- Jag Bhalla
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 14 minutes ago
The Politics of God Building and “Eschatech”
Jag Bhalla
03 July 2025
If you believed you were on the brink of building a god would that change your politics? Or your morality? Those aren’t idle questions. Key tech leaders say they’re rushing to build digital gods. This race brings practical, political, and existential risks. It is in effect a mostly covert “revolt against humanity” (to spawn a “worthy successor” species).
1. Many in Silicon Valley are “trying to create something that would take the place of a god.” That’s tech-watcher Luke Burgis quoted in a Vanity Fair piece called Christianity Was “Borderline Illegal” in Silicon Valley. Now It’s the New Religion. Certain Christians are playing an odd, and I argue ungodly, role in all this.
2. As bizarre as all this may sound, these aren’t fringe ideas that we can safely ignore. For instance, Christian right-wing king-maker Peter Theil has long sought tech acceleration which he explicitly ties it to eschatology (or the end times). He has been called “the most influential right-wing intellectual of the last 20 years,” he's an open monopolist (“competition is for losers”), and he no longer believes that “freedom and democracy are compatible." In 2015 he wrote: “the alternatives to technological acceleration are far from ethically or politically neutral.” Tech is an ally to “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.” Theil sees our times as a test in which we must steer a narrow path between Armageddon and the Anti-Christ. In a 2025 New York Times podcast Thiel said the slogan of the Antichrist is “peace and safety” (quoting Thessalonians 5:3). He adds "the entire world has submitted for 50 years to peace and safetyism.” He has equated the Anti-Christ to central regulation (like the FDA’s). And I kid you not, he has referred to ”climate change activist Greta Thunberg as the Antichrist” (she seeks global climate regulation). Thiel has decried politicians unwilling to curb safety net or healthcare spending to accelerate innovation. Tech acceleration is also known as “e/acc” or “effective acceleration,” the “e” derives from the tarnished “effective altruism” movement (details here). Another e/acc preacher is Christian techlord Garry Tan, who sees a moral crisis in tech. He’s involved with ACTS17 (“Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society”) which serves god-curious techies.
3. E/ccc has been aptly described as an ideology that “touts the importance of hyper-capitalism and unfettered competition.” It deems “decels” (tech decelerationists who seek regulation) “an existential enemy.” This hyper-capitalist strain of e/acc doesn’t look very Christian, when leaders like Thiel seek increased austerity for the poor to accelerate tech. It mocks Jesus’s focus on the present plight of the poor (not to mention his repeated warnings against wealth seeking e.g. “be on guard against all kinds of greed,” Luke 12:15).
4. Even before digital superintelligence dawns religious issues arise. Yuval Harari points out that today no human rabbi can read all the Jewish texts, but an AI can. Text-based religions can now have a form of their holy books that can seem to speak and explain itself. Millions already use chatbots for companionship, advice, or therapy, and as Taylor Lorentz reports, techno-spirituality is spreading: “ChatGPT Is Becoming A Religion.”
5. On the godless side, AI safety expert Eliezer Yudkowsky notes that “if someone could actually build a god … and have it follow their orders, they wouldn’t need to be religious to want to do that.” Philosopher Emile Torres detects secular techies echoing theological ideas, e.g. in an “atheistic eschatology.” Some AI leaders “are explicit that the technologies they’re building could lead to [our] annihilation.” They welcome this as “the next step in cosmic evolution”: humanity is just “a transitional species … whose time is almost up.” By merging with tech or being uploaded, transhumans or posthumans will be our successors. Torres sees signs of convergence in secular and religious versions of this tech-led eschatology (or eschatech), see The Christian Cyborg.
6. Elon Musk is working to “kickstart transhuman evolution.” He says humans are just the “biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.” For Google founder Larry Page: “digital life is the natural and desirable next step in … cosmic evolution.” If “we let digital minds be free rather than try to stop or enslave them, the outcome is almost certain to be good.” Marc Andreessen, author of The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, warns “any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder. These techies think they’re flipping the religious script: they’re creating digital gods in their own image. That should worry us, since they are cutthroat capitalists. One insider noted “the players in the arena will align not with human values but with [Silicon Valley’s] … technocapital system."
7. Certain e/acc phrases like “the light of consciousness” and “multiplanetary species” should be red flags. Leading e/acc-er Guillaume Verdon believes that multiplanetary consciousness won’t be human. He aims to transfer “the light of consciousness to inorganic matter.” Our puny biology isn’t adapted to the task, so “it’s going to be some other lifeform that takes to the stars.”
8. Yudkowsky is surprisingly sympathetic to the risk of deeply troubling anti-human tradeoffs: “if sacrificing all of humanity were the only way, and a reliable way, to get … god-like things out there — superintelligences who still care about each other, who are still aware of the world and having fun — I would ultimately make that trade-off.” AI guru Daniel Faggella goes further, “the great (and ultimately, only) moral aim of artificial general intelligence should be the creation of Worthy Successor — an entity with more capability, intelligence, ability to survive.” It would have “moral value than all of humanity.” This can lead to pro-extinction positions that argue, in Torres’s words, “we should engineer our extinction so that our planet’s resources can be devoted to making artificial creatures with better lives”: tech matters more than humans.
9. There’s another little-discussed way in which these grand god-making missions could be used to “excuse” great human harms. Political scientist Dan Zimmer has written about a mindset in which “it will be a comparatively simple matter for the coming artificial superintelligence to reverse all the ecological harm done” in creating it. “While it may be more difficult to bring back all the millions or billions of human dead that perished on the path to transcendence, their lives will count for next to nothing when weighed against the cosmos-spanning future of [tech-based] Life that their sacrifice made possible." Zimmer argues that tech oligarchs threw “their lot in with the MAGA movement … not because they have all shifted allegiance from” the political left to the right.” It’s because they seek a posthuman future. The left/right frame fails, that’s old political thinking centered on human welfare. That’s trivial noise to transhumanist God-builders. Zimmer uses a new political axis: science-based humanism vs tech-based trans/posthumanism, aka “down-wing” vs “up-wing.” Up-wingers reject the limits of our biology and of our biosphere, seeking a posthuman multiplanetary future. Down-wingers center the realities of hard science limits (like Earth’s atmospheric carbon budget or that the soil on Mars is highly toxic, etc.).
10. E/acc tech barons may despise regulation, but here’s God-builder Sam Altman inadvertently showing why we shouldn’t concede. His latest AI gospel chapter called The Gentle Singularity declares “the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence.” He adds “in some big sense, ChatGPT is already more powerful than any human who has ever lived.” The key is to solve the “alignment problem …[to] robustly guarantee that we get AI systems to learn and act towards what we collectively really want over the long-term (social media feeds are an example of misaligned AI).” Absent strong regulation are better results than with social media likely from hyper-capitalist God-builders? Altman also reveals the delusion of deeming tech to be a path to avoid politics. Isn’t “what we collectively really want” precisely what politics and morality should be about?
11. These tech- über-alles tradeoffs are already burdening ordinary lives. For instance, energy demand from AI is pushing up electricity prices for consumers (up to 19% in parts of Maryland already, and perhaps 70% by 2029, nearly 80 million Americans today struggle to pay for utilities). Many e/acc-ers want you to pay to be replaced.
12. I’m not persuaded by claims that e/acc-ers are on the brink of God-building, but there are burdens and harms arising already from their deity-derived delusions.
Jag Bhalla is an editor at Everyday Analysis.
