Thiel Fellow Creates Building Blocks of Civilization
Explores what it would take to create a community from scratch
Kang is a Thiel Fellow, which means that the foundation of Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal (EBAY) and prominent Silicon Valley investor, will pay him $100,000 over the next two years to avoid college. Thiel loves to challenge the status quo and has funded 20 Fellows, betting that the group of brainy kids will go out into the world and do big things.
It turns out that Kang is now on a farm in rural Missouri. The compound—known as the Factor e Farm—is the subject of a feature story I wrote this week for Bloomberg Businessweek. Kang, along with a dozen or so like-minded people, has set to work building 50 tools that man would need to start a civilization from the ground up. So they're working on such things as bread ovens, brick presses, saws, tractors, and bulldozers and then posting videos and schematics online about how to build these objects. The end goal is sort of an open-source attack on the traditional companies that manufacture our fundamental machines.
Hide Comments (0)
Editor's Note: As of February 29, 2024, commenting privileges on reason.com posts are limited to Reason Plus subscribers. Past commenters are grandfathered in for a temporary period. Subscribe here to preserve your ability to comment. Your Reason Plus subscription also gives you an ad-free version of reason.com, along with full access to the digital edition and archives of Reason magazine. We request that comments be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment and ban commenters for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post commentsMute this user?
Ban this user?
Un-ban this user?
Nuke this user?
Un-nuke this user?
Flag this comment?
Un-flag this comment?