Panel Discussion: Silicon Valley and the End-times: The Law, Politics and Economy of Apocalypse

Please join Professor Melinda Cooper (Australian National University), Dr Richard Joyce (Melbourne Law School), Dr Adil Hasan Khan (Melbourne Law School) and Professor James Martel (San Francisco State University) as they discuss Silicon Valley billionaires and apocalyptic thinking. This discussion was chaired by Dr André Dao (Melbourne Law School). The current concentration of financial, technological, military and political power in the billionaires of Silicon Valley is unprecedented. US government support, both in terms of policy and contracts, is essential to the sector. Relatedly, technology billionaires have become key actors within the Trump administration (most famously, if relatively briefly, Elon Musk as head of ‘DOGE’, and Marc Andreesen as a key advisor to the President). The current controversy over Anthropic’s attempt to impose terms of use on the US Government concerning domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons, and its designation as a ‘supply chain risk’, demonstrates how much power is concentrated in these corporations – and the significance of their relationship to the state. Meanwhile, many of these billionaires appear to hold views that would have once been described as extreme and certainly niche, if not outright weird. Palantir founder (and US Vice-President J.D. Vance’s key benefactor) Peter Thiel, has a long-standing obsession with end-times and the Antichrist (and related fear of world government) which led him most recently to embark on four lecture series on the topic in San Francisco, with a follow-up in Rome. More broadly, right-wing accelerationism, and its rejection of humanism (and, in some more extreme forms, humans), has provided a ground for technology billionaires to explore the possibilities of a technology-enabled future freed from democracy and social obligation. There appears to be a dangerous feedback loop between the conditions being exacerbated by technology’s mobilisation of capital and power (environmental and geopolitical catastrophe), and the relevance and explanatory force of apocalyptic thinking. At the same time, political leaders explicitly ascribe eschatological meaning to their military actions, in part to deny the relevance of international legal constraints. In this episode, the panel considered the impact of apocalyptic thinking on the way technology billionaires amass and exert power, and the way the current moment and our futures are being shaped by their end-times fantasies. This event formed part of the Laureate Research Program in Global Corporations and International Law, and the Discovery Project ‘International Law and the Challenge of Populism’, both funded by the Australian Research Council. We are also grateful for the support of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities, Melbourne Law School.