A few days ago I read a piece by Joe Lonsdale: “Taking Thiel Seriously on the Antichrist.”
It did something very rare these days: it made me stop and read every line.
Joe describes Peter Thiel's reflections on the Antichrist, the Katechon (the "restrainer"), and how old models can help us think about new threats: AI, global governance, safety as a new god.
In simplified terms, their frame looks like this:
- The Antichrist = a planetary regime of total "safety".
- The Katechon = what holds it back (historically: empires, nation-states, the US).
- The danger = existential risk used to justify a global sovereign that never lets go.
On one essential point, they are RIGHT: fear and safety can absolutely become tools of total control.
But there is a deeper issue, more structural and far more dangerous that remained with me after reading.
Something in the way power is framed stayed with me like a stone in the shoe.
A very vertical reading of power
Throughout the article, power is still imagined in a very classical way:
- vertical,
- sovereign,
- attached to a throne,
- embodied by an empire, a State, or a future world government.
Everything revolves around who "holds" power, who "rules", who "governs". Even the Antichrist is framed as a centralized, sovereign structure.
And this is where the confusion begins.
Joe opens his piece with Kant:
"Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind."
He's right. We cannot think without models.
Kant also understood: a concept that orients attention in the wrong direction is worse than no concept at all. Because it produces structured blindness! You search actively, rigorously... in the wrong place.
The Antichrist/Katechon frame is structurally misaligned with how power actually operates today. And that misalignment matters, because it determines where you look for the threat.
The fantasy of sovereignty prevents elites from seeing that the loss of freedom will come from an excess of optimization.
And despite the many references to Daniel and Jewish texts in Lonsdale's piece, this way of thinking power is not Jewish in its essence, at all.
There is no "Antichrist" in Judaism
Let's be clear: the word Antichrist does not appear anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. It is a Christian concept, born in the New Testament.
Judaism has no central anti-Messiah figure structuring the end of times. Instead, it has a deep suspicion of false messiahs (humans who claim to embody ultimate redemption) and a long history of destructive empires (Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome) that rise, dominate... and fall.
In some late, marginal texts, there is a figure called Armilus, sometimes described as an anti-messiah. But never central, not canonical. Never structuring theology.
The closest concept Judaism has to an "ultimate evil" is not a person, but a force: Amalek. An impulse to oppose freedom, to erase memory, to extinguish goodness. Kind of a death cult, in modern terms. Diffuse, not centralized. Persistent, not final.
Judaism is organized around God, the Covenant, and the permanent risk of humans mistaking themselves for absolute saviors or forces like Amalek manifesting in new forms across history.
And it changes everything about how power is imagined.
In the Christian Antichrist framework: evil becomes centralized, power becomes total, the threat becomes one global structure, salvation becomes a final rupture.
In the Jewish reading: power is always fragmented, kingdoms are always temporary, no empire is ever final, no human structure can fully replace God, history does not end in one definitive political configuration.
So when modern thinkers (who happen to be founders of PayPal, co-founders of Palantir, early investors in Tesla and SpaceX) imagine a one-world Antichrist regime of total safety, they are not thinking in a Jewish category of power, even when they cite Jewish texts.
They are thinking in a fully Christian-apocalyptic architecture of power, translated into the language of technology and global governance.
And that matters, because a centralized theology of evil produces a centralized politics of power.
What power actually looks like from the field
The problem with the Antichrist/Katechon frame, as it is usually mobilized today, it is that it still assumes that power is something that is held.
Held by a State.
Held by an Empire.
Held by a Sovereign.
Held, therefore, by someone who can be named, targeted, overthrown and replaced.
This assumption is precisely what doesn't hold.
I have spent years in the field and operational layers of opaque institutions, observing how decisions actually get made. The informal leverage.
And from that vantage point, one pattern appears with absolute consistency:
Power is not primarily a position.
It is a circulatory phenomenon.
And this is where most theories break.
1. The visible layer of power, what people think is power
This is what the public sees: titles, institutions, leaders, flags, ceremonies, cameras, official authority.
This is what produces respect, fear, obedience, indignation. It looks solid. It feels permanent. But it is intrinsically fragile !
A scandal, a change of alliances and *poof*. It disappears.
This form of power PERFORMS power. It REPRESENTS it, it makes it ivisible, narratable and therefore contestable.
And because it is visible, it becomes the natural target of critique, revolt, fear, myth... including apocalyptic myth.
But representation is NOT causation. This layer can command in appareances, but it cannot operate alone. And above all: it depends entirely on the second layer.
2. The operational layer, where power really circulates
In May 2025, I posted a foundational piece of the Grey Zone: "The fluidity of power (or how societal spheres interconnect)".
In very veryyyy short (please read the full piece): power does not "rule", power FLOWS through actors.
Once you stop thinking in terms of thrones and start thinking in terms of flows, the entire geometry of domination changes. In my frame, power behaves like a fluid:
- It has channels (institutions, platforms, infrastructures).
- It has reservoirs (elite universities, key ministries, dominant platforms).
- It has valves (gatekeepers, editors, regulators, engineers, financiers).
- And it has leaks (informal networks, whistleblowers, informal influence, cultural side-channels).
In this context, no one truly "owns" power. Some only can regulate the pressure at particular points.
That means control is never total, never final, never centralized in one sovereign form, even when it appears so.
And it means that the classical image of a single Antichrist structure "devouring the whole world" already rests on a misreading of how power actually operates.
Or maybe that is just a Kings' fantasy ?
The recurring illusion that power can ever fully belong to those who sit on thrones.
Oh, and if we were to take actual biblical references, we might recall what happened to Saul... the moment a king believes that power belongs to him, it already begins to slip away.
Once you understanding this, your relationship to power completely transforms. You stop worshipping it, or fearing it. You just learn how it circulates.
Through intermediaries, negotiators, gatekeepers, scribes, wives inside dynasties, analysts, shadow operators, loyalty chains, information brokers.
They don't "serve" power. They don't "hold" it either. They circulate it. They can stabilize or destabilize a leader without ever appearing.
They hold no throne.
They hold leverage.
And leverage is always reciprocal: the banker can influence the king, but the king can expulse the banker. The advisor can shape the emperor's decisions, but the emperor can ignore the advice. The gatekeeper can control access, but someone can build another gate.
Leverage is NOT possession. It is conditional, temporary, revocable. Being in the network is not being the network.
This is why conspiracies that blame "the elites" or "the bankers" or any single identifiable group always miss the point.
They confuse visibility with control.
They see gatekeepers, intermediaries, financiers - people with leverage at specific nodes - and assume these people own the reservoirs.
Those who regulate the valves are never the same as those who own the water, the territory, or the force that protects it all.
And this confusion between operating within the system and being the system is what produces the recurring delusion that power can be localized, named, and overthrown by removing a few visible actors.
It cannot.
Because the system is not held. It circulates. And always had.
I don't think Peter Thiel is unaware that power is fluid.
As Joe Lonsdale reminded us:
- Thiel cofounded Palantir: he knows control flows through data, not decrees.
- He was the first investor in Facebook: he knows interfaces shape behavior more than laws ever could.
- He has been studying Girard mimetic desire for decades: he knows power is relational, not positional.
So why does the Antichrist/Katechon frame persist?
Perhaps because it serves a pedagogical function? To warn leaders about a specific political configuration, global governance justified by existential risk.
Or perhaps because it serves a strategic function.
If you want to mobilize a base against AI Safety regulations, bureaucracies, or centralized tech governance, you need a meme that resonates. And "the Antichrist" resonates. It's visceral, biblical, apocalyptic. It turns a policy debate into a metaphysical war.
Whether Thiel believes this frame literally or deploys it instrumentally, the problem remains the same:
There is a foundational incoherence with using a vertical model to warn against a fluid threat: the model itself orients attention toward thrones, empires, visible sovereigns.
It orients action toward the WRONG defenses. You build walls when you need friction. You defend thrones when you need to preserve ambiguity. You look for a sovereign to restrain when the threat is already circulating through the defaults.
And in doing so, it risks missing the real danger entirely.
Why the Antichrist vision misses the real threat
The intuition is correct: fear and safety can absolutely become tools of total control.
Yet, the frame used still assumes the threat will take the form of a visible sovereign structure. A centralized power that can be named, resisted, overthrown.
And that assumption is precisely what makes the frame obsolete.
Once power becomes fluid rather than positional, there is no definitive throne to seize. No single empire can fully "contain" control.
Total control, in a fluid architecture, does not appear as tyranny.
It appears as normality.
It flows through:
- defaults (what happens if you do nothing),
- probabilities (what the algorithm suggests),
- incentives (what becomes profitable or punishable),
- narratives (what becomes sayable or unsayable),
- interfaces (what becomes visible or invisible),
- and cognitive saturation (what becomes thinkable or exhausting).
The danger is, therefore, a system where nothing appears coercive, yet everything becomes oriented. And this is not a distant dystopia.
It is already the infrastructure of perception itself.
Take ESG, as an example.
No one voted for it. No global sovereign imposed it. But once BlackRock makes it an investment criterion, once banks make it a lending criterion, once platforms make it a visibility criterion... resistance becomes structurally expensive.
Not forbidden, just too costly.
This is not tyranny. It is normalization. And it is far more durable than any decree, because it never presents itself as power.
The real Antichrist does not announce itself
In the classical frame, the Antichrist is recognizable: it speaks "pompous words," it demands worship, it sits "as God in the temple."
But modern power does not work that way.
Modern power does not say: "Obey me."
It says: "This is how things work."
It does not demand worship.
It offers comfort, efficiency, safety, convenience.
It does not sit on a throne.
It circulates through platforms, protocols, defaults, and norms.
And because it never presents itself as power, it becomes almost impossible to resist.
You cannot overthrow what has no center or rebel against what feels like reality itself.
If control has become fluid, then restraint must become fluid as well.
A circulatory power can only be restrained by:
- Friction: structures that slow down the flow, create delays, force reconsideration.
- Contradiction: competing narratives, competing infrastructures, competing defaults.
- Ambiguity: spaces where power cannot fully encode itself, where meaning remains unstable.
- Inner sovereignty: individuals who can perceive the flow without being swept by it.
- Competing perceptual frames: alternative ways of seeing that prevent any single frame from becoming total.
Not a throne defending freedom ! But a permanent, distributed refusal to let any system become the only reality.
What does that mean concretely?
If you want to restrain the threat you describe, stop looking for an empire to defend against another empire. Start building infrastructures of friction:
- Protocols that are deliberately non-interoperable, so no single standard can become universal.
- Platforms that allow exit, so normalization never becomes total.
- Institutions that preserve ambiguity, so meaning cannot be fully encoded.
- Spaces where questioning remains structurally cheap, not expensive.
The real Katechon today is not the United States holding back a rival empire.
It is the engineers who refuse to build systems that are too smooth.
The architects who design for friction, not flow.
The operators who preserve contradiction, not coherence.
What I call the "Grey Zone" is the space where the confrontation actually happens
Not the place where power is officially held, but the space where power actually moves.
The space where it is continuously redistributed, recoded and rerouted.
In the Grey Zone, power is not held and not attributed. It is not even intended. And this is where the real confrontation of our time takes place.
In the daily, invisible struggle over:
- what feels normal,
- what feels necessary,
- what feels inevitable,
- what feels like reality itself.
The safetyism Joe warns against is a convergence, and it's real:
Public actors seeking legitimacy.
Private actors seeking stability.
Intellectual elites seeking respectability.
Platforms seeking liability protection.
None of them wants a throne. But all of them want to reduce uncertainty.
And when risk-reduction becomes the organizing principle of civilization, when every potential harm justifies preemptive control, when safety becomes indistinguishable from management... you don't get a world government.
You get a situation where deviation from the optimal path becomes structurally discouraged by friction, cost, and cognitive exhaustion.
And this is obviously not a distant threat. It is already how our infrastructure operates.
It is manifesting as a situation where:
- questioning becomes exhausting,
- alternatives become unimaginable,
- refusal becomes incomprehensible,
- and normality itself becomes the prison.
The Antichrist frame assumes power must be visible to be dangerous. But the most dangerous form of power is the one that never has to announce itself.
A final note
I don't study power to romanticize it.
I study it because I have seen what it does to people who venerate it: they get crushed.
To those who fear it: they get paralyzed.
To those who desire it: they lose themselves.
To those who believe they hold it: they discover they only ever held the appearance.
What most people call "power" is often just a façade maintained by belief. But once you see the operational layer, the way it actually circulates, something changes.
You stop being impressed, afraid or captured.
You don't "have" power.
You stay lucid and humble, inside it.
And that lucidity is not just intellectual. It is operational. It is the only way to move through opaque structures without being consumed by them.
This is what I try to transmit: a posture. It's not reverence, it's not revolt either. Just lucidity.
And that, paradoxically, is the closest thing to real restraint I have ever found: a distributed refusal to mistake the flow for fate.
If you are serious about restraint, the question becomes:
Does the fluidity of power invalidate the Katechon model, or does it require us to rethink what restraint actually means?
Depending on the answer, the infrastructures we will need to build look nothing like what has existed before.
Oriane