^{Tony Blair inspects an ecstasy pill (Credit: PA Images / Alamy)}

Simulation of the Antichrist

Adam C. Jones
6 August 2025

In the fifth episode of the latest Adam Curtis series, Shifty, the New Labour strategist Philip Gould opines about the democratic power of the ‘focus group’, declaring it to be ‘a way of hearing what the people have to say… a new form of politics.’ Focus grouping is a qualitative research practice in which around six to ten individuals are asked questions about a certain topic or issue by a moderator. These individuals are selected along certain demographic lines in order to represent or model a desired population or section thereof. This pre-selected group of people would therefore constitute, through their answers to pre-selected questions, the data of public opinion. The demographic categories according to which they have been selected for the focus group—and there is no democratic input as to the categories, they have no input in this, for they are the input—allow for the constant production of public opinion from its elementary data sets. The focus group is the feedback mechanism of democracy in the model of the New Labour style of governance. It is the production of democracy through data. The desire of the people, when understood through the categories which government data-analysis places them under, can be miniaturized to the aggregation of a focus group, a data set. To be recognized under the categories of the demographic data set is to be allowed admission into the focus group, and hence into the determining desires which inform political decision making. Efficient, analytical, smoothly managed. For the focus-group politician, the people are constituted by these categories, their stratifications encoding into the data-sets the genetics of the body of The People. With the right sample, this allows The People to be miniaturized into 6-10 individuals. As Jean Baudrillard noted in Simulacra and Simulation, ‘it is genetic miniaturization that is the dimension of simulation.’ [1]

Government by Simulacrum

The history of the focus group in British governance, under both New Labour and its current farcical replay, is a developmental sequence of the attempt to match government policy to the desires of The People, mediated through the focus group system as adopted from marketing agencies. The People, however, can only be received by the institutions of governance not as they are, but only as they are selected, and they are received not because the selections correspond to them, but because they correspond to the selections, i.e. to the desired or desirable set of responses that policymakers aim to produce. For all of this postmodern fancy, this simulacra and simulation, it would be tempting to declare that such a bourgeois democratic politics has evacuated all reality in favour of simulation, the map in favour of the territory, and that Britain has become a political ‘desert of the real’. Yet it is precisely policymakers who have deserted reality, and amongst the dunes the sun of the real casts its burning light upon them with a radiant hatred. The current regime is despised, and no demographic categorization is desired by them such that they could recognize it.

Indeed, this government are excellent at the generation of their own detestability. It is therefore wholly unsurprising that—as the philosopher Pete Wolfendale recently noted [2] — the current wonker de jour Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s Downing Street Chief of Staff, has decided to follow Brecht’s recommendation that they simply dissolve the people and elect a new one. I am referring here to McSweeney’s reported use of “synthetic voters”, LLM-generated focus groups produced from averages of data, which can provide outputs for less money and at greater speeds. [3] This is an intensification of genetic miniaturization, where individuals are broken up into ‘dividuals’. That is, into different accounts on various platforms and consumer metrics, rather than being brought into a space and interviewed as singular human beings. With this, The People are secondary to their data; the map precedes the territory. The reasons why people may consume X content or make Y purchase is not considered from the standpoint of their own testimony. Instead, this is left to the aggregating axioms—the assumptions and desires—of those who code the generators. Nonetheless, people still hate them, and the government is actively making sure that it does everything it can to resist politicized mass desire: it pursues near-universally unpopular attacks on welfare provisions, disabled people, trans people, anyone, and perpetuates an active role in the genocide of Palestinians. It sees its function as catering to The People as a set of managed data, and precisely on that basis does it disdain them as people, those who do not coincide with their subsumption into the conceptual schema of their ‘democratic’ market research. This negative dialectic will be their destruction because they despise everyone. They are imperialists in every sense of foreign policy, and they are domestic imperialists to the extent that they, in Baudrillard’s terms, “attempt to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation.” [4]

It is therefore no surprise that the Starmerite regime has thrown themselves entirely into the cult of ‘AI’. The New Labour ideology of data, of the focus group, bears little difference to the way in which ‘AI’ is sold as a solution to the problems of governance whilst, as Dan McQuillan notes, “what it is really doing is applying algorithmic morality judgements to target groups while obscuring the structural drivers of the very problems it is supposedly solving.” [5] This ideology is not, however, a pure worship of LLMs, of the machine, but an extension of the political ideology of the simulation, and the political economy of data. It is the movement of bodies that produces this data whenever they pass through a system of recording, from online purchases and travel through ticketed systems, to financial accounting and social media activity. Data is dead labour, and from this they wish to generate a surplus of political value which they can reinvest into their own attempts at simulated political legitimacy. That the current British regime has walked directly into the arms of the AI cult is unsurprising on this basis, since it presents itself as nothing other than the logical extension of their own ideology of simulation. When Palantir UK boss Louis Mosley—aristo grandchild of Oswald Mosley, head of the British Union of Fascists—declared that Starmer “gets it” when it comes to their project of ‘AI’ (Palantir’s motto is, of course, “Software that Dominates”), [6] this is not because Starmer underwent a Palantir catechism, but rather because he found that he was preaching to the converted. Lest I be accused of declaring ‘AI’ to be a ‘cult’ on the basis of disdain rather than argument, however, let me unpack what this declaration means. As a brief summary of what follows, I will argue that ‘AI’ is a cult purely because capitalism is a cult, and that ‘AI’ names nothing technological in the sense of a new machine, but rather is the ideological shine of capitalism which has at last appeared in the age of omnipresent simulation, the exemplar of its articles of faith.

^{Still frame from Shifty (2025), dir. Adam Curtis, Credit: BBC}

The Cult of AI and the Religion of Capitalism

A cultic analysis of capitalism was first brought to my attention by the philosopher Billie Cashmore in the form of Walter Benjamin’s 1921 fragment ‘Capitalism as Religion’. She presented this text as a critique of the project of political theology, on the basis of Benjamin’s argument that capitalism is no proper religion, in the sense of having a specific body of dogma or theological doctrine, even though it, as Benjamin claims “serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers”. [7] Namely, why we are here, to what ends do we act, and what awaits us in the future as the beings that we are—the answer to the infamous ‘riddle of existence’. The fragmentary nature of the text allows for us to quote it at length and for myself to present its argument in the form of a commentary upon it, in which Benjamin claims that

it is possible to distinguish three aspects of this religious structure of capitalism. In the first place, capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed. In capitalism, things have their meaning only in their relationship to the cult; capitalism has no specific body of dogma, no theology. It is from this point of view that utilitarianism acquires its religious overtones. [8]

The comparison to utilitarianism serves as the thread of elucidation. Utilitarianism has no singular body of dogma or doctrine: one can follow Mill’s utilitarian calculus for the production of rules of ethical conduct, Bentham’s felicific calculus for the goodness of an individual act, or Singer’s calculative principles based on the fulfilment of preferences (to the exclusion of those who withhold their preferences from calculation or who are unintelligible to the utilitarian theorist). One could follow one of these, syncretise them, or follow none. All that is required is that one accepts what Deleuze and Guattari would call the ‘flexible’ axioms of the practice, the re ligio, the thing that binds them all to the utilitarian worldview: the article of faith that life is to be led in the production of a singular thing, utility, pleasure. All things within the realm of the ethical, of what matters, only have their meaningfulness—their ‘ethical substance’ one might say—in relation to this article of faith, this axiom of belief or practice. Similarly, capitalism can take on many forms, be it social-democratic, libertarian, state-socialist, fascist, but in all cases the foundation remains the same: the production of surplus value, capitalization as the end of the social process, money that makes money. Capital makes more of itself, and all of these systems only make sense in relation to the axiomatic article of faith in capitalist production, the formula in which M is augmented in its passage through C. Capital is posited as the future through the coercive presence of the future in the present, which demands it be realised through the activity of living beings. Whether those beings are furnished by the trappings of a strong welfare state, or any other such variation, before being marched into its jaws is ephemeral to the cult, for it is capital that grants it its purpose for existing; and it is this purpose which austerity and privatization,which converts public institutions into sites of capital extraction, can execute by consigning them to destruction.

From here we are led to the second feature of the cult of capitalism:

This concretization of cult is connected with a second feature of capitalism: the permanence of the cult. Capitalism is the celebration of the cult sans reve et sans merci [without dream or mercy]. There are no “weekdays.” There is no day that is not a feast day, in the terrible sense that all its sacred pomp is unfolded before us; each day commands the utter fealty of each worshipper. [9]

Religious practice informs the everyday, this is true, but ritual also demands not only secular time but the carving out of a sacred time, time sacrificed from the labours of the everyday to be set aside for the Sabbath or call to worship. There is no such separation under capitalism, it demands all of our time. If we are not consuming, we are producing, and even our consumption is increasingly something which is nothing if not productive, especially in the era of metrics and the production of data-commodities. Society does not do capitalism only on Sundays, there is no longer a separate day to take goods to market. Like a cult, capital demands all of our time (and this is central to the class struggle, as Marx elaborated in the pivotal chapter of Capital: Volume One regarding the struggle over the length of the working day). The cult of capital is hence a cult of its own permanence. With this omnipresence, the cult provides us with the affective dimension of its answer to the question of the meaning of all things:

And third, the cult makes guilt pervasive. Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement. In this respect, this religious system is caught up in the headlong rush of a larger movement. A vast sense [of] guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal, to hammer it into the conscious mind, so as once and for all to include God in the system of guilt and thereby awaken in Him an interest in the process of atonement. This atonement cannot then be expected from the cult itself, or from the reformation of this religion (which would need to be able to have recourse to some stable element in it), or even from the complete renouncement of this religion. The nature of the religious movement which is capitalism entails endurance right to the end, to the point where God, too, finally takes on the entire burden of guilt, to the point where the universe has been taken over by that despair which is actually its secret hope. [10]

What does it mean to make guilt pervasive? The key is in the original German term ‘verschuldend’, built from the German Schuld which is often rendered as ‘guilt’. However, as Benjamin knew and (as Nietzsche constantly found himself incapable of not pointing out), Schuld equally means debt, and so it is more accurate to say that the cult of capitalism makes us all guilty in the sense of being a cult of indictment for the same indebtedness it forces upon us. Every one can be capitalised upon, every one can be dispossessed from their means of survival, and no one is exempt. There are no nobilities, no elect ones predetermined for salvation from the seat of eternity. There is no metaphysical or theological necessity that exempts one from hunger and the compulsion to labour, only the contingencies of material wealth and the capricious probabilities of market forces. The condition of possibility of living under capitalism—if we were to be Derridean about things—is the same as the condition of the impossibility of living under capitalism: that one has no means to reproduce oneself other than those goods which are purchased by means of wages gained through the capitalist process and through the accumulation of money and capital. The wages of sin are the wages of death and life all at once. This is what Søren Mau calls transcendental indebtedness, in which the fundamental Schuld of their existence means that the worker “is not merely a nothing, but in a sense, they are less than nothing: not only are they excluded from the conditions of their existence (they are absolutely poor); they also owe their future to capital.” [11]

Capitalism transcendentalizes guilt, but it also makes it transcendent. It is beyond all of this, and hence there is no way in which the worker shall reach their atonement, capital will never be satisfied, it will go on forever. As Giorgio Agamben noted, we could approach this from the point of view of Christianity in noting that its theology recognizes an economy which “knows neither interruption nor end: Hell.” [12] Yet whilst Hell is a separation from God, Benjamin reminds us that capitalism admits of no such separation from itself, and God must serve the ends of the cult to which history has made Him subject. History is not that of God, or the Absolute Idea in Hegel, but the history of class struggle, and so Benjamin concludes that “Capitalism has developed as a parasite of Christianity in the West (this must be shown not just in the case of Calvinism, but in the other orthodox Christian churches), until it reached the point where Christianity’s history is essentially that of its parasite – that is to say, of capitalism.” [13] This is Benjamin’s retort to Weber; that capitalism is not Christianity realized so much as it is capitalism that has cannibalized Christianity in the universalization of its plea to ‘forgive us our debts’, at the same time as it has crucified the ransom of atonement. We too are called—to not only take up, but to produce our cross in discipleship to capital. Yet in Hell, there is hope, despite the infernal demand that we abandon it to the demands of the cult; not because things will get better, but because they must. But this demand is not of the cult, and so its analysis transcends us here.

Let us now return to the question of the cult of ‘AI’, and why I believe that it fulfils the same characteristics as Benjamin’s cult of capitalism. The ideology—or mythology—of ‘AI’ is one, I argue, of transcendental indebtedness. This is because the possibility of ‘AI’, and by this its members almost always mean the possibility of the ‘AI’, the singularity, Artificial General Intelligence; the self-replicating, self-producing quasi-deity that is smarter than us and will no longer need us, incurs upon us a debt in relation to its realization in the future by virtue of its possibility in the present. Peddlers of this faith declare that it is coming soon, or may already be here—it is just a matter of time. AI has no specific theology for this debt, rather it has multiple. The first is a theology which—true to Benjamin’s claim that capital is a parasite on Christianity—arises from the heterodox thought of the Russian pastor Nikolai Fedorov, father of Russian Cosmism, and fetish-object of Palantir founder Peter Thiel. Fedorov believed in a philosophy of the ‘Common Task’; let us examine its principles as relevant to the ideologies of ‘AI’ (as is unsurprising, they have rejected any such reference to Fedorov’s communism). First: death is a contingency, not a necessity, and can be defeated. Second: science and technology can and will solve all of our problems, including death and all forms of poverty. Third: as death can be defeated and is merely a contingency, death severs none of our duties to other human beings, especially those within our family. Fedorov believes we are necessitated by familial obligation to serve our family, we are obliged to save them from death. He writes:

Mortality is an inductive conclusion. We know that we are the offspring of a multitude of deceased ancestors. But however great the number of the deceased, this cannot be the basis for an incontrovertible acceptance of death because it would entail an abdication of our filial duty. Death is a property, a state conditioned by causes; it is not a quality which determines what a human being is and must be. [14]

As all humans technically have such relations at a base level, all humans are obligated to pursue the advance of technology to save all of humanity from death, and this advance includes the colonization of the wider universe: “the skies will be attainable only to the resurrected and the resurrecting”. [15] One possible implication of this—of many if not all utilitarianisms—is that the possibility of death’s defeat renders all other ends worthless and all other means justified. This may even extend to murder, because their death would be a purely temporary measure in the preamble to the abolition of mortality; but Fedorov would likely say that this contradicts the principle of familial obligation. I am not sure that his contemporary fans would say the same. Indeed, this theology of transcendental indebtedness to ‘AI’ actually allows for the redefinition of murder in view of one of its budding theological entrepreneurs, Marc Andreesen: “We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.” [16] To not buy into the ‘techno-optimist’ flavour of the cult is therefore murder, and with this the debt gains the theological presentation of a debt to life. This life is defined by Andreesen as nothing other than the abstraction of life as a resource for the production of the very ‘AI’ which the demands of ‘life’ compel us to serve. Service to technology of ‘AI’ is, as Andreesen names one of the sections of his theological ‘manifesto’, “The Meaning of Life.” [17] As such, we are transcendentally indebted because we may, and we will, owe our lives to this nebulous category of technology, whose epitome is ‘AI’.

^{The Worship of Mammon (1909), Evelyn De Morgan}

Following this we have a further theology which offers itself as a means of understanding the cult, which like the former example, holds no monopoly on its doctrine. ‘AI’ has no doctrine, but maybe competing determinations of its meaning—but none of them dispute that whatever its meaning is, it is the meaning of what we are and should be doing. The second theology is one of indebtedness which is far less humanistic in its outlook. This is the notion of ‘Roko’s Basilisk’, which holds it to be self-evident that ‘AI’ is possible, it will surpass humans (and therefore look down upon them disdainfully—this says more about its believers view of those ‘lesser’ than them than it does of their deity) and that it will exist in the future. This future ‘AI’—which will inevitably exist, and hence its futurity exists presently as the spectre of its inevitable birth—will supposedly reward those who aided its coming into being, and will torture—even after death—those who fought its coming into being or failed to aid it. Those who believe in this version of the cult have internalised Benjamin’s warning regarding the capitalist enemy, that “not even the dead will be safe”. [18] Yet, in their confusion of possibility with necessity, they have decided that they better be on the enemy’s side; a theology of the collaborator. With this, the debt is set: work for it, or it will not only kill you, it will make your death an eternal life of suffering. You owe it to yourself to owe it to the ‘AI’.

Both of these attempts at theologization mask the fact that ‘AI’ needs neither of them, and their ground is little more than the characteristics Benjamin highlighted, namely that ‘AI’ universalizes indebtedness to itself, that it offers solutions to the traditional religious questions of life, its meaning, and the enigma of death, and—given its abstract possibility is easily imaginable in the barest sense, this possibility makes itself concrete in the omnipresence, the permanence of its image, and hence its debt. Whether this is a debt to escape death or to avoid something worse, the grounding axioms remain the same. Either theology is a theoretical edifice built around the same injunction, they both demand of us that we ‘trust the process’. They declare that all we need to do is to keep producing more data, and hence more training of the models, and (for now) more value for the investors in the machineries to which this cult—capital--has manifested itself through the speculative image of ‘AI’. It should be noted that neither Andreesen’s manifesto nor the formulation of Roko’s Basilisk contains any reference to such machines as Large Language Models. This is because the function of the image ‘AI’ is a technology of cultist capitalization which, to paraphrase Heidegger, is itself nothing technological. The term refers to all machines and none. Even previous algorithmic processes have been resold as ‘AI’, because the term is a sigil to inspire faith in the cult of capital. It is an affirmation from the ruling class that we—by which they mean, you—have a debt to pay, the debt you have always owed to capital now given the shine of a future that means both damnation and deliverance but never atonement, for the ‘AI’—much like the final capital which has finished capitalizing upon itself—will never arrive. What ‘AI’ offers its adherents is a false hope, an escape from the history of class struggle dependent on our very surrender to our capitalization by these vampiric forces.

The Cult of Capitalism does not care whether or not we surrender in our hearts and minds, as long as we lose, and as long as we work. Nonetheless, beneficiaries of this system often make use of ideologies of surrender to smooth the process of extraction. They offer the redemption of the cosmos—the order of things—and not the world, which could be otherwise than its current ordering by capitalism. They demand that we surrender to our indebtedness on the basis that in an indefinite and impossible future, capitalism will make it all worth the trouble, that the world has always held the germ of its own perfection within the jaws of its own devourer. There is a theological term which names the office which makes this demand and offers it as a fulfilment of all hitherto religious impulses and desires. Its name is Antichrist, which men like Thiel cannot recognize from the blank mirror of their vampiric desire. Historical materialism, if we are to grant it the messianic import that Benjamin does, can only appear as redeemer by carrying forth the liberatory tradition of the oppressed against that which seeks their continued domination. The response of historical materialism to the cult of ‘AI’, of data, of imperialist simulation, must therefore be one that illuminates and profanes the satanic roots of its mysteries: the extraction of surplus value, and the reproduction of the enslavement of all humankind.

1. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Michigan, 1994) p.2

2. https://x.com/deontologistics/status/1940737510268875051

3. https://x.com/flying_rodent/status/1940726766664097830

4. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, (Michigan, 1994), p.2

5. Dan McQuillan, Resisting AI, (Bristol, 2022), p.4

6. Sophie Church, “Palantir Boss Louis Mosley: Keir Starmer "Gets" AI, "You Could See In His Eyes"”, Politics Home, https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/palantir-boss-interview-keir-starmer-gets-ai

7. Walter Benjamin, Capitalism as Religion (1921)
https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/2018/06/08/capitalism-as-religion-benjamin-1921/

8. Ibid. Translation modified.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion, (Verso, 2023), 134.

12. Giorgio Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom, (Seagull Books, 2018), 41.

13. Walter Benjamin, Capitalism as Religion, https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/2018/06/08/capitalism-as-religion-benjamin-1921/

14. Nikolai Fedorov, “The Common Task” in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, (Urbanomic, 2014), pp.84-90, 86.

15. Ibid, 85.

16. Marc Andreesen, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/

17. Ibid.

18. Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm