日本語版はこちら / Japanese version: 誰がパランティアを監視するのか？
My name is Norimitsu Kaiho, and I tell stories for a living. I write novels, manga, anime scripts, and game scenarios. I was also one of the translators of the Japanese edition of Watchmen, a book this essay will return to more than once.
Running a technology company, on the other hand, is not my field. I am in no position to assess Palantir Technologies on either technical or business grounds. Whether large-scale data analysis systems are valuable or dangerous, beneficial or harmful, is for experts in those fields to judge.
But as I read what Peter Thiel, Palantir’s chairman, and the people around him have to say about stories, something struck me as odd, as a storyteller.
Thiel likes to invoke fiction of many kinds. The company he co-founded takes its name, Palantir, from the “seeing stones” in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Its platform for government and defense is called Gotham. He discusses Watchmen. He discusses One Piece. He discusses Faust. And he connects them to his own thinking about technology, politics, and the Antichrist.
Put these readings side by side and a pattern shows up. There are things Thiel seems repeatedly to miss in these stories. Broadly speaking, there are two.
First, he misses the hero’s restraint of his own power.
Second, he misses that the figures he himself calls Antichrists look nothing like the Antichrist he describes, the one who halts technological progress.
And these two omissions ultimately converge on the same problem: who can stop a capable individual with immense power?
That is the question.
The First Omission
The Hero’s Fear of Power
Let us begin with the name Palantir.
Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale1 explains that the name comes from
“the cautionary tale in the Lord of the Rings about the power of ‘seeing stones’ that later fall into the wrong hands.”
A palantír is a magical instrument that allows its user to see distant places and images transmitted by other stones.2 It is not inherently evil. The stones were brought from Númenor and once served as legitimate instruments through which the rulers of Gondor and other lands surveyed distant places and communicated with one another.
By the time of The Lord of the Rings, however, the Dark Lord Sauron possesses one of them. Using a stone has become dangerous: the enemy can see you, and can exploit his control over what you are shown.
At first glance the name suits an information company. But it is also an ominous one: a stone that lets the enemy see what you see. Lonsdale’s phrase “cautionary tale” suggests the company knows it.
Gotham and The Dark Knight
Gotham offers an almost identical story.
In Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight,3 Batman uses the mobile phones of every citizen of Gotham to build a vast sonar surveillance system that gives him a view of the entire city.
Within the film, this is almost the only way to stop the Joker from destroying the city. Yet it also lays bare everyone’s private information: an enormous violation of people’s rights, and a dangerous instrument if misused.
Are Only the “Wrong Hands” Dangerous?
As noted above, Joe Lonsdale describes Palantir’s namesake as
“the cautionary tale in the Lord of the Rings about the power of ‘seeing stones’ that later fall into the wrong hands.”
There is no doubt that both the palantíri and Gotham’s surveillance system in The Dark Knight would be dangerous in the “wrong hands.”
But this reading leaves something important out. Saruman and Denethor, who use the palantíri disastrously in The Lord of the Rings, are not simply the “wrong people.”
They are, rather, alarmingly close to being the right people.
Saruman, one of the great wizards known as the Istari, is no ignorant villain. He is the head of their order, a wise figure sent to Middle-earth to oppose Sauron. He is one of the highest-ranking experts on the side of good, and one of those who best understand the threat Sauron poses.
Denethor, meanwhile, is the Steward of Gondor, ruling Minas Tirith, where a palantír is kept. He is its rightful keeper. And he uses it to protect the city and its people.
What happens? Through repeated contact with Sauron,4 Saruman is overwhelmed by his power and eventually ends up serving him. Denethor obtains information about real enemy armies through the palantír,5 but the overwhelming forces Sauron selectively shows him drive him to despair and, ultimately, suicide. He can acquire vast quantities of accurate information, yet cannot adequately test the picture of the world that information creates.
The theme here is not simply keep it out of the wrong hands. It is that even the right hands can go wrong.6
Danger remains even when the user is intelligent, well-intentioned, legitimately authorized, and acting for peace and the common good rather than personal gain.
This is not just a security problem. It is a problem of power.
It is a central theme of The Lord of the Rings, repeated in the story of the One Ring.
There, Gandalf and the Elven Lady Galadriel7 embody goodness, and for precisely that reason refuse the power of the One Ring.
The Case of The Dark Knight
The Dark Knight repeats this theme. When Bruce Wayne shows him what he has built, Lucius Fox, who developed the underlying technology, says:
“This is wrong.”
And then:
“This is too much power for one person.”8
Batman is a good man, not a villain. He is the most capable person in the film’s world. His motive is just: to stop the Joker from committing mass murder.
Even so, the film does not conclude: “Batman has proved he can use this power properly, so he should keep using it.” Control remains with Fox, and after a single use the entire system is destroyed.9 Here, as with the One Ring, what makes the hero a hero is
not merely possessing power, but being able to take that power away from himself.
Faust and “Competent Evil”
Before going further, one thing Thiel does not miss. One concept is important to understanding Thiel’s idea of a hero: “competent evil.”
In a conversation with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner on the podcast MD MEETS, released on September 24, 2026,10 Thiel says that the word “good” has two kinds of antonym.
“The moral antonym is evil. The functional antonym is bad.”
From there, he argues:
“if you’re evil, you’re at least competent.”11
This is more than wordplay. Immediately afterward, Thiel himself explains it through Faust.
He compares Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus with Goethe’s Faust.12
In his reading, Marlowe’s Faust is a “fake scientist,” a “fake alchemist”: his science does not work, and he ends up in hell.
Goethe’s Faust, by contrast, makes a pact with the devil and obtains knowledge by “morally dubious means.” But that knowledge works, and Faust is ultimately redeemed.
Thiel then says:
“So I think it’s better to be good than evil—I want to be very clear—but perhaps I prefer Goethe’s Faust to Marlowe’s Faust.”
Thiel is therefore not simply claiming that evil is better than good.
What he is really contrasting is competence that gets something done, even by morally troubling means, with incompetence that gets nothing done at all, whatever its morals.
Indeed, he connects this to the argument that modern society spends its time debating good and evil, when a greater problem may be that so many of its institutions and leaders, in business and in politics, are “totally incompetent.”
With “competent evil” on the table, the earlier question gets sharper. Imagine someone who holds dangerous power, draws criticism for it, acts anyway when action is needed, and gets results. What happens if that person really does save the world?
He may be “evil.” But he is competent, and he is a hero who succeeded. What, then, can stop him? So consider the hero who succeeds.
The Hero Who Succeeds
Should dangerous power, then, simply be discarded? Each of these stories has a hero who confronts dangerous power and succeeds.
Aragorn himself uses a palantír13 and pits his will against Sauron’s. In doing so, he unsettles Sauron and creates an opportunity to change the course of the war. Batman, too, uses the surveillance system and succeeds in capturing the Joker.
These heroes do not go on using that power indefinitely.
But what if a hero who has once used immense power rightly and saved the world says, “I have proved that I can use this power properly”?
Here we come to Watchmen.
The Smartest Man in the World
Adrian Veidt, known as Ozymandias,14 is, to borrow Thiel’s terms, an almost ideal example of competent evil.
The smartest man in the world. A billionaire who develops extraordinary technology.
When he concludes that nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union is becoming all but inevitable, and that existing political institutions cannot avert it, he builds a third option on his own.
He kills millions of people. By doing so, he prevents an even greater nuclear catastrophe.
Alan Moore, moreover, does not write Veidt in a way that makes him easy to dismiss.
The plan actually succeeds. By the time the heroes arrive, it is already done. It was done thirty-five minutes ago.15 The victims cannot be brought back. Revealing the truth might destroy the peace achieved between the United States and the Soviet Union and bring back the threat of nuclear war.
Nite Owl, the hero who has been investigating the conspiracy, falls silent in the face of this fact.
Rorschach, who accepts only an absolute, black-and-white division between good and evil, appears to refuse compromise. Yet in the end he removes his mask and dies as the human being Walter Kovacs.
Still, Veidt lacks one thing: an assurance that he was right. He asks Doctor Manhattan, the godlike being who sees both past and future, whether he was right in the end, whether it all worked out. Manhattan gives him none.
“Nothing ever ends.”16
This is not a simple “You failed.” It is harsher than that. Even the fact that you succeeded cannot finally prove that you were right.
That is the answer.
Tolkien, Nolan, Moore: three very different storytellers, yet something runs through all three.
A hero uses dangerous power. The hero is competent. Sometimes he actually succeeds. Even so, competence, goodness, and even success are no grounds for granting someone unlimited power. That is precisely why a hero needs restraint.
Aragorn fears power.
Gandalf refuses the Ring.
Batman destroys his own surveillance apparatus.
Even Veidt cannot finally guarantee that he was right.
Yet when Thiel reads these works, this dimension becomes strangely faint.
This is particularly clear in Thiel and Sam Wolfe’s own discussion of Watchmen.17 They call its heroes “high-agency individuals”18 and discuss the Keene Act, which regulates them. Yet they scarcely explore the question of people with dangerous power placing limits on themselves. Instead, they treat the very question “Who watches the watchmen?” as “an infinite regress”19 and pronounce: “Watchmen triumphs as literature and fails as philosophy or theology.”
This is the reading I am objecting to, in its clearest form. They give more weight to the fact that no final judge exists than to the question the book actually puts to us: how should those who hold power doubt themselves, and how should they bind themselves?
The Second Omission
Why Are Both Antichrists Champions of Technology?
Halting science and technology plays an important part in Thiel’s recent thinking about the Antichrist.20
In this account, humanity, fearing an Armageddon brought about by nuclear war, AI, biotechnology, or other technologies, seeks
“peace and safety”
and accepts a powerful global political authority. That authority then controls dangerous science and technology.
In lectures in the fall of 2025,21 Thiel went so far as to describe the modern Antichrist as “a luddite who wants to stop all science.” He wants to steer toward neither Armageddon nor the Antichrist, but along the “narrow path” between them. As an aim, this is reasonable: find a middle course between abandoning technology and letting it run until it destroys the world.
Yet in the essay he published with Wolfe that same October, the two figures he reads as Antichrists, Ozymandias and Imu’s World Government, are not trying to stop technology at all.
The First Antichrist: Ozymandias
Thiel and Wolfe explicitly identify Ozymandias as an Antichrist:
“Veidt is a type of Antichrist.”22
But Veidt is no Luddite. Far from averting Armageddon by banning technology, he secretly develops cutting-edge technology, deploys it on a scale beyond the capacity of states, and averts catastrophe through his own technological intervention.
Nor is Veidt trying to send humanity back into the past.
Early in the story, his company sells a perfume called Nostalgia.23 It is a product for a society retreating into the past out of fear of nuclear war.
After his plan succeeds, it is replaced by Millennium, a perfume oriented toward the future and technology.24
Veidt, in other words, follows this course:
Armageddon approaches → Existing politics cannot solve the problem → An exceptional individual uses dangerous technology → He transcends morality and averts Armageddon, despite inflicting enormous casualties → He leads humanity into the future
He is not an Antichrist who stops technology. He is Thiel’s own “competent evil” walking Thiel’s “narrow path.” He is practically the type specimen.
The Second Antichrist: Imu
The same thing happens in Thiel’s account of One Piece.
In the world of One Piece, a World Government rules most of the globe. Its publicly acknowledged highest authorities are the Five Elders. Above them, however, stands the mysterious Imu, whose very existence has long been concealed. As the story unfolds, Imu emerges as the World Government’s secret ruler.25
Thiel and Wolfe present the World Government as a rigid regime, emphasizing its suppression of knowledge about lost advanced technologies and its attempt to kill Vegapunk.
Thiel and Wolfe then write:
“Oda must reveal a narrow, third way.”26
But the World Government in One Piece does not reject science and technology in general, either.27
It employs Vegapunk and produces one new weapon after another: Pacifistas, Seraphim, artificial Devil Fruits.
It even uses Vegapunk’s technology to unleash a weapon of mass destruction.28
What the World Government suppresses, then, is not science itself. It is science that threatens its rule. This is not technological stagnation. It is a political monopoly on technology and knowledge.
A Curious Misreading
So a question arises. By Thiel’s definition the Antichrist stops technology, yet Ozymandias and Imu’s World Government, which he himself reads as Antichrists, are plainly promoters of it. Why, then, are they Antichrists? They share a much clearer feature: “One World.”
Imu is, quite literally, the secret ruler of a World Government that unifies the world. Thiel and Wolfe also read Veidt’s plan as a story of the establishment of “One World.”29 Whether Moore’s text actually supports that reading is doubtful (see note 29). But it is their reading, and it tells us something. On that reading, technological stagnation is no longer the essential feature of the Antichrist. What explains both figures more consistently is centralized political power.
The Last Ringbearer
Another work is interesting in this connection: The Last Ringbearer, published in 1999 by the Russian biologist and writer Kirill Eskov.30 This unofficial novel treats The Lord of the Rings as history written by the victors, retelling it from the perspective of the defeated Mordor.
Thiel is reported to have spoken favorably about it in a 2011 interview.31 What he emphasized was that Mordor, the land of evil in Tolkien’s original, is reimagined as a technological civilization grounded in reason and science, while Gandalf and his allies become the forces seeking to destroy it.
The novel does more than simply reverse good and evil in The Lord of the Rings. It reconstructs Middle-earth around a conflict between technological civilization and political and religious forces seeking to arrest its progress. In that sense, it fits Thiel’s later account of an “Antichrist who wants to stop science” much more straightforwardly than the other works do.
But this retelling pushes another question in the original into the background. In The Lord of the Rings, the danger of the One Ring and the palantíri is not merely a matter of the forces of good being oppressed by evil technology. The problem is that even the well-intentioned, the competent, and the legitimately authorized can go wrong when they acquire immense power.
A reversal of the kind offered by The Last Ringbearer transforms that problem into a picture far more congenial to Thiel: a progressing technological civilization oppressed by power that seeks stagnation.
Here, too, the suppression of technology by centralized political power becomes the most important problem.
Two Omissions Become One
Here the first omission and the second come together.
In the first, what fades is the story in which the immensely powerful hero fears his own power and places limits on himself.
In the second, what makes the Antichrist they reject objectionable is not stopping technology, but immense political power standing above those who possess it.
Put the two together, and a distinctive kind of hero emerges.
He identifies a crisis. He concludes that existing politics cannot resolve it. He uses dangerous technology. He is unafraid of being called evil by society. He achieves results through competence. He refuses to submit to government control. He chooses for himself the “narrow path” between Armageddon and the Antichrist.
But one thing is missing from this story:
Who can stop that hero?
Who Watches the Watchmen?
Here Thiel and Wolfe’s criticism of Watchmen takes on decisive importance.
They treat Moore’s question,
“Who watches the watchmen?”
as a question that can only lead to another watcher, and another:
“an infinite regress”
And they conclude:
“Watchmen triumphs as literature and fails as philosophy or theology.”
Grant Morrison, who has spent a career arguing with Alan Moore, was asked about Thiel’s reading and gave a different answer. Moore does answer the question, Morrison said: we, the readers, watch the Watchmen, and judge accordingly.32
That is one answer. Here is a less literary one.
But real democracies do not run on having found a final, absolute watcher.
Courts make mistakes. Legislatures make mistakes. Regulators make mistakes. Companies make mistakes. The press makes mistakes.
That is why we distribute power and arrange for its holders to scrutinize one another. We create transparency, avenues for challenge, and countless other safeguards, trying to establish checks and balances. And because these, too, fail, we revise them further.
“Nothing ever ends.”
This is not a defect. It is what we should expect in a society with no absolute court of final appeal.
Palantir: “Watching the Watchers”
Here the literary omissions lead us back to reality.
Palantir supplies enormous information-processing capabilities in fields such as military affairs, national security, policing, immigration, and intelligence analysis.33 These are areas where state power and human rights come into direct contact.
Of course, Palantir does not disregard internal controls.
Joe Lonsdale explains that, from the company’s founding, the founders were thinking about
“watching the watchers.”34
They keep audit logs to prevent abuses. Palantir also has a Privacy and Civil Liberties Engineering team35 for this purpose.
But is this “watching the watchers” the same as the question “Who watches the watchmen?” Is it the question Thiel himself dismisses as a philosophical failure, an infinite regress?
No.
Audit logs can answer “Did a user stray beyond an authorized purpose?” They cannot answer “Was the person who authorized that purpose right to do so?”
Watchmen is not asking, “Who audits Veidt’s subordinates?” It asks “Who can stop Veidt?”
Even if Veidt’s organization had perfect audit logs capable of detecting every instance of misuse by his subordinates, they could not stop Veidt himself from deciding to sacrifice millions of people.
Tolkien’s more troubling warning is about the moment when the right hands become the wrong ones.
The Hero Under Regulation
Here the second omission also connects to reality.
Legal regulation of companies is not, in itself, tyranny. Privacy rules, data-protection rules, and oversight cannot simply be equated with the totalitarian control of Thiel’s “One World.”
Still, technology companies have strong incentives to see regulation as tyranny. Thiel, moreover, has long regarded government regulation as an important cause of technological stagnation.36
As his misreading of the Antichrist suggests, what his stories most consistently fear may not be
political power that stops technology.
It may be
political power that stands above those who hold technology and can constrain them.
He rejects technological regulation as the Antichrist. In discussing morality, he says that even someone evil is at least not “bad” if he is competent. And in reality, the company he co-founded handles precisely the kind of information technology that invites external oversight and legal regulation.
This does not prove Thiel’s motives. But it is hard to dismiss as coincidence that the story of a technological hero on the “narrow path,” facing a political power that could stop him, maps so neatly onto Thiel’s own position in the world. The question is which way this worldview cuts when it is applied to the power Thiel himself holds.
Who Watches Palantir?
Let us set the two omissions alongside each other once more.
First:
He misses the hero’s restraint of his own power.
Gandalf refuses the Ring.
Aragorn fears the palantír.
Batman destroys his own surveillance apparatus.
Veidt cannot finally guarantee that he was right.
Even those believed to be the right hands can turn themselves into the wrong hands.
The commitment to restrain oneself in order to prevent that is a quality of the hero. It is what Thiel misses.
Second:
He describes the Antichrist as an agent of technological stagnation, yet misses that the Antichrists he himself chooses advance technology.
Ozymandias averts Armageddon through technology. Imu’s World Government monopolizes and uses advanced technology. They are Antichrists nonetheless. Remove technological stagnation from the picture, and what remains is “One World”: control by immense political power.
A competent individual possesses dangerous technology and seeks to save the world, unafraid of being called evil. Yet he exercises no restraint over his own power, and he rejects social constraints as tyranny and stagnation. He may be a hero. He may save the world. But then, who can stop that hero?
How do we face this problem in a world without absolute certainty that we are right?
Tolkien depicted that fear. Nolan depicted that restraint. Moore left us with that question.
“Who watches the watchmen?” The watching goes on forever. “Nothing ever ends.”
Point that question at a real company with that kind of power, and the name changes by itself.
Who Watches Palantir?
That is not an infinite regress. It is a practical question.
Joe Lonsdale, “Why we built Palantir” (September 30, 2020). Lonsdale explains that the company’s name derives from the cautionary tale of the “seeing stones” in The Lord of the Rings, which later fall into the “wrong hands.” https://joelonsdale.com/why-we-built-palantir/ . He elaborates on the same point in “Did Palantir’s founders consider the ethical implications of their work?” https://blog.joelonsdale.com/p/did-palantirs-founders-consider-the
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Return of the King, and the Appendices. The palantíri are “seeing stones,” said to have been made by Fëanor, that allow users to see distant places and communicate between stones. At the end of the Third Age, stones remained at Orthanc, Minas Tirith, Barad-dûr, and other locations, with Sauron controlling one of them. Rather than saying that Sauron “hacked the network” of the stones themselves, it is closer to the original to say that he used his own stone and his powerful will to influence other users.
The Dark Knight, directed by Christopher Nolan (Warner Bros., 2008). Near the end, Bruce Wayne expands the mobile-phone sonar technology developed by Lucius Fox to the scale of a city, visualizing all of Gotham to locate the Joker.
Tolkien, The Two Towers, Book III, Chapter 10, “The Voice of Saruman,” and The Return of the King, Book V, Chapter 9, “The Last Debate,” among other passages. Saruman uses the Orthanc-stone to contact Sauron. Although he ultimately seeks the Ring for himself in opposition to Sauron, his actions are heavily constrained by Sauron’s power.
Tolkien, The Return of the King, Book V, Chapter 7, “The Pyre of Denethor.” Gandalf explains that Denethor used the stone to see Sauron’s forces and that, although Sauron could not make it show falsehoods, he could deceive Denethor by selecting what it showed. The important point about despair induced by accurate information is therefore the selective presentation of truth, rather than simple disinformation.
This reading is not mine alone. Hannah Frances Roux, “How Silicon Valley misreads The Lord of the Rings,” The Conversation, June 10, 2026, https://theconversation.com/how-silicon-valley-misreads-the-lord-of-the-rings-282862 , and Alex Skopic, “How the Right Abuses Tolkien,” Current Affairs, June 2, 2025, https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/how-the-right-abuses-tolkien , both observe that the palantíri undo legitimate and well-meaning users, not only enemies. What this essay adds is to set that reading against Palantir’s own “wrong hands” account of its name, and against the question of who stops the user who succeeds.
For Gandalf, see The Fellowship of the Ring, Book I, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past.” He refuses the Ring when Frodo offers it, fearing the terrible power it would exercise over him through his desire to do good. For Galadriel, see Book II, Chapter 7, “The Mirror of Galadriel.” Frodo offers her the Ring; despite the temptation, she refuses it.
The Dark Knight (2008). Seeing the citywide sonar surveillance apparatus, Fox objects: “This is wrong.” “This is too much power for one person.”
The Dark Knight (2008). Batman entrusts operation of the system to Fox and arranges for it to destroy itself when Fox enters his own name after locating the Joker. The film thus separates the system’s successful use from its permanent retention.
Mathias Döpfner, “Peter Thiel: The AI Crisis, Europe’s Decline & the Battle for America,” MD MEETS, September 24, 2026. Official episode page: https://shows.acast.com/md-meets/episodes/peter-thiel-the-ai-crisis-europes-decline-the-battle-for-ame
The same conversation, from approximately 13:49 onward. Thiel distinguishes the moral opposite of good, evil, from its functional opposite, bad, and then argues that being evil implies at least some competence. The publicly available transcript at CEOInterviews.ai was also consulted for the wording. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2926257/
The same conversation. Thiel contrasts Marlowe’s Faust, whom he describes as a fraudulent scientist and alchemist whose science fails and who goes to hell, with Goethe’s Faust, who obtains knowledge through morally dubious means but whose efforts work and who is finally redeemed. This is Thiel’s own interpretation of the two works, not an independent judgment of them made by this essay.
Tolkien, The Return of the King, Book V, Chapter 2, “The Passing of the Grey Company.” Aragorn deliberately uses the Orthanc-stone to reveal himself to Sauron, wrests control of it back, and makes the enemy aware of the existence of Isildur’s heir. This hastens Sauron’s decisions and affects the subsequent strategy.
Alan Moore (writer) and Dave Gibbons (artist), Watchmen (DC Comics, 1986–1987). Adrian Veidt, also known as Ozymandias, is a former hero who styles himself the smartest man in the world. While running an enormous business, he carries out a secret plan to avert nuclear war.
Watchmen, Chapter XI. After Rorschach and Nite Owl declare their intention to stop his plan, Veidt explains that he is no serial villain who would reveal his scheme while it could still be prevented: “I did it thirty-five minutes ago.” This is one of the work’s defining reversals.
Watchmen, Chapter XII. When Veidt asks Manhattan to confirm that he was right in the end, Manhattan tells him that nothing ever ends and departs.
Peter Thiel and Sam Wolfe, “Voyages to the End of the World,” First Things, October 1, 2025. The essay connects Bacon, Swift, Moore, and Eiichiro Oda through questions of science, eschatology, and the Antichrist. https://firstthings.com/voyages-to-the-end-of-the-world/ . For the publication date and Japanese translation, see also the February and March 2026 issues of Bungeishunjū and the introduction on Bunshun Online. https://bunshun.jp/articles/-/85263
Thiel and Wolfe, “Voyages to the End of the World.” They discuss the political problems posed by the superheroes in Watchmen, treating them as highly agentic individuals who operate outside ordinary laws and institutions.
The same essay. They treat the question of who watches the watchmen as a regress in which each watcher requires another watcher, praising Watchmen as literature while criticizing its philosophical and theological resolution. This essay argues that the absence of an ultimate watcher and the need for mutual scrutiny and a separation of powers are distinct questions.
Thiel’s private lecture series, held in San Francisco from September 15 to October 6, 2025, was reported on by The Guardian and The Washington Post, both of which obtained recordings. These are not official full transcripts of the lectures; the quotations here rely on the recorded remarks as reported. The Guardian, October 10, 2025: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/peter-thiel-lectures-antichrist . The Washington Post, October 10, 2025: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/10/peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-leaked/
The articles cited above in The Guardian and The Washington Post. Thiel reportedly said in his September 15 lecture that, in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, the Antichrist would have resembled a Dr. Strangelove figure practicing evil science, whereas in the twenty-first century the figure would seek to halt science. He also linked technological regulation to global control proclaimed in the name of peace and safety.
Thiel and Wolfe, “Voyages to the End of the World.” They read Watchmen through the dilemma of a unified world versus nuclear war and identify Veidt as an Antichrist figure.
Watchmen, Chapter X and elsewhere. Veidt’s perfume Nostalgia is advertised throughout the work, linking longing for the past with the anxieties of the late Cold War.
Watchmen, Chapter XII. After the catastrophe, an advertisement for Veidt’s new product Millennium appears in New York. The story’s present is 1985, and the name points toward the approaching new millennium: the future.
One Piece, Chapter 907 introduces the Empty Throne and Imu; later episodes establish Imu’s position as a secret ruler above the Five Elders. In “Voyages to the End of the World,” Thiel and Wolfe likewise describe the World Government as an eight-hundred-year-old regime and Imu as its secret sovereign.
Near the conclusion of the same essay. Thiel and Wolfe argue that neither apocalyptic pirate anarchy nor Imu’s rigid World Government can endure, and insist that Oda must disclose a narrow third alternative.
Eiichiro Oda, One Piece. The World Government has long exploited Vegapunk’s research capabilities and deploys advanced weapons and biotechnology, including Pacifistas and Seraphim. It is therefore inaccurate to describe it as a regime that rejects science and technology in general. The work more closely depicts a regime that politically controls what may be researched, disclosed, and used.
One Piece, Chapter 1089 and Chapter 1113 onward. It is later revealed that the weapon that obliterated the Kingdom of Lulusia used Vegapunk’s Mother Flame as its energy source. The main text avoids making a definitive claim about the identity of the weapon itself.
Thiel and Wolfe, “Voyages to the End of the World.” They read Moore’s scenario as “Ozymandias or nuclear war?” against the underlying logic of “One World or None?” Here, however, the original work must be distinguished from their reading. What Watchmen, Chapter XII, explicitly depicts is a rapprochement between the United States and the Soviet Union in the face of a common threat following the New York catastrophe, and a receding danger of nuclear war. It does not explicitly establish that Veidt founded a formal world government, or that founding one had been his goal from the outset. The strong identification of Veidt as the builder of “One World” is therefore, to a substantial degree, Thiel and Wolfe’s own interpretive framework.
Kirill Eskov (Кирилл Еськов), Последний кольценосец (English title: The Last Ringbearer), 1999. An unofficial retelling that reconstructs the war in The Lord of the Rings from the defeated side’s perspective and depicts Mordor as a civilization with advanced science and technology.
Several secondary sources quote Thiel as referring to The Last Ringbearer in a 2011 interview and discussing Mordor as a technological civilization grounded in reason and science. At the time this essay was prepared, however, a stable primary-source text of that interview had not been verified. The main text therefore says “is reported,” and does not make this remark an indispensable premise of its argument.
Grant Morrison, Reddit “Ask Me Anything,” October 17, 2025, as reported in Bleeding Cool: https://bleedingcool.com/comics/grant-morrison-alan-moore-watchmen-peter-thiel/ . Morrison went further, calling “alienated billionaires” the true Antichrists of our time. This essay does not go that far; its interest is in the question, not the verdict.
Palantir Technologies’ Form 10-K for fiscal 2025 and its official website. The company identifies the U.S. government as a major customer since its founding and supplies data integration and analysis software to government agencies, including defense and intelligence organizations, as well as to the private sector. Form 10-K: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1321655/000132165526000011/pltr-20251231.htm . Official description of its intelligence offerings: https://www.palantir.com/offerings/intelligence/ . The nature of its work in military affairs, national security, policing, and immigration varies by contract; the main text does not equate these individual engagements with the purpose of the company as a whole.
Lonsdale, “Why we built Palantir.” In the same essay, he explains that the platform was designed to protect privacy through mechanisms for auditing its users—“watching the watchers.” During a 2025 appearance on PBS’s Amanpour & Company, he similarly explained that audit trails allow those higher up to scrutinize the watchers. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/palantir-co-founder-joe-lonsdale-on-trump-musk-and-a-new-vision-for-america/
Palantir Technologies, “Privacy & Civil Liberties Engineering.” The company describes a dedicated team, access controls, data governance, and an advisory body of independent experts intended to protect privacy and civil liberties. https://www.palantir.com/pcl/ . Its Form 10-K for fiscal 2025 also describes features supporting oversight and accountability, granular access controls, and auditing capabilities. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1321655/000132165526000011/pltr-20251231.htm
Thiel has long linked the differing rates of progress in information technology (“bits”) and the physical world (“atoms”) to differences in regulation. In a 2015 Conversations with Tyler interview, for example, he said “bits were unregulated and atoms were regulated,” citing FDA approval of pharmaceuticals among his examples. Public transcript: https://podscripts.co/podcasts/conversations-with-tyler/peter-thiel-on-stagnation-innovation-and-what-not-to-call-your-company-live-at-mason . The same argument also appears in a Hoover Institution interview: https://www.hoover.org/plus/research/apocalypse-now-peter-thiel-ancient-prophecies-and-modern-tech