Who is the Antichrist?

Who Is the Antichrist?

There’s a difference between histories and secret histories. WIRED tends to avoid the former, for the same reason we hate anniversaries: There’s nothing WIRED about looking backward. (If you’re about to point out that we’ve done anniversary stories before and even put out whole anniversary issues, shut up, yes, I’m well aware, and I threw a proper fit every time.) But a secret history? Which, in making jarring adjustments to the past, tampers ineluctably with the shape of the future? That’s a WIRED move to its core.

This week’s Big Story works as a secret history on two levels. The first is literal—it literally tells the backstory of Peter Thiel’s obsession with the Antichrist for the first time. (If you hadn’t heard, that’s been going on for at least a couple years now, and it’s just as popcorn-horror-movie as it sounds.) The second is more spiritual. The big ideas in Laura Bullard’s piece “The Real Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Obsession” have to do with hidden forces throughout history. She nests Thiel’s secret intellectual history, in other words, within a larger (Christian) theory of the human race. It’s a religio-philosophical trip, and a triumph.

Maybe I’m making too much of this secret-history thing. It’s not as if Thiel ever tried to cover up these influences (though at least one of them he’s never publicly acknowledged). Nor are the philosophies under discussion exposing anything like actual conspiracies. And, finally, at the end of the day, knowing any amount of history, secret or otherwise, can affect the way you think about the future.

Still, one of the many things I thought about while reading the piece was this: ChatGPT knows its history. So much history. Need it to give you a primer on the Antichrist or a gloss on Girardian mimesis? No problem. But could it have connected the dots and written this story? Does it have any idea how one of the most pivotal figures of our time, a billionaire and a political kingmaker who’s now trying to save the whole goddamn world, came to care about the Antichrist, or what that means? Of course not. You need humans for that. ChatGPT doesn’t know a single, not a single, secret.

 READ THE BIG STORY ➔ 

Palantir and Policing

I should have been less surprised than I was to learn, in this week’s Big Story, that right after Peter Thiel founded Palantir, he penned an essay claiming mass surveillance can stave off the apocalypse. Convenient. 

While the actual scale of Palantir’s surveillance capabilities is decidedly unknowable (with federal contracts come federal secrets), its state-level dealings are relatively easy to uncover. Or so Mark Harris explained in a 2017 Backchannel original feature, “How Peter Thiel's Secretive Data Company Pushed Into Policing.” Through an extensive months-long investigation, Harris revealed how, during the mid-2010s, the data analytics company took over California’s law enforcement community jurisdiction by jurisdiction, contract by contract. One agreement spiraled into a tangled (and propriety) statewide ecosystem, from which local police departments had no hope of escaping—to say nothing of the California citizens who became increasingly surveilled and targeted because of it. Reading Harris’ piece, I couldn’t help but remember that, according to Thiel, this was all in service of holding off the Antichrist. Read both pieces and then share your thoughts: What will Peter Thiel do next? Send an email to samantha_spengler@wired.com or comment below the article.

For last week’s Big Story we shared a selection from WIRED’s politics issue in which legendary Silicon Valley whisperer Steven Levy reflected on the shock of seeing once-revered technologists cave to the MAGA-sphere. I asked you whether the days of deifying wunderkind cofounders might be coming to an end. One reader emailed to say “I respected the techno founders when they were focused on doing good by bringing information and technology to everyone. Sadly too many people revered them … so they came to believe they are God.” Another called upon Steven’s reference to Icarus: “The Greek concept of hubris leading to subsequent downfall seems more and more relevant.”

Tell us about your favorite WIRED stories and magazine-related memories. Write to samantha_spengler@wired.com, and include “CLASSICS” in the subject line.