Conjuring the End: Techno-eschatology and the Power of Prophecy

[Elke Schwarz is a Professor of Political Theory at Queen Mary University London]

Following the re-election of Donald Trump, the American technology elite has embraced its growing global power. They have always held significant power but now it is out in the open. And with this greater visibility comes a peculiar, dark narrative, cultivated by some of the more vocal tech elites. This narrative foregrounds doom and renewal, destruction and rebirth. Earlier this month, Peter Thiel extolled the virtues of apokálypsis in an incongruous Financial Times op-ed. The invocation of eschatology is not new to Silicon Valley either. It has been underway for almost a decade but is now bubbling to the surface. 

A few years back Silicon Valley venture capital heavyweight and self-styled technology optimist Marc Andreessen penned “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” on his company’s blog site a16z. The manifesto rattles off a heady mix of statements about our lamentable technological condition and advocates for those with the prodigious skills to do so to craft a techno-utopia in which we will become “technological supermen” and create “a far superior way of living, and of being”. The manifesto rests on a number of explicitly stated beliefs about the world and its material workings, and crescendos in the belief that “technology is liberatory. Liberatory of human potential. Liberatory of the human soul, the human spirit. […] We believe technology opens the space of what it can mean to be human”. This vision of a splendid future possibility is framed by naming “The Enemy”: everything that stands in the way of technological progress and a utopia of technologically-produced abundance: statism, collectivism, socialism, bureaucracy, gerontocracy, regulatory capture, ethics, sustainability … the list goes on. With this sophomoric muddle of beliefs, Andreessen tells a classic tale of good and evil, of victory over nefarious and detrimental forces, of the possibility for human thriving in some unspecified future time, centred around an ideological belief in a quasi-natural organising principle – in this case, technology and its liberatory potential. It is, for those deep in the weeds of this ideology, a “meta-religion” of sorts, with all the trimmings of a biblical narrative. Andreessen is part of a group of technology entrepreneurs known as effective accelerationists, e/acc for short, who want the unfettered development and roll out of technologies (usually that means AI-type systems, startups, and other digital-type innovations) – no matter what. Andreessen is also consulting the second Trump administration in matters of defense. 

In contrast to the e/acc advocates, there is another Silicon Valley movement with powerful technology entrepreneur backers: Effective Altruism (EA). Although broadly speaking, EAs are concerned with how to achieve the greatest good for the largest number of people – a classic utilitarian approach to socio-political life – the EA movement has consolidated around mitigating existential risk to humanity and AI technology is central to this aim. For EA adherents with Silicon Valley ties, AI simultaneously poses the greatest threat of humanity’s total extinction and a pathway to untold benefits and the extension of human life, be that on earth, in space, or in digital form. EA ideologies centre on the belief that the alignment of AI is paramount in ensuring utopia rather than annihilation. This narrative is, again, tinged with apocalyptic notions good and evil. Dubbed by e/acc adherents as “doomers”, EAs, like the e/acc crowd, are dealing in stories of doom and glory, refracted through technology. And in our present moment, the focal point for this is the pursuit of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Often dressed up in spiritual terms, AGI represents the aspiration for the creation of artificial consciousness, an artificial creation by which technology is no longer thing but rather a superior being – a common trope in the contemporary AI cycle, particularly since the proliferation of generative AI. 

Both groups represent, however, simply two sides of the same quasi-spiritual coin in which AI stands in as the ordering principles for a future-oriented reality. Both factions are also deeply embedded within venture capital logics, and have significant vested interests in promoting the advancement and roll-out of more AI, and in attracting more capital for their respective AI ventures. Both camps are already undergirded by enormous amounts of capital investments and with that, they exert significant influence over our collective visions of the future. And in doing so, both are recognisably oriented around eschatological narratives that deal in secrets, in the unknowable, in make-belief.

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In theology, eschatology is the study of the last things. In Judeo-Christian eschatology, the last things are usually four: death, judgement, heaven and hell. Throughout the centuries and across different cultures, ideas about how the four last things play out, who holds the knowledge about these aspects and what the “after” constitutes are diverse and have changed over time. Traditionally, knowledge about the end was revealed knowledge – an idea that is intrinsic to Christian conceptions of apocalypse. In modernity, this knowledge was produced, no longer revealed. For this, modern probability theory was crucial and with this, techno-eschatology can be situated more clearly. 

Techno-eschatology refers to the entanglement of technological visions and ideas of reality that are bound up with religious ideations about human transcendence, visions of judgement and salvation. In the technological variant, the eschaton comprises both revelation and renewal as it pertains to the individual and to humanity at large in one or more ways (as I show in more detail elsewhere). The crucial point, however, is the interplay between technology and the production of knowledge about reality and in particular, future-oriented reality. Techno-eschatology has a longer lineage which David Noble expertly draws out in his seminal work The Religion of Technology, published in 1999. In this text he clearly identifies the role technology plays in shaping narratives of eschatology and the associated production of knowledge needed for these shifting ideas throughout the centuries and decades. It is a long history, like all histories, filled with nuance and detail, but one constant remains: those who could credibly claim that they hold the key to some secret knowledge about humanity’s inevitable future were those that held the greater political power and exerted a significant sway. This is the same today and those with vested financial interests understand that techno-eschatological narratives hold enormous sway. 

The point is not that eschatology, or indeed techno-eschatology must be coherent to be effective. Quite the contrary. The inherent ambiguity of the current techno-eschatological discourse opens a space for belief-making, drawing a greater number of people into a closed system that offers the illusion of provenance, order and some sense of a hopeful future. Those that claim to have discovered secret knowledge are those that are able to direct these futures. This opened space for make-belief also closes the space for introducing a different idea of progress, beyond an AI determined future. That this future is simultaneously a foreclosure of alternative visions of the future becomes obscured. The present techno-eschatology focusing on the liberatory capacity of AI technology, and on the necessity of AGI keeps attention firmly on the question of AI as a quasi-deity and an inevitable element in the development of world history. And an entire eco-system of AI startups is built around this belief. 

The notion of inevitability is central to perpetuating the techno-eschatological claims around AGI,  and to producing increased valuations for startups that work toward AGI. Repeated claims about inevitable AI doom or salvation becomes fact, the fact becomes what is sacred, and what is sacred must be defended. This is, what OpenAI’s Sam Altman (an adherent of the e/acc ideology) advocates in a most literal sense when he says “Whether we burn $500 million a year or $5 billion – or $50 billion a year – I don’t care, I genuinely don’t. As long as we can figure out a way to pay the bills we’re making AGI”. OpenAI is currently valued at US$ 80billion. In a world of rising global economic inequality, this reckless allocation of financial resources is a declaration of intent. 

Viewed with a sober eye, this narrative, and its potency is, ultimately, about money. The sacralizing of AI as a quasi-deity serves, first and foremost, those with capital invested in AI companies and when we look at the logic of venture capital in particular, it becomes evident that the spiritual narrative serves to bolster the financial wealth of those investing enormous amounts in startups like OpenAI (e/acc) and Anthropic (EA), and various others, with the anticipation of outsized capital gains. To create belief in a technology is to sacralize the capacity of a startup to deliver this quasi divine technology and this, in turn serves to elevate the valuation of such a company. And who to do this more credibly than the self-anointed prophets of progress. Peter Thiel, founder of various AI-based enterprises including the defence company Palantir, is, like Marc Andreessen, running on of the world’s largest venture capital funds – Founders Fund. In his 2014 bestselling business book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, Or How to Build the Future, he suggests that in order to build a valuable company, you have to tap into available secrets. In the book, he laments that the general belief in secrets (and with that the mythical) has become eroded. He suggests, entrepreneurs should go and build their enterprise around the potency of secrets: “a great company is a conspiracy to change the world, when you share your secrets the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator”. To achieve financial gains, then, one must enroll ever more audiences into a belief system, built around symbolic acts and actors. This, in turn, as Dave Elder-Vass explains, aids in the “symbolic production” of a company’s valuation. And that translates to extraordinary financial gains for those invested in the venture. Claiming to hold the secret to salvation or doom is a tried and tested, and extremely potent narrative, drawing more and more audiences in its wake – willingly or unwillingly. And it ultimately comes back to a very simple, but very powerful equation: money equals power. Increasingly, venture capital is shaping policy landscapes in a variety of political domains – including the military – through extensive lobbying power. This edifice of power and influence is, at the core, built on the current variant of techno-eschatology. 

In October 2024, Founders Fund (currently US$ 12 billion in total assets under management) was hosting the ‘Hereticon: Apocalypse Ball’. It is an invite only event for investors and companies, but a handful of tickets are available for the general public. The event will showcase and celebrate “technologies and projects so ambitious, they will ultimately transform our world for the better – or destroy it”. The invitation is directed at “the most dedicated doomers and recklessly accelerating techno-utopians to meet and talk and yell and have a few kids, who knows”. It is an opulent jolly for techno-entrepreneurial elites with vested financial interests in propagating the apocalyptic narrative in all manner. The invite closes with an ominous provocation that should give the rest of us, uninvited to the ball, pause for thought: “Maybe if you are not trying to destroy the world, you are not trying hard enough”.