Peter Thiel Fears the Antichrist Is Coming
Comments
andsoitis
KellyCriterion
> lack of progress risks catastrophic outcomes.
Well in case of fighting climate change, he is right, Id say?
cf100clunk
Ross Douthat is author of ''The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success'', which, when read along with ''Amusing Ourselves To Death'' by Neil Postman, might put a lump in your throat in the face of today's rampantly compulsive tech broligarchs and their enshittification of society.
dmix
Palantir turning into a movie villain caricature on the internet through breathless journalism is a great example of "Amusing Ourselves To Death". Journalists turned it into a great story that sounds straight out of a thriller TV show. But trying to spin unchecked growth in government power, a lack of accountability, and mindless consumerism as some sort of side effect of the new cabal of tech-bro elites rather than a persistent drumbeat that existed well before that is an unhelpful distraction that only makes people feel helpless.
Nobody sells books by saying that our issues are a result of general neglect by society as a whole, only movie villains push numbers.
zzrrt
Consider that the current vice president has agreed with Curtis Yarvin saying things like we need to get over our dictator phobia and replace the government. I don't think that can be hand-waved as business as usual. The next phase in the persistent drumbeat, maybe, but it's a big step.
frm88
I would agree with you if it weren't proven fact that Thiel is a kingmaker - he created the current JD Vance turning him from being Anti-Trump ("I believe he is a bad man") to vice president with a Girardian mission in just 8 years. He is a demagogue and dangerous.
Nevermark
You should probably come out of your comphy cave.
Centralization of power isn’t a narrative it’s an accelerating reality.
I am having a hard time thinking of a mode of power that isn’t far more centralized today than it was just 2, 4, 6, 8, … years ago.
ben_w
> I am having a hard time thinking of a mode of power that isn’t far more centralized today than it was just 2, 4, 6, 8, … years ago.
Electrical power. That used to be almost entirely centralised, but it's increasingly easy to be off-grid.
Manufacturing power. I don't know the full dynamics, but there's clearly a lot of cheap good tools easily available, so the term "cottage industry" still makes literal sense.
Comms. Twitter becoming X pushed a lot of decentralised alternatives with similar vibes.
That said, if you go back 20 years, you get the pre-Facebook world and the pre-Twitter world for comms, but you lose cheap good home 3D printing and a specific district in China was becoming the obvious heavily centralised place for all modern consumer electronics to get made.
Of course, go back to 1800 and you get something like, IDK, 70% of the world's internationally traded cutlery being made in Sheffield? I may be off by a lot there, that's just a rough guess given its dominance.
hshdhdhj4444
3D printing hasn’t taken power away from anybody.
The percentage of goods manufactured in the world that come from the set of the top 5 or top 10 or top 100 or top 1000 sources have all increased today relative to before.
I agree on electricity though. Cheap solar panels have made distributed energy possible in a way that was unimaginable even 20 years ago.
Nevermark
In a sibling comment, I point out that increasing long tails are not incompatible with overall mass centralization.
Relevant to your comment, increases in 3D printing capabilities have not translated into a reversal of manufacturing centralization in China’s favor.
That centralization continues as instability (often defended as an attempt to act against centralization) has perversely disrupted and pulled back manufacturing investment elsewhere.
As an individual, you may be able to do more, or choose from more niches. Even as the vast majority of resources and impact flow to fewer entities by volume.
Nevermark
That is a very good point. Long tails exist. And many long tails continue to grow.
But the mass of everything keeps centralizing.
So the two are not contradictory. Together they imply an increasing dearth of middle diversity/distribution of choices and players.
Increased choices (the menu) can happen at the same time as decreased diversity of choice (flocking, herding) or capacity (sourcing).
So I don’t think you are wrong, despite centralization still being overwhelming.
——
Despite 3D printers, manufacturing in particular has been centralizing in China for decades, and this trend has only increased over the last year as politics and economic instability have hampered manufacturing investment outside China.
Being able to print anything, doesn’t turn around economics and structure that hamper creating major supply chains and new manufacturing centers.
Anymore more than being able to write and publish, and an increase in voices, is turning back the general tide of people en masse viewing/reading and self-exposing themselves to fewer uncoordinated voices.
Economic power is centralizing in fewer mega corporations and in the hands of an increasingly dominant economic minority.
Tech business power in capitalization and sources for the best components is centralizing.
Political parties power is centralizing. Very dramatic changes relative to previous decentralization between different party scales, like local vs. Federal. And far more “personal” centralization like has happened at the top in US parties.
Especially in the US, dramatic power centralization across all three branches of government, over the top of the checks and balances, and intended competing roles, that maintain the US Constitution’s relevance as a constraint on autocracy.
Social media over the last two decades has greatly centralized communication and media. And most of all, popular influence.
That power grows despite the emergence of decentralized alternatives. A reversal in favor of decentralization overall would be welcome.
The creation of huge centralized governmental and corporate caches of deeper and richer surveillance information, is a massive submerged centralization of power.
Device lockdowns on outside ecosystem software continues to increase, relative to the typical consumer.
——
Long tails operate at the fringes, and matter to many. But they are not slowing down overall economic, technological, social and political centralization.
CamperBob2
unchecked growth in government power
Like what we saw in Minneapolis, amirite?
boyoboy
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frm88
I watched this some time ago. Is it just me, or is Ross' permanent and verbose interruptions of Thiel's thoughts grating? If you want an interview where you really get to listen to Thiel's thoughts fully expressed, I can recommend his interview with Jordan Peterson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=918qslcfwfY.
Bonus content: witchcraft is a lost art and we have become feminised.
tim-tday
By Antichrist he means “a little girl asking us to please not ruin the world for future generations.” Really.
cf100clunk
He's been riffing on the antichrist thing for awhile:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/peter-thiel-...
aaron695
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sph
Are you guys just about done advertising his world tour? I’ve been hearing about it for weeks at this point.
runamok
Behind the Bastards did a few episodes on this: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236... and they were quite entertaining.
sph
The topic is interesting to me so I gave it a go, but by God this podcast (quite popular I hear) is insufferable. Why is everyone trying to be a comedian? Why does one of the guest sound like they’re on Valium? And I cannot stand the air of basic anti-intellectualism I keep getting from American presenters, where any piece of information is met with a groan and a joke.
I reckon not every podcast can be as excellent as The Rest Is History, for example.
I’m waiting for some coverage on the pillock from this side of the pond.
tetris11
Whilst I enjoy their topics, I do admit their banter feels like it's talking down to the audience
aaron695
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dangus
We need to stop listening to this guy and tax him.
He is not smart. Most of his fortune is directly tied to extremely lucky bets on Facebook and PayPal. Palantir is a boring government contractor that makes glorified ERP software.
And he has really, really dumb opinions.
rvz
Just like the rest of the other "thought-leaders" everyone else listens to on this orange site as they do not care if they are wrong.
CamperBob2
He is not smart
True. Personally, I think my first clue was when he gave millions of dollars to people who want to round up LGBTQ folks like himself and load them into boxcars.
Just another "high-agency" bozo who confused getting lucky with being smart.
b33j0r
He’s proof that the elites are not mystically smarter than you. Probably dumber.
metalman
His subconsious is getting to him, a simple fix for everybody would be if he had all his mirrors removed
stevenalowe
He’s already here, in the White House
awesomeMilou
Jesus we fucking KNOW already
ZeroGravitas
Title of his sex tape.
bibimsz
when have we last had a pro-christ?
CamperBob2
Rest assured, if such an entity were to appear, the Republicans will have ICE on the scene before you can say 'Gethsemane.'
mastermage
didnt he belive he is the antichrist?
anthk
If we scratch out the Christian folklore and metaphors, god it's the Logos, the source of knowledge, the pure logic, verified facts through reason. Kinda like programming in Lisp.
Sins are just a metaphor on human (animal) impulsiveness due to faulty instinct; the Church just said 'think before you act, you might screw up greatly'. LLM's are like loaded dice in nature, thus, the output will never be reproducible but pretty much close enough in the 99% of caases, like a Markov based chatbot on stereoids (small LLM's and a GB trained Hailo will mainly converge in how to behave internally).
LLM based products are actually much closer to the Christian 'devil' -human prejudices causing bad acts, instead of slow analysis with reproducible proofs- than anything else. Because over time the accuracy gap without human revision will just get bigger and bigger upon feeding LLM's between themselves.
kotaKat
Did he drink some tainted blood or something?
orionblastar
Mabus: https://www.prophet666.com/2025/07/decoding-mabus-prophecy-o... If you are interested in Nostradamus. Comes from Europe, etc.
mindslight
"We're all trying to find the guy who did this!!"
If you're worried about someone coming to your party, perhaps start with not sending them a gold-leafed invitation.
I presume all of Thiel's noise about the antichrist is a play at trying to maintain some support for techno-fascism from the religious fundamentalists after they're done satiating themselves with the recent Crusades. The reality is of course that the closest thing we have to an antichrist figure is sitting in the White House, having charmed millions with his blatantly false promises.
bdbdbdb
I'm an atheist, and I don't believe in the antichrist, but it's hard not to see how closely he fits the bill. Only lies come out when he opens his mouth. Even if he says something true, he basically qualifies it with another untruth, and people lap it up. Even the media, even the cynical media, seem to report the things he says at face value. It boggles the mind sometimes.
Last week someone challenged him on his claim that Iran had tomahawks and they bombed their own school. First time I've heard anyone directly challenge him. His response was "I don't know enough about it" classic bs packpedal, like any kid caught in a lie. Next day CNN stories were "trump doesn't know what's happening in the war, others are running it and he's unaware", completely missing the obvious truth, he lied to misdirect people on the school bombing, one person challenged it, he lied again to backpedal.
Some days it's like he has a supernatural ability to get away with lies
mindslight
I'm an atheist too, but I still see religions as having embedded wisdom - both descriptive of how past societies failed, and prescriptive in that they are parts of the foundations of our present societies.
(Of course they also have a lot of details that are easy to latch onto as mere justifications for doing immoral things. And as moral people move on from traditional religion, then the share of people merely using it as crutch for immorality grows)
The archetype of a leader who engages in abjectly evil behavior while gathering ever more power and followers under a charm spell certainly rings true. But the dynamic is probably more like an individual being particularly adept at releasing the floodgates for our own worst impulses, rather than some supernatural power.
ratrace
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nacozarina
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nine_zeros
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akomtu
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frm88
One world eco-fascist government to be precise. All that green energy is why we are stagnating and haven't cured Alzheimer. Hence Thunberg as the antichrist. He's building Palantir to get control over more antichrist movement and hopes to stop it.
throwatdem12311
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Better to hear from him directly than filtered, so worth watching the interview with the NYT's Ross Douthat, in which Thiel frames what he means by the Antichrist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV7YgnPUxcU
Without spoiling too much, it is related to civilizational stagnation, and that our lack of progress risks catastrophic outcomes.