e–flux Journal

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

Giorgio Cesarale and Matteo Pasquinelli

Benjamin West, Death on the Pale Horse, 1817. Collection: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. License: Public Domain.

Issue #164

June 2026

In September 2025, Peter Thiel—data overlord and éminence grise of the Trump presidency—convened a series of closed-door lectures in San Francisco on a subject that was, by Silicon Valley standards, rather gothic: the Antichrist. The theme was untimely. Or perhaps it was all-too-timely given investors’ anxieties about the AI bubble and the approaching end of the present economic cycle. Mobile phones were forbidden, so the lectures went unrecorded, spawning urban legends. In March 2026, Thiel attempted to replicate the lectures in Rome, a few hundred meters from the Vatican. Father Paolo Benanti, once an AI advisor to Pope Francis, repudiated Thiel’s plan and compared it to a “theological regime change.”

There is no need to recover the content of these specific lectures to know what was discussed. For at least twenty years, Thiel has openly constructed a political theory of the enemy and a cosmology of enmity, feeding a paranoid view of a single world government ruled by “woke” culture while advancing the business of private intelligence companies in state apparatuses. Ultimately, Thiel distorts scripture and manipulates the figure of the Antichrist to represent his business competitors rather than adversaries of the US. In this “confusionist” strategy, the Antichrist refers to a spectrum of decoy enemies—including European social democracy, environmental movements, public-sector workers, and coronavirus researchers—without forgetting China, the truly global adversary that remains the only force capable of contesting US hegemony and its sovereign data monopoly.

In his lectures on the Antichrist, Thiel (who studied philosophy at Stanford under the French philosopher René Girard) drew upon the sophisticated interpretations of the Apocalypse offered by the German jurist Carl Schmitt, one of the legal theorists of National Socialism. Not unlike Thiel’s attempt to position the US in the present geopolitical order, Schmitt was obsessed with positioning Germany against the communist threat, and with the construction of the enemy figure. Why concern ourselves today with Thiel’s elucubrations, carried out against the backdrop of global wars? The reference to Schmitt evokes a parallel between a Weimar Germany on the brink of the catastrophe of the Second World War, and the US of today on the brink of a potentially equivalent catastrophe. 

On the one hand, the revival of the Antichrist trope appears as just the latest toxic meme to circulate within US political discourse. On the other, it also represents a symptomatic case of right-wing agitation in which the economic crisis (of both the industrial and digital sphere) fuses with the old gnostic substrate of Silicon Valley and a new warmonger techno-nationalism. Thiel’s operation follows a certain logic: It is a marketing cover-up for the privatization of signals intelligence (SIGINT) in the US and Western countries, with the promise to secure digital supremacy in the AI arms race with China. In this sense, Thiel’s operation is an extension of the Obama doctrine on SIGINT and is part of the long history of operations research and cybernetic analyses of the “ontology of the enemy” in US foreign policy. Meanwhile, Thiel’s company Palantir benefits from generous public contracts to assist in several dubious enterprises: helping the US’s ICE profile migrants, Israel’s IDF target Palestinians, and the UK’s NHS “treat” patients.

Luca Signorelli, Sermon and Deeds of the Antichrist, 1499. Collection: Orvieto Cathedral. License: Public domain.

Here, we deconstruct Thiel’s system of ideas by tracing its origin in Schmitt’s interpretation of the theological concept of the “katechon,” an obscure biblical notion concerned with resisting the Antichrist (and global civil war). We also read political theology through the lens of political economy, the operations of the world algorithm, the stagnation of Western digital capitalism, and the struggles of the global working class and nonaligned countries. Ultimately, we look beyond a world system of bipolar conflicts.

Paul’s Katechon: The Political Force That Restrains Chaos in the Roman Empire

In the Second Letter to the Thessalonians, Saint Paul prophesies a mysterious figure who “holds back” (katechon) the advent of an “adversary” that is traditionally identified as the Antichrist: “And now you know what restrains [the adversary] so that he may be revealed in his own time. For the mystery of iniquity is already at work: Only he who now restrains it must be removed.” The katechon has often been identified with the Roman Empire and its Emperor: state forces holding back the coming of the Antichrist (chaos), but therefore also the coming of Christ, who arrives to defeat the Antichrist at the end of times. The katechon refers, in some sense, to the dualism typical of the Christian polis, in which spiritual authority (the Church) recognizes secular power (the state) as separate and yet in its service and in service to the world. In the early twentieth century, the idea of the katechon—of a state form that holds back the Apocalypse of human civilization—was exhumed and claimed by Schmitt’s reactionary project. At the end of the twentieth century, the theme underwent another revival within Italian political philosophy. Authors such as Mario Tronti, Carlo Galli, and Massimo Cacciari read the katechon as a force that must mediate social and political antagonism; by contrast, Giorgio Agamben read it as a force that hides the illegitimacy of each and every power. The return of the figure in Silicon Valley today is a third populist iteration, in which the katechon is imagined as restraining a techno-nationalist revolution.

In political theology, some authors identify the katechon with a positive state form that “restrains” the advent of evil (that is, the destructive instincts of human nature), while others identify it with a negative state form that “restrains” the advent of the good—originally understood as the coming of the Messiah and, subsequently, by secular analogy, as the coming of modern revolutions. In a manner analogous to Thomas Hobbes, Schmitt read the state as a force that at every moment prevents the disintegration of civilization by repressing the conflictual impulses of the human. Thiel has appropriated this idea to entertain the fantasy that public and international institutions oppose the manifest destiny of US capitalism. In US political discourse, a Greek term such as “katechon” could never achieve popular traction. For this reason Thiel replaces it and conflates it with “the Antichrist,” conjuring nefarious imagery. In Thiel’s vision, a highly heterogeneous ensemble of subjects present themselves as candidates for the role of Antichrist. At the same time, Thiel’s Antichrist—as he himself has confirmed—is really just a rhetorical device for implicitly naming the most threatening competitor to US capitalism: China.

Schmitt’s Katechon: The Political Force that Restrains Communism in Europe

Schmitt’s reinterpretation of the katechon cannot be understood outside the context of its writing: Accused by the Allies of collaboration with the Nazi regime, Schmitt penned Ex Captivitate Salus in a jail cell, amidst the gigantic transformations of the international system triggered by the Second World War. Though the book purports to be a self-defense, it’s also an attempt to write history from the perspective of the loser’s side. Schmitt flirts with the desire for death, for suicide, but cannot accommodate himself to it; the time of Seneca and of Stoic suicide has long passed, bound as it was to a world without sacraments, in which the Christian eschaton had not yet been revealed. More to the point, suicide is out of the question because it would be the deception of a man who, enclosed in his solitude, failed to recognize other men, and above all the other who would seem to disavow him: the enemy. Who is the enemy? The one who “can call me into question.” But who can call me into question? “Only I myself. Or my brother. The other proves to be my brother, and the brother proves to be my enemy.” These may seem like dialectical moves, but they also refer to Genesis: “Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel. Thus begins the history of humankind. This is what the father of all things looks like. This is the dialectical tension that keeps world history moving, and world history has not yet ended.”

For Schmitt, enmity is the originary fact of human reality, for it is through the enemy that men are capable of self-recognition. At the same time, enmity must be disciplined by a form—not only to avoid dangerous consequences like uncontrolled aggression, but also to preserve the rational potential of primary recognition among men. This potential finds expression in law, the supreme form of conflict regulation in human societies. Much of humanity, however, is not content to regulate conflict through the rational instrument of the law. They invent utopias and fashion political doctrines that postulate the unity of the human species and the affirmation of universal brotherhood (“workers of the world, unite!”), perhaps achieved through centralized planning.

Schmitt observes the waning of religious universalism in his time and the transformation of humanity, through international law, into a political subject. As such, humanity will require an enemy. But what kind of enemy? When humanity becomes a political subject, its enemy must by definition be a nonman, a nonperson. The criminal, the parasite, the vagrant are nonmen, to be discriminated against and annihilated. On the level of geopolitics, when a state or group of states appeals to international law in the interest of waging a “just” war, they represent the interests of humanity as a whole. All other states and the individuals belonging to them will be regarded as nonmen, nonpersons. When this occurs, what does human history proceed toward? One possibility is the real unity of the human species—which for a Christian is akin to the last coming of Jesus. Another possibility, as described by Saint Paul, involves the katechon:

First there must come the apostasy, and the man of iniquity must be revealed, the son of perdition, the adversary, who exalts himself above everything that is called God or is an object of worship, so as to seat himself in the temple of God and present himself as God. Do you not remember that I told you these things when I was still with you? And now you know what restrains him so that he may be revealed in his own time. For the mystery of iniquity is already at work: only he who now restrains it must be removed. 

In the 1942 essay “Involuntary Accelerators, or: The Problem of the Western Hemisphere,” Schmitt speaks for the first time of “that which restrains” (to katechon) and “he who restrains” (ho katechon). These phrases designate the force that holds back the adversary—the filius perditionis, the anomie—from manifesting itself by pretending to be God and thereby seating itself in His place in the Temple. Schmitt explains that the figures and vestments of the katechon, of this distinctive and mysterious power, have been many throughout history. Tertullian, as well as many other representatives of the Christian patristic tradition, held this retarder of the end to be the Roman Empire. During the Middle Ages, this title was transferred to the Holy Roman Empire, through the doctrine of translatio imperii, which reconnected all imperial history to its origin in the Roman Empire.

The contours that Schmitt imparts to the katechon are observable in the last three examples adduced in Involuntary Accelerators. The first of these, almost a historical curiosity, is the Emperor Franz Joseph, who “restrained” the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire by his mere physical existence. The other two examples are the Czech president Tomáš Masaryk and the Polish marshal Józef Piłsudski, both of who played a crucial role in slowing the advance of communism. Masaryk is discussed with some precision in the Glossarium, the diary notes Schmitt wrote immediately after his release from captivity in 1947:

Masaryk the father was an authentic European katechon; the katechon of Western liberal democracy. He operated with admirable historical awareness—infinitely superior to that which German politicians, philosophers, and historians were capable of demonstrating at the time—and made a very shrewd choice for the West. 

At a delicate juncture in European history, while the council revolution was raging in Germany, Masaryk made a moderate choice and aligned the Czech Republic with Western liberal democracy, escaping international communism. This “restrained” the advance of communism in the heart of Western Europe.

We might ask if the Antichrist, for Schmitt, was the labor movement and international communism? In a certain sense yes, if we recall that Schmitt’s true nightmare was worldwide unification through integrated economic and technical planning. But that is not all. Schmitt grasps very clearly—far more than the average cultivated Westerner—that the turning point of contemporary history is the nexus between 1848 and 1917, between the publication of the Communist Manifesto and the affirmation of Leninism with the victory of the October Revolution. Thanks to the Manifesto, which was communism’s “constitutional charter,” socialists and communists gained a monopoly on the meaning of the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on the continuity between the revolution of 1848 and the First World War.

Titian, Cain and Abel, between 1542 and 1544. Collection: Santa Maria della Salute. License: Public domain.

The great igniter of the twentieth-century conflagration is Lenin, who takes up the Catholic and medieval doctrine of the bellum justum, or “just war,” bending it toward unprecedented aims in Socialism and War (1915). The Leninist motto of the transformation of world war into world civil war—into the world war of the working class against capitalism—restores “civil war” to the center of history. A civil war, for Schmitt, is the worst kind of war, since like that of Cain and Abel,

it is a war between brothers, because it is fought within a common political entity that encompasses the opponent within one and the same legal order, and because both sides of the struggle simultaneously assert and deny this common political entity in absolute terms. Both place the opponent absolutely and unconditionally in the wrong. They suspend the rights of the opponent, but they do so in the name of justice.

Furthermore, world civil war (or world class war) places the adversary outside of humanity and thereby declares a war against law, which, as the regulation of the primary fact of existence (or enmity), ensures that the two enemies recognize each other as members of the human universal. Leninism is thus Catholic in a fundamental element of its strategy, yet is at the same time the most profound enemy of Catholicism. It has seated itself, in Pauline fashion, “in the temple of God,” presenting “itself as God.” Is communism therefore the antikeimenos, the adversary against which the katechon must be invoked? In a certain sense it is. But matters are far more complicated, as we shall see.

In the Glossarium, Schmitt records his reply to a letter from Pierre Linn: “Do you know my theory of the katechon from 1932?” What happened or came to maturation in 1932 to inspire in Schmitt’s mind the image of the katechon as a means of comprehending the historical continuum stretching from the end of the Roman Empire to the present? Only hypotheses can be ventured here. The same year, Schmitt wrote “Forms of Modern Imperialism in International Law,” in which certain fundamental theses of his essays on international law of the 1940s and 1950s, and of the Nomos of the Earth, were anticipated. In an almost Marxist vein, Schmitt argues there that modern imperialism clothes itself in universalistic ideological justifications—the defense of humanity, of international law, of peace, and so on—but must above all assert its economic dominion. He argues that the United States has done so since 1823, since the enunciation of the Monroe Doctrine, which made it possible to exclude any European intervention in the Western hemisphere in order to establish its own sphere of influence. The US’s imperialist internationalism is of a new type, he contends, for it is no longer grounded in the distinction between Christian and non-Christian peoples, as was the old jus publicum europaeum, but between creditors and debtors. Who were the great creditors and debtors of the time? In 1932, the year of the Lausanne Conference, they were the US and Germany. That year was also when Schmitt collaborated with the chancellor of the Weimar Republic, Kurt von Schleicher. Was Germany during the final phase of the Weimar Republic—a Germany not yet Hitlerian—the katechon against the antikeimenos, against the American adversary that imposed its world hegemony by obliterating the great European space?

John Martin, The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, 1822. Collection: Tate Britain. License: Public domain.

Certainly there was a period in which Schmitt hoped that the US would not enter the war, or at least would not do so against Germany. This sentiment is found in a lengthy essay written between 1939 and 1941, “The Großraum Order of International Law with a Ban on Intervention for Spatially Foreign Power,” where Schmitt announces the crisis of the jus publicum europaeum, which had been founded on a felicitous equilibrium of European states that nonetheless projected conflict—itself regulated—onto the colonized countries. The moment had now come for a new international law, of which the US was the forerunner, with its announcement of the Monroe Doctrine. Following its example, other great geopolitical blocs must form—the so-called “great spaces”—each guided by a dominant power, endowed with its own concrete political principle and capable of limiting external interference. Schmitt’s hope did not last: In the aforementioned 1942 essay “Involuntary Accelerators,” he writes that Roosevelt, with “the intrinsic absence of decision in his manner of proceeding,” prevented the US from acting as katechon, aligning it instead with the side of the involuntary accelerators. This acceleration was toward the unity of the world—the true face of the antikeimenos. The US was in fact about to enter an anti-fascist alliance with the USSR, moving closer to the “one world” of which the 1940 Republican presidential nominee Wendell Willkie had spoken in a book of the same title—a great obsession for Thiel, who imagines the UN-China axis as the contemporary incarnation of this project.

In Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth—which, we must remember, was completed in 1945 but not published until 1950—he defends the heterogeneous plurality of great spaces amidst the anti-fascist alliance between the US and the Soviet Union. Schmitt never emphasized the significance of the Cold War and therefore the East-West dualism; nor was he a “Cold Warrior.” Rather, he adhered to the ideas of James Burnham, who argued in his early work that the managerial revolution encompassed all advanced countries, and Raymond Aron, who argued that the production of mass goods by “industrial society” transcended the opposition between capitalism and socialism. These are also the ideas of a certain Frankfurt School, for instance of the Marcuse of Soviet Marxism. Had Schmitt known them he might well have appreciated them.

Far more decisive for Schmitt was the split between the Soviet Union and China following the 1956 Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Schmitt intuits that this split marks a new epoch in the history of international communism. Its consequence is the opening of a third space in geopolitics, populated not only by China but also by the nonaligned ex-colonial countries that had gathered at the Bandung Conference in 1955. His theorization of great spaces was returning to relevance, but in order to reestablish its credibility he had to demonstrate that the third great space was endowed with its own political principle, anchored in a concrete order. (Playing on the possibilities of the German language, Schmitt underscored that every Ordnung, every “political order,” is also an Ortung, a “spatial localization.”) His Theory of the Partisan (1963) demonstrates this by investigating Maoism as an intensification of Leninism’s social war as world civil war, but in a particular inflection that transforms the communist militant into a partisan—an unleashed member of a nomadic and irregular military formation. The partisan has a profound relationship with the justissima tellus—their own land and community—which they ardently defend against the invader. One might suggest that the partisan’s rootedness in their own land is one of the principal antidotes against the voluntary (USSR) and involuntary (US) accelerators of techno-planetary unification. Was Mao’s China the last katechon, a metamorphosis of Leninism that, reinterpreting and containing Leninism itself, stifled it?

Thiel’s Katechon: The Political Force that Restrains China

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, US economic, political, and military apparatuses reorganized themselves. In July 2004, against this backdrop, Peter Thiel and Robert Hamerton-Kelly convened the conference “Politics and Apocalypse” at Stanford University to discuss the political situation with their teacher Girard. Thiel presented his essay “The Straussian Moment,” which over the following decades would have a remarkable fate. “From The Wealth of Nations on the right to Das Kapital on the left, and to Hegel and Kant and their many followers somewhere in between,” claimed Thiel, “the brute facts of September 11 demand a reexamination of the foundations of modern politics.”

The conference aimed to clarify the existence of a new geopolitical enemy. In his presentation, Thiel did this by conscripting Schmitt and his overtheorizing of the political centrality of the enemy: “The high points of politics are the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.” Thiel recasts Schmitt’s agonistic ethos as a moral lesson about the decadence of US citizens and the peoples of the West. “If a part of the population declares that it no longer recognizes enemies, then, depending on the circumstance, it joins their side and aids them.” Thiel concludes with a cosmological vision animated by the ancient principle polemos pater panton (“war is the father of all things”) and a universal religion of enmity: “Absent an invasion by aliens from outer space, there never can be a world state that politically unites all of humanity. It is a logical impossibility.” The anthropology of Schmitt is counterposed to the universalism of the Enlightenment, which has allegedly brought the West to ruin with its architecture of international institutions and its conspiracy of One World Government.

Thiel goes on to argue that the US and allied governments should invest massively in intelligence services and digital supremacy in order to defeat “terrorism.” Thiel thus theorizes (and publicizes) the necessity of a company like Palantir, which he cofounded barely a year earlier: “Instead of the United Nations, filled with interminable and inconclusive parliamentary debates that resemble Shakespearean tales told by idiots, we should consider Echelon, the secret coordination of the world’s intelligence services, as the decisive path to a truly global pax Americana.” With this Thiel actually criticizes Schmitt for being too transparent with the enemy, and praises Strauss for his political strategy centered on secrecy.

It is at this 2004 conference that Thiel begins to discuss the katechon, incorporating it into his worldview. He discovered the theme of the katechon via the Austrian theologian Wolfgang Palaver, whose essay “Hobbes and the Katechon: The Secularization of Sacrificial Christianity” inspired Girard’s own reading of the katechon. At the Stanford conference, Palaver presented a paper titled “Carl Schmitt’s Apocalyptic Resistance against Global Civil War.” Within the conference’s reactionary intellectual milieu, Girard’s principle of “mimetic violence” was fusing with Schmitt’s katechon to forge a dispositive in which difference and enmity guarantee the equilibrium of the world. In an almost blasphemous inversion of agape (Christian love for one’s neighbor), Palaver asserted that war breaks out precisely where solidarity prevails. For him, it was the disappearance of differences wrought by the “single thought” of globalization that was driving humanity toward civil war:

Mimetic theory offers us an alternative paradigm. It assumes that human conflicts are more likely to arise if differences disappear and equality starts to characterize human relationships. Brothers not strangers are more likely to become enemies. According to mimetic theory, it is the disappearance of differences in our globalizing world that is most threatening.

Palaver thus sketches the foundational principles of what will subsequently be developed by Girard and adopted by Thiel in the following decades.

Thiel’s Anthropological Stagnation

It is, indeed, easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Unmistakably, Thiel’s agitation around the Antichrist is but an ideological mirror of the US economic crisis, in which state actors have repeatedly instrumentalized cultural archetypes in the fight for political hegemony (a strategy synthesized in the Breitbart motto “politics is downstream from culture”). Thiel’s theological marketing serves to distract everyone—both workers and investors—from the true causes of stagnation, also driven by the crisis of data monopolies.

Thomas Couture, The Romans of the Decadence, 1847. Collection: Musée d’Orsay. License: Public domain.

In a permanent war economy still determined by energy rents, the only new sector that appears to drive business is AI, but this too is facing a growth crisis and the limits of scale. The development of algorithms to construct AI models is only one component of AI infrastructure. Even more important assets are data collected about consumer behavior, and high-quality training datasets that are usually created by gathering (often pirating) digitized records from public and private libraries. Large AI models require ever larger and faster data centers, which have disastrous ecological impacts. The AI business model appears to have reached an infrastructural limit that has not yet been offset by the success of applications such as ChatGPT and Claude. Nobel Prize–winning economist Daron Acemoglu sees no indication that AI is increasing productivity. For these reasons, major AI companies such as OpenAI appear to be at a standstill, operating with large budget deficits—and fueling concern over a massive speculative AI bubble.

To understand the nexus between the crisis of the digital economy and the ideology of techno-nationalism—between the Algorithm and the Antichrist, in other words—we must also look at China’s AI ambitions, which benefit from a de facto state monopoly on data. China has strategically distributed free, “open-weight” AI models such as DeepSeek. (Open-weight does not mean open-source, as they do not disclose the composition of training data—data being precisely what makes the real difference in AI competition.) In an attempt to emulate China’s state monopoly, Silicon Valley companies have planned an aggressive infiltration of US state agencies. As the largest private military intelligence company, Thiel’s Palantir is at the forefront of this effort, specializing in data analysis for Western governments and even local municipalities. Measured by capitalization, Palantir is larger than Lockheed Martin, which gives one an idea of the size of the AI bubble. Palantir’s business model depends on state contracts (often from the military) and privileged access to the data of public institutions in Europe.

To debunk Thiel’s lectures on the Antichrist, it suffices to read them against his positions on the current economic stagnation. In a 2022 interview conducted at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank, Thiel expounded his theses on stagnation, ascribing it to anthropological rather than economic causes. He explained the slowdown of economic and technological progress in a fragmentary and contradictory manner, pointing to the moral and scientific decadence of the West rather than to the failure of neoliberalism as a socioeconomic order. He claimed that progress had slowed because science has focused only on information technologies (“we were promised flying cars and instead we got 140 characters”). He lamented that information technologies (which include his own companies) had become “less charismatic,” and he offered a grudging recognition of the social crisis they have precipitated:

I think the computer Internet revolution was the one big exception, and it is striking how uncharismatic that has become over the last six or seven years where, you know, even in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, the felt sense is that most people are somehow being left behind, that it is not, it’s not this utopian inclusive future at all.

It is symptomatic that in attempting to explain the causes of stagnation, Thiel cites “sclerosis and overregulation in government” and “ways education institutions have deranged.” He then paints an obscurantist picture in which “human nature” is the true cause of the ills of the present world, while the acceleration of capitalism has only helped to combat such ills. He attributes the slowdown of progress to a generic collective phobia around the dangers of science—an accusation that Thiel must be careful to calibrate, given the position of the MAGA base regarding the origins of Covid-19 and vaccines. And when Thiel discusses the alleged harms of biotechnology in the context of Covid, he points to the obligatory scapegoat, China:

We should have a ticker tape parade for the scientists who invented the mRNA vaccine, which is, again, [an] impressive breakthrough in biotech, and I think we’re uncomfortable giving them a ticker tape parade because immediately adjacent to the mRNA vaccine is … the sort of gain-of-function research that was being conducted at the Wuhan lab. 

Such observations offer a view of the contradictory character of US techno-nationalism, caught between the urgency of scientific research and the anti-scientism of the MAGA base, which is probably the true restrainer of political progress.

Even though Silicon Valley already enjoys technological hegemony over society—resulting in the mass alienation caused by social networks, among other ills—cultural hegemony remains a central battlefield for Thiel. He regards “woke” culture as a katechontic power that causes stagnation. He also includes the Club of Rome and its Limits to Growth report in this “culture of stagnation.” Almost one-third of the interview is concerned with China, which is simultaneously demonized and implicitly lauded as a worthy adversary. China is the alter-ego of the US; in an unconscious inferiority complex, Thiel seems to be describing the US itself when he accuses China of xenophobia. Conceding that China cannot be defeated militarily given its population size—approximately four times that of the US—Thiel proposes innovation as a strategic weapon that the US should wield to gain scientific and technological supremacy, which explains his attack on technophobia and AI regulation elsewhere in the interview. His theses on stagnation are connected to a broader geopolitical and historical reading in which the principal katechontic forces (gathered under the label of “the Antichrist”) are, as for Schmitt, integral to the project of a One World Government: “If you were to use … the biblical terminology, it’s the Antichrist, the one-world totalitarian state, and there’s always a sense where I think we should be at least as scared of the Antichrist as of Armageddon.”

In general, Thiel catastrophizes about the potential outcomes of the current economic-technological cycle without remembering that similar cycles of expansion, stagnation, and recession have occurred at least five times since the first industrial age. One should position the age of AI within the long century of industrial automation and information technologies. Thiel is the de facto leader of Silicon Valley’s new techno-nationalism—that is, the recent rightward shift taken by many tech companies as a response to the crisis of digital capitalism and the US economy. The theological debate on the katechon signals not the end of times, but the likely end of the narrative of the Manifest Destiny of the United States, compelled to reckon with ancient theological controversies as it reaches the limit of its technological frontier. The Antichrist is born, this time, from the ruins of the Algorithm.

From the Third Space to Trans-Systemic Movements

The main actors in the present world order remain intertwined and antagonistic. The sociologist Giovanni Arrighi read the rise of contemporary China, for example, as the outcome of its anti-colonial struggle against the West, suggesting that the process of its political emancipation was the engine of its economic transformation. On this view, the subaltern East has transformed the rule of the hegemonic West and reversed the longue durée of financial accumulation. Such Western dialectical readings, however, should be placed alongside Chinese thought’s own accounts of the process. China today appears to be restructuring itself around the defense of a postwar “universal” that is based on novel criteria. While Western political doctrines continue to try to revive the role of nation-states, the philosopher Wang Hui has argued that the history of China is better grasped as a dynamic between “trans-systemic societies” and “trans-societal systems.” The former contain multiple systems of governance, law, and social organization rather than operating under a single unified logic, while the latter—which include things like trade networks and religious traditions—span multiple societies, linking them without merging them into one polity. At the global scale, trans-societal systems extend well beyond China and constitute a prismatic order of such complexity that it is difficult to imagine Thiel’s reductive katechon succeeding in dividing them.

Just as Schmitt tried to advise Germany to escape the geopolitical corner into which it had been backed—caught between its war debts to the US and the communist threat of the USSR—so Thiel tries to exploit the same theoretical arsenal to urge a strategy upon the US as it faces economic stagnation and a hegemonic confrontation with China. Yet Thiel overlooks the outcomes of the short twentieth century. Schmitt imagined that the US could aid Germany against the USSR. The opposite occurred: The Americans and Soviets ultimately formed an anti-fascist alliance against Germany. In his attempt to imagine a new counterbalancing of powers, a new geopolitical triangulation, Schmitt ultimately included China as essential to the equilibrium of the world order. The key difference between then and now (which Thiel fails to grasp) is that there is no new actor that could today aid the US, since Europe is no longer a secure ally and Russia falls within China’s sphere of influence. A third space capable of balancing current powers is still in formation—unless one counts the “Third Block” of emerging and nonaligned countries, and the new global movements against war and authoritarian politics.

Techno-nationalism has bet on digital supremacy while failing to recognize that its infrastructures are more fragile than the old analogue ones. The wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran have reminded everyone that energy and information infrastructures will increasingly be the targets of military strikes and sabotage operations alike. This is true for oil refineries and power plants as much as for mobile networks and data centers. (In the case of the internet, this vulnerability is contrary to its original conception, in which a decentralized architecture would enable it to survive an attack on any one of its nodes.) Data centers in particular have become nodal points of global confrontation and contradiction: centralizing apparatuses of labor automation, labor management, knowledge extraction, military intelligence, and financial speculation, with very high costs in energy and water consumption—an alarmingly fragile concentration of powers.

The true weakness of digital capitalism, however, lies not in the vulnerability of its infrastructure but in the collapse of the social bond on which it was premised. The crisis of the digital economy compounds the earlier crisis of the industrial economy and the inability of contemporary capitalism to absorb surplus populations and guarantee prosperity. The MAGA movement initially gained momentum by co-opting the resentment of both blue- and white-collar workers, who are now increasingly displaced by the new AI economy. Yet the MAGA project of radicalizing class structure in the US is reaching a point of exhaustion. The new composition of labor (gig work and micro-work) affecting people all over the planet—especially younger generations—is about to disintegrate. It will not be easily depoliticized by the new authoritarian agenda. The data center economy will collapse, not because the AI financial bubble bursts but most likely because the social pact with the gig workers and micro-workers of platform capitalism collapses. As is well-known, the international division of AI labor falls along old colonial lines, connecting data annotation sweatshops in the Global South to data centers in the Global North. Will the “wretched” of the earth reunite with the “wretched” of the digital world, reactivating the internal social antagonism of late capitalism against militarization and geopolitical campism? Universalism is a partisan project, and the current predicament calls for a new generation of partisans of the universal to contest the cosmology of enmity. Will a new generation of transnational, trans-institutional, and trans-systemic partisans build the missing universal from below?

Notes

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).

Category

Technology, Fascism, Religion & Spirituality

Subject

Artificial intelligence, Christianity, Geopolitics

Return to Issue #164

Giorgio Cesarale is Full Professor in Political Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His latest book is A Sinistra: Il pensiero critico dopo il 1989 (Laterza, 2019).

Matteo Pasquinelli is Associate Professor in Philosophy of Science in the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, where he coordinates the ERC project AIMODELS. His latest book, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (Verso, 2023), won the 2024 Deutscher Memorial Prize.

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