Christianity has always been transhumanist, so this development with the “newly minted ortho bros” (laugh-cry emoji) isn’t surprising. I only wish this type of technerd did more *cool* nerd stuff like LARPing, D&D, fantasy novels etc…then maybe they’d have an outlet for their power fantasies and not need to use the world as a giant sim game. These guys though, they’re like some new breed of autistic nihilist nerd that scares the shit outta me because they have access to unlimited resources and zero sense of irony or imagination.
Yup. I share your fears and repulsion. The issue of Christianity being deeply transhumanist is fascinating, a complex topic! The “theosis” in Orthodoxy was put to the side in the Western church but its traces are there. I suspect I will be returning to this topic!
My short take on it is that the transhumanist fantasies of Musk and the boyz is the result of their hyperliteralism, a total lack of imagination and capacity for thinking metaphorically. It’s Christian eschatology dumbed down into its most literal form. It’s not a bad way to think about the antichrist…Jesus being a master of metaphor and parable, surely the antichrist will be a hyper literal robot-like figure who will destroy the world by trying to save humanity in its dumb, anti-empathic way.
I wish those cats learned how to plant a garden. They might have a more realistic appraisal of the challenges involved in a successful space colonization effort. Tim Leary was the same airhead, of course. Same with Robert Anton Wilson. "City boys", as Yvon Couinard calls them.
You're right about the transhumanism of Christianity. It's at least pro-transhumanist. The reality is that we've been on the transhumanist path for some time now. Some of us have plastic parts.* Some of us have had organ transplants. I mean, the reality of medicine had better be compatible with Christianity. The questions remain of where to draw the ethical lines, but a prohibitionist effort is out of the question. When I think about CRISPR research and so forth, I feel like I'm at the mercy of forces more powerful than myself to prevent it. I'd prefer to see some sort of triage--so that people with the worst conditions would get the remedies first. But, you know, consumerism...maybe the cosmetic surgery profits will pay for the MS therapies, or something. But that's getting ahead of the game. There are physiological obstacles. For some studies of the new therapies, decades will be required: understand, this is mutation. Not necessarily bad, but with a lot of unknowns. It's in the cards that some of the answers will be easier to find out than others. Most of us--including myself--are in the habit of considering the challenges of genetic modification as a project similar to building a rocket to Mars. But over time I've gotten acquainted with some of the uncertainties remaining in the process, and now it looks to me as if developing successful gene therapies included some aspects that are more like cultivating a Biosphere. Speaking of which, what if a Biosphere had ever been built that actually worked as designed? (Hint: study scale models first.)
There's this attitude that is seriously attached to the realization of their Fantasies Now. And some of those fantasies are very ambitious. So ambitious that--while it's possible that there's some Grand Upgrade for humanity on the horizon--I wouldn't bet the farm on a prospect that ambitious.
*most forms of plastic--PP,PE-- are quite nontoxic and non-carcinogenic. So plastics make good replacement parts, for human bodies. Fortunate, considering how bad plastics are in so many other ways.
I like your balanced approach. Yes we have been on this path for a long time. But the gap between the accelerationist Fantasies and the inevitable pushback from ecological and physical reality only seems to be growing. City Boys aren’t half as bad as Screen Boys!
Beware of the A/V mediated level of experience. The orders of remoteness are detached and untrustworthy. Except for music, music doesn’t count. It’s a recorded medium that’s also 1st order experienced sensory Reality.
Text is untrustworthy, too. But the interaction is cleaner. And, well, text is text. It doesn’t get any more real to read this message on a paper page. The 2-D screen serves the same purpose. Shifty, due to edits. But at the basic perception-cognition level, stable. Doing what an alphabet should.
Make the Screen into trompe l’oeil, though. 3-D video, and anything can happen. Especially with AI. I’m still not sure about some of those trick animal videos.
I’m not sure about the correlation between ‘plastic parts’ and trans-humanism. I see plastic prosthetics as using tech to mimic natural parts, which I feel is a lot different than using tech to escape the body and natural earthly systems all together. A prosthetic leg seems downright quaint when compared to the carbon fibre fins that athletes are fitted with to jump higher, run faster etc., not to mention silicon brain implants that would give you access to “unlimited knowledge”. The whole movement gives of gnostic vibes that I find disturbing, because (again) the crass literalism of it all.
Prosthetics restore people to a place more complete than they otherwise would be without that technology being available. Or, as you've noted, mechanical assistance enhances their abilities. Genetic tinkering is an order of magnitude more fraught, of course. I expect that natural impediments to progress will be more complicated in some aspects, and less complicated in other aspects, and perhaps in some ways entirely foreclosed. Like I said, the people first in line to be offered the option of promising experimental gene therapies are those most gravely disabled or most critically ill. And everyone else should wait their turn. I'm fine with being at the back of the line. As for the people who are determined to throw their money at breeding perfect little yuppie puppies with CRISPR, in my opinion that's a much riskier experiment than people want to admit.
Fascinating stuff, thank you. I find Peter Thiel an individual of horrifying banality who seemingly just wants to innovate us all to death with no regulation but dresses this up in Curtis Yarvin monarchical dreams and prophecies. The folks at Trashfuture have a joke about Climate Stalin as the way to fix the planet but it's very consciously a joke when we're controlled by big business. Thiel is apparently still pearl clutching, however, worried that we won't get anything as wondrous as Facebook or weaponized surveillance again and that he won't make another few billion.
The Christians (especially the Catholic conservatives) and the tech accelerationists also find common ground on the desirability of having loads of kids. Thiel was cultivated by Opus Dei’s vicar in the US, Arne Panula, while he was a student at Stanford and ever since. Panula suggested to him that US technological stagnation (one of Thiel’s bugbears) began in 1971 with the pill and roe vs wade - fewer American kids, less innovation. Though the transhumanists are generally in favour of IVF and genetic enhancement of course, and the Catholic Christians less so. Still you get some odd blends - JD Vance is both against IVf and a Thiel-inspired investor in a gene therapy company…
Thanks for this. I started to write about natalism for this piece but realized I needed to bone up on the sort of intricate alignments you describe. But the birth rush does seem a place where even non racist conservative old school folks get lured into transhuman procedures and proto eugenics “solutions.” Gotta mint that space faring remnant!
Look at that speaker's list, includes some of the most deranged wingnuts (Jack Posobiec, Raw Egg Nationalist) and people like Robin Hanson (GMU economist who is a guru to the Bay Area Rationalist movement). Thread: https://bsky.app/profile/jennycohn.bsky.social/post/3llovx36wmc27
Loved reading this Erik. Just wish Dale was here because I know he’d have a lot to say given his early life as a PK, his years working in Silicon Valley and just who he is/was
Thanks Laura. There are so many angles on Silicon Valley especially in earlier decades where in some very significant ways the freaks and the Whole Earthers and the liberal science types were in control. But it was an era not a lasting condition. Scott Malcolmson s book SPLINTERNET is a short brilliant telling of this tale, how the Internet pressed against the military industrial complex and then collapsed back in.
Your scholastic sharpness does have a clarifying effect. In this case you've been able to describe how the circle was squared between ultra traditional Christian Conservatives and the trans-humanist Silicon Valley scene, between those who want absolute boundaries and those who admit no boundaries to form a surprising (and concerning) political coalition.
Excelent post. Quinn Slobodian also managed to track these various waring fractions, and possibly even The Corporation Wars Series by Ken MacLeod. Altough honestly Dolph Lundgren as Karl "The Street Preacher" Honig in the big screen version of Johnny Mnemonic also managed to fuse the Trad Transhumanist mercy merc.
Insightful and incisive, always—thanks for pulling the trigger on this one and sharing your thoughts.
Your point about the silicon-conservative coalition being a shotgun wedding got me thinking: is there a poster boy for this split personality? How about Jordan Peterson? Here’s a speaker who straddles the same line, tap-dancing between chaos and order. On one side, he’s crawling through Jung’s underworld, sniffing out archetypes like a bloodhound. He invokes Nietzsche and talks a lot about self-overcoming—face the darkness, clean your room, get your act together. But then he bolts it all down to good old Judeo-Christian values—pre-fab ethics Nietzsche would have torched without a second thought.
It’s not just silicon versus conservative—or Peterson, either. This tension is baked right into your own inestimable TechGnosis project: tech as the fast, hot, forward charge; gnosis, cold and slow, digging backward, peeling back the skin of knowledge like old wallpaper. One eye on the future, one on the ancient glyphs. Same uneasy marriage.
The question is, can a bird with wings pulling in opposite directions really fly? And, perhaps more to the point of your post—can we guess which wing’s gonna buckle first?
"“Science and technology are natural allies to this Judeo-Western optimism, especially if we remain open to an eschatological frame in which God works through us in building the kingdom of heaven today, here on Earth — in which the kingdom of heaven is both a future reality and something partially achievable in the present.”
I'm not necessarily opposed to this framing. But priorities are paramount. An extra level of ethics. Using advanced genetic technology to return someone else afflicted with a disabling disease like MS or spinal injury to health is infinitely more important as a goal than aiding the personal desires and drive ambitions of Poor Mortal Me.
Your "Fiery Accelerant" piece was well done -- it offers an important realization about the current techno Christian "convergence" (really a re-convergence, as the "techno" here is the child of Western science -- which at its epistemological root is already a Judaeo-Christian endeavor). I can't say "I enjoyed it" as there is something about all this MAGA-techno-Christian drama which I increasingly find extravagantly dull -- even as it gets more completely bonkers, there's so little original, vivacious imagination at its core, that its weirdness feels tedious and stale. I don't know how to describe it other than my sense that this death-cult desire to "immanentize the eschaton" is so inherent and boringly inevitable in Western Culture, that there is something deeply banal to it, and this is made even more wearisome by current moronic ideations...
I guess, the flip-side of what I'm trying to articulate is that it seems that so many of the problems that humanity now faces -- from climate to socio-economic/political -- all stem from an extreme failure of imagination. I believe it was Blake who wrote "nature is imagination itself". And imagining often has ecological agency -- it informs how we interact with the world. With the navel gaze of modernity and widespread loss of even the most rudimentary ecological literacy, imagination has atrophied to the point where many people no longer have the imaginal capacity to even glimpse the effervescent wonder of the world around them, let alone understand how every one of us co-creates that world with each breath and every action, or envision any kind of fertile future (just look at how film and literature has been choking on the same rehashed dystopian narratives for decades). Instead we have purblind misanthropes like Thiel and his fellow tech-barons whose 'genius'** seems to me, at best, the mental equivalent of acid reflux after a rich meal made by other hands...
I guess we'll all get to experience what happens as the inescapable ecology of physical existence makes itself ever more present through climate-driven disaster that no amount of riches, hubris and matte magical thinking can insulate one from...
I'm not holding my breath, but if there's some silver lining to this dark storm's clouds, perhaps it's that catastrophe will force greater numbers of people to re-engage with physical reality, and mayhap this will rouse imagination’s slumber and rehydrate desiccated thinking... though at what cost?
___
**(Admiring accumulation of wealth and power as a kind of genius is too often idolizing a stolid sociopathy. If we're going to allow people to wield such king-like power, then we should at least demand that their right to power rests on their ability to imagine, harness and ensure the living fecundity of the land -- like the European kings of medieval legend or the Sapa Inca of the pre-Conquest Andes.)
4/1/2025 or 4-1-9 or 14...so let us look at Chapter XIV in The Book of Revelation
"And I saw, and behold a Lamb standing on mount Zion, and with him a hundred forty-four thousand, having his Father's name written upon their foreheads."
#613, The Apocalypse Revealed by Emanuel Swedenborg (The Rotch Edition, 1890)
By a hundred and forty four thousand are signified all those who acknowledge the Lord alone as the God of heaven and earth, and are in truths of doctrine from the good of the love from him through the Word.
This is really brilliant. I'm so grateful for writers like you. This piece really starts blazing in the last few paragraphs where you talk about the paradoxes in the governing approaches to Climate change, AI bonkers, and accelerationist optimism. It's maddening just to see people lost trying to make sense of all this mythic cultic contradictory apeshit, let alone explain it. You point to these mega colliding forces (Christianity and Tech) and, I couldn't help notice, in the background, almost what you said on Scapegoats for instance, but definitely seems worth mentioning is the mind boggling absurd hypocrisy in the form of adopting the Whiny Victimization trope. The cruelty cult loves that shit. And it's textbook fascism right? Act victimized (like nazis, like Musk, or worry about the Antichrist) and they're on their way to whipping up the sycophants to erupt in their own ids for Trumpism. So, you didn't see this coming in Techgnosis? That journey you took to India recently is an amazing story, where I can tell you gleaned more insights. This bad trip is hard to make up. Keep on/Carry on!
Appreciate the fullness of your text, continually horrified by the absurd hubris of Thiel and company. Thiel seems intoxicated by some manner of vision, a too common affliction of insanity that overcomes a percentage of psychedelic users (I've been studying that community since I made a film on Aldous Huxley back in 1990 and more recently Neurons to Nirvana)...He probably believes he is on a mission. I see him as being arrogant, delusional, badly educated and so rich he has no reason to develop self reflection. See my article on Palantir: A stark example of the gap between the hype surrounding tech solutions and their real-world effectiveness is the case of Palantir. This company, lauded for its supposed ability to predict and prevent security threats using advanced data analytics, notably, catastrophically failed to foresee or mitigate the October 7th attacks. Its heavy promotion as a tool for terrorism detection and national security showed its wall of defence to be as thin as air - at least in the case of the USA’s number one ally, Israel.
The silence around this failure is not incidental but a calculated effort to obscure how ineffective these tools often are compared to the grandiose claims made by their billionaire backers.
Thanks for the link! What’s hard for me to judge is the extent to which Palantir is directly responsible for how their tech is used — even the company waffles on responsibility, sometimes strutting as the new newer cops on the block, other times saying we just make data management tools, etc.
Christianity has always been transhumanist, so this development with the “newly minted ortho bros” (laugh-cry emoji) isn’t surprising. I only wish this type of technerd did more *cool* nerd stuff like LARPing, D&D, fantasy novels etc…then maybe they’d have an outlet for their power fantasies and not need to use the world as a giant sim game. These guys though, they’re like some new breed of autistic nihilist nerd that scares the shit outta me because they have access to unlimited resources and zero sense of irony or imagination.
Yup. I share your fears and repulsion. The issue of Christianity being deeply transhumanist is fascinating, a complex topic! The “theosis” in Orthodoxy was put to the side in the Western church but its traces are there. I suspect I will be returning to this topic!
My short take on it is that the transhumanist fantasies of Musk and the boyz is the result of their hyperliteralism, a total lack of imagination and capacity for thinking metaphorically. It’s Christian eschatology dumbed down into its most literal form. It’s not a bad way to think about the antichrist…Jesus being a master of metaphor and parable, surely the antichrist will be a hyper literal robot-like figure who will destroy the world by trying to save humanity in its dumb, anti-empathic way.
I wish those cats learned how to plant a garden. They might have a more realistic appraisal of the challenges involved in a successful space colonization effort. Tim Leary was the same airhead, of course. Same with Robert Anton Wilson. "City boys", as Yvon Couinard calls them.
You're right about the transhumanism of Christianity. It's at least pro-transhumanist. The reality is that we've been on the transhumanist path for some time now. Some of us have plastic parts.* Some of us have had organ transplants. I mean, the reality of medicine had better be compatible with Christianity. The questions remain of where to draw the ethical lines, but a prohibitionist effort is out of the question. When I think about CRISPR research and so forth, I feel like I'm at the mercy of forces more powerful than myself to prevent it. I'd prefer to see some sort of triage--so that people with the worst conditions would get the remedies first. But, you know, consumerism...maybe the cosmetic surgery profits will pay for the MS therapies, or something. But that's getting ahead of the game. There are physiological obstacles. For some studies of the new therapies, decades will be required: understand, this is mutation. Not necessarily bad, but with a lot of unknowns. It's in the cards that some of the answers will be easier to find out than others. Most of us--including myself--are in the habit of considering the challenges of genetic modification as a project similar to building a rocket to Mars. But over time I've gotten acquainted with some of the uncertainties remaining in the process, and now it looks to me as if developing successful gene therapies included some aspects that are more like cultivating a Biosphere. Speaking of which, what if a Biosphere had ever been built that actually worked as designed? (Hint: study scale models first.)
There's this attitude that is seriously attached to the realization of their Fantasies Now. And some of those fantasies are very ambitious. So ambitious that--while it's possible that there's some Grand Upgrade for humanity on the horizon--I wouldn't bet the farm on a prospect that ambitious.
*most forms of plastic--PP,PE-- are quite nontoxic and non-carcinogenic. So plastics make good replacement parts, for human bodies. Fortunate, considering how bad plastics are in so many other ways.
I like your balanced approach. Yes we have been on this path for a long time. But the gap between the accelerationist Fantasies and the inevitable pushback from ecological and physical reality only seems to be growing. City Boys aren’t half as bad as Screen Boys!
!
Beware of the A/V mediated level of experience. The orders of remoteness are detached and untrustworthy. Except for music, music doesn’t count. It’s a recorded medium that’s also 1st order experienced sensory Reality.
Text is untrustworthy, too. But the interaction is cleaner. And, well, text is text. It doesn’t get any more real to read this message on a paper page. The 2-D screen serves the same purpose. Shifty, due to edits. But at the basic perception-cognition level, stable. Doing what an alphabet should.
Make the Screen into trompe l’oeil, though. 3-D video, and anything can happen. Especially with AI. I’m still not sure about some of those trick animal videos.
I’m not sure about the correlation between ‘plastic parts’ and trans-humanism. I see plastic prosthetics as using tech to mimic natural parts, which I feel is a lot different than using tech to escape the body and natural earthly systems all together. A prosthetic leg seems downright quaint when compared to the carbon fibre fins that athletes are fitted with to jump higher, run faster etc., not to mention silicon brain implants that would give you access to “unlimited knowledge”. The whole movement gives of gnostic vibes that I find disturbing, because (again) the crass literalism of it all.
Prosthetics restore people to a place more complete than they otherwise would be without that technology being available. Or, as you've noted, mechanical assistance enhances their abilities. Genetic tinkering is an order of magnitude more fraught, of course. I expect that natural impediments to progress will be more complicated in some aspects, and less complicated in other aspects, and perhaps in some ways entirely foreclosed. Like I said, the people first in line to be offered the option of promising experimental gene therapies are those most gravely disabled or most critically ill. And everyone else should wait their turn. I'm fine with being at the back of the line. As for the people who are determined to throw their money at breeding perfect little yuppie puppies with CRISPR, in my opinion that's a much riskier experiment than people want to admit.
Wonderful, thank you
Fascinating stuff, thank you. I find Peter Thiel an individual of horrifying banality who seemingly just wants to innovate us all to death with no regulation but dresses this up in Curtis Yarvin monarchical dreams and prophecies. The folks at Trashfuture have a joke about Climate Stalin as the way to fix the planet but it's very consciously a joke when we're controlled by big business. Thiel is apparently still pearl clutching, however, worried that we won't get anything as wondrous as Facebook or weaponized surveillance again and that he won't make another few billion.
Climate Stalin! I am printing the r shirts now…
The Christians (especially the Catholic conservatives) and the tech accelerationists also find common ground on the desirability of having loads of kids. Thiel was cultivated by Opus Dei’s vicar in the US, Arne Panula, while he was a student at Stanford and ever since. Panula suggested to him that US technological stagnation (one of Thiel’s bugbears) began in 1971 with the pill and roe vs wade - fewer American kids, less innovation. Though the transhumanists are generally in favour of IVF and genetic enhancement of course, and the Catholic Christians less so. Still you get some odd blends - JD Vance is both against IVf and a Thiel-inspired investor in a gene therapy company…
Thanks for this. I started to write about natalism for this piece but realized I needed to bone up on the sort of intricate alignments you describe. But the birth rush does seem a place where even non racist conservative old school folks get lured into transhuman procedures and proto eugenics “solutions.” Gotta mint that space faring remnant!
So this just happened: https://www.natalism.org/
Look at that speaker's list, includes some of the most deranged wingnuts (Jack Posobiec, Raw Egg Nationalist) and people like Robin Hanson (GMU economist who is a guru to the Bay Area Rationalist movement). Thread: https://bsky.app/profile/jennycohn.bsky.social/post/3llovx36wmc27
Loved reading this Erik. Just wish Dale was here because I know he’d have a lot to say given his early life as a PK, his years working in Silicon Valley and just who he is/was
Thanks Laura. There are so many angles on Silicon Valley especially in earlier decades where in some very significant ways the freaks and the Whole Earthers and the liberal science types were in control. But it was an era not a lasting condition. Scott Malcolmson s book SPLINTERNET is a short brilliant telling of this tale, how the Internet pressed against the military industrial complex and then collapsed back in.
sounds like a book worth looking into
I’m sure it will find a suitable place in the library 📚
Your scholastic sharpness does have a clarifying effect. In this case you've been able to describe how the circle was squared between ultra traditional Christian Conservatives and the trans-humanist Silicon Valley scene, between those who want absolute boundaries and those who admit no boundaries to form a surprising (and concerning) political coalition.
Thank you. Clarity and articulation around currents and transformations like this is one of the main goals.
Really fascinating stuff. This is the kind of shit I am thinking about these days as well. Subscribed.
Excelent post. Quinn Slobodian also managed to track these various waring fractions, and possibly even The Corporation Wars Series by Ken MacLeod. Altough honestly Dolph Lundgren as Karl "The Street Preacher" Honig in the big screen version of Johnny Mnemonic also managed to fuse the Trad Transhumanist mercy merc.
Outstanding, thank you so much Erik. This is one of the most comprehensive of Thiel that I've seen.
Just Plain Weird…
Insightful and incisive, always—thanks for pulling the trigger on this one and sharing your thoughts.
Your point about the silicon-conservative coalition being a shotgun wedding got me thinking: is there a poster boy for this split personality? How about Jordan Peterson? Here’s a speaker who straddles the same line, tap-dancing between chaos and order. On one side, he’s crawling through Jung’s underworld, sniffing out archetypes like a bloodhound. He invokes Nietzsche and talks a lot about self-overcoming—face the darkness, clean your room, get your act together. But then he bolts it all down to good old Judeo-Christian values—pre-fab ethics Nietzsche would have torched without a second thought.
It’s not just silicon versus conservative—or Peterson, either. This tension is baked right into your own inestimable TechGnosis project: tech as the fast, hot, forward charge; gnosis, cold and slow, digging backward, peeling back the skin of knowledge like old wallpaper. One eye on the future, one on the ancient glyphs. Same uneasy marriage.
The question is, can a bird with wings pulling in opposite directions really fly? And, perhaps more to the point of your post—can we guess which wing’s gonna buckle first?
"“Science and technology are natural allies to this Judeo-Western optimism, especially if we remain open to an eschatological frame in which God works through us in building the kingdom of heaven today, here on Earth — in which the kingdom of heaven is both a future reality and something partially achievable in the present.”
I'm not necessarily opposed to this framing. But priorities are paramount. An extra level of ethics. Using advanced genetic technology to return someone else afflicted with a disabling disease like MS or spinal injury to health is infinitely more important as a goal than aiding the personal desires and drive ambitions of Poor Mortal Me.
Your "Fiery Accelerant" piece was well done -- it offers an important realization about the current techno Christian "convergence" (really a re-convergence, as the "techno" here is the child of Western science -- which at its epistemological root is already a Judaeo-Christian endeavor). I can't say "I enjoyed it" as there is something about all this MAGA-techno-Christian drama which I increasingly find extravagantly dull -- even as it gets more completely bonkers, there's so little original, vivacious imagination at its core, that its weirdness feels tedious and stale. I don't know how to describe it other than my sense that this death-cult desire to "immanentize the eschaton" is so inherent and boringly inevitable in Western Culture, that there is something deeply banal to it, and this is made even more wearisome by current moronic ideations...
I guess, the flip-side of what I'm trying to articulate is that it seems that so many of the problems that humanity now faces -- from climate to socio-economic/political -- all stem from an extreme failure of imagination. I believe it was Blake who wrote "nature is imagination itself". And imagining often has ecological agency -- it informs how we interact with the world. With the navel gaze of modernity and widespread loss of even the most rudimentary ecological literacy, imagination has atrophied to the point where many people no longer have the imaginal capacity to even glimpse the effervescent wonder of the world around them, let alone understand how every one of us co-creates that world with each breath and every action, or envision any kind of fertile future (just look at how film and literature has been choking on the same rehashed dystopian narratives for decades). Instead we have purblind misanthropes like Thiel and his fellow tech-barons whose 'genius'** seems to me, at best, the mental equivalent of acid reflux after a rich meal made by other hands...
I guess we'll all get to experience what happens as the inescapable ecology of physical existence makes itself ever more present through climate-driven disaster that no amount of riches, hubris and matte magical thinking can insulate one from...
I'm not holding my breath, but if there's some silver lining to this dark storm's clouds, perhaps it's that catastrophe will force greater numbers of people to re-engage with physical reality, and mayhap this will rouse imagination’s slumber and rehydrate desiccated thinking... though at what cost?
___
**(Admiring accumulation of wealth and power as a kind of genius is too often idolizing a stolid sociopathy. If we're going to allow people to wield such king-like power, then we should at least demand that their right to power rests on their ability to imagine, harness and ensure the living fecundity of the land -- like the European kings of medieval legend or the Sapa Inca of the pre-Conquest Andes.)
4/1/2025 or 4-1-9 or 14...so let us look at Chapter XIV in The Book of Revelation
"And I saw, and behold a Lamb standing on mount Zion, and with him a hundred forty-four thousand, having his Father's name written upon their foreheads."
#613, The Apocalypse Revealed by Emanuel Swedenborg (The Rotch Edition, 1890)
By a hundred and forty four thousand are signified all those who acknowledge the Lord alone as the God of heaven and earth, and are in truths of doctrine from the good of the love from him through the Word.
This is really brilliant. I'm so grateful for writers like you. This piece really starts blazing in the last few paragraphs where you talk about the paradoxes in the governing approaches to Climate change, AI bonkers, and accelerationist optimism. It's maddening just to see people lost trying to make sense of all this mythic cultic contradictory apeshit, let alone explain it. You point to these mega colliding forces (Christianity and Tech) and, I couldn't help notice, in the background, almost what you said on Scapegoats for instance, but definitely seems worth mentioning is the mind boggling absurd hypocrisy in the form of adopting the Whiny Victimization trope. The cruelty cult loves that shit. And it's textbook fascism right? Act victimized (like nazis, like Musk, or worry about the Antichrist) and they're on their way to whipping up the sycophants to erupt in their own ids for Trumpism. So, you didn't see this coming in Techgnosis? That journey you took to India recently is an amazing story, where I can tell you gleaned more insights. This bad trip is hard to make up. Keep on/Carry on!
Appreciate the fullness of your text, continually horrified by the absurd hubris of Thiel and company. Thiel seems intoxicated by some manner of vision, a too common affliction of insanity that overcomes a percentage of psychedelic users (I've been studying that community since I made a film on Aldous Huxley back in 1990 and more recently Neurons to Nirvana)...He probably believes he is on a mission. I see him as being arrogant, delusional, badly educated and so rich he has no reason to develop self reflection. See my article on Palantir: A stark example of the gap between the hype surrounding tech solutions and their real-world effectiveness is the case of Palantir. This company, lauded for its supposed ability to predict and prevent security threats using advanced data analytics, notably, catastrophically failed to foresee or mitigate the October 7th attacks. Its heavy promotion as a tool for terrorism detection and national security showed its wall of defence to be as thin as air - at least in the case of the USA’s number one ally, Israel.
The silence around this failure is not incidental but a calculated effort to obscure how ineffective these tools often are compared to the grandiose claims made by their billionaire backers.
https://latentemanate.substack.com/p/bad-faith-thiel-and-luigis-fortitude
Thanks for the link! What’s hard for me to judge is the extent to which Palantir is directly responsible for how their tech is used — even the company waffles on responsibility, sometimes strutting as the new newer cops on the block, other times saying we just make data management tools, etc.
Thanks for all your work and books! Remember how the libertarians where (and rightfully so) up in arms about the gov "Total Information Awareness" (TIA) program that was in the early 2000? Now they are all in. The USA is becoming yet more exceptional in its belief in its own exceptionalism. One thing we do know about Palantir is that it is increasingly cozy with the Rump administration. Here's that: https://latentemanate.substack.com/p/palantirs-power-surge and a Tolkenized version: https://latentemanate.substack.com/p/a-bag-end-bugle-exclusive and finally AI and Psychedelics: https://latentemanate.substack.com/p/ai-and-psychedelics