How the Tech World Turned Evil
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I. That Antichrist Nonsense, ExplainedTwenty-second-century historians tracing the ascent of American technocracy from quirky garage tinkerers grooving on the Whole Earth Catalog to sinister oligarchs enacting Philip K. Dick prophesies may locate its apogee in four lectures that Peter Thiel (net worth: $29 billion), chairman of the data-mining giant Palantir and a co-founder of PayPal, delivered at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club in September and October 2025. The subject was the Antichrist.“In the seventeenth, eighteenth century,” Thiel explained, “the Antichrist would have been a Dr. Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science.” As Thiel spoke, dozens of protesters—some in devil costumes—marched outside bearing signs that said things like The End Is Near/ Palantir Is The Path/ Thiel Leads The Way. “In the twenty-first century,” Thiel continued, “the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer.” Greta is Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate change activist. Eliezer is Eliezer Yudkowsky, a Berkeley-based critic of artificial intelligence, or AI.Class warfare doesn’t get more unhinged than this. Say what you will about the American plutocracy, it seldom frames its economic self-interest as a religious imperative. But even in its more innocent days, Silicon Valley inclined toward grandiosity, heralding not just a new technology but a new advancement in human consciousness. Now a prince of the technocratic elite was framing tech’s future prosperity quite literally as a battle against agents of Satan, with Thunberg and Yudkowsky cast as Gog and Magog. Suggest Thiel’s dominion could stand a bit more government oversight and he just might toss you into a lake of fire.Thiel’s speeches prompted an appropriately horrified public response. But his was merely the most literal expression of a millenarian sentiment about the coming of AI that’s now conventional wisdom among tech barons. Thiel’s tactical error in applying the Book of Revelation to the digital future was to keep his message explicitly biblical. But other tech leaders have been secularizing the same narrative. “
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Technology is the godhead” is how the Columbia law professor and tech critic Tim Wu described this view to me, and Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI—AI that surpasses human intelligence in all dimensions—“is the Second Coming.”The story goes like this. A war is coming between good (AI) and evil (government regulation). If AI wins, a New Jerusalem will dawn where human intelligence is eclipsed by intellectually superior computers that represent, figuratively if not literally, Jesus Christ’s return. Techies call this the Singularity. Silicon Valley executives can prepare for that great gettin’ up day by paying $15,900 to attend a five-day seminar at an establishment in Santa Clara County, California, called—I kid you not—Singularity University.How glorious will be that dawn to come! “The first ultra-intelligent machine,” the British mathematician Irving John Good wrote in a 1965 essay that’s often credited with introducing the singularity concept, “is the last invention that man need ever make.” It follows that any who would impede AGI’s arrival, or attempt to control its development in any way, must be in league with the seven-headed Beast. Not a literal beast, mind you, but rather the notional one of government interference or (in more extreme versions of this tale) democracy itself. Either way, the meddlers must be stopped at any cost.That’s more or less the story told by the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen (net worth: $1.9 billion) in the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” that he posted online in October 2023. “We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone,” Andreessen wrote, invoking a process to turn lead into gold and thence into an elixir of eternal life that, let me remind you, never existed outside mythology. Also: “We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder” (italics mine). Andreessen declared war on such commonsense concepts as “sustainability,” “social responsibility,” “risk management,” and “tech ethics,” because they were part of “a mass demoralization campaign … against technology and against life.
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”Andreessen may sound like a crackpot parading Sand Hill Road in a sandwich board, but in the tech world he’s hugely consequential. His venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, is Silicon Valley’s richest, with $90 billion in assets. Previously a vocal fundraiser for Democratic candidates, in 2024 Andreessen spent $5.5 million to elect Donald Trump and helped Elon Musk recruit staff for his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Bloomberg’s Emily Birnbaum and Oma Seddiq reported in February that Andreessen Horowitz is “the first outside call that top White House officials and senior Republican congressional aides make when considering moves that could affect tech companies’ AI plans.”The talk may be of a literal or figurative God, but what’s really at stake—as usual—is Mammon. Tech lords’ ferocious opposition to government interference reflects a collective financial investment in AI that’s quite literally unprecedented within the private sector. In February, The Wall Street Journal reported that the $670 billion to be spent this year developing AI by Meta (Facebook), Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet (Google) represents 2.1 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. That’s slightly more than what the United States spent to build the railroads in the 1850s (2 percent of GDP), and considerably more than the amount spent to build the Interstate highway system (0.4 percent) or to put a man on the moon (0.2 percent). The only national investment the Journal could identify that represented a larger slice of GDP was the Louisiana Purchase (3 percent), which nearly doubled the size of the United States. That was in 1803, when GDP was a puny $488 million, not today’s $31 trillion. And unlike these earlier infrastructure projects, this year’s $670 billion investment in AI draws entirely on private-sector funds.The stakes have pushed Silicon Valley into the arms of the GOP. As recently as 2020, the tech industry favored Joe Biden overwhelmingly against Trump, with 98 percent of its donations going to Democrats. The biggest tech contributor that year was Netflix chair Reed Hastings, who gave more than $5 million to Democrats.
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But by late 2025, the nonprofit Public Citizen found, nearly three-quarters of tech political spending went to Republicans, with Musk the biggest tech contributor; he gave $351 million to elect Republicans. Granted, Musk’s impact was outsize; nearly half of tech’s political spending came from Musk alone. But after Trump won in 2024, other tech chiefs fell in line, scrambling to attend Trump’s second inauguration, with four of them (Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Google’s Sundar Pichai) seated in front of Trump’s Cabinet members, a spot previously reserved for former presidents and the incoming president’s family. This digital Rushmore contributed a combined $26 million to Trump’s inauguration and planned “Golden Ballroom.” Overall, the tech industry kicked in $48.6 million. To you and me, that’s a lot of money. To tech companies, it’s pocket change.Beneath the towering images of the past— Surrender of General Burgoyne (left) and a marble sculpture of Ulysses S. Grant—at the United States Capitol, American power players of the current era gathered at Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025. Among them, from left: Scott Bessent, Marco Rubio, Priscilla Chan and husband Mark Zuckerberg, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Lauren Sánchez, Kash Patel, Jeff Bezos, Howard Lutnick, Pete Hegseth, Sundar Pichai, and Elon Musk.SHAWN THEW/POOL/GETTYUntil recently, tech showed limited enthusiasm for Washington’s lobby scene. A decade ago, it ranked fourth among lobbying industries, spending less than half as much as Big Pharma, which ranked first, according to the campaign website OpenSecrets. But by late 2025, the last year for which data is available, tech had moved up to the number two spot, spending nearly three-quarters as much on lobbying as Big Pharma (which still ranks first). The reason was AI. “AI didn’t just increase its footprint in Washington,” noted Ashley Gold in Axios. “It ate tech lobbying whole,” and it added to tech’s existing lobbying on corporate consolidation, privacy, and free speech new topics like crypto, defense procurement, and the insatiable energy needs of data centers.
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Even Silicon Valley’s own congressman, Democratic Representative Ro Khanna, frets about tech’s reach. “We need regulations that prevent companies from using AI to eliminate jobs to extract greater profits,” Khanna tweeted in November. “There should be a tax on mass displacement.” After Khanna endorsed California’s proposed onetime 5 percent wealth tax on billionaires, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz called Khanna an “obnoxious jerk” on X and committed to “voting him the fuck out.” Never mind that Khanna, who calls himself a “progressive capitalist”—and who as recently as last year collected $15,000 in campaign contributions from Andreessen Horowitz associates—is nobody’s idea of a radical; in 2024, govtrack.us rated him the sixty-seventh-most left-leaning member of the House. When tech peers out its window, it sees only enemies.This was an industry that, a generation ago, came into being promising to disperse power and information to ordinary people. Now it fetishizes surveillance, misinformation, monopolization, and lethality as it races toward a Singularity that occasions, among thinking people with no financial stake in it, no small worry. How did it get so monstrous?II. When Computers Meant Freedom“Ready or not, computers are coming to the people,” wrote Stewart Brand in a December 1972 issue of Rolling Stone. (Carlos Santana was on the cover.) “That’s the good news, maybe the best since psychedelics.” Previously, Brand had been one of the novelist Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, that youthful band of LSD-dropping nonconformists whose travels on a multicolored school bus Tom Wolfe famously chronicled in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968). Brand had then moved on to create the Whole Earth Catalog, a wildly popular counterculture guide to living close to the land and far from the Man. Readers could learn where to buy the best cut beads, or how to build a geodesic dome, or what the I Ching was, or how to repair your Volkswagen Beetle. In a 2005 commencement speech at Stanford, Apple founder Steve Jobs would remember the Whole Earth Catalog as “sort of like Google in paperback form 35 years before Google came along.”