Source: Astral Codex Ten
by Scott Alexander
“Peter Thiel recently gave a lecture on the End Times, described as ‘portraying the Antichrist as a technocratic leader exploiting fears of catastrophe to impose global control.’ Thiel suggested that maybe the Antichrist would use worries about global warming, or inequality, or AI safety, to frighten people into accepting some kind of evil surveillance state. His moral was that we need to stop living in fear of people’s scare stories. But isn’t the idea that if we try to regulate things, it will summon the literal Antichrist and plunge the world into eternal darkness, kind of a scare story? Isn’t Thiel using this scare story to frighten people into accepting the, uh, evil surveillance state he’s enabling?” (11/06/25)