What follows is a small - though impudent - side riff from one of the chapters of my upcoming book about Artificial Intelligence (isn't everyone writing one?) In chapter two I cite many different Doom Scenarios, some of them just cautionary and others fiercely luddite or anti-technology.
But in this riff... sampled here in advance... I take a look at another kind of “anti-enlightenment” zealotry out there. This variant is not luddite. Nor does it favor technology-relinquishment. Rather, the self-named “dark enlightenment” is eagerly gung-ho about cyber data gathering and utterly credulous about the likelihood of breakout AI.
And tes, readers of Contrary Brin will find a few aspect familiar, while others are shockingly new.
As I write this passage, one wing of Silicon Valley ‘tech-bro’ billionaires has allied itself with unabashed proto-feudalists now roaming the halls of the White House, calling for an end to the “failed experiment in mass democracy” and a return to more classic social orders, of the kind that reigned across most continents, for most of the last sixty or so centuries – everywhere that agricultural surplus enabled local lords to hire thugs to enforce their ownership over masses of peasants, below. And never mind that the Liberal West accomplished far more, across the last century, than all other times and places in the human past… combined. Romanticism sees what it wants to see, especially when a delusional masturbation-incantation is self-serving.
This modern version of reactionary anti-liberalism – also called neo-monarchism – proclaims disdain toward the very system that educated, enriched and eventually empowered its devotees, providing every comfort and opportunity imaginable. Adherents promoting this cause now demand that mob rule be replaced by a “CEO-monarch” with absolute power to get things done, no longer impeded by bureaucrats enforcing so-called rule-of-law. And above all, that singleton king should need get complete freedom from accountability.
While the preceding paragraph may sound polemically pretentious or excessive, it doesn’t exaggerate. Not even in the slightest. And I elaborate about this modern cult elsewhere. (Including how some members, having built their mountaintop ‘prepper’ fortress-redoubts, now openly avow wishing to ‘accelerate the Event,’ a purportedly-coming Civilizational Collapse that will topple corrupt western society.)
For a chillingly excellent depiction of the outcome that they seek, I recommend Vladimir Sorokin’s short novel Day of the Oprichnik.
As for the Dark Enlightenment’s pertinence in a book about artificial intelligence and its implications, well, one feature of that movement merits some further mention… the involvement of those ‘tech-bros.’ Because a number of the very same fellows whose names you see across these pages – having been outrageously enriched by the relatively flat-fair-creative and socially-mobile University America – are now leveraging all of that to invest heavily in AI.
Moreover, some (certainly not all) of them have also bought into a movement to end the very same social mobility that benefited them, in a modern West that they now denounce as inflexible and decadent. One that hampers their efforts to bring about…
…to bring about what?
Wel I elaborate in Chapter 9 of my book the widely shared motive of achieving some form of personal immortality, perhaps through AI-driven medical advances. Or else by pairing-with or uploading-into cybernetic entities. But those redemptions will likely lack one ideal trait that these fellows desire – exclusivity to a narrow, ruling caste. Not unless some scenario erects a caste system, monopolizing such goodies only for an elite. Which, of course, is part of the fantasy.
Then there is a different form of immortality. One that propels male reproductive strategies all across Nature… maximization of offspring. Indeed, we are all descended from the harems of brutally insistent men who pulled off that trick across the ages, passing along some of their traits and drives. (I leave it as an exercise for the reader to spot and name those in the tech community who clearly fall into each of the categories listed in the preceding two paragraphs.)
== The archetype exemplar isn't who you think ==
But here I want to mention one more type of immortalist drive. One that may strike some readers as quaint, as it is also terrifying. It was typified in a September 2025 series of ‘confidential lectures’ by Paypal/Palantir impresario Peter Thiel. Confidential lectures (that were recorded and leaked, of course) offering his unique perspectives concerning the antichrist.
Subsequent articles and summaries emphasized Thiel’s blithe slurring of “candidate antichrists,” a list that includes Bill Gates, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom, a panoply of Democrats… and Greta Thunberg, of all people. Yudkowsky because he now supports moratoriums and restrictions on AI development. Bostrom because he warns of potential AI failure modes. As for Thunberg and Gates, they appear – in Thiel’s eye – to support some kind of global governance, ostensibly to save the planet, but in ways that might constrain or guide further AI developments.
Alas for those of us wishing to grapple with Peter’s theological specifics, these have been glossed-over, or entirely ignored, in subsequent articles about the event. (I can understand most journalists being uninformed about the subject matter. But you don't have to be. For a fun and easy intro to the BoR (Book of Revelation) see Patrick Farley's manga version - Apocamon - wherein you’ll get a gist of the New Testament’s gruesomely sadistic back-end. The part that so many of our neighbors prefer over the actual words of Jesus -- His diametrically-opposite sermons that Jimmy Carter touted, across 80 years teaching Sunday School.)
What makes all of the above pertinent to the AI Revolution is the common element. That all of Peter Thiel’s assigned antichrist candidates stand – in one way or another – athwart any path to achieving his own desired place in the world to come.
In both worlds to come. One of them above – amid clouds and harps – after mortality. But far more urgently, power in this temporal reality, wherein ultimate supremacy awaits those who consolidate unaccountable empires of data and data-crunching. And sure, that dearly desired, universal surveillance panopticon certainly must incorporate plenty of AI.
And hence, completely separately, I would love to see a point-by-point checklist of antichrist traits that were described by John of Patmos, when he predicted that dire fellow’s imminent arrival within a single generation…
...whereupon we might compare that list to Greta Thunberg, to Bill Gates, to Eliezer Yudkowsky, to Donald Trump… or to Peter Thiel.
== But the news-of-distration doesn't pause for theology ==
Surely ONE of the 247 would step up for the prize? Small problem though: "Trump himself was president on January 6, 2021, and had been president for nearly four years at that point. As such, it was Trump’s FBI, so to speak, not Biden’s, and in any event, the claim is false."
But the real problem?
Shouting "That's not true!" doesn't work. Because MAGAs don't care. In fact, yelling it gives them food. It reminds them of when they bullied nerds on the playground, relishing the whine "That's not fair!"
On the other hand, there are tactics to confront lies that do confront them where it hurts... terrifies them. And no one - certainly not a single rich person who could do it and help save America - has the imagination or gumption to try.
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