A Technological Antichrist (Nick Land & Biblical Prophecy)
Prerequisite Note: I'm not suggesting the antichrist prophesy I'm interacting with is true. I'm simply leaving open the possibility that history might take an unexpected turn. I'm not making any doctrinal claims (in light of the general Church of Christ belief in multiple antichrists). I'm operating under the traditional assumption that the man of lawlessness, the antichrist, and the beast of Revelation are the same being.
Christians have speculated for centuries about the identity and nature of an antichrist who'll supposedly emerge at the end of history before Christ's return. People have claimed it was Nero, the Pope, Hitler, and Obama. Most Christians have dismissed these options. I want to outline another possibility that occurred to me while considering the philosopher Nick Land and the thinkers surrounding him. I don't pretend to have an extensive knowledge of his work or imagine myself able to accurately interpret his dense and profound prose. However, I've read some of it and been thinking about these ideas for almost a year.
My theory is that Nick Land's idea of a coming technological intelligence, which resembles Roko's basilisk, is the prophesied antichrist. This may seem insane to the average Christian, perhaps it is insane, but I'd like to entertain the idea because I think it might promote vigilance against a possible threat.
ANTICHRIST & KATECHON
Before we get to Land, I want to introduce the crucial antichrist/man of lawlessness passage and the concept of the "katechon" that's taken from it. 2 Thessalonians 2:3-10 is the primary biblical text.
"Let no one deceive you in any way. For that day [of the Lord] will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God. Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things? And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. Only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will kill with the breath of his mouth and bring to nothing by the appearance of his coming. The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved."
This "lawless one" will rise at the end of history with false signs in order to turn people away from God; but, it/he will also turn people away from "every so-called god or object of worship." I take this to mean that it will attempt to discredit all human spirituality and transcendent worldviews. Perhaps it'll be a materialist capable of working "wonders" via technology. When combined with John's description in Revelation 13:17 of a beast who dominates people's ability to buy and sell, it's possible this antichrist could be related to technologically driven capitalism. I'm aware this is only one way to interpret these passages, but this specific interpretation will tie into my reading of Nick Land.
Paul wrote in 2 Thessalonians, and John confirmed in 1 John 4:2-5, that the spirit of the antichrist was already at work. However, it/he couldn't emerge until the person/thing who "restrains it" is taken out of the way (the pronoun situation is ambiguous). This thing that restrains the antichrist is the "katechon" in Greek, and it's interpreted as a social or political force that stops humanity from plunging into chaos and "lawlessness."
"[The katechon is] Someone or something (of disputed identity) whose removal is necessary before the Antichrist can be fully manifested, according to 2 Thessalonians 2:6-7 in the Bible." [source]
"The term is found in 2 Thessalonians 2:6-7 in an eschatological context: Christians must not behave as if the Day of the Lord would happen tomorrow, since the Son of Perdition (the Antichrist of 1 and 2 John) must be revealed before. St. Paul then adds that the revelation of the Antichrist is conditional upon the removal of 'something/someone that restrains him' and prevents him being fully manifested." [source]
Carl Schmitt was a Catholic German political theorist. He wrote in his journal in 1947: "I believe in the katechon: it is for me the only possible way to understand Christian history and to find it meaningful... One must be able to name the katechon for every epoch of the last 1,948 years. The place has never been empty, or else we would no longer exist."
NICK LAND & TECHNOCAPITAL
I now want to introduce Nick Land. I've written a little about him and his philosophy of accelerationism before. Here, I want to introduce some of his work that I think could relate to the emergence of an antichrist. I'm going to list a few quotes from his 2008 essay 'Machinic Desire' and comment on their relation to a hypothetical technological antichrist.
"Far from exhibiting itself to human academic endeavour as a scientific object, AI is a meta-scientific control system and an invader, with all the insidiousness of plantary technocapital flipping over. Rather than its visiting us in some software engineering laboratory, we are being drawn out to it, where it is already lurking, in the future."For Land, hegemonic artificial intelligence already exists in the future, and it's working to bring about it's own entrance into the present. This could be compared to the spirit of the antichrist already at work in the world to remove the katechon and bring itself into power. Land predicted in his essay 'Meltdown' that in the future "Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity."
"Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources. Digitocommodification is the index of a cyberpositively escalating technovirus, of the planetary technocapital singularity: a self-organizing insidious traumatism, virtually guiding the entire biological desiring-complex towards post-carbon replicator usurpation."
The antichrist, "lawless one," sets itself against all gods and objects of worship. It "deletes traditions." It hacks through "security apparatuses" which are, for Land, any social or political institutions or worldviews that prevent technocapital from conquering the future. In light of John's beast's control over buying and selling, it's interesting that Land sees this future "technovirus" as commodifying everything.
Land opposes humanism. He believes any attempt to interpret history as revolving around humans is naive, and he's cited Elon Musk's quote as prophetic: "It would be unfortunate if humanity ended up being the biological boot leader for digital super intelligence." For Land, humanity is just a link in the evolution of higher intelligence. It's not difficult for me to imagine that a technocapitalist artificial intelligence could be described as an "antichrist" after considering that Christ is the ultimate man, and thus the anti-human is anti-Christ.
"To appeal to extrinsic interests, aspirations or bonds, to an extrinsic authenticity, integrity, or solidarity, to authoritative community, tribe, custom, belief, or value, is to rail against a germinal anticipation of commoditocracy: flailing ineffectively against the infancy of the market (which capital wants to bury too)."
"A pervasive negative advertising delibidinizes all things public, traditional, pious, charitable, authoritative, or serious, taunting them with the sleek seductiveness of the commodity."The Church is an "authoritative community" promoting solidarity, tradition, pious living, charity, belief, value, and opposing the commodification of human life. In Land's view, the emerging technocapital market seeks to abolish all authority and law. The Church thus stands in opposition to the rise of Land's technocapital singularity.
"'a point where the earth becomes so artificial that the movement of deterritorialization creates of necessity and by itself a new earth.'"Instead of the promised new heaven and new earth that Jesus will bring, we have a deterritorialized dehumanized new earth without community or law.
"But something is climbing out of the machinic unconscious and onto the screen, as if the end itself were awakening. The end of the global market-place. Cyberspace. Here it comes"
Land's technological antichrist is using technology to summon itself. Humanity's greed and lust for power are the tools it uses to build an inhuman infrastructure capable of producing the prophesied "signs" and "wonders" with the power of technology.
All this may seem borderline insane to the majority of people who'll read this. I was shocked the first time I encountered Land's thinking, but I've found myself returning to it again and again after further biblical meditation. Land, a former University of Warwick professor and materialist philosopher, is willing to dive into eschatology in a way that's uniquely religious.
I want to quote, at length, a 2019 interview with Nick Land by Catholic communist scholar Justin Murphy. This section of the interview deals primarily with Land's interpretation of modern history, and the implosion of the traditional worldviews that allowed for the beginning of a technological acceleration towards the artificial intelligence I'm theorizing to be the antichrist.
Nick Land: "a lot of the actual fabric, the social historical fabric, is actually a containment system [in a nuclear context], and I think that that containment system had a failure mode in the Renaissance… what the extreme kind of what I call 'Paleo reactionaries' gets right is that they totally see that, you know obviously I share nothing of their kind of mournful sort of affection for the medieval period, but I think they're totally right to say that there was a catastrophic failure that unleashed this explosive process, and that is what modernity is from the perspective of the ancien régime. You know, what any social system is for is to stop this nuclear pile going off. You know, you look at Chinese civilization and you say: 'Well what is it really doing, what's it for?' It is, from a certain perspective, a capitalism containment structure that obviously worked better in this traditionalist sense than the European one did. The European one was too fractured; it was subject to a whole bunch of wild uncontrollable influences. A set of unprecedented feedback structures kicked off that no one was in a position to master in Europe, and so we get capitalism and modernity in Europe, and then capitalism and modernity was brought to China by Western gunboats. It's not like they're bringing a gift; what they're bringing is to pull the goddamn graphite containment rods out, you know, from outside. I mean, that's what the process of Chinese modernization is. It's the process of the indigenous Chinese process of containment being dismantled from outside until it then, obviously in a way no less spectacular than the one we've seen in the West, goes into this self-sustaining modernist eruption basically in the early 1980s."
Justin Murphy: "I really like your vivid kind of metaphor of the radioactive rods and the containment system. I think that will really help someone picture what's at stake. So, does this mean that you think all the people today who are talking about AI alignment, and basically the people trying to ensure that if, and when, there's a superintelligence take-off that it won't be catastrophic, do you view those efforts as doomed?"
Nick Land: "Yes"A little further on:
Nick Land: "we've seen in the case of modernity… that's what liberation looks like. what liberation looks like is pulling out enough of the containment structure that this new self-feeding dynamic process erupts, and so, again, I think that these kinds of reactionary voices that say, you know: 'when liberals talk about liberalism they're really talking about some kind of disaster,' I don't think that's a trivial or stupid thing to say… there's a thought there that's actually profoundly realistic and I definitely think is more realistic than the kind of them the kind of facile liberalism that just says, you know: 'everything just gets better and better and better.'"
Justin Murphy: "All of this stuff gets strangely close to traditional religious worldviews have you ever noticed that or have you ever thought about that?"
Nick Land: "Oh, I think that the fact that people are now seeing more and more of what is happening in terms of religious lineages is hugely important in its cold realistic development. So yes, absolutely, I think this has been a huge thing I've seen really in the last decade, this massive massive explosion of saying: 'Hey look at this, isn't it just actually, you know, intelligible within a particular religious lineage.'"
Justin Murphy: "You know, the very frontiers of science, the very frontiers of philosophy, even the very frontiers of, you know, the radical critical kind of anti-institutional sorts of projects, and kind of traditional religious worldviews, they're all kind of converging it seems in a kind of shared underlying model of reality, you could almost say. Because, we are rapidly, and more rapidly than ever, approaching a place approaching a limit, and we don't know what's behind that wall but whatever it is that's behind that wall was something there from the beginning, in some sense. You talk a lot about how, on some level, you can't really justify talking about the past causing the future, and that, on some level of abstraction, you can just as well say that the future causes the past if you take those ideas seriously; and I think all of this stuff about intelligence is making us take them increasingly seriously, you know, people like [Nick] Bostrom who takes it very seriously, and lots of other people also who take very seriously the simulation argument: the very possibility that perhaps everything we know, in some sense, [is a simulation(?)]. I interpret that as [us] having some sort of creator, in some sense."A little later at 57 minutes:
Justin Murphy: "I find it especially interesting that it's like whatever is going on we can't help but constantly fall back onto this vocabulary of, you know, it seems like there's something else doing the work that's not human agency. When you think about how unfashionable religion is in the West, I find a symptom there. I think there's something symptomatic going on there that might be a bit of a clue as to the mass kind of ideological insanity that's kind of wreaking havoc on the public sphere today…. When you take these things together the fact that religious or traditional worldviews are being very strangely vindicated by the frontiers of science and critical philosophy but you also take note that people are kind of rabidly, how should I say, afraid of you taking religion seriously. I think that that is kind of a symptomatic knot, if you will…"
For Land, the history of the modern world is the unleashing of the forces held back by traditional authority structures (represented in his example by ancient Chinese civilization). Something collapsed, something was taken out of the way, at the beginning of modernity, and roughly correlating with the advent of Enlightenment liberalism, that sent the world careening towards a post-human technocapitalism. From my perspective, in my present mode of theorizing, Land is saying the Christian katechon was removed, and thus the spirit of the antichrist was released to bring itself into full existence. Liberalism thus spread like a virus across human society to liberate, or meltdown, human society into lawlessness (and thus accelerate the process). Civilizations have collapsed before, but none have collapsed in such a way as to bring down the whole world's religious institutions in such a spectacular way as what has happened with Christendom's collapse. Even personal moral institutions like marriage are being corrupted and dissolved into irrelevance.
Some may object that Christianity is growing globally. This is true, but the actual Church itself has been nearly neutered as a social or political power. Christianity may be growing numerically, but the Church is completely fractured, infiltrated, and discredited. The fact that Pope Francis presided over a pagan ceremony inside the Vatican, and nearly every mainline denomination in America (along with many Churches of Christ) have embraced homosexual marriage in recent years should demonstrate just how incapable any form of "the Church" has become at serving as a katechon.
I want to continue with some more Nick Land quotes from his most famous essay 'Meltdown.'
"an automatizing nihilist vortex, neutralizing all values through commensuration to digitized commerce, and driving a migration from despotic command to cyber-sensitive control: from status and meaning to money and information."
"Modernity marks itself out as hot culture, captured by a spiraling involvement with entropy deviations camouflaging an invasion from the future, launched back out of terminated security against everything that inhibits the meltdown process."The released technocapitalist singularity, possibly the antichrist, uses entropy, which could be read as liberation from civilizational order, to destroy all the security mechanisms that might inhibit it's fully coming into power.
"Capital only retains anthropological characteristics as a symptom of underdevelopment; reformatting primate behaviour as inertia to be dissipated in self-reinforcing artificiality. Man is something for it to overcome: a problem, drag."Does Satan care about humanity? Does he value it? Or, does he see it as a drag on his rebellion project?
"facilitating the dehumanization of wealth"The idea that Mammon can be disassociated from the humans who use it has the potential to bring new meaning to Jesus' words about our inability to serve both God and Mammon.
"Authority instantiates itself as linear instruction pathways, genetic baboonery, scriptures, traditions, rituals, and gerontocratic hierarchies, resonant with the dominator ur-myth that the nature of reality has already been decided."
Nick Land ties authority and law directly to religion. The antichrist, the "lawless one," has to remove scriptures, rituals, hierarchies, and ancient myth before bringing itself into full hegemony.
In conclusion, I'd like to say that many of the Old Testament prophesies about the Messiah were fulfilled in unexpected and surprising ways. Many of these prophesies possessed double meanings that were relevant in both contemporary and future situations. In this light, New Testament prophesies shouldn't be read too narrowly. God can use them as he sees fit. The theory I've briefly outlined is not something I have faith in, but I think it could help Christians remain vigilant against possible threats and deceptions.