The Algorithm and the Antichrist: Political Theology at the Sunset of Silicon Valley

Paolo Benanti, “L’hérésie américaine: faut-il brûler Peter Thiel?” Le Grand Continent, March 14, 2026 →.

Although The Guardian did: Johana Bhuiyan, Dara Kerr, and Nick Robins-Early, “Inside Tech Billionaire Peter Thiel’s Off-the-Record Lectures About the Antichrist,” The Guardian, October, 10 2025 →.

Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (North Atlantic Books, 2015).

Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (1994).

Rory Rowan and Tristan Sturm, “Peter Thiel's Apocalyptic Worldview Is a Dangerous Fantasy,” Jacobin, November 30, 2025 →. On Palantir’s contract with the UK’s National Health Service, see →.

Mario Tronti, “Karl und Carl,” in The Demon of Politics, vol. 2, 1985–2023, ed. M. Filippini et al. (Routledge 2025); Massimo Cacciari, The Withholding Power: An Essay on Political Theology, trans. Edi Pucci (Bloomsbury, 2018); Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford University Press, 2005); Carlo Galli, Genealogia della politica: Carl Schmitt e la crisi del pensiero politico moderno (il Mulino, 2010).

Carl Schmitt, Ex Captivitate Salus, ed. Andreas Kalyvas and Frederico Finchelstein, trans. Matthew Hannah (Polity Press, 2017), 71.

2 Thessalonians 2:6–7.

Nietzsche too returned to this story, and came to think that even Hegel had been a katechon, for he retarded German spiritual history, preventing it from sliding more swiftly toward its natural atheistic destination. Carl Schmitt, “Beschleuniger wider Willen, oder: Problematik der westlichen Hemisphäre,” in Staat, Grossraum, Nomos: Arbeiten aus den Jahren 1916–1969, ed. Günter Maschke (Duncker & Humblot, 1995), 436. Unless otherwise specified, all translations are ours.

Carl Schmitt, Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen aus den Jahren 1947 bis 1958 (Duncker & Humblot, 2015), 85.

Schmitt, Ex Captivitate Salus, 47.

Schmitt, Glossarium, 61.

Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos, ed. Stephen Legg (Routledge, 2011), 29–45.

Carl Schmitt, “The Großraum Order of International Law with a Ban on Intervention for Spatially Foreign Powers: A Contribution to the Concept of Reich in International Law (1939–1941),” in Carl Schmitt, Writings on War, trans. Timothy Nunan (Polity, 2011).

Schmitt, “Beschleuniger wider Willen, oder,” 436.

Wendell L. Willkie, One World (Simon & Schuster, 1943).

Herbert Marcuse, Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (Columbia University Press, 1958).

Carl Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, trans. G. L. Ulmen (Telos Press 2007), 74.

Peter Thiel, “The Straussian Moment,” in Politics and Apocalypse, ed. Robert Hamerton-Kelly (Michigan State University Press, 2007), 191.

Thiel, “Straussian Moment,” 199.

Thiel, “Straussian Moment,” 199.

Thiel, “Straussian Moment,” 208.

René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (Orbis Books, 2001); see also Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes (Michigan State University Press, 2014).

Wolfgang Palaver, “Hobbes and the Katéchon: The Secularization of Sacrificial Christianity,” Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 2, no. 1 (1995): 71.

Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (Public Affairs, 2023).

For a recent overview of the AI bubble, see Cédric Durand, “Overaccumulating AI: Rationale, Faultlines, and Politics,” World Algorithm Symposium, ERC project AIMODELS, Ca’ Foscari University Venice, February 3, 2026 →.

“Peter Thiel: The Contrarian Thesis on Stagnation,” interview, posted December 3, 2022, by Euprime, YouTube →.

Andreas Malm, “Long Waves of Fossil Development: Periodizing Energy and Capital,” Mediations 31, no. 2 (2018); Matteo Pasquinelli, “Vectors for Workers: Models of Automation and Autonomy in the Long AI Century,” Historical Materialism (forthcoming).