath, puts ego aside, and just writes the damn essays—and then maybe does that several times every single year over a 40 year career. It seems reasonable to suppose that a figure like Parsons fits into the former category.

  Richard Feynman is more of a personal favorite of mine from that era, and listening to mindbending old interviews and lectures with him, one hardly forms the impression of someone who spent every weekend cranking out a new grant application. I get the sense that if Feynmen had been professionally told to do this, he’d have quit on the spot and moved to some tropical beach to play bongo drums and be a guru for hippie-pilgrims.

• Note that David Graeber is called (and called himself, and justifiably so) an “anarchist”—and yet here he is highlighting the strengths of mega-innovation projects when they’re associated with a highly organized big state, such as the “fordist” American state of the 1940s through 1960s. As with Noam Chomsky, his “anarchism” really seems to mean “the possibility of widespread human creativity”, and if a big state is needed to secure the conditions necessary for that creativity, neither figure is particularly hostile to having a strong state in place.