The End Times: How Silicon Valley absorbed ‘techno-religious’ doomerism - Middle East Eye

In a recent interview, US Vice President JD Vance expressed an alarming indifference at the possibility that his actions could lead to the apocalypse.

“I’m trying to focus on doing as much of God’s work as possible. And if that leads to the end times, okay,” he told a Christian podcaster, without a hint of irony.

Vance owes his political career almost entirely to tech billionaire and Palantir founder Peter Thiel – who describes himself as a “small-o orthodox Christian” and is known for his obsessive hunt for the Antichrist, who he believes will usher in the apocalypse.

The two first met in 2011 when Vance attended a talk by Thiel as a student, later calling it “the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School” which convinced him to pursue a career in tech.

Vance went on to work for Thiel’s venture firm Mithril Capital in 2015 and then received Thiel’s financial backing to co-found the venture capital firm Narya Capital – which, like Palantir and Mithril, draws its name from The Lord of the Rings.

When Vance entered politics, Thiel donated $15m to his 2022 Senate campaign and allegedly helped court Trump’s endorsement.

Thiel made his fortune co-founding PayPal with billionaire owner of X, Elon Musk.

In his off-the record lectures, Thiel stipulated that the Antichrist would be “a luddite who wants to stop all science”, citing 23-year-old climate and pro-Palestine activist Greta Thunberg as an example.

In his book Nerd Reich, Gil Duran traces the influence on Thiel of a book called The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State, which argues democracy has become obsolete in the technological era – a transformation that should be “welcomed, accelerated, and exploited by a knowing class of elite investors”.

This is known as accelerationism – a white supremacist ideology that views violence as a necessary means of catalysing already inevitable societal collapse and ushering in a new global order: an apocalyptic eugenicism, which will be a utopia for those deemed strong and deserving enough to survive and dystopia for everyone else.

Thiel has called technology an “incredible alternative to politics” and said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Billionaires have begun preparing for this future by investing in underground bunkers and far-right parties seeking to build fortressed ethnostates. 

Musk collaborated with far-right political movements across 18 countries, inciting narratives about civilisational replacement during rallies from Germany to the UK, and has used his purchase of X, formerly Twitter, to amplify right-wing voices. 

Palantir’s technology is already used to monitor migrants for deportation in the US and facilitate mass surveillance and targeting of Palestinians for Israel, as well as being embedded in vital services like the NHS in the UK.

Britain's far-right Reform Party, which recently received a record-breaking £72m donation from just two crypto billionaires, wants to create an ICE-style agency to oversee the deportation of illegal immigrants.

Reform's former head of policy James Orr – who was recently forced to step down after an undercover investigation filmed him apparently trying to evade electoral law – has links to Thiel and hosted his Antichrist lectures at Cambridge.

Musk also funds science-fiction fantasies of extraplanetary living on Mars and transhumanist AI takeover. 

Others invest in building artificial islands or “freedom cities”: havens free from taxes and regulation, run by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrency, as global instability from endless war and climate change causes mass displacement and deprivation.

Thiel himself moved to Argentina, which is led by Javier Milei, a libertarian and ardently pro-Israel president who pledged to “destroy” the state from within.

According to a website leak, Thiel invited many of the world’s rich and powerful to secret “Dialog” society retreats, featuring panels from cult-building to prepping for World War III.

As these powerful figures come up with ways to escape to technological utopia as the real world veers towards climate breakdown and global conflict, they continue to profit from the fossil fuels and arms industries actively creating these crises.

Although Vance bridges seemingly incompatible constituencies of the Christian alt-right and Silicon Valley libertarians, his interview tapped into a shared vision of the coming apocalypse where some will be saved and others damned.

A study by James Piazza found that Christian nationalists with apocalyptic tendencies were more likely to hold negative attitudes towards social outgroups, reject norms of civil discourse and democracy, and normalise political violence toward opponents. 

While apocalyptic ideas have long been an undercurrent of American society amongst Evangelicals, Christian nationalists and Christian Zionists, Piazza told Middle East Eye that these voices have grown more influential in recent years, and now “represent a mainstream political force”, including figures like US Ambassador for Israel Mike Huckabee and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

Christian Zionists like Huckabee and Hegseth advocate for Jews to return to the Holy Land – which covers Israel and territories in the occupied West Bank, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan – to fulfil biblical prophecies and bring about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. 

At the same time, Israel also represents exactly the kind of high-tech theocracy Christian nationalists want replicated in the US.

Huckabee called Israel the “land that God gave...to a people that he chose” and said that he would be “fine” with its expansion across almost all of the Middle East.

In his first Pentagon worship service since the Iran war began, Hegseth prayed for “overwhelming violence” against America’s enemies, while US military commanders reportedly told troops that the war on Iran was “all part of God’s divine plan” backed up by biblical prophecies about the “end times”.

For Christian nationalists, the idea of apocalypse is “pre-ordained”, Piazza explained, and therefore inevitable, and so should be ushered in rather than resisted. 

In her book Empire of AI, tech journalist Karen Hao argues that a “quasi-religious” cult has developed in Silicon Valley around the mythological development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). 

In 2014, Musk told MIT students that AI was “summoning the demon” and is “our biggest existential threat”. 

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called AI a “genie that can grant any wish”, while saying it “will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there will be great companies created”. Thiel famously hesitated when asked if he thought humanity should survive.

Last weekend, Altman, Musk and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei agreed to an industry-wide slowdown after several whistleblowers raised concerns that AI could wipe out humanity within the next decade.

OpenAI asked Congress to bypass antitrust law regulating market competition, and has ruled out going public this year, citing safety concerns.

“It is a very convenient moment to play this ‘slowdown’ message,” Virginia Tech Professor Lee Vinsel told MEE, given the companies’ precarious economic situation.

AI firms are all currently losing money with the exception of Nvidia, which sells infrastructure and finances unprofitable firms, propped up through circular deals inflating the AI bubble. 

The technology has proved less transformative than anticipated, with companies rehiring employees after failing to generate the promised productivity gains from AI adoption.

Vincel coined the term “criti-hype” to describe how critics of technology can overstate its capabilities, validating the industry’s claims and boosting share prices.

Doomerism is an effective marketing tool as it taps into our “deep cultural scripts” from science fiction and religious tropes about the end of the world, Vinsel told MEE.

Now, instead of just critics touting it, the companies themselves broadcast AI’s apocalyptic abilities, with the technology becoming “a kind of messiah” for some.

“Silicon Valley has absorbed a techno-religion that brings together science fiction, century-old transhumanist aspirations…and American apocalyptic brands of Christianity,” Robert Geraci, professor in religion, science and technology, told MEE.

While superintelligence may not be technically impossible, Geraci said their vision is “profoundly religious” and “not rooted in rigorous logic or economics,” relying on “curves of exponential growth” and profit, which ignores the reality that “all systems have limits”.

“[AGI] lacks a concrete definition or criteria, so people can fantasise about monsters or angels lurking in the void,” Eryk Salvaggio, fellow at Tech Policy Press, told MEE.

In a 2025 paper, Salvaggio argued alongside experts across industry, policy, and academia that, while investment in AI leans heavily into promises of machine superintelligence, the ability of current systems to deliver on such goals is questionable.

Mona Sloane, assistant professor of data science and media studies at the University of Virginia, reiterated that, while unregulated AI poses dangers, “the idea of ‘existential risk of AI’ is a deliberate moving target”.

“When there is this level of uncertainty, we latch onto narrative structures we are familiar with – in the case of machines and automation, that is the utopia-dystopia or boomer-doomer nexus,” she told MEE.

“Many powerful actors in the AI world believe in technology being deterministic,” Sloane added, revealing “their bleak and narrow understanding of humans as not having any agency”, and conveniently exonerating themselves of responsibility.

“Having this threat always in the future keeps those who built AI systems in their powerful position, even when these systems become mundane and lose their magical aura – as is happening with AI.”

Last week, one of America’s top credit-rating agencies warned that if markets lose faith in the industry’s ability to generate returns on investment, it could cause a major crash that would likely entail a US recession, impacting the global economy.

Claims that AI will “take all our jobs” may be overhyped, but a crash caused by inflated valuations might well lead to mass unemployment.  

There are also environmental threats from energy-intensive data centres amid worsening climate change, alongside social impacts, from cognitive decline to mental health problems, as well as concerns over autonomous weapons and cybersecurity.

“The reality is that US tech giants are causing real harm, right now to people and planet,” Donald Campbell, director of advocacy at digital rights group Foxglove, told MEE.

“What is clear about the tech billionaires is their staggering indifference to the human suffering their companies and platforms are causing - and their determination to ensure that there are no laws or regulations which could stand in their way.”