Want to understand the interweaving of tech-bros, MAGA, and apocalyptic religious fundamentalism? How do these movements fit together in uneasy alliance? And how are they reshaping each other and our world? I’d highly encourage you to read this very insightful piece by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor:

The Rise of End Times Fascism

Taylor also discusses the topic with Kelly Hayes on the ever-worthwhile Movement Memos. Transcript and recording here:

Traitors to the Earth: Fascism, Christian Nationalism, and the Tech Elite

What I see at work here in the dynamics they discuss (even as they cover futuristic AI, paradise, and apocalypse) are ancient things still continuing with us, gnosticism and the fashioning of idols.

Ancient gnostic philosophies and cults varied but some general features included hidden knowledge available to a select group, and dismissal of this material world as either evil or meaningless, a captivity to be escaped and transcended through knowledge, spiritual experience, or escape to a spiritual realm.

Gnosticism filtered into the Jesus movement in a variety of ways, from the very beginning to now. Significant surviving writings from the early church combat the influence of Gnosticism, like St. Irenaeus in Against Heresies. But one of Gnosticism's modern children is the extremely common idea (particularly among evangelicals and non-practicing-but-Christian-identifying) of life after death simply being an escape to a spiritualized heaven with little concern from God or God's people for the world left behind. Another version is the widespread fascination in evangelical/fundamentalist circles with an “end times” featuring a “rapture” where the followers of Jesus are whisked away from earth to heaven and those remaining face years of disaster, the rule of an anti-Christ figure, and God's climactic judgment.

In this twisted distortion of what the Jesus movement really is, God’s select people have this special knowledge of what is coming, and are rescued out of the world before destruction is poured out upon it. This world is a prison to be escaped, and those without the special knowledge are easily cast as enemies and objects of destruction.

Certain events are interpreted from that movement's twisted view of Revelation to precipitate these “end times” events and some seek to accelerate those events through political actions, driving much of the movement’s alliance with Zionists and the modern State of Israel.

What place do people like those in Gaza have in this worldview? Very little except as obstacles to be cleared and dehumanized enemies to be destroyed. What place for caring for the material creation itself or the material conditions of the people who inhabit it? Very little, as this world is just a prison to be escaped and real hope lies in a spiritualized, paradisaical heaven. Real conditions for real bodies aren't the concern, only correctly holding the right knowledge to be able to participate in the escape.

Such a movement easily bunkers itself in separation from broader society, seeing them as enemies and disposable objects of wrath, while hardening their own identity and beliefs as shields against an evil outside world. As crisis brews in the real material world, a group with this kind of gnostic ideology does not get engaged in making things right but rather circles the wagons, doubles down on identity as the chosen few, and hopes for divine intervention for their escape to come quickly. They become, as Hayes phrases it referring to something else, “silos of self-concern”.

Like religious end-times fanatics, the titans of Big Tech also see destruction of the world coming, and they don't mind accelerating it. At the expense of the well-being of the material world and its people, they pursue new technologies for the sake of profits that accelerate crisis, profits even off of the realities of that crisis itself, and capture and dismantling of the state that would hold any check on their actions or safety net for that crisis. I encourage you to check out the article to understand that more in-depth. These titans see themselves as the chosen few who will survive. Whether through escape to Mars, development of bunkers or freedom cities, or making transhumanist adaptations to their bodies, they will accelerate and profit off of crisis in expectation that they have an escape route and like the gnostics, they need not care for this world.

Three priesthoods each offer their own path to salvation as they accelerate the crisis. As the world comes apart, people search for a new source of meaning and stability, and each priesthood has one on offer. Religious fundamentalism offers a self-justifying us-versus-them narrative and spiritualized get-out-of-apocalypse-free ticket to heaven, as discussed above. MAGA nationalism (and other nations’ nationalisms) offers bunker-creation, whether Steve Bannon's podcast shilling rations and weaponry to prep your individual doomsday bunker, or Steven Miller and Kristie Noem using immigration crackdown, violence, and imprisonment to reshape a nation into a reassuring right-wing bunker for a select few against the evils they’ve been convinced fill the world around them. Big Tech offers tools to the wealthy - the threat of AI replacements giving them leverage to force their workers into accepting less, or the tools for a surveillance advantage over their workers to maximize profit extraction, as well as the distractions of mind-numbing entertainment to the workers, that we might accept our own class-appropriate form of bunkered escapism from brewing crisis, content to sit out the fight in virtual reality or our favorite streaming.

In each, a knowledgeable elite leads the way, priests of the escape plan, and we in the pews don’t need to worry about the details of the escape (they’re the experts of course) or about the crumbling world outside (since we're ok here inside the fortress-temple). As Hayes and Astra discuss, each of these priesthoods is conducting a “war on empathy”, casting empathy as weak or toxic and idolizing aggressive masculinity willing to compete and to sacrifice others as the necessary costs of survival. As empathy crumbles, those inside become “silos of self-concern”, and those outside the bunker become the enemies, or at minimum, the necessary collateral damage of surviving the coming collapse.

Klein, Astra, and Hayes offer some discussion of the extravagant ambitions of Big Tech’s titans. Google’s Eric Schmidt, for instance, speaks of the need to put vast energy investment into development of a superintelligence beyond humanity, a digital divinity, one might say. Tech prophets like Schmidt here, Musk in his quest for Mars, or all the promises of how AI is going to make our lives better, cast a vision of a grand achievement that will somehow bring salvation in crisis. The details are a mystery, left as hidden knowledge of the tech priesthood, but the newly raised divinity demands sacrifices. Whether energy, precious metals, labor, fulfilling jobs, or life-saving programs, resources (and the human lives and well-being spent to acquire them) must be offered on the altar of the new gods, and the crowds of worshipers hope that somehow, they’ll benefit from the offering of all that is going up in smoke and have enough in the future that is to come.

This too is nothing new. It is the same recipe for the development of idol-cults that's been around for thousands of years. The secret is out on those - the idols aren't true gods and can't offer any real salvation. They distract and placate the masses, so that they won't look behind the curtain to see who makes the idol talk, notice the heavy pockets of the temple priests in contrast to their own now-empty ones, or question the idols’ divine endorsement of the ruling elites atop the societal pyramid (who happen to also fund the new temple construction).

So where ought we place our trust for salvation instead, when these priesthoods of bunkered tech and religious gnosticism are driving us into crisis and robbing us on the way by selling us false salvation? I don’t mean in a spiritual sense, but in the sense of surviving the building crises of climate disasters, pandemics, authoritarian states, dismantled social safety nets, fragile food and supply networks, rising costs of essentials, and disappearing good jobs with sufficient wages.

As I’ve been writing here, I think we need to build resilience through increasing our skills and deepening our relational ties. We need to be able to rely on one another.

Safety through Strong Communities

Prepping for the Apocalypse

What Can You Offer?

We have to reject the temptation to become silos of self-concern. Our hope does not lie in bunkering ourselves in as individuals or as a righteous chosen few against an evil world. Our hope does not lie in escaping a world in crisis through wealth, tech, gated communities, spaceships, uploading our souls, or getting raptured. Our hope lies in so loving this world and loving our neighbors that we don’t want to escape them. Rather we see them as sacred, and we see it as our responsibility to help one another to survive, rebuild, and restore harmony. Our hope lies in engaging with and understanding the world around us rather than offloading that to a tech priesthood as mysteries beyond our understanding. Our hope lies in opening our eyes, arms, and hearts to trust and depend on one another, dismantling our bunkers and pooling our skills and resources together so that we can all make it through.

I've also been reading Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp, an accounting of the rises and collapses of Goliaths - powerful states/empires/hierarchical societies throughout history. While the collapses of these are typically remembered historically as very negative events - the move from golden ages to dark ages, Kemp complicates that narrative. While there is often great suffering in these collapses, he argues that these Goliaths consistently intensify inequality, that while “glorious” in the eyes of history, what they actually accomplish is the transfer of resources to elites, and dramatic increases in the scale and frequency of violent death. Across many times and places, well-being and equality were lessened by the rise of these Goliaths. When they fell, there was often chaos and harm in the fall, but the result was very often an increase in equality and overall well-being for most individuals. To overly summarize, these benefits happened most when the community had elements of resilience, underlying networks of relationship, skills, resources, and ethics of care that allowed collapse to coalesce into widespread cooperation toward common good.

As our own social order faces the kinds of system shocks that drove many past Goliaths to collapse, and much is on the verge of reordering in significant ways, will we step into practicing more resilience-building, or slip into Gnostic escapism that cedes the making of the next order to the tech, nationalist, and fundamentalist priesthoods?

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