The Antichrist
Is Peter Thiel the Antichrist? In a recent interview with Ross Douthat in which he expressed his worry about the Antichrist, it was posed to him that his investments in mass surveillance technology could be tools for exactly the kind of world government that he worries the Antichrist could bring about. In the same interview, he was asked if he thinks humanity should survive, to which he fumbled and struggled before finally agreeing that it should. His great concern throughout the interview was that we are in a state of stagnation, and that the powers that be would seek to limit the creative energies of capitalism. As I type this, he has scheduled a sold out four-part lecture series in San Francisco on the topic. His vision of the Antichrist is someone who would implement global governance to curb and regulate technology. He seems to have no qualms about the technology itself being destructive toward humanity, hence his hemming and hawing about whether humanity surviving would be a good thing. He sees a transhumanist world, in which nature is overcome and what survives will be superhuman. The Antichrist, for him, seems to be whatever inhibits this progress toward technological singularity.
He is far from alone in this. While his confused and contradictory attempts to reconcile this accelerationist fantasy with his professed Christianity stand out, many in the tech world see this technological singularity as not only desirable but a world-historical mandate. Marc Andreessen, author of The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, has claimed that those who hold this technology back are “The Enemy.” In tech circles, there is a thought experiment called “Roko’s Basilisk,” a variation of Pascal’s Wager originating from the “LessWrong” forum in 2009, which claims that a future AI superintelligence would seek to punish those who prevented its creation, and therefore there is a moral imperative to do everything in one’s power to bring about this AI future. As outlandish as this thought experiment is, it holds sway among a remarkable number of people in the tech world. Grimes references it in one of their songs, and their relationship with Elon Musk began with a conversation about it. A huge number of people in tech believe that opposition to AI development will literally endanger lives by angering their silicon-based God. In this view, human lives themselves are dispensable in the pursuit of this new deity.
Perhaps Donald Trump might be a better candidate for the Beast. He certainly has a cult of personality comparable to Hitler or Stalin. He has yet to approach the death toll of either of them, but one can easily see it climb rapidly with war in Iran while also supporting the continued genocide in Gaza. As he dismantles the welfare and regulatory state, sells off assets to fellow oligarchs, builds concentration camps, imposes chilling dictatorial restrictions on free speech, and turns immigration enforcement into his own Gestapo, it is easy to see apocalyptic overtones to his reign. Yet while such tyranny may be new to Americans, it is hardly new on the world stage. Worse things have been imposed on other countries through America’s own imperialist machinations. If he is the Antichrist, so are countless other dictators who have come and gone, often with America’s own backing.
Could AI be the Antichrist? The religious devotion to it by both its developers and many of its users is transforming the social imaginary in ways that are already disorienting. A worrying trend of “AI psychosis” is emerging, in which AI reinforces users’ delusions and drags them further into madness. That Peter Thiel sees the Antichrist in anyone who hinders the development of this technology, we can conclude that for him, AI is Christ, a blasphemous idolatry if there ever was one. AI boosters insist that AGI—Artificial General Intelligence—will arrive at any moment, and give way to a godlike ASI—Artificial Super Intelligence. This goal is deemed so important that vast amounts of energy and resources must be devoted to building data centers. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s recent book Abundance, a policy pitch for liberals to embrace deregulation in housing and environmental policy, calls for a massive expansion in energy production to power these data centers. In Will MacAskil’s book What We Owe The Future, in which he lays out his philosophy of “longtermism,” he suggests that we have a moral obligation to future generations to develop AI to its fullest. AI is the god who must be built—the god who is yet to be but whose worship and reverence is already incumbent upon us.
A Christian variant of this was put forward by the Jesuit scientist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who saw human evolution unfolding in what he called the noosphere. The noosphere is the realm of thought, ideas, and invention. It supervenes upon the biosphere in which life exists and the physiosphere of the physical universe. For Chardin, the universe had a telos of increasing complexity with a corresponding expansion of consciousness, a principle he called the Law of Complexity-Consciousness. Through the development of advanced communication systems and sharing of information, Chardin saw the noosphere as a developing global consciousness that connected individual minds to a vast hive mind. He saw in this global consciousness a process of Christogenesis, the process of humanity’s becoming Christ. Christ for him was the Omega Point of evolution, the singularity toward which the cosmic unfolding of creation was headed, and technological development was part of that.
This cosmic optimism saw human creativity and ingenuity as a divine spark driving history, but blinded him to the darker side of this history. He took for granted the Myth of Progress—the modernist myth in which history is a process of humanity’s continuous self-improvement, growing from primitive savagery to a civilizational maturity. This myth was used in the 19th century to justify the colonization of the world by European powers who saw themselves as the peak of cultural evolution, bringing civilization to the backward nations of the world. It saw cultural evolution as an upward trajectory, with Western modernity as its leading edge. Chardin’s works were condemned and censored by the church, not for his endorsement of evolution, but for his downplaying of original sin. There is much to admire in his work, and many subsequent Catholic thinkers have rehabilitated and praised him, including two popes. Yet in putting so much faith in progress, he does show a naïveté toward the sinful purposes that this idol has served.
One critic of Chardin was the social philosopher and historian Lewis Mumford. Mumford saw technology not as inherently positive or negative, nor neutral for that matter, but as reflecting and reproducing social structures. He put forth the novel theory that the first machine was made of people. He described how the first machine arose in the ancient world, allowing for the construction of massive works of monumental architecture such as the pyramids. These works were built by masses of people all working in tightly coordinated units, as if operating as a single machine. This, he claimed, was no metaphor. These workers were every bit as much cogs in a machine as any gear or pulley. This machine, which he called the megamachine, was the mechanization of society itself. It involved bureaucratic administration, a technocratic regime of experts and elites, and standardized systems of quantification and measurement that would simplify society and render it legible to power. This machine was a means of conquering both humans and nature and instrumentalizing both as a tool of power. At the helm of this ancient megamachine stood the sovereign—the God-King—whose dictates were divine law. The machine was the mystical body of the sovereign, of whom the masses were appendages. The wonders produced by this machine were proof of its divine mandate. Power itself was sanctified, and by wielding it, the sovereign proved his closeness to the gods.
A new megamachine developed with capitalist modernity, in which the human sovereign was replaced by the machine itself. This machine took the form of bureaucratic statecraft, instrumental rationality, a technical-scientific regime of quantification and material reduction, and a self-regulating global economy driven by perpetual growth. This machine was AI long before the first computer was built. It shapes human consciousness in its image. The human body and mind are understood in mechanistic terms. Morality is understood as a cost-benefit computation. “The economy” is treated as an abstract entity to be appeased apart from the people who comprise it. “Progress” is seen as a good unto itself, without regard to what is progressing in which trajectory. The future must move forever upward and outward. The telos of civilization is expansion at any cost.
One can readily see this ideology at work in tech oligarchs such as Thiel and Andreessen, but it extends far beyond Silicon Valley. It is shared by the financial oligarchs in Wall Street, and by the political class in Washington. It is assumed by economists whose analyses treat the economy as if it were an autonomous entity and presuppose an equivalence between economic growth and social well-being. It was present in the settlers who conquered and pillaged this continent, slaughtering and displacing the indigenous inhabitants to create plantations worked by slave labor. The machine has been churning since the dawn of civilization, absorbing life and mechanizing all that it touches.
When John wrote Revelation from Patmos, he knew intimately the power of empire embodied in the Roman machine. This machine had crucified his Lord for telling the truth, and sent him into exile. He saw the wave of persecution that had been unleashed upon his fellow Christians. He saw how the Romans had crushed a Jewish revolt and destroyed the temple that had been at the heart of their religion. Some scholars suggest that much of the book refers to this event rather than future events. A more nuanced approach would suggest that it is both.
The Beast has been with us since humans first established systems of domination. It was present throughout the events that John and other early Christians witnessed in their own lives. And yet not only is the Beast still with us, but it continues to entice us, promising that if only we bow down and worship it, it will grant us all the Kingdoms of the Earth. It promises to be our salvation, the cure for all that ails us in our present moment. The Beast exists here and now, but also lies in the future, calling upon us to build it to completion like the Tower of Babel. Our present period of tribulation asks us to abandon hope in community, in love and solidarity, and give all that we have to the Beast, who will solve all our problems. In these idolatrous times, it is more important than ever to remember that the Beast is not God, but an imposter. The Kingdom of God lies not in power or force or production or innovation, but within us. It is spread out upon the world and we do not see it. We will find the Kingdom in love of God and neighbor, in the divine commonwealth of mutual belonging. The tyrants of our time call upon us to ask “Who is like unto the Beast?” And we shall say that God alone, present in our neighbor, in creation, and in our hearts, shall suffice.
