The Antichrist In Silicon Valley

A few weeks ago on X, Pope Leo XIV posted a simple call for responsible action from Silicon Valley power brokers.

 

He wrote: 

“Technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation. It carries an ethical and spiritual weight, for every design choice expresses a vision of humanity. The Church therefore calls all builders of #AI to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work— to develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life.”

Interestingly, Marc Andreessen sarcastically responded by reposting it with a snarky meme. Andreessen is a billionaire entrepreneur, software engineer, and venture capitalist primarily investing in tech, crypto, NFTs, and other Silicon artifacts. His bigwig firm funded Facebook, Pinterest, Airbnb, Stripe, Slack, Lyft, Coinbase, and more.

After critical pushback, he deleted the post.

Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and Palantir, has a net worth of approximately $24 billion. Silicon Valley has been very, very good to these gentlemen. Interestingly, he recently finished a lecture series about the Antichrist.

Yes, the Antichrist.

Thiel is a philosophical follower of René Girard, the now-deceased French social science philosopher and author, and, although Thiel would dismiss this as of late, German political theorist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt, an antisemitic and anti-democracy proponent, became a supporter of Adolf Hitler because he believed Hitler could be the katechon. The katechon is referenced in 2 Thessalonians 2:7 as the restraining force holding back the rise of the Antichrist, and Schmitt believed that a potentially globalized USSR communism was the political face of the Antichrist. Hitler would be a hero.

Okay, enough of that. But here’s where it gets, uh, weirder.

At a recent conference, Thiel suggested that the Antichrist is basically anyone or anything that would try to restrain AI, or any technological progression, for that matter. He said that the Antichrist would rise to power “by playing on our fears of technology and seducing us into decadence with the Antichrist's slogan: peace and safety.”

The idea that AI is anything that should be regulated is beyond the pale for Thiel. He might check out Yudkowsky and Soares' new bestseller, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. Fascinating. You can guess their thesis—plus they provide a roadmap on how it could happen. It's not just a matter of pulling the plug.

One of Thiel’s proposals is that a secret global coordination of all the world’s intelligence systems would be a great katechon. In his words, it would be wise to have “a political framework that operates outside the checks and balances of representative democracy as described in high school textbooks.”

I think he might be barking up the wrong eschatalogical tree.

And by the way, Thiel’s company Palantir is deeply involved in military tech: a recent U.S. government contract was worth $10 billion. No metaphysical conflict of interest here, right?

I don't know what your apocalyptic theology is—I’m not so sure what mine is(!)—but this isn't reassuring to me. And not so much for the theological/political stance, but something deeper.

Over sixty years ago, Eisenhower warned of the “military-industrial complex”—it’s clear what that was about. But I would suggest that the “government-evangelical complex” is far more dangerous. And the problem is obvious: when the Church gets cozy with governmental sovereignties, it forfeits its ability to speak truth to power. There is always an inherent spiritual danger in aligning with the political powers-that-be. And when the Church loses its prophetic voice, it loses its own ability to function as a katechon.

So like any good Chicagoan, keep talking, Pope Leo.

Dave Workman | The Elemental Group

ps: Not so ironically, the above picture was obviously AI-created!

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