PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel is embarking on an uncommon mental journey this fall—delivering a sold-out four-part lecture sequence on the biblical determine of the Antichrist. The non-public lectures, hosted by The Commonwealth Membership in San Francisco, symbolize the newest evolution in Thiel’s more and more public theological pursuits, which intertwine his Christian religion together with his issues about expertise’s potential to allow authoritarian management.
The sequence, organized by the nonprofit Acts 17 Collective, will discover “the theological and technological dimensions of the Antichrist” in 4 periods throughout September and October. The lectures stay off-the-record, with no transcripts or recordings made public, however they draw upon the work of René Girard, the French thinker who profoundly influenced Thiel throughout his Stanford undergraduate years, together with thinkers like Francis Bacon and Carl Schmitt.
Thiel’s theological preoccupations may appear incongruous together with his enterprise empire, however they replicate a constant worldview formed by Girard’s “mimetic concept“—the concept that human needs are realized via imitation, typically resulting in battle and violence. This philosophical framework reportedly influenced Thiel’s $500,000 angel funding in Fb in 2004, which he credit to recognizing the mimetic nature of social media.
The 57-year-old billionaire, value an estimated $20.8 billion in response to Forbes, constructed his fortune via a sequence of contrarian investments that challenged typical Silicon Valley knowledge. His funding philosophy facilities on figuring out monopoly-like companies and backing transformative applied sciences earlier than they achieve mainstream recognition. This method led to early successes with PayPal, which offered to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002, and later investments in corporations like Palantir Applied sciences, the data-analytics agency he co-founded in 2003.
Palantir has emerged as maybe Thiel’s most controversial enterprise, offering surveillance and information evaluation instruments to authorities businesses together with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Division of Protection, and intelligence providers. The corporate’s “Gotham” platform allows regulation enforcement to attach huge datasets, creating detailed profiles of people by combining all the things from DMV data to social media exercise. Latest Trump administration contracts have expanded Palantir’s attain throughout federal businesses, elevating issues about potential misuse for political concentrating on.
A concept of technological apocalypse
Thiel’s fascination with the Antichrist idea stems from his perception that such a determine would rise to energy not via overt evil, however by exploiting technological fears to impose world management. In a latest New York Occasions interview, Thiel stated his “speculative thesis” about how the Antichrist may emerge: “The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop.”
This concept positions the Antichrist as somebody who would provide “peace and safety” whereas utilizing worry of catastrophic technological dangers—synthetic intelligence risks, nuclear conflict, local weather change—to justify unprecedented surveillance and management measures. The irony, as some critics be aware, is that Thiel himself continuously discusses apocalyptic eventualities whereas constructing the very surveillance applied sciences that might allow such management.
Thiel has beforehand urged that trendy expertise gives the “mechanism” that fictional depictions of the Antichrist lacked: the power to realize world dominance via information integration and surveillance quite than conventional conquest. Thiel’s firm Palantir exemplifies this functionality, with its platforms designed to synthesize disparate data sources into complete intelligence programs.
Thiel’s theological pursuits have grown extra public in recent times, coinciding together with his elevated political affect. He was an early Trump supporter and delegate on the 2016 Republican Nationwide Conference, the place he made historical past as the primary brazenly homosexual speaker to declare his sexuality from the stage. His assist for political figures like J.D. Vance, whom he helped launch into politics, displays his perception that technological stagnation requires disruptive political change.
The Acts 17 Collective—which organized Thiel’s Antichrist lecture sequence and takes its identify from Acts 17, the place the apostle Paul preached to cultural elites in Athens and different mental facilities—targets rich tech leaders by recognizing that conventional evangelical approaches typically fail to resonate in secular tech tradition. For Thiel, who grew up Lutheran however describes himself as having difficult spiritual views, his interpretation attracts closely on Girard’s work on sacrifice, violence, and social order, seeing Christianity as uniquely geared up to diagnose the risks of society that expertise can amplify.
The massive image
The timing of Thiel’s Antichrist lectures coincides with rising scrutiny of Palantir’s increasing position in authorities surveillance. Beneath the Trump administration, the corporate has secured over $113 million in federal contracts, with its expertise now deployed throughout no less than 4 main businesses. The corporate’s capability to combine information from a number of sources has raised issues amongst civil liberties advocates and even some Republicans in regards to the potential for abuse.
Critics argue that Thiel’s warnings in regards to the Antichrist ring hole given his position in constructing the very surveillance infrastructure that might allow authoritarian management. 13 former Palantir staff not too long ago signed a letter urging the corporate to stop its work with the Trump administration, citing issues about how the expertise is likely to be misused for political concentrating on.
These tensions replicate broader questions in regards to the position of expertise corporations in democratic governance. As Palantir’s instruments grow to be more and more subtle, the road between respectable safety purposes and potential authoritarian abuse turns into more durable to outline. Thiel’s theological framework gives one lens for understanding these dangers, however whether or not his Antichrist lectures symbolize real concern about technological overreach or an try to deflect criticism of his personal corporations stays an open query.
Palantir didn’t instantly reply to Fortune‘s request for remark.
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to assist with an preliminary draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the knowledge earlier than publishing.
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