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.