"We were promised flying cars we got 140 characters," he likes to say. But it's obvious to him that we're living through an extended technological stagnation. We spoke in his sleek, floor-to-ceiling-windowed apartment overlooking Manhattan - a palace built atop the riches of the IT revolution. He founded PayPal and Palantir, was one of the earliest investors in Facebook, and now sits atop a fortune estimated in the billions. Thiel isn't dismissing the importance of iPhones and laptops and social networks. "If the other things are not defined as 'technology,' we filter them out and we don't even look at them." "Technology gets defined as 'that which is changing fast,'" he says. It's a coping mechanism in an age of technological disappointment. Our definition of what technology is has narrowed, and he thinks that narrowing is no accident. To Thiel, this signals a deeper problem in the American economy, a shrinkage in our belief of what's possible, a pessimism about what is really likely to get better. When a grave-faced announcer on CNBC says "technology stocks are down today," we all know he means Facebook and Apple, not Boeing and Pfizer. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel guesses it's the latter. What do you think of when you hear the word "technology"? Do you think of jet planes and laboratory equipment and underwater farming? Or do you think of smartphones and machine-learning algorithms?
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