Peter Thiel Fears the Antichrist Is Coming
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Without spoiling too much, it is related to civilizational stagnation, and that our lack of progress risks catastrophic outcomes.
Nobody sells books by saying that our issues are a result of general neglect by society as a whole, only movie villains push numbers.
Like what we saw in Minneapolis, amirite?
Centralization of power isn’t a narrative it’s an accelerating reality.
I am having a hard time thinking of a mode of power that isn’t far more centralized today than it was just 2, 4, 6, 8, … years ago.
Electrical power. That used to be almost entirely centralised, but it's increasingly easy to be off-grid.
Manufacturing power. I don't know the full dynamics, but there's clearly a lot of cheap good tools easily available, so the term "cottage industry" still makes literal sense.
Comms. Twitter becoming X pushed a lot of decentralised alternatives with similar vibes.
That said, if you go back 20 years, you get the pre-Facebook world and the pre-Twitter world for comms, but you lose cheap good home 3D printing and a specific district in China was becoming the obvious heavily centralised place for all modern consumer electronics to get made.
Of course, go back to 1800 and you get something like, IDK, 70% of the world's internationally traded cutlery being made in Sheffield? I may be off by a lot there, that's just a rough guess given its dominance.
The percentage of goods manufactured in the world that come from the set of the top 5 or top 10 or top 100 or top 1000 sources have all increased today relative to before.
I agree on electricity though. Cheap solar panels have made distributed energy possible in a way that was unimaginable even 20 years ago.
Relevant to your comment, increases in 3D printing capabilities have not translated into a reversal of manufacturing centralization in China’s favor.
That centralization continues as instability (often defended as an attempt to act against centralization) has perversely disrupted and pulled back manufacturing investment elsewhere.
As an individual, you may be able to do more, or choose from more niches. Even as the vast majority of resources and impact flow to fewer entities by volume.
It frightens the incumbent powers badly: https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=2321&Year=2025
That's a good way to recognize sources and movement of power.
But the mass of everything keeps centralizing.
So the two are not contradictory. Together they imply an increasing dearth of middle diversity/distribution of choices and players.
Increased choices (the menu) can happen at the same time as decreased diversity of choice (flocking, herding) or capacity (sourcing).
So I don’t think you are wrong, despite centralization still being overwhelming.
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Despite 3D printers, manufacturing in particular has been centralizing in China for decades, and this trend has only increased over the last year as politics and economic instability have hampered manufacturing investment outside China.
Being able to print anything, doesn’t turn around economics and structure that hamper creating major supply chains and new manufacturing centers.
Anymore more than being able to write and publish, and an increase in voices, is turning back the general tide of people en masse viewing/reading and self-exposing themselves to fewer uncoordinated voices.
Economic power is centralizing in fewer mega corporations and in the hands of an increasingly dominant economic minority.
Tech business power in capitalization and sources for the best components is centralizing.
Political parties power is centralizing. Very dramatic changes relative to previous decentralization between different party scales, like local vs. Federal. And far more “personal” centralization like has happened at the top in US parties.
Especially in the US, dramatic power centralization across all three branches of government, over the top of the checks and balances, and intended competing roles, that maintain the US Constitution’s relevance as a constraint on autocracy.
Social media over the last two decades has greatly centralized communication and media. And most of all, popular influence.
That power grows despite the emergence of decentralized alternatives. A reversal in favor of decentralization overall would be welcome.
The creation of huge centralized governmental and corporate caches of deeper and richer surveillance information, is a massive submerged centralization of power.
Device lockdowns on outside ecosystem software continues to increase, relative to the typical consumer.
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Long tails operate at the fringes, and matter to many. But they are not slowing down overall economic, technological, social and political centralization.
Bonus content: witchcraft is a lost art and we have become feminised.
Well in case of fighting climate change, he is right, Id say?
He is not smart. Most of his fortune is directly tied to extremely lucky bets on Facebook and PayPal. Palantir is a boring government contractor that makes glorified ERP software.
And he has really, really dumb opinions.
True. Personally, I think my first clue was when he gave millions of dollars to people who want to round up LGBTQ folks like himself and load them into boxcars.
Just another "high-agency" bozo who confused getting lucky with being smart.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/peter-thiel-...
Sins are just a metaphor on human (animal) impulsiveness due to faulty instinct; the Church just said 'think before you act, you might screw up greatly'. LLM's are like loaded dice in nature, thus, the output will never be reproducible but pretty much close enough in the 99% of caases, like a Markov based chatbot on stereoids (small LLM's and a GB trained Hailo will mainly converge in how to behave internally).
LLM based products are actually much closer to the Christian 'devil' -human prejudices causing bad acts, instead of slow analysis with reproducible proofs- than anything else. Because over time the accuracy gap without human revision will just get bigger and bigger upon feeding LLM's between themselves.
I reckon not every podcast can be as excellent as The Rest Is History, for example.
I’m waiting for some coverage on the pillock from this side of the pond.
If you're worried about someone coming to your party, perhaps start with not sending them a gold-leafed invitation.
I presume all of Thiel's noise about the antichrist is a play at trying to maintain some support for techno-fascism from the religious fundamentalists after they're done satiating themselves with the recent Crusades. The reality is of course that the closest thing we have to an antichrist figure is sitting in the White House, having charmed millions with his blatantly false promises.
Last week someone challenged him on his claim that Iran had tomahawks and they bombed their own school. First time I've heard anyone directly challenge him. His response was "I don't know enough about it" classic bs packpedal, like any kid caught in a lie. Next day CNN stories were "trump doesn't know what's happening in the war, others are running it and he's unaware", completely missing the obvious truth, he lied to misdirect people on the school bombing, one person challenged it, he lied again to backpedal.
Some days it's like he has a supernatural ability to get away with lies
(Of course they also have a lot of details that are easy to latch onto as mere justifications for doing immoral things. And as moral people move on from traditional religion, then the share of people merely using it as crutch for immorality grows)
The archetype of a leader who engages in abjectly evil behavior while gathering ever more power and followers under a charm spell certainly rings true. But the dynamic is probably more like an individual being particularly adept at releasing the floodgates for our own worst impulses, rather than some supernatural power.