Tip-Off #207 - Not with a Beast but a Spreadsheet
Rethinking Peter Thiel’s Apocalyptic Tech Theology.
Peter Thiel is more than a billionaire with opinions. He’s an influential Silicon Valley figure—founding investor in PayPal, Palantir, and Facebook, and a philosophical outlier who draws from code, markets, and darker veins of political theory.
Thiel has long admired Carl Schmitt, the legal theorist who argued that the political is fundamentally defined by the friend-enemy distinction, and Leo Strauss, many of whose admirers approach ancient political philosophy not merely as a corrective to modernity but as a source of enduring alternatives to it. Thiel invokes Strauss—though many dispute his interpretation—to claim he “no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Thiel was also a student of the cultural theorist René Girard, whose ideas on imitation and desire significantly influenced his thinking. He adapted Girard’s philosophy to support his own “anti-mimetic” thinking—a call to resist modern culture's herd instincts and embrace contrarian belief. For Thiel, that often means monetizing contrariness as the best bet on the market. Play your cards right, and unpopularity can pay off. Just like criminal indictments. Keep a poker face.
Thiel is a mentor and key financial sponsor of J.D. Vance, whose rise reflects the convergence of cultural grievances, apocalyptic rhetoric, and political ambition.
These are not household names--but they help explain Thiel’s taste for civilizational crisis, strong authority, and grand narratives of decline. So when Thiel lectures invoking AI as a kind of Antichrist, it’s not mere provocation—it’s a worldview, offered with the weight of capital and a strange sort of theological intensity.
His claims, recently outlined in UnHerd, deserve more than curiosity or dismissal. They require a response grounded not in fear or futurology, but in theology, political responsibility, and an understanding of what we may still become.
Thiel warns that AI, as total surveillance, resembles the Antichrist of Christian eschatology. But this comparison distorts the tradition it attempts to invoke.
The Antichrist, in Christian thought, isn’t a machine, a system of code, or a network. It’s a spiritual counterfeit—a false messiah, not a superintelligent spreadsheet. The Book of Revelation offers metaphor, not predictive analytics. The Beast isn't housed in a database. The danger of AI lies not in its divinity or damnation, but in human misuse, moral evasion, and the old temptation to exalt power over wisdom.
Thiel's reading risks collapsing theology into paranoia—mistaking the symbolic depth of apocalyptic literature for a tech roadmap. This bypasses Christian eschatology's actual drama, which concerns not machines run amok but misplaced worship, distorted desire, and false sovereignty.
There’s also a civic danger in this thinking. By casting AI as an unstoppable evil that requires messianic urgency, Thiel risks justifying the authoritarianism he claims to fear. If technology is the Beast, what sort of empire will we build to restrain it?
When fear becomes the premise for political action, democracy suffers. Strongmen rise not to preserve freedom but to save the people from their own fragility—a pretext for power.
And for all its seeming boldness, Thiel’s framing ultimately reflects a retreat into fatalism. The idea that technological destiny is locked in—beyond accountability, beyond reform, beyond shared agency—undermines the very civic structures that could shape it.
What’s missing in Thiel’s vision is not a stronger warning but deeper confidence. Christianity proclaims a promise, not anxious hope: that nothing—not empire, entropy, nor death—has the final word over creation.
The story doesn’t end in collapse. It ends in restoration. The Christian imagination holds that what is broken is remade, the hidden revealed, and the human, however flawed, is never beyond grace. The final word is not technological catastrophe but divine astonishment: resurrection, transfiguration, the return of all things to their source.
Technology raises fundamental questions. It is a human product, shaped by human hands. It demands attention, not alarmism. AI is not the Antichrist. It is a tool—dangerous in the wrong hands but not beyond reach of the Good.
The deeper Christian vision isn't about betting on outcomes but recognizing that reality is sustained and completed by a beauty we do not create. That beauty will not be outmatched by code.
Regardless of sharing the Christian vision, we can agree that fear of our own inventions is a poor excuse for lacking moral clarity or political courage. If we can still vote, still speak, still build coalitions—why act as if the future is already decided?
If that sounds far-fetched, it's far less so than giving ultimate power to a fatalistic vision, making it another Golden Calf. Peter Thiel may have hedged his own bets by investing in cryonics—planning to be frozen for preservation (via Alcor Life Extension Foundation).
Notes and reading
Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) was a German political theorist who emphasized the centrality of conflict and the distinction between friend and enemy in politics. He is often associated with authoritarian legal theory and critiques of liberalism. Schmitt has been rediscovered and considered relevant to current debate, not just on the right.
Leo Strauss (1899–1973) was a political philosopher preoccupied with the crisis of modernity and the decline of engagement with fundamental questions of justice, virtue, and the good. While some of his followers have interpreted his work as a defense of hierarchy, tradition, and conservative politics, his concern was principle, not program and policy. The intensity of ongoing praise and criticism reflects his considerable impact on political philosophy and intellectual history.
René Girard (1923–2015), now called “theologian of Silicon Valley,” contrary to his predilection. Girard was a French theorist of culture and religion best known for his theory of “mimetic desire”—the idea that human beings learn what to want by imitating others, which leads to rivalry, scapegoating, and violence. Thiel studied under Girard at Stanford and cites his work as formative. He, in turn, became a significant influence on J.D. Vance, both intellectually and professionally, including financially backing Vance's political career.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism - Shoshana Zuboff (2019). A foundational critique of how data-driven systems shape political and social power. She is a Harvard Business School professor emeritus and social psychologist who bridges business, technology, and social theory.
Additional
The Concept of the Political - Carl Schmitt (1932; the 2007 edition includes a critical introduction by Tracy Strong, renowned political theorist). A brief but influential text defining politics through the friend-enemy distinction.
Violence and the Sacred - René Girard (1972). A foundational text explaining how mimetic rivalry underlies both mythology and social order.
"Peter Thiel’s visions of Apocalypse" - Jacob Howland, UnHerd (May 29, 2025). Howland is Provost, Dean of Intellectual Foundations, and Professor of Humanities at the University of Austin. - Also, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power (2021) - Max Chafkin. A definitive biographical work connecting Thiel's philosophical influences to his concrete business and political activities.
That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation - David Bentley Hart (2019). A forceful and theologically rich vision of ultimate restoration in Christian eschatology and the inadequacy of sentimentalized “hope.” Hart is a prominent public theologian known for the depth of his theological commentary on contemporary cultural and philosophical debates.
Alcor Life Extension Foundation - Peter Thiel, investor. For whole-body cryopreservation, a minimum of $200,000 is required (neuro preservation reduces storage costs to $80,000)—one-time payments made upon legal death, typically funded through life insurance policies.
Tip-Off #206 - The Death of Humanity…Again
Forthcoming #208 - The Burnout Gospel