Antichrist
Article
Antichrist is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between September 29, 2022 and November 06, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “When the Antichrist takes control over the world”; “The Antichrist / The Dragon”; “summon the literal Antichrist and plunge the world into eternal darkness”. It most often appears alongside China, QAnon, Trump administration.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: September 29, 2022
- Last seen: November 06, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- China (2 shared issues)
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- QAnon (2 shared issues)
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- Trump administration (2 shared issues)
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- 1 Kings 10-11 (1 shared issues)
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- 10th century (1 shared issues)
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- 19th Century (1 shared issues)
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- 2008 Democratic National Convention (1 shared issues)
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- A16Z (1 shared issues)
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- Abbott (1 shared issues)
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- Acts 4:4 (1 shared issues)
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- Adam Scheffer (1 shared issues)
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- Adam Schefter (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
I remember coming across TPPU last year, when its top article offered to teach me "how to discern the spirit of God from the Antichrist spirit". Unfortunately, here's the article:
I found myself imagining the scene after my death. I would arrive at the Pearly Gates, and God would say: “Depart from Me, for you did not serve Me, but followed false prophets and wolves in sheep’s clothing.”
And I would answer: “Look, I was going to read the blog post on how to distinguish between the the Spirit of God and the Antichrist spirit, but it required a $7/month subscription, and I just really don’t like paying for online content.”
Antichrist lectures are the hot new thing in Silicon Valley, but so far they’ve honestly been kind of disappointing. Some people are giving entire lecture series without even revealing who the Antichrist is! You’d expect that to be the bare minimum!
Inline links: the hot new thing in Silicon Valley
We can do better. Earlier this year, at the Manifest forecasting conference in Berkeley, I gave a presentation titled “Forecasting Transformative AI Using The Book Of Revelation”. Given the renewed interest in this topic, I repost it below, in written form, with slight edits. The first two-thirds, including the section on the Antichrist, is free. In deference to the injunction by prior researchers on this topic not to “cast one’s pearls before swine”, the last third (including the Whore of Babylon, the Battle of Armageddon, and the New Jerusalem) will be paywalled.
Inline links: Manifest forecasting conference
Thank you for attending. The Book of Revelation was written around 95 AD by St. John of Patmos. Most secular scholars interpret it as an allegorical description of events in John’s own time, especially the Roman persecution of the early church. But millennia of Christian commentators have treated it as a prophecy about some future cataclysm - most often during the commentator’s own era. In the 10th century, a renegade bishop declared Pope John XV to be the Antichrist. In the 19th century, the Russian Old Believers accused Napoleon of the same. In our own day, American evangelicals have proposed everyone from Saddam Hussein to Barack Obama.
Peter Thiel recently gave a lecture on the End Times, described as “portraying the Antichrist as a technocratic leader exploiting fears of catastrophe to impose global control.” Thiel suggested that maybe the Antichrist would use worries about global warming, or inequality, or AI safety, to frighten people into accepting some kind of evil surveillance state. His moral was that we need to stop living in fear of people’s scare stories.
Inline links: described as
But isn’t the idea that if we try to regulate things, it will summon the literal Antichrist and plunge the world into eternal darkness, kind of a scare story? Isn’t Thiel using this scare story to frighten people into accepting the, uh, evil surveillance state he’s enabling? Thiel seems to have the same blind spot as Pargin’s characters - you need to stop letting scary stories ruin your life, except the scary story about how scary stories can ruin your life, which you should let ruin your life as quickly and decisively as possible.
Inline links: evil surveillance state
My own view is that we have many problems - some even rising to the level of crisis - but none are yet so completely unsolvable that we should hate society and our own lives and spiral into permanent despair. We should have a medium-high but not unachievable bar for trying to solve these problems through study, activism and regulation (especially regulation grounded in good economics like the theory of externalities), and a very high, barely-achievable-except-in-emergencies bar for trying to solve them through censorship and accusing people of being the Antichrist. The problem of excessive doomerism is one bird in this flock, and deserves no special treatment.