Peter Thiel, wrong about the Wright brothers, believes we’re not living in a technological age because movies are mean to techies and people are concerned about losing their jobs to their silicon betters. Strange reasoning. I think Tony Stark of Iron Man, fleshed out with Thiel’s friend Elon Musk in mind, is portrayed as the hero of our time. If contemporary film is often unfriendly to technologists, that’s because it’s an easy conflict to sell and because Hollywood and Silicon Valley are currently vying for the title of the “Dream Factory” of California–and the world. At any rate, Thiel’s measures for our degree of our ensconcement in technology are anecdotal, whiny and inefficient. From Brian R. Fitzgerald at the Wall Street Journal:

“[Thiel] said Progress—that’s progress with a capital P—is at the core of any scientific or technological vision for the world. But that talk is counter-cultural right now, and so ‘in many ways we’re not actually living in a scientific or technological age.’

‘We live in a financial and capitalist age,’ Mr. Thiel said. ‘Most people don’t like science, they don’t like technology. You can see it in the movies that Hollywood makes. Tech kills people, it’s dysfunctional, it’s dystopian.’

Not that the PayPal co-founder claims to know how to change society. That used to be government’s role—the atom bomb was built in three and a half years, and Apollo got someone on the moon–but not so much anymore. Today, ‘a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mailroom,’ he said.”