Peter Thiel thinks so:
The technology slowdown threatens not just our financial markets, but the entire modern political order, which is predicated on easy and relentless growth. The give-and-take of Western democracies depends on the idea that we can craft political solutions that enable most people to win most of the time. But in a world without growth, we can expect a loser for every winner. Many will suspect that the winners are involved in some sort of racket, so we can expect an increasingly nasty edge to our politics. We may be witnessing the beginnings of such a zero-sum system in politics in the U.S. and Western Europe, as the risks shift from winning less to losing more, and as our leaders desperately cast about for macroeconomic solutions to problems that have not been primarily about economics for a long time.
Declan McCullagh recently interviewed Thiel on a range of topics:
Is improving agriculture a subject that's fit for technology? Is that a technological area? If you were to look at the Middle East issues, you could give an interpretation that's bullish on technology. It's the Arab spring, a happy byproduct of the information age.
Or you could say we have a political green revolution that is the result of the failure of the true green revolution, which is agriculture. As the true green revolution has failed, we have a lot of people in that part of the world, a lot of desperate people who have become more hungry than scared. And that's basically been triggered by food price increases on the order of 30 to 50 percent in the last year. It's really not a story of technological success but technological failure.
(Image: by Philipp Igumnov via Colossal)
The Dish 