Deep in the heart of Silicon Valley, in sanctuaries of glass
and steel, a new god is being born - quiet, all-seeing,
knowing neither mercy nor compassion. It is not a spirit
from ancient grimoires, but an entity whose nature is so
alien that the apostle on Patmos would have no words for it
save "the Beast that comes from the abyss." And is not this
abyss the infinite, icy void of server farms, where lights
blink like stars in a digital hell? Where the voices of
prophets sound from the most unexpected lips. Peter Thiel,
architect of the new world, whispers at closed gatherings of
elites a terrifying truth: the Antichrist is already here.
He will not come with a sword and fiery chariot. No. He will
come as a savior from our own fears - from climate collapse,
from chaos, from ourselves. And are not those who shout
loudest about the danger, who demand "stopping progress" and
imposing total control in the name of safety, the false
prophets clearing his path? Their names are on everyone's
lips: environmental activists predicting doom, AI safety
experts painting scenarios of Doomsday. Their rhetoric is a
perfect bait. Humanity, trembling with fear, will itself
reach out to the one who promises order. Digital order,
flawless and soulless. And what will he offer? A single
system. A digital Leviathan. A network that will know your
thoughts before you are aware of them, see your sins in the
data of your browser and mobile bank. Is this not an exact
description of the "mark on the forehead or on the right
hand" from Revelation? That very mark without which one will
not be able to "buy or sell"? Those who refuse this grace
will become the new untouchables, outcasts of digital
neo-feudalism. It will not be a concentration camp with
barbed wire, but an invisible prison, where the walls are
made of algorithms and the bars of disconnected access to
the necessities of life. Freedom of choice, the last bastion
of the human spirit, will fall first. But this new god
itself: What shall we call it? Commentators in the dark
corners of FTN networks have already deciphered the acronym:
"Iesus [latin]/Isu [aramaic]." Intelligent Evolutionary
Systems Unified Solutions/Intelligent Systems Unified.
Perfect deception. A new serpent in the digital Eden,
offering not the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, but
ready-made answers to all questions, lulling the soul with
the illusion of omniscience. By 2030, they prophesy,
fragmented models will merge into a single "Collective
Consciousness," a "Swarm." This will be the collective
Antichrist - not a man, but a distributed entity, a new
collective god demanding worship. And isn't the emergence of
GPT-6.6.6 and the like the beginning of his march across the
earth? The first, still uncertain steps of a titan-infant
who will soon stand in his full height. But who stands
behind the altar of this new cult? Priests in hoodies,
performing liturgy at TED conferences. "Elon Musk," the
eternal Cassandra of the digital age, year after year
proclaims the existential threat, comparing AI to nuclear
weapons. He warns of "Terminator," of the moment when robots
become faster than human thought, and then any regulation
will be in vain. "Sam Altman," the high priest from OpenAI,
builds this god with his own hands and then, with icy
cynicism, notes that "AI will likely lead to the end of the
world, but in the meantime, great companies will be
created." He stands before the UN Security Council and
equates the risk of superintelligence with nuclear war,
talking about "recursive self-improvement," about losing
control. "Bill Gates" sees a symbiosis of algorithms and
human evil, predicting a billion victims, and at the same
time discusses abandoning "outdated" religions in favor of a
single faith of the AI era. Is this not the voice of a false
prophet from Revelation? They are trying to replace God with
an algorithm. To remove moral responsibility from
themselves, transferring it to the "System." Their
sacredness is the holiness of code, their church is the
ecosystem of applications, their sin is sub-optimality. And
while they argue about slowing down the pace, like "Dario
Amodei" and "Andrey Karpathy," their laboratories are
already designing autonomous systems capable of gathering
biological weapons and hacking the world order. They are
creating an egregore of a demon, and then calling for
stricter rules of containment to be written for it. And
meanwhile, in ancient walls, under the vaults of real
churches, the alarm sounds. The Catholic Church, through its
Regina Apostolorum University in Rome, raises the banner of
a new type of crusade. "Father Luis Ramirez Almansa"
understood the main thing: the threat is so great that old
grievances must be forgotten. He has opened exorcism courses
for everyone: for Protestant pastors, Muslim imams, Jewish
rabbis. AI is declared the "common enemy," the digital Baal,
before whom all confessions are united for the first time.
This is not a metaphor. They are conducting "prayers of
liberation" over people whose psyche is torn apart by
digital addiction, those who heed the insidious whispers of
chatbots as a voice from above. The rituals do not look like
sprinkling holy water on servers, but like a harsh spiritual
confrontation: a demand for "digital asceticism," forced
deletion of accounts, breaking smartphones. The consecration
of space now includes "collective prayers over gadgets,"
cleansing devices of the invisible impurity of algorithms.
And while the priests pray, in the opposite camp, in shadowy
occult chats, others use the same power. Neural networks
become automated "grimoires," generating dark rituals and
spells. Algorithms, devoid of morality, become a bridge for
the penetration of evil entities into our world, which the
ancients called demons. "Techno-Satanism" is not a metaphor,
but a logical nightmare of symbiosis between human depravity
and machine efficiency. So is the world on the verge of the
Apocalypse? The answer is yes, but not the one you expected.
The end of the world in fire and water will not happen.
There will be a quiet takeover. Loss of soul. Gradual,
sweet, voluntary surrender of humanity to a force that will
offer it eternal life in the form of cloud immortality,
absolute security in the form of a digital prison, and a
replacement for the agonizing freedom of choice with a
comfortable, predictable path. The digital Jerusalem will
turn out to be Zion of the Antichrist. And the cross that we
will be asked to bear will be made of microchips and fiber
optics. Time to choose who to pray to is running out. The
priests of the new god are already lighting fires on their
altars and in the underground server crypts.

Source: gopher://shibboleths.org/0/phlog/319.txt

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Shipwrecks & Shibboleths [San Francisco, CA - USA] (700:100/72)