MIKE SOLANA WANTS YOU TO COMMIT THOUGHT-CRIMES: The Hereticon organizer on deplatforming, tribalism, and why tech dudes and journalists are natural enemies.

• Author: Suderman, Peter

MIKE SOL AN A IS a vice president at Founders Fund, a venture capital firm that has invested in a number of businesses that you probably know well, from Airbnb to Stripe. He runs the firm's branding, working to attract young investors and companies. He's also an outspoken critic of moralizing, pessimistic tech journalism, a theme he hits frequently in Pirate Wires, his irreverent, pointed Substack.

And he hits bigger themes too. "This whole entire question of what is true has really animated me for the last few years," he says. "High-level, I care about freedom."

"Libertarianism was the animating political philosophy in my life, starting in high school," says Solana. His political journey included a drift into "scary leftism" briefly during college and a brief embrace of anarcho-capitalism, which is how he met Peter Thiel, his now-boss who created Founders Fund. With some areas, such as foreign policy and concern about China's sometimes opaque influence on tech companies, Solana deviates from traditional libertarian thought. "I don't want [the U.S.] being the police of the world, and yet there is this, I think, very important question of what happens when America does stop being the police of the world," he says. "I think you're going to see the destabilization of power globally, the rise of powers in places like Russia and China. I'm not convinced that's a better world."

He also recently organized and hosted Hereticon, a conference focused on ideas and arguments that have largely been shut out of mainstream discourse. Conceived of more than two years ago, the event was repeatedly postponed due to the pandemic, which Solana says further proved the value proposition. It finally took place in Miami Beach in January.

Solana's interview with Peter Suderman appeared on The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie in March.

Reason: You've been writing Pirate Wires on Substack for several years now.

Solana: The real reason that I'm doing it is probably because I'm allowed to do it. I work for Peter Thiel and he is a little bit anarchist in this way--that's how everything operates under him. He allows people to do weird shit.

I started the Substack as a monetization of my podcast, called Problematic, very much in the thick of the culture war stuff. I started doing a newsletter, just my cut on the tech press, and that got a lot more attention than my podcast did, which was weird, because I thought I was doing a good job with the podcast. The thing grew and grew. Now I consider myself one of many newly emergent countervoices in the tech/political press landscape.

In the world of tech, the whole environment is dominated by people who hate tech and really hate the people in tech. I wanted to be a part of the solution there.

On both your Substack and your Twitter feed, you display what I think is sort of a honed, crafted internet persona. It's snarky and contrarian, perhaps trollish. What's your vibe?

I just don't ever want to be afraid to speak my mind ever again. I understand why you're picking up on perhaps snark or [being] almost troll-adjacent. I don't think I am a troll; what I am is willing to fight back. It's just words on the internet, right? What do we have to be afraid of?

You described Hereticon as "a conference for thought-crime." What are you talking about when you say thoughtcrime?

I'm talking about sharing either data--Charles Fort called it "damned data"--that is compelling but no one will look at, or an opinion that you are not supposed to share. We all have an intuitive sense of what the bounds of acceptable speech are, and increasingly in our culture there are consequences for [violating] that. People lose their jobs; people are deplatformed. There are a lot of things we don't say because they're actually bad or wrong. Most people are wrong about a lot of things. I'm wrong about a lot of things. However, all of the new, interesting things in the world throughout history start that way. So if you're not living in a culture that has room for thoughtcrime, then you're not living in a culture that is...