TNR - How the Tech World Turned Evil [View all]

Twenty-second-century historians tracing the ascent of American technocracy from quirky garage tinkerers grooving on the Whole Earth Catalog to sinister oligarchs enacting Philip K. Dick prophesies may locate its apogee in four lectures that Peter Thiel (net worth: $29 billion), chairman of the data-mining giant Palantir and a co-founder of PayPal, delivered at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club in September and October 2025. The subject was the Antichrist.

“In the seventeenth, eighteenth century,” Thiel explained, “the Antichrist would have been a Dr. Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science.” As Thiel spoke, dozens of protesters—some in devil costumes—marched outside bearing signs that said things like The End Is Near/ Palantir Is The Path/ Thiel Leads The Way. “In the twenty-first century,” Thiel continued, “the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer.” Greta is Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate change activist. Eliezer is Eliezer Yudkowsky, a Berkeley-based critic of artificial intelligence, or AI.

Class warfare doesn’t get more unhinged than this. Say what you will about the American plutocracy, it seldom frames its economic self-interest as a religious imperative. But even in its more innocent days, Silicon Valley inclined toward grandiosity, heralding not just a new technology but a new advancement in human consciousness. Now a prince of the technocratic elite was framing tech’s future prosperity quite literally as a battle against agents of Satan, with Thunberg and Yudkowsky cast as Gog and Magog. Suggest Thiel’s dominion could stand a bit more government oversight and he just might toss you into a lake of fire.

Thiel’s speeches prompted an appropriately horrified public response. But his was merely the most literal expression of a millenarian sentiment about the coming of AI that’s now conventional wisdom among tech barons. Thiel’s tactical error in applying the Book of Revelation to the digital future was to keep his message explicitly biblical. But other tech leaders have been secularizing the same narrative. “Technology is the godhead” is how the Columbia law professor and tech critic Tim Wu described this view to me, and Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI—AI that surpasses human intelligence in all dimensions—“is the Second Coming.”