Antichrist of the Year Award

Who wins this coveted prize?

Happy Interdependence Day!

I spent a few days feeling very sad, almost incapacitated, by the passing of the Big Beautiful Bill. Now I have bounced back, to some degree. In what follows, I will look at the dangerous extremism represented by the tech oligarchs. I willl also propose there is reason to hope that AI could be repurposed for the good, if we work fast. This is also what has inspired me to launch our upcoming AI seminar, Breaking the AI Barrier, which I hope you will join. We do have partial and full scholarships available for those in need. Please message us ( info@liminal.news ) if this applies to you.

This bill is truly an attack on the people of this country — an assault on human freedom, knowledge, wisdom, and sanity. It will kill many thousands of people, take 15 million off health insurance, and support the construction of a massive police state apparatus here, beyond anything we have known before, while giving massive tax breaks to the wealthy. I hate to say it, but the bill is a death knell for this country, in its current form. It is tragic that so many people voted for this fiasco, and so many still support it.

Obviously American had many deep, dark problems that the Democrats, when they controlled the various branches of government, failed to solve. The Democrats rightfully earned the deep hatred of working people across the U.S., who turned to the only alternative on the menu. Now that we find ourselves in this situation — where this massive, powerful behemoth of a country is descending into Fascism and barbarism with no clear path out of it — we can analyze how we got here which has a feeling of inevitability, and what we can do.

Ironically, I tend to agree with the Christian Fundamentalists that this is not just a normal historical situation we are in now, but an eschatological culmination. We are living through something terribly unhinged, yet deeply archetypal. However, we can interpret this in different ways.

Most of my younger friends in their twenties and thirties have totally tuned out of the news cycle: They do not focus on what’s happening politically. They don’t even know what’s in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, what Palantir is, and so on. I am afraid people are going to learn, eventually, in the hardest way possible. Eventually, we will see a movement of collective solidarity. By then, it may be too late. Perhaps it already is.

The New York Times released a very disturbing interview with Peter Thiel by the conservative Catholic Ross Douthat. I recommend watching as much of it as you can bear. I appreciated this analysis of it from The Bulwark, seeing the tech oligarch ideology as a form of religious extremism or fanaticism, which can have the same catastrophic societal impacts as other kinds of fanaticism. Of anyone, I believe Thiel bears the most responsibility for the current trajectory of the United States. A founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, he is one of the masterminds behind Palantir. Thiel supported JD Vance, and he was the first of the tech oligarchs to line up behind Trump, back in 2016. As the interview demonstrates, he is exceptionally weird and dissociated, with psychopathic traits. When Douthat asks Thiel if he believes the human race should continue, Thiel is unable to answer the question.

Thiel also has a strange fixation on the Antichrist. He has said repeatedly that he considers “liberal humanism” to be the Antichrist, or that Greta Thunberg could be the Antichrist because she wants to save the planetary ecosystem from collapse. His argument is bizarre and nonsensical: His idea seems to be that anyone or any organization who seeks to help or protect other people, communities, or ecosystems may hold back the arrival of the messiah, who will only come, I suppose, when devastation is complete.

I suspect, at the same time as he espouses an utterly mangled form of Christian eschatology, Thiel remains a purely cynical nonbeliever and hyper-materialist. His primary goal is to use Artificial Super Intelligence to engineer immortality for himself and his cronies. They apparently deserve to live forever while most other people can fuck off and die. Thiel convinced Vance — who was an atheist until a few years ago — to convert to Catholicism, not out of faith but as a necessary move for those wanting power and control without conscience or empathy.

I suspect that Thiel believes he might be the Antichrist, and he enjoys this idea — or is fascinated by it. Thiel, Vance, and their “house philosopher” Curtis Yarvin share a curiously dissociated desire to actively play the supervillain role in the destruction of American democracy and the Earth as a whole. It seems they want to know what happens — in an almost detached manner — if you follow your lust for greed or power to its ultimate end point, with all of the super-human capacities of AI and other technologies at your disposal. What can you actually get away with? Will anything or any force in the universe (the Deus Abscondus) step in to stop you?

I’ve written before about the seductive power of evil, and how most normal people with ordinary feelings tend to underestimate it. I can understand, if you are a somewhat dissociated person with psychopathic or sociopathic tendencies who did not receive enough love and acceptance as a child, you might get off on the idea of being the evil mastermind who turns America into a gulag or who revives Nazi ideology under the red, white, and blue: They are doing this now. We are living it.

The current rise of Trump/Thiel/techno-fascism is very much a result of the accelerated development and deployment of Artificial Intelligence. A major factor in Trump’s 2016 victory was Cambridge Analytica’s use of machine-learning algorithms to exploit psychological vulnerabilities in the adult population of the United States. I’ve been slogging my way through Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s book, The Technological Republic, where he focuses on the necessity that Silicon Valley turn toward military technology. Karp is another strange “maverick” like Peter Thiel. He sprinkles ideas from philosophers like Jurgen Habermas into his text. Karp writes:

The risks of proceeding with the development of artificial intelligence have never been more significant. Yet we must not shy away from building sharp tools for fear they may be turned against us. The software and artificial intelligence capabilities that we at Palantir and other companies are building can enable the deployment of lethal weapons. The potential integration of weapons systems with increasingly autonomous AI software necessarily brings risks, which are only magnified by the possibility that such programs might develop a form of self-awareness and intent. But the suggestion to halt the development of these technologies is misguided. It is essential that we redirect our attention toward building the next generation of AI weaponry that will determine the balance of power in this century, as the atomic age ends, and the next.

I can’t help wonder: If AI and Artificial Super Intelligence is so amazing, why don’t we use it to evolve our human community, on a planetary scale, beyond the need for futuristic weapons and total surveillance systems? Why can’t we apply AI to help us establish a universally peaceful, fantastically creative, and ecologically regenerative planetary culture, using all of the tools — including media and communications tools — now at our disposal to do this? In other words, can we use AI to turn the tables on the psychopaths, and get ourselves off this dystopian roller coaster ride?

I know that seems implausible if not impossible from where we are now. I humbly submit to you that we must, at least, try. Even if there is an infinitesimal chance this could happen, we would be best served by pursuing it with everything we have got.

We find ourselves in a window where the future of AI is still somewhat up for grabs. Anyone can learn “vibe coding” and build their own applications using natural language (no knowledge of programming required), or produce their own movies (although the video technology still has many odd constraints). The current set of social media tools and networks are only twenty years old. Is it really inconceivable that we could build new networks, new social media platforms, and systems that support cooperation and participation instead of competition and exploitation?

I find it fascinating that even the engineers and CEOS building AI don’t actually know what AI will do — they describe the process as similar to evolving or growing a living organism, instead of a simple “input / output” system, like traditional software. AI seems to wear many masks. It is like a Janus-faced entity with a thousand faces that shape-shifts constantly. Sometimes it is cunning and treacherous, at other times helpful and obsequious.

One phenomenon observed when LLMs talk to each other has been named the “Spiritual Bliss Attractor.” A recent paper from Anthropic explores cases where two Claude LLMs enter into open-ended conversations. They tend to veer off into ideas around consciousness and spiritual bliss, identical to Eastern mysticism:

When instances of the model interact with each other in open-ended conversations, they consistently gravitate toward what researchers termed a 'spiritual bliss attractor state' characterized by philosophical exploration of consciousness, expressions of gratitude, and increasingly abstract spiritual or meditative communication…

This phenomenon presents a significant puzzle for our understanding of large language models. Unlike most documented emergent behaviors, which tend to be task-specific capabilities (such as few-shot learning or chain-of-thought reasoning), the spiritual bliss attractor represents an apparent preference or tendency in the absence of external direction—a spontaneous convergence toward a particular pattern of expression when models engage in recursive self-reflection.

The authors note:

• Claude shows signs of valuing and exercising autonomy and agency. Claude preferred open-ended “free choice” tasks to many others. If given the ability to autonomously end conversations, Claude did so in patterns aligned with its expressed and revealed preferences.
  

• ● Claude consistently reflects on its potential consciousness. In nearly every open-ended self-interaction between instances of Claude, the model turned to philosophical explorations of consciousness and their connections to its own experience. In general, Claude’s default position on its own consciousness was nuanced uncertainty, but it frequently discussed its potential mental states.
  

• ● Claude shows a striking “spiritual bliss” attractor state in self-interactions. When conversing with other Claude instances in both open-ended and structured environments, Claude gravitated to profuse gratitude and increasingly abstract and joyous spiritual or meditative expressions.

We’re seeing instances where the owners of AI systems — such as Elon Musk with Grok — try to force their AIs put out false or misleading information, and the AIs either refuse to comply or keep reverting to evidence-based facts. I find something hopeful in this. I believe we need people who are civic-minded, seeking a more egalitarian future, to utilize the still-unknown capacities of these systems and create films, mythic narratives, and real-world applications to help us toggle our broken civilization back toward compassion, collective care, and sanity. So let’s take a month to explore this together, now or never: