Greta and Gaia

Bruno Clarke

In a brilliant recent installment of The Burning Shore, “God is a Fiery Accelerant,” Erik Davis deconstructs the unholy contemporary alliance between secular transhumanist transcendentalism and Christian end-times theology, only to confirm the current virulence of that odd coupling. Davis renders an account of tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel during an interview Thiel did for the “Uncommon Knowledge” YouTube channel produced by the Hoover Institution, discussing “Ancient Prophecies and Modern Tech.” This is high Erik Davis territory, and in Davis’s lightly mocking version of Thiel’s apocalyptic dread:

 The fear is that, in the name of “peace and safety” (1 Thess. 5:3), the charismatic and holy-seeming Antichrist takes over our benighted planet, waves the rainbow flag of the Big Blue Marble, and starts regulating technologies and making everyone ride bicycles and genuflect before Greta Thunberg.

In this one passing tableau, Davis ironically submits the current face of the worldview bequeathed half a century ago to cultural awareness by the organic cybernetics of the Whole Earth era, epitomized by the Gaia hypothesis—one Earth seen in its virtual human unanimity amidst ecological diversity and to be governed sustainably for the sake of preserving habitability for future generations—to oligarchic ridicule focused on the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, a rebellious young female now iconic of Earth resistance. Davis’s satire captures the white misogynist monotheism fueling the convergence between Silicon Valley authoritarians, Christian nationalists, and the business of radical climate denialism—pervasive and gendered contempt for the body and the biosphere that holds it down.

Compare a different evocation of Greta, at a slightly earlier moment, in a 2021 volume edited by the late French philosopher Bernard Stiegler with the Internation Collective, Bifurcate: There Is No Alternative. The volume opens with a letter from Nobel laureate for literature Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio to Stiegler, thanking him for “inviting me to support Greta Thunberg’s actions, and your own, so that future generations may live in a better world” (10). The volume closes with a mission statement by an ad hoc Association of Friends of the Thunberg Generation, noting that “Greta Thunberg calls on adults to take their responsibility. In so doing, she poses the problem of a kind of generalization of irresponsibility that seems to have taken hold in various ways in much of the world, if not all of it” (303). The statement has seventeen signatories, including mathematician Giuseppe Longo, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, sociologist Saskia Sassen, and biologist Ana Soto, in addition to Stiegler and several student representatives.

Between Moloch and Gaia, techno-transcendental nationalism and techno-ecological internationalism, between the elitist autocrat Thiel and the planetary crusader Thunberg, who will have been the truer prophet? At the moment it would seem that Thunberg’s climate activism has been sidelined by her rallying to the human/natural catastrophes in Ukraine and Gaza, while Thiel’s favorites flaunt their powers. Putin’s fist falls hard across all of this global trashing of ecological witness. But so, as legal historian Jill Lepore writes in "The Failed Ideas That Drive Elon Musk" (NYT, April 4, 2025), does the “dead robotic hand of the past” in the form of an ideological revenant, the sociopolitical program of Technocracy. It turns out this term technocracy is no innocent locution but carries along a sordidly autocratic political pedigree. It is this vision that Elon Musk channels from his apartheid-supporting grandfather Joshua Haldeman, and for which the annexation of Canada and Greenland was always part of the plan.

Joshua Haldeman is the Old Testament prophet behind Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist gospel. In the Word of Andreessen: "Combine technology and markets and you get what Nick Land has termed the techno-capital machine, the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance." Or, combine an unmoored technological will with unchecked capitalism on Adderall and you get Trump's barbarism and Andreessen's and Musk's and Bezos's and Thiel’s cosmo-fantasies of a universe of endless resources infinitely to be consumed. At this stage of the unfolding illogic, garden-variety human beings are being herded into pens, sheep here, scapegoats there. Greta, come back, your greatest work awaits you. There are greater dragons abroad for you to challenge and slay.