The campaign for death relief

An Irishman’s Diary about big thinking at the Web Summit

When I visited the Web Summit for the first time, this week, I was struck by how much the tech start-ups pitching for business looked like on-course bookmakers at a racetrack. They had the same narrow stands, with just enough room for a display board including names and logos. They also had satchels – at least metaphorically – in which to stuff the money of anyone who wanted to place a bet with them.

The big difference from actual bookmakers is that each of them was itself a horse. And the trick for investors was to guess which of these horses – some very dark – might emerge from this year’s field of 2,160 and become the next Google.

I didn’t notice any start-up offering the prospect of eternal life. Yet that is, generally speaking, one of the big potential growth areas for entrepreneurs – at least according to Peter Thiel, a star speaker at the summit. And he should know.

Thiel has backed many of the most successful horses of recent times. He set up Paypal, took an early share in Facebook, and presides over an investment company with $2 billion assets. But as well being very rich, and having a talent for identifying businesses that will make him even richer, he is also a philanthropist, contrarian, and deep thinker, who expects more from investments than mere money.

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He is mildly critical of Twitter, for example, on the grounds that it will not “take civilisation to the next level”, which is probably understating it a bit. What will advance civilisation, he suggests, are technologies to postpone death indefinitely. Thiel takes a hard line on death – he’s very much against it. And he thinks the philosophical acceptance of it in the western world is defeatist.

Among the beneficiaries of his philanthropy, therefore, is Aubrey de Grey, an English gerontologist behind a thing called the Methuselah Foundation. The owner of an Old Testament-style beard, De Grey looks not unlike Methuselah, although only 51, and yet devotes himself to finding ways that ageing could be reversed or stopped.

He has repeatedly stated his belief that the first human who will live for 1,000 years has probably already been born. If he’s right, it’s hardly Peter Thiel, who even at a tender 47, may already have left it too late to be an early adapter of immortality-conferring technologies. So Thiel is also on record as saying that when (or if) he dies, his body will be cryogenically preserved, in case the possibility of regeneration emerges later.

Alongside his anti-death activism, Thiel’s other contrarian stances – including his annual scholarships that encourage would-be entrepreneurs to drop out of university before it ruins them, and his principle of never investing in young technologists who wear suits – seem only a little eccentric. And not the least interesting thing about his campaign against the Reaper is that he is also a believing Christian. Born in German to evangelical parents, who emigrated to the US when he was a baby, Thiel has retained his religion, if in less fundamentalist form. But maybe his investment in the Methuselah Foundation is an each-way bet.

Speaking of Christians, another star interviewee at the summit was Bono. Who, I noticed, repeated verbatim something he had said several weeks ago, which I had then thought was just a carelessly mixed metaphor.

He was talking about the controversy surrounding U2’s latest album and the deal done with Apple. In which context, he again declared music to be a “sacrament”. Then in the same breath, as if by extended logic, he again added: “I believe musicians should be paid for it.” Now I’m no theologian, God knows. But I’m fairly sure that sacraments are not supposed to be paid for, in any circumstances. In fact, I seem to recall from my history books that there was a bit of a row about this very thing back in 16th-century Germany, when a Dominican friar was going around selling remission of sins.

In the cases of those already dead, he used to tell customers, a simple payment was enough to spring their souls from Purgatory. This so outraged another friar, one Martin Luther, that it caused him to break with Rome.

Luther instead launched his own start-up religion. And no doubt benefitting from the support of so-called “angel investors”, it became a huge success. Indeed, despite much competition, it remains one of Christianity’s more popular service providers, offering customers a direct route to salvation, with no middle-men and greatly reduced administration fees.

@FrankmcnallyIT