1. Peter Thiel - “Against Edenism” (First Things)
  • Thesis: Thiel warns that humanity’s nostalgia for a pre-technological Eden is misplaced. Genesis ends not in return to the Garden, but in the City of God - a divine, engineered future.
  • He frames technology as moral necessity: without continual innovation, civilisation reverts to Malthusian scarcity where growth and democracy collapse.
  • The Enlightenment’s “Faustian” drive to master nature, he argues, was closer to the biblical impulse than today’s post-modern technophobia. To stop building is to surrender to chaos.
  • Thiel contrasts “atheist pessimism” - acceptance of chance and entropy - with Judeo-Christian optimism, which seeks order and mastery through God-given creativity.
  • In the eschatological frame, every act of engineering becomes co-creation with the divine: even Faust’s dykes and data centres can be instruments of providence.
  • Against Edenism – First Things
  1. AI Pays the Bills — The Anguilla Revenue Revolution
    • In 2018, the tiny Caribbean island of Anguilla made just a few percent of its budget from selling .ai domain names. By 2025, that figure hit ~50%. A bar chart displaying the share of .ai domain revenues in the state budget of Anguilla from 2018 to 2025. The x-axis lists years, and the y-axis shows the percentage share, ranging from 0 to 50%. Bars indicate revenue shares: 2018 at a low percentage, slight increases in 2019 and 2020, small rises in 2021 and 2022, a significant increase in 2023, and a peak at nearly 50% in 2025.
    • The global AI boom has turned a country of 15,000 people into a digital landlord of the future - where every startup and lab pays rent.
    • It’s a modern twist on resource economics: no oil, no rare earths - just two letters of the alphabet.
    • The result: one of the world’s most dramatic fiscal transformations, powered purely by naming rights in cyberspace.
    • A reminder that in a dematerialised economy, symbolic capital - even a domain suffix - can become national wealth.
  2. The Pravda Gap - Fascism Falls Quiet, 1939–1941
    • Before 1939, Soviet newspaper Pravda overflowed with denunciations of “fascists”. Then - silence. A bar chart showing the frequency of mentions of "fascism" in the Soviet newspaper Pravda from 1930 to 1944. Vertical bars represent yearly data, with different shades of blue indicating varying levels of mentions. Text at the top reads "Упомянаемость фамизма в газете 'Правда'" and includes years and percentages on the axes. A watermark from Восток Восток is visible.
    • From mid-1939 to mid-1941, references to fascism all but vanished from Soviet pages. The timing? The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.
    • When Nazi Germany became a temporary ally of Socialist Russia, even ideological vocabulary bent to diplomacy.
    • After June 1941 - Hitler’s invasion - the word returned in a flood. History’s data spike of cognitive dissonance resolved overnight.