Description
Silicon Valley technolibertarian billionaire and Trump megadonor, Peter Thiel, recently held off-the-record ‘lectures’ on the advent of the antichrist, harbinger of Armageddon. For Thiel, this figure is incarnated in a person or movement that attempts to curtail technological progress – i.e., subjects like activist Greta Thunberg, who promote stronger regulation on technology, environmental protection, and/or international cooperation. This civilisational othering is embedded in Thiel’s well-documented obsession with fantasy tropes, as exemplified by his involvement in tech firms named after J.R.R. Tolkien’s work (e.g., Palantir Technologies, Anduril Industries, and Mithril Capital). This discursive assemblage around fantasy tropes responds to a broader political structure linking fantasy, dystopia, grievance, and desire for saviourism and immortality – a structure widely shared by tech oligarchs, reactionaries, and fascists. Whereas erstwhile restricted to niche pop culture ‘nerdom’, this phantasmatic structure is currently shaping high politics, norms, and practices around a religious, oligarchic desire for transcendence or immortality that feeds (off) fascism. Most prominently, this structure is not only about the fear of dystopia, but also about how the anxiety directed at it can transform into socially transgressive enjoyment. This enjoyment is predicated on phantasmatic narratives stitching the ‘good’ techno-supremacist civilisation to the godliness of our righteous tech-bro saviours, thus earmarking the ‘dark-Other’ – e.g., Thiel’s antichrist. In this paper, we use a critical fantasy approach (Glynos, 2021) to examine the anxious fantasies of ontological (in)security that structure this techno-civilisational enjoyment. We specifically analyse the integration of pop culture narratives into techno-fascist discourses of immortality, civilisationism, and godliness as protecting the ‘righteous Whites’ from the ‘taint’ of the dark-Other. We reflect on the consequences of this increasingly streamlined phantasmatic structure on our civilisational negotiation and shift away from liberal modernity, and into the quasi-religious embrace of techno-fascism as a ‘righteous’ horizon of struggle and aspirational cruelty.
