Who You Calling “Antichrist?”

Oppose Peter Thiel’s agenda? Read about yourself in Revelation 13.

It is a delight to share this guest post from Jason William Karpf. He’s an award-winning Christian sci-fi author and professor of marketing and communication. Don’t miss his Substack publication, Playing God Leads to Trouble.

Subscribers to this publication represent a range of opinion, uncommon in our polarized moment. Proposals for guest posts on relevant topics of interest to readers are always welcomed.

It is easy to identify the Antichrist in a Renaissance fresco.

Peter Thiel has shared his thoughts on the Antichrist in speeches deemed off-the-record, ensuring breathless coverage of his revelations about the Book of Revelation. As Silicon Valley’s answer to Cardinal Richelieu, eschatology falls in Thiel’s portfolio as does kingmaking, from coalescing and selling PayPal with Elon Musk, to mentoring and funding Mark Zuckerberg in Facebook’s early days, to ensconcing himself in Donald Trump’s inner circle (always a tenuous seating arrangement—ask his former partner Mr. Musk).

Thiel’s theology is simple: people opposing his techno-socio-economic doctrine are agents of Armageddon. A warning about AI is the shofar blast of the foretold global tyranny, a call to bar the digital paradise awaiting us, free of disease, toil, and stasis. Like the hedge fund founder he is, Thiel hedges his bets on the enemy’s secret identity. It might be “someone like Greta,” as in Greta Thunberg, global activist. AI safety researchers Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nick Bostrom are “legionnaires of the Antichrist” if not directly occupying the throne.

The evil dictator label gets slapped on aggrieving authorities from the president down to the local HOA secretary. “Hitler” is the frequent variation, but “Antichrist” is more severe. Like millions of other moviegoers, I became familiar with the biblical entity when I saw The Omen in 1976. Decades after middle school, I accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and read the actual Scripture. In the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, Jesus warns of false messiahs performing signs and wonders amid actual and rumored wars, natural disasters, and oppression. Later in the New Testament, John specifically warns of the Antichrist in his epistles.

Dear children, the last hour is here. You have heard that the Antichrist is coming, and already many such antichrists have appeared. From this we know that the last hour has come. — 1 John 2:18 NLT

In Revelation 13, the beast of the sea is widely considered to be the Antichrist with its follow-on, the beast of the earth, acting as enforcer, known for the mandated mark on hands and foreheads and the number 666.

The media has fanned discord over Thiel’s Antichrist talks, less as scriptural fact checking and more as doomscroll fuel. To this point, I view the polemics less from my witness as a Christian and more from my perspective as a film history professor and public relations professional. I recall the aforementioned The Omen and its many sequels, reboots, and ripoffs—Scripture scraped into something that goes bump in the night. I understand what it takes to earn media coverage, a verb too honorable for much of what claims third-party ink and pixels. And I shake my head at trolling, the sadly effective practice of turning adrenaline into attention.

Thiel may lack the bombast of Trump or Musk, but he is a provocateur going way back. In The Contrarian, Max Chafkin chronicles his 1987 co-founding of The Stanford Review, a conservative student paper. He enraged opponents and surfaced allies with inflammatory screeds and what would be called clickbait headlines today. Twenty-two years later as the Don of the PayPal Mafia, Thiel declared freedom and democracy incompatible in his essay “The Education of a Libertarian.”

The title underscores Thiel’s fundamental belief system, a devotion to Our Lady of Laissez-Faire. He has long decried government’s intervention or impediment regarding enterprise, hardly a radical notion among business leaders. In fact, you don’t need to be an elite to hate taxes or scrutiny. With “liberty” built into the brand, libertarianism promises hands-off governing with prosperity and privacy for all, qualities that take a quantum leap for billionaires such as Thiel and his advocate forerunner Charles Koch. Restricting the power of the state has moved from the wildest dreams of John Birchers like Koch’s father, Fred, to reality. The reduced government of the Reagan Revolution shrivels with the three branches twisting into one, federal workers being doxxed and dismissed, and the halls of the Capitol ringing empty.

Thiel has led Silicon Valley’s shift toward Trump, elevating big tech’s priorities with the administration. For Thiel, the Antichrist is anti-technology, a loud Luddite who amasses power by stoking AI fears. Before his splash at the 2016 GOP convention, he dismissed a political path to libertarian utopia, his alternative being “a new space for freedom” through cyberspace, outer space, and ocean settlements known as seasteading. Technological salvation would overcome the ignorance and timidity of elected officials and voters.

As a Christian sci-fi author, I love gadgets, rockets, and outposts in forbidding realms. I was born in 1962 and grew up watching Star Trek episodes sprinkled with Tang commercials. Thiel was born in 1967, a fellow child of the space race. He flashes Gene Roddenberry’s techno-optimism, but his talking computers and spacecraft are real, making his stakes much higher than a “created by” credit in a media franchise. Thiel is the hype man for the world of tomorrow in which he is invested financially, politically, and existentially.

Science fiction becoming fact is neither inevitable nor desirable. Award-winning author Charles Stross warns of tech billionaires turning dystopian tales into instruction manuals, actualizing the fictional technology while ignoring the stories’ downsides. He calls out TESCREAL—transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, long-termism—an umbrella ideology espousing artificial intelligence, space colonization, and life extension to achieve a future greater good. Tycoons can wrap themselves in TESCREAL, pushing their lucrative visions for a brave new world at the expense of the present one. Stross insists sci-fi authors are entertainers, not impartial philosophers or practitioners of the scientific method. He caps his argument with a meme from writer/game designer Alex Blechman:

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus

Peter Thiel is not the first to insinuate the Antichrist’s arrival. Early Christians considered Emperor Nero a likely candidate. Nor is Thiel the first to materialize a sci-fi McGuffin. Motorola turned Star Trek’s communicator into the flip phone, and the Manhattan Project turned H.G. Wells’ 1914 atomic bomb into the real thing. He’s not alone in mashing up Christian themes and speculative fiction tropes. I do this routinely in my writing. The difference comes with the intent and impact. Entering the second quarter of the 21^st century, his influence soars as the tech industry roots deeper into the economy, the government, the grid, and the psyche. His methods, however, plateaued in the 1980s. As a twenty-something, Peter Thiel mastered the communication strategy known as “Made ya look!”

Image Credit | Detail from The Preaching of the Antichrist, Luca Signorelli, Public Domain via Wikipedia.