Introduction

A quarter of a century ago, the Anthropocene lumbered into our collective consciousness and lexicon, bearing a heavy load of metaphysical baggage. For better or worse, the term has penetrated both scholarly and popular imaginations and spurred ongoing discussion about whether “we” should feel chastened or awestruck by humans’ planet-shaping powers.¹ A contingent of scholars in religious studies, environmental humanities, and beyond have framed the Anthropocene in ways that hint at something exciting and even auspicious (Sideris 2016, 2026). On these accounts, the Anthropocene heralds a new planetary stage in which national identities and parochial investments, including religious investments, might give way to collective identity and environmental action. The predicted shift, many hoped, would bring cosmopolitan sensibilities and allegiances, and perhaps even a common commitment to tackling planetary-scale problems.

The word planetary, like the term Anthropocene, has spun off additional terms and debates. Scholars across the humanities and social sciences continue to debate what a planetary perspective entails. Some contrast the “planetary” (and sometimes “planetarity”) to the global, where the latter signals (variously) a more human-centric, homogenized, or objectified view of the planet as “seen from nowhere,” and the former suggests identification with something beyond (just) the human, with greater emphasis on embodiment and trans-species and transcultural connectedness.² A key feature of the hoped-for planetary turn, as I discuss it here, is an awareness of vast temporal and spatial scales, and collective self-awareness of humans’ embeddedness within a system that we are now empowered to shape. Extraplanetary orientations are part of this shift. Understanding Earth as a planet positions humans as creatures within a vast, unfolding cosmic process and community—a microcosm/macrocosm framing often expressed in the idea (popularized in hopeful terms by Carl Sagan) that we humans are the creature in whom the cosmos becomes conscious. This reflexive awareness has the potential to foster the unitive consciousness needed to tackle our collective, planetary-scale crises.

The Anthropocene, understood as a threshold moment that quickened humanity’s awareness of our planet-shaping powers, has carried this peculiar whiff of optimism from the start, despite (or because of) its message of warning and collective danger. This upbeat spin is indebted to conceptions of planetary evolution that both preceded and merged with the Anthropocene concept. When Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (a chemist and an ecologist, respectively) first deployed the term in writing, it was proffered with a somewhat jarring nod to an abstruse entity, namely, the “noosphere” (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). Crutzen and Stoermer (2000, 18) appraise the Anthropocene as both an exciting and daunting time that will draw upon the “wise application of the knowledge” made available by the noosphere. The task before us, they concluded at the time, is to develop a “world-wide accepted strategy” to protect Earth and its ecosystems against unprecedented impacts. Soon after, Crutzen (2002) would invoke the noosphere again, this time referencing two of its founders directly: the Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky and the Catholic priest and paleontologist Pierre Tielhard de Chardin.

The noosphere has a religious, or (in some cases) religion-adjacent provenance, having developed out of the broader milieu of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian Cosmism and its belief in teleologically unfolding and purposeful cosmic evolution (Hagemeister 1997, 185). Russian Cosmism is a broad term for a wide-ranging movement that weaves together aspects of Russian orthodoxy with scientific materialism and occult influences. Its utopian vision blends eschatological elements with technological aspirations to control natural forces, extend human life, defeat death, and colonize space. The figures commonly associated with key aspects of Cosmism are Nikolai Federov (1829–1903); the aforementioned Vernadsky (1863–1945), who originated both the biosphere and noosphere concepts; and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), a Christian philosopher often described as the founding figure of transhumanist and immortalist movements and an early pioneer of rocketry and aeronautics.

Enthusiasm for “active or self-directed evolution,” an effort that is at once “holistic, anthropocentric and teleologically determined” is a thread connecting a broad swath of Cosmists, whether poets, philosophers, theologians, scientists, or artists (Young 2012, 9). The noosphere, too, is central to visions of conscious, progressive evolution. It refers to an evolving layer of planetary mind—literally the mindsphere (Greek, nous)—emerging from the collective mentation and technological artifacts of human intelligence. The noosphere was understood by those who coined it as “the next level of human development” according to which the Earth’s terrestrial envelope, the biosphere, would come under the regulation of human reason “which was itself beginning to appear as a form of energy, as it had the ability to change material processes” (Laruelle 2019, 44). Even for Vernadsky, whose take was more materialist than mystical, the noosphere was no mere contingent occurrence. The very scientific and technological knowledge that manifests as “the geological force creating the noosphere, cannot lead to results contradicting the geological process that created it,” Vernadsky insists. “It is not an incidental phenomenon: it is very deeply rooted” (Vernadsky 1999, 95). In Teilhard’s philosophy, this non-incidental quality of the noosphere positioned it as a stage predestined by the Creator on the path to the Omega Point, an eschatological climax of sorts that would unify matter and spirit, merging humans with the divine. This culmination of human and (quasi-)divinity is a defining feature of Russian Cosmism as well.

In its anticipation of an emerging planetary consciousness, the noosphere is sometimes regarded as a possible precursor concept to the Anthropocene, even though the dominant “mood” of the two concepts diverges, the latter signaling warning and crisis and the former, hope and transformation (Shoshitaishvili 2021). While Teilhard and Vernadsky articulate the noosphere in different ways, with Teilhard striking an overtly spiritual tone, both are products of “evolutionary thinking in which civilized Man emerges as a geological force” (Hamilton and Grinevald 2015, 66). The teleological character of the noosphere within planetary or cosmic unfolding confers an air of inexorability to our more recent concept of the Anthropocene as well, as a crucial moment of transformation that is embedded in planetary evolution and yet requires the conscious agency and active evolution of humanity to complete the transition. On these readings, the Anthropocene may appear as a “crisis or pivot point within the fuller”—and often more hopeful—“story of Noosphere formation” (Shoshitaishvili 2021, 7). The Anthropocene as a stage within “noogenesis” generates excitement and optimism at the prospect of a dawning planetary phase in which the complexifying cosmos begins to direct its own future evolution—via humans’ newfound agency. Crutzen’s and Stoermer’s inaugural use of the term gestures in this direction.

A quarter century on, however, no robust “world-wide strategy” or collective planetary consciousness appears to be emerging. Far more evident, I argue, particularly among a subset of humans who are actually positioned to shape the planetary future—namely, tech billionaires and the government officials under their sway—is a merger between the pursuit of planetary-scale technologies and ambitions and nationalist and ethno-nationalist movements, to the neglect of planetary forms of governance and the wellbeing of the planet itself (Shoshitaishvili and Sideris 2025). If indeed a planetary form of nationalism is ascendant, should we understand it as a perversion, perhaps a betrayal, of the unifying, cosmopolitan impulses that animated visions of the noosphere and Anthropocene? Or, on the contrary, is the rise of fractured planetarity, nationalist or otherwise, a continuation, perhaps even a fulfilment, of the cosmic frameworks and philosophies that preceded it? And if, as it appears, the noosphere and the Anthropocene both draw from a wellspring of religious and metaphysical speculation about humanity’s cosmic place and purpose, what sort of religious formations accompany the present rise of planetary orientations that eschew cosmopolitan sensibilities?

To explore these questions, I first discuss the ways in which cosmopolitan expectations have failed to manifest, considering how this failure connects to recent events, including the rise of a technocratic elite class with nationalist and ethno-nationalist agendas. I argue that spiritual investments of earlier forms of Cosmism, centered particularly on “active evolution,” still animate the dangerously narrow forms of planetary consciousness we are witnessing today. A close examination of the sometimes toxic mix of techno-science and religion that characterizes past and present cosmic orientations reveals an abiding and powerful belief in a progressive, teleological evolutionary framework. This framework, which drives Silicon Valley technocracy today, encourages perilous expressions of planetarity that blithely justify present harms to human and nonhuman life by subsuming them within the structure of its own enchanted cosmology.

Whither Cosmopolitanism?

Both the Anthropocene and the noosphere concepts have been appropriated for techno-optimistic ends. Some of the most transparently technophilic expressions of Anthropocene enthusiasm are now at least a decade old. For example, The Ecomodernist Manifesto and similar forms of Anthropocene boosterism welcome the acceleration of technologies that would enable a “decoupling” of human development and material needs from impacts on nature (Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015). The “good Anthropocene” envisioned by ecomodernists is presented as an optimistic alternative to “doomsday” environmentalism. If Earth is now “remade by human hands,” then knowledge and technology can and should be applied with “wisdom” to enable a “good, or even great, Anthropocene” where growth continues without negative impacts on nature and the future dawns bright and prosperous for (not quite) all (Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015, 6). Clive Hamilton (2015, 234) has proposed that the “good Anthropocene” framing bears the structure of a theodicy or, more accurately, an “anthropodicy,” according to which “human Progress takes the place of God” and climate disruption is revealed as “a treatable side effect of the modernization process—a growing pain that the growth process itself will resolve.” Those who suffer the effects of planetary crises are assured that their pain is justified for the greater good. We will see similar tropes appear repeatedly in the context of progressive human–planetary co-evolutionary narratives.

Other Anthropocene narratives are less technophilic in tone, but nevertheless exhibit a telltale teleology—often embracing the noosphere by another name.³ Many of these draw on Teilhard’s cosmology and are known to academic and popular audiences as the Universe Story or the Epic of Evolution. They unspool the wondrous narrative of a self-organizing, animate cosmos, from its origin in the Big Bang to the present day, in a blend of science and spirituality (Sideris 2017). These narratives have been actively promoted for several decades now, if we take the so-called geologian Thomas Berry’s call for a “new story” to replace the purportedly dysfunctional traditional religious narratives as the originary event (Berry 1978). Sweeping stories of human and cosmic co-evolution often converge on Anthropocene/noosphere themes of human consciousness awakening to its planetary role and collective task. These narratives serve a mythic function, diagnosing the human condition, and generating prophetic visions of the future unfolding of a planet managed by our species.

Humans are assumed to have a unique role in guiding planetary, and indeed, cosmic, unfolding toward greater complexity and unity. Understanding our place in the cosmos restores a sense of purpose, direction, and enchantment. Paradoxically, humans’ role is simultaneously understood as foreordained—immanent in the cosmos from its very inception—yet requiring activation through our conscious participation in cosmic unfolding (Michelson and Sideris 2025). Universe Story narratives and Russian Cosmism alike exhibit these same discursive habits: an “anthropocentric view of the universe which presupposes a teleologically determined—and thus meaningful—evolution” that is at the same time “dependent on human action to reach its goal” (Hagemeister 1997, 185–86). The similarity is not coincidental, given that the noosphere concept, coined by Vernadsky and Teilhard, is a feature of both cosmologies.

The investment in a noogenic imaginary of humans’ progressive co-evolution with Earth has long been implicit in perspectives influenced by Teilhard’s cosmology (Thomas Berry imagined the transition to a new “Ecozoic” era as an auspicious evolutionary stage), but some contemporary cosmic storytellers have made their debt to the noosphere explicit. Evolutionary cosmologist Brian Swimme, a chief architect with Berry of the Universe Story, offers an example. Swimme has moved seamlessly from decades of promoting the Universe Story (Swimme and Berry 1992) and more recent advocacy of the Journey of the Universe offshoot project (Swimme and Tucker 2011) to championing the noosphere concept as essential to the cultural shift needed to avert planetary crisis (Human Energy, n.d.). Swimme’s “new” narrative, detailed in a book titled The Story of the Noosphere and under the auspices of something called the Human Energy (n.d.) project—a “catalytic hub for evolving collective consciousness” that takes its name from Teilhard’s work—foretells the imminent arrival of a “planetary nervous system” capable of addressing planetary-scale crises and unifying humanity (Swimme and DeRaspe-Bolles 2024; Human Energy, n.d.). Echoing Hamilton’s claims about theodicy, the story anticipates “great hardship” to come but urges readers to “stay faithful to the long process that will, over time, unify the antagonistic fragments of humanity” (Swimme and DeRaspe-Bolles 2024, 177). Humans should trust the cosmic process we are also actively shaping.

But why should we trust it? In narratives inspired by Teilhard, as noted, the expectation is that human consciousness will ultimately merge with a divine principle and direction inherent in the universe itself, culminating in a form of superintelligence or super-consciousness. Indeed, Teilhard predicted that the noosphere would mark a profound spiritual transformation, with human-created machines catalyzing an “‘etherised’ universal consciousness” spanning the entire planet; the explosion of super-consciousness would propel humanity’s long-awaited merger with the divine (de Chardin [1959] 2004, 161–62).

It is not difficult to see how the noosphere and Teilhard’s Omega Point prefigure ideas of so-called Singularity and technological determinism proposed by transhumanist thinkers like Ray Kurzweil, an AI visionary at Google who predicts that technological acceleration will effect a merger between human and machine intelligence, or that the latter will simply surpass us, resulting in immortal “spiritual machines” (Kurzweil 1999; Steinhart 2008). Similarities between Teilhard and Kurzweil, which the latter has acknowledged, are so pronounced as to be “uncanny” (O’Gieblyn 2017, 71). If a primary conduit of the noosphere idea to the West as a whole came via (translated) Teilhard, a secularized version reached Silicon Valley and the broader tech industry in large part due to the Kurzweil’s inordinate influence on prominent tech figures, including Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, among others (Becker 2025). Singularity appeared in even more respectable garb through the work of Swedish-born philosopher Nick Bostrom. Until recently, Bostrom held a faculty position at Oxford University, where he directed the Future of Humanity Institute, funded in part by Musk. Bostrom produced a stream of academic works on the topic of superintelligence under the institute’s auspices prior to its closure in 2024 following numerous scandals and allegations pertaining to racism, sexual harassment, and fraud (Robins-Early 2024).

Currently, this (thinly, if at all) secularized counterpart to the Omega Point—Singularity, superintelligence—attracts many adherents among the Silicon Valley elite and techno-visionary thinkers (Becker 2025; O’Gieblyn 2017). Transhumanists, “Singularitarians,” and other techno-utopians, as Meghan O’Gieblyn observes, today enjoy outsized power and influence in Silicon Valley and beyond. “Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and many venture capitalists identify as adherents” to Singularity and speculative transhumanist ideas that are now being researched and developed at places like Google, Apple, Tesla, and Space X (O’Gieblyn, 2017, 74). These spiritually inflected future projections shape new and emerging technologies that, in turn, impact all our lives, particularly in the current AI boom. As we will see, other esoteric and cosmic philosophies past and present have also made inroads to Silicon Valley (Genovese 2023). Again, common to many such worldviews is a commitment to a progressive, teleological reading of evolution and the cosmos. And yet, for all their investments in planetary-scale technologies, new forms of distributed intelligence, and space-faring endeavors, there is little indication that tech elites, and the government officials with whom they now align, embrace an expansive politics and ethical vision commensurate with planetary aspirations. What happens when enthusiasm for planetary orientations and technologies blends with values contrary to cosmopolitan politics and ethics?

A Retreat to Lifeboat Ethics

At its outset, the COVID-19 pandemic seemed irrefutable evidence of our profound, if shocking, trans-species and planetary entanglement. Initially, there were promising signs of solidarity, even across political party lines. Recall those frightening but heady days in spring of 2020, when at 7 p.m. each evening, ordinary citizens of New York City under lockdown conditions appeared in doorways and windows to applaud exhausted health care workers, first responders, and other laborers in what were deemed essential services.

The communitarian impulse was short-lived. Although the roots of nationalism and political divisiveness likely began much earlier, the pandemic may well have intensified political polarization, a retreat to hyper-individualism, and a deficit of empathy. Italy was one of the regions first ravaged by COVID-19 in early 2020, but by fall of that year, Pope Francis (2020, para. 11) was already warning from the Vatican that a “myopic, extremist, resentful and aggressive nationalism” was “on the rise”; journalist David Wallace-Wells (2025) hailed the immediate post-pandemic period, and beyond, as a “new age of Social Darwinism.”

The connections now seem obvious between the terror of a mysterious worldwide plague and heightened alarm over an encroaching horde of alien others or an “enemy from within,” in a Trumpian phrase. Fears about bodily boundaries and bodily permeability readily align with obsessive border control and demonization of those “outside,” giving rise to panicked political rhetoric about invasions and the poisoning of a nation’s lifeblood. In short, “instead of pulling together in the face of a global disaster,” we see a retreat to “lifeboat ethics” (Wallace-Wells 2025), a concept popularized by an environmental ethicist, Garrett Hardin, with unfortunate ties to white nationalist anti-immigrant sentiment and racist pseudo-science (Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d.).

In particular, the pandemic-induced association of health with virtuous behavior expanded into a broader set of beliefs about merit and desert and encouraged ideas about “natural” social hierarchies—and, in turn, set the stage for a ferocious backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Meanwhile, the “greatest social and technological experiment of our time,” namely AI, gleamed, or threatened, on the horizon as “a kind of exit from the realm of human flesh and microbes into one built by code” (Wallace-Wells 2025). As we will see, racially tinged suspicions about unearned merit, preoccupations with social and ethnic hierarchy, and pursuit of high-tech escapist fantasies are integral and interconnected features of the Silicon Valley ethos that now shapes our day-to-day lives. That ethos manifests in eclectic forms of spirituality with roots in and affinities with cosmic philosophies, East and West.

The Rise of Planetary Nationalism

The planetary turn, I suggest, has not produced the hoped-for cosmopolitan politics or unifying sensibilities oriented toward the flourishing of humankind, let alone nonhuman life. Instead, we see a troubling rapprochement between populist-nationalist investments and planetary/extraplanetary technologies and ambitions (Shoshitaishvili and Sideris 2025). One way to understand these developments is as an emerging form of planetary nationalism—an expanding tendency of nations, regimes, and elites to extend their influence through planetary registers: space forces, AI as a form of distributed planetary intelligence, exoplanetary futures, social media-driven collective intelligence, and blockchain economies (cryptocurrency, for example, is currently proffered by tech giants as the basis for not just a planetary but an interplanetary financial system [Puente and Puente 2025]). While planetary techno-sciences and planetary-nationalist politics accelerate, genuine planetary governance—institutions capable of managing shared risks and vulnerabilities—lags drastically behind. Shattering expectations of a cosmopolitan turn, current events appear antithetical to planetary oversight or ethical norms that might rein in and regulate globe-spanning and globe-transcending technocratic projects.

Scholars have examined related formations, sometimes manifesting as far-right environmental movements with nationalist agendas. These include green nationalism, where climate issues drive countries to compete with one another to achieve dominance in arenas like renewable energy or electric vehicles, or forms of ecofascism, where nations weaponize environmental concerns by hardening borders against climate migrants (Moore and Roberts 2022). But the category of planetary nationalism encompasses a broader constellation of developments, including an embrace of, not just strategic responses to, human-caused environmental change (Shoshitaishivili and Sideris 2025). Consider the case of Greenland: rapid climate warming is creating highly lucrative mining opportunities in regions once rendered inaccessible by extreme conditions and prohibitive costs. The island contains a wealth of extractible resources essential to contemporary industrial and technological systems, among them iron ore, lead, zinc, diamonds, gold, oil, uranium, and—especially—large deposits of the rare earth minerals so dear to Silicon Valley.

Both Vice President J. D. Vance and Donald Trump, Jr. paid visits to Greenland in early 2025. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley investors have been eyeing Greenland as a prime spot for constructing a libertarian “freedom city” or “network state,” terms for high-tech, deregulated communities for entrepreneurs and other tax-averse elites. In early 2026, Trump escalated his threat to seize Greenland, hinting at military action and imperiling the critical NATO alliance forged in the wake of World War II. Should efforts to control the territory come to fruition, tech magnates such as Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos—both of whom have invested in a start-up seeking to extract Greenlandic resources for AI-related applications—stand to benefit considerably. Peter Thiel and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen likewise have prospective interests in Greenland and the development of similar high-tech enclaves (Parshley 2025); Greenland, complete with mineral deposits and a very challenging climate, is also being considered as a test site for Musk’s fantasy of Mars colonization (Levy and Ulmer 2025). Recognition that climate change is reshaping the planet, combined with a drive to capitalize on newly accessible resources, dovetails with the conviction that such extraction could speed technoscientific advancements envisioned on a planetary scale.

A more straightforward example is Trump’s 2020 creation of Space Force as an independent branch of the United States armed services. The previous year, Trump issued an executive order emphatically declaring that the United States does not consider space a global commons, in a reversal of his predecessor’s policy and in defiance of statements by other space-faring nations (Silverstein and Panda 2021). Space Force documents unequivocally claim rights to a distinct sphere of influence in space, guaranteeing United States access for purposes of security, commerce, and exploration. As Space Force 101 explains, “The formative purpose of the Space Force is to achieve space superiority, ensuring freedom of action in space for our forces while denying the same to our adversaries.” Space Force personnel—designated “Guardians”—are tasked with “secur[ing] space superiority for the nation” (United States Space Force, n.d.). What stands out is how this mandate extends beyond the defensive protection of satellites to the ambition to control an entire planetary domain. In this respect, Space Force invokes a “Monroe Doctrine for a planetary age”—a nationalist drive toward uncontested dominance within a defined sphere of influence, now consisting of Earth’s near-space environment (Shoshitaishvili and Sideris 2025).

On the surface, of course, these lucrative alignments of tech culture with nationalist figures and agendas may be simply that—hugely profitable partnerships. But a broader set of techno-spiritual commitments and prophetic visions of cosmic evolution give both urgency and profound meaning to these endeavors for those engaged in their promotion.

Tech Support from the Broligarchy

When Trump regained the White House, he rode a wave of white Christian ntionalist anti-immigrant sentiment, abetted by obscenely large donations and fawning endorsements from the reigning tech “broligarchy,” many of whom had front row seats at his inauguration: Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Musk. The day after the inauguration, Sam Altman joined Trump at the White House to announce the launch of Stargate, a massive AI infrastructure project. Other tech billionaires hold official or unofficial positions in the second administration. These include Thiel, a member of Trump’s transition team in 2016, who mentors Vance in theology and bankrolled his political career to the tune of $15 million. Thiel’s software and data analytics company, Palantir—named for the magical “seeing stones” in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings—partners with United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement to track and deport immigrants (Cameron 2025).⁴ Also included is Andreessen (2023), a billionaire venture capitalist and writer of techno-optimistic manifestos (“I am here to bring the good news”) who served as chief architect of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. David Sacks, a tech investor who assumed the role of Trump’s tech “czar,” advises him on AI and cryptocurrency. Many of these men have long-standing ties to one another (in 1998, Thiel and Sacks co-authored a book-length anti-diversity screed, taking Stanford University to task for alleged anti-Western zealotry), but their synchronized pivot toward Trump is largely a new development.

For example, Musk’s preoccupation with planetary technologies and extraplanetary realms has remained fairly consistent, but his drift toward Trump and embrace of the far right generally (including Germany’s far-right AfD party, or Alternative für Deutschland) marks a departure from what seemed a progressive, pro-environmental stance. Some see in Musk’s alignment with the political right the imprint of his formative experience growing up in apartheid South Africa (Klein 2025). His attraction to the Great Replacement theory, an ethno-nationalist conspiracy suggesting that white populations are systematically being replaced by mass migration, is evidenced by his amplification of “white genocide” and anti-Semitic conspiracies on social media (Chan 2025). Racist ideologies have captured other Silicon Valley elites, notably, the other members of the so-called PayPal Mafia—Thiel and Sacks—who have similar ties to South Africa (McGreal 2025).

Some in Trump’s orbit, particularly Steve Bannon, have criticized the tech titans (Bannon labels them techno-feudalists). Yet Bannon’s own populism retains a strong nationalist orientation and an ardent embrace of certain technologies. In an interview in the New York Times, Bannon, who previously served as Trump’s chief strategist, presents his vision of how MAGA-style movements are changing the world. He invokes Teilhard de Chardin and the noosphere to describe a current state of “unrestricted narrative warfare” in which only one story can prevail. In this narrative battle, he predicts that the noosphere, working through mass media will “so overwhelm evolutionary biology that it will be everything” (Brooks 2024). He advises MAGA foot soldiers to “use your agency . . . The divine providence works through your agency” (Brooks 2024). Here we have an explicit appeal to key planetary concepts by a prominent right-wing nationalist—and a nod to the idea, central to Russian Cosmism and Teilhard’s philosophy, of active human agency combining with providential forces to transform evolution.

Although Bannon self-identifies as an economic nationalist and has occasionally ridiculed white nationalist groups, his close ties with the alt-right platform Breitbart News and his enthusiastic endorsement by the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups cast him in a suspicious light (Childress 2017).⁵ Teilhard, whom he references, is likewise controversial. His pronouncements lead some scholars to align him with racist and eugenic movements (Slattery 2017, 2024), and others to defend him vehemently against such charges (Haught 2019). To be sure, when one reads Teilhard referencing “unprogressive ethnical groups” and inquiring to what extent the “advancing wing of humanity” should “tolerate” them, it is difficult not to find his vision of evolution troubling (Teilhard 1962, 132–33). Whether these sentiments were foundational or peripheral to Teilhard’s larger cosmology is a matter of ongoing contention among scholars. I will not attempt to resolve the question. However, for the purposes of the present discussion, it is clear that Teilhard (1962, 127) understood disability and disease as “counter-evolutionary” forces that slow the progression of the noosphere. To maximize what he called hominization, an evolutionary threshold when matter becomes conscious of itself and humanity begins to shape its own evolution, these counter-evolutionary elements would need to be addressed. This threshold of human self-awareness marks a significant step toward the noosphere, and thus it follows in this progressive cosmological scheme—as Teilhard (1951) himself suggests—that gaining control of evolutionary forces, including by way of a “generalized eugenics,” facilitates the “maturing” process by which the biosphere transitions to the noosphere.⁶

As unsettling as these aspects of Teilhard’s philosophy are, however, they may not be what attracts Bannon to his conception of the noosphere—at least not directly. Both men are interested in the idea of history’s directionality, its unfolding in a planet-wide teleology “possessing spiritual dimensions,” and both too understand media and communication as powerful and even salvific forces (Shoshitaishvili and Sideris 2024). In the aforementioned Times interview, Bannon also invokes the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, whose writings greatly influenced 1960s counterculture and the California tech industry that grew out of it. The result was, and to some extent still is, a distinctly Californian “mish-mash of hippie anarchism and economic liberalism beefed up with lots of technological determinism” (Barbrook and Cameron 1996, 56). And as is often the case with visions of progressive, inevitable advance toward utopia, whether cosmic or technological, this ideology depended upon a “willful blindness” toward less positive features of life on the wealthy West Coast: “[R]acism, poverty and environmental degradation” (Barbrook and Cameron 1996, 45).

As Adrian Daub (2020) similarly observes in What Tech Calls Thinking, an incipient messianism and teleology infected the industry early on, encouraging a sense that technology unfolds according to a predetermined plan—a worldview that conveniently insulates tech creators from damaging consequences of their inventions while allowing them to claim the mantle of ingeniously disruptive innovation. McLuhan, whom Bannon admires, “furnished [the tech industry] with a narrative of historical inevitability, a technological determinism that they could now call on to negate the consequences of their inventions—if it was fated to happen anyway, is it really their fault?” (Daub 2020).⁷ McLuhan, we should note, was himself a Teilhard enthusiast. Teilhard’s noosphere and his vision of a single, worldwide civilization became McLuhan’s “seamless web of experience” and “global village” concepts, respectively (Wolfe 2004, 22). In tech’s recurring theme of inevitability—and the ease with which it justifies “progress” for some at the expense of others—we can discern one of the intriguing threads connecting the spirituality of Silicon Valley with cosmic philosophies and theologies from a century (or more) prior. In this teleology, as I argue, a certain magic dwells. By analyzing its religious dimensions and antecedents, we might begin to demystify it.

Religious Formations of Fractured Planetarity

For the remainder of this article, I explore in greater depth how narrow nationalist and ethno-nationalist expressions of the planetary intersect with, are driven by, or are driving religious and spiritual commitments—again, keeping in mind features of the “planetary” I previously outlined, and which here encompass developments and forms of awareness that are planetary in orientation or impact. These include but also extend beyond climate change, such as the distributed intelligence of AI, to space-faring endeavors and colonization.

Some scholars have analyzed the religious dimensions of recent trends in tech culture, often with particular attention to extraplanetary ambitions. Much of this analysis circulated around Musk and his aerospace company Space X in the period prior to Trump and Musk’s tumultuous and widely publicized on-again, off-again relationship and before Musk emerged as the president’s chainsaw-wielding “Dark MAGA” sidekick. These critiques, and those of tech journalists who track the spiritual milieu of Silicon Valley, often focus on apocalyptic dimensions of techno-futurism and space colonization in particular. As Sarah McFarland Taylor (2022, 2024) observes, Musk’s thinly veiled apocalypticism tracks a set of recognizable marketing schemes like fabricated urgency and perceived obsolescence—Earth’s own obsolescence—calculated to attract adherents to his end-times predictions and self-presentation as the messianic genius the world needs. Mary-Jane Rubenstein critiques the “weird religion” of the new corporate space race, what she calls “NewSpace,” as a retooled Christian ideology of colonization, expansionism, and extraction. Channeling Nietzsche, she argues that the “very nihilism that characterized imperial Christianity now characterizes modern science,” particularly as seen in these corporate and dominionistic endeavors (Rubenstein 2022, 35). Our tech overlords offer a world-destroying “utopianism without the utopia” (Rubenstein 2022, 18).

Meanwhile, building on apocalyptic themes of planet destruction, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, in an essay that is at times stunningly bleak, diagnose the reigning technocracy “less as old-school imperialism than super-sized prepping, at the level of the national state. Gone are the old colonial fig leaves of spreading democracy or God’s word—when Trump covetously scans the globe, he is stockpiling for civilizational collapse” (Klein and Taylor 2025). They suggest that what links tech billionaires to Trump-style politics and its base of evangelicals, white Christian nationalists or Zionist Christians (think Pete Hegseth) is a shared end-times vision where only a subset of humans will escape. Some in this “millenarian mashup” straddle both camps, notably Thiel, who lately delivered a series of high-profile, closed-door lectures on the Antichrist, a figure symbolizing global unity and therefore, to Thiel, unspeakable evil (Bullard 2025). For tech elites, corporate-ruled “startup countries” and outer space present possible escape routes; for the right-wing Christian contingent, the Biblical rapture beckons. In the meantime, an immediate priority for these Armageddon bedfellows is hardening national borders against all enemies, foreign, domestic, ethnic, or theological.

Klein and Taylor’s analysis reveals a quasi-religious constellation of Silicon Valley ideologies that has received less attention from religion scholars than one might expect. These include an eccentric cluster of movements that, I argue, cannot be fully grasped apart from their investment in active, progressive evolution: effective accelerationism, longtermism, as well as the aforementioned promise (or threat) of Singularity.⁸ Accelerationism in the tech world is associated with reaching Singularity, the point at which human and machine intelligence merge and an intelligence explosion transforms human and cosmic history. Effective accelerationism seeks to hasten the arrival of Singularity by means of unrestricted technological progress. Unobstructed development of AI or, more accurately, AGI (artificial general intelligence, the point when AI reaches or exceeds human levels of intelligence) will facilitate the spread of consciousness throughout the universe.

Effective accelerationists draw from the utopian optimism of effective altruists, a utilitarian philosophy originating from the philosopher Peter Singer that endorses funneling money and resources in precisely calculated, data-driven, and cost-effective ways, achieving the most good for the most people (disgraced entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried was a high-profile advocate). Blending effective altruism with the claim that vast temporal distances should not negatively influence assessments of which humans “count” refocuses moral attention on generations existing well into the future, a view called longtermism. Blending these ideologies, in turn, with urgent appeals to speed up technological progress results in a position, increasingly influential in tech culture, called effective accelerationism or “e/acc.” Silicon Valley figures associated with e/acc (or technological accelerationism generally) include, minimally, Musk, Andreessen, Altman, Bostrom, and Kurzweil, the latter of whom formulated a Law of Accelerating Returns (more on that later). The accelerationist camp focuses on speculative, far-future scenarios, believing that future lives (which vastly outnumber humans alive today) take clear moral priority. This group positions itself against those it perceives as decelerationists or doomers who worry about the existential risks, such as AGI misalignment with “our” values. In a move that will by now sound familiar, longtermism enables proponents to gloss over present harms caused by technology—algorithmic discrimination, exploitation of workers, widespread unemployment, environmental degradation—for the sake of abundant future life.

Were longtermism merely about safeguarding future generations, climate activists might readily get on board. But, crucially, it is also about “maximizing the probability that there are as many lives of those generations as possible” (Becker 2025: 15). These future lives include digital people, uploaded brains living in computer simulations, or space-colonizing transhumanist creations. Longtermists envision futures spanning billions or even trillions of years from now. Failing to enable these incalculably numerous future digital or posthuman lives by decelerating technological progress would be an unthinkable moral dereliction. In the tech world, stagnation is the apocalypse. Moreover, wealthy countries have more to contribute to the future than poorer ones, owing to worker productivity and innovation, some longtermists argue. To maximize the possibility of future lives, we need rapidly accelerating technology, even though—as some longtermists admit—these powerful technologies present grave risks. But the sooner superintelligence emerges, the sooner technology will transform us into cognitively and morally enhanced posthumans (Damiani 2025). Moreover, its emergence is auspicious, for while it poses huge existential risks, it marks the next logical stage in evolution. Thus, on this account, even catastrophic climate change would be a minor setback, a rounding error, in the totalizing tally of “greater good” represented by trillions of years of future intelligent life.

While accelerationists rebuke the pessimism of doomers, their far-future orientation presents an odd sort of optimism that assumes the likelihood of disasters but judges them negligible in the long, long run (needless to say, the value of myriad nonhuman lives currently inhabiting Earth—remember them?—do not register in these calculations at all). These “ethical” frameworks explain in part why a growing chorus of concern about energy-hogging AI data centers that exacerbate climate change and destroy communities are met with a shrug by tech moguls, some of whom previously spoke in grandiose terms about saving the planet.

Klein and Taylor stress the destructive nihilism of these worldviews, in contrast to previous forms of fascism that at least anticipated some golden era to come. Meanwhile, Christian nationalists or Zionists who find common cause with the broligarchy do believe something awaits, and perhaps they assume that the tech bros believe it too. But for tech entrepreneurs, Klein and Taylor suggest, it is enough that Christianity has the right apocalyptic mix to get its faithful on board with accelerationism.

Note, however, that there are many different accelerationist creeds, spanning the entire political spectrum and with historic roots, on some accounts, extending to Marxist and Nietzschian philosophies. As mentioned, many effective accelerationists pit themselves against “decel” doomers (thus, characterizing the former as preppers, as Klein and Taylor do, seems to miss something). The closest thing to a common denominator among accelerationist philosophies is the belief that radical change can be created through intentionally speeding up processes that shape society, including technologies that generate many of society’s problems. Yet Klein and Taylor’s analysis leans heavily on an association of accelerationism with apocalyptic fatalism, and therefore with a secular(ish) rapture narrative that revels in sheer destruction. Illuminating as they are, then, these analyses center darkly apocalyptic and millenarian imaginaries to such a degree that important parts of the picture fall outside the frame. To be sure, certain bizarre Silicon Valley tenets of faith link up with prophecies of all-out destruction. But the apocalypse frame falls short of grasping how their techno-utopian character is rooted in an embrace of progressive evolution and human capacities to quicken its pace. My point is not to defend tech billionaires against charges of fascism or bad faith. It is rather to argue that focusing on end-times fatalism and annihilatory agendas—what Rubenstein (2022, 34) sees as big tech’s Christianity-shaped “will-toward-nothing”—obscures the profoundly, if also darkly, magical elements of tech spirituality. These future visions are not simply secular or “pseudo” versions of Christian apocalyptic fever. They have their own distinct religious genealogies and forms of enchantment.

Cosmism Revisited

To pull back the curtain on the religious enchantments shaping tech culture, including in its planetary nationalist tendencies, we need to return once more to earlier cosmic philosophies and theologies that are structurally similar to Silicon Valley spirituality.

Especially key here is Russian Cosmism, a wide-ranging and eclectic movement that has generated a number of successive waves over the past century or so, with some still influential in Russia today (Bernstein 2019). Leading scholar of Cosmism George Young (2012, 4) summarizes the central features, many of which are relevant to contemporary techno-elites:

[T]he active human role in human and cosmic evolution; the creation of new life forms, including a new level of humanity; the unlimited extension of human longevity to a state of practical immortality; the physical resurrection of the dead; serious scientific research into matters long considered subjects fit only for science fiction, occult, and esoteric literature; the exploration and colonization of the entire cosmos; the emergence on our biosphere of a new sphere of human thought called the “noosphere”; and other far-reaching “projects,” some of which may no longer seem as impossible or crazy as they did when first proposed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

For Russian Cosmists, the stuff of the universe has a latent spirituality or soul. Collaboration with the vital, quasi-divinity inherent in the universe results in the active evolution of humans and the cosmos. Federov, bent on resurrection and immortalism, saw a universe filled with the dust of the ancestors, waiting to be reawakened. Tsiolkovsky, the aeronautics pioneer, understood the cosmos as rationally ordered into hierarchies, with the lowest forms of matter containing dormant spirits and higher forms being spiritually alive—all moving toward a more perfect state. For Tsiolkovsky, the cosmos possesses an absolute will of its own, while humans are endowed with a “conditional will” that must be actively exerted (Smith 2018). This cosmic telos reveals the deeper meaning of the universe and the place and purpose of technologically advancing humans within it. Even Vernadsky, perhaps the least mystical of the major cosmic thinkers, was beholden to ideas of creative evolution, an élan vital or dynamic force driving evolution, as promulgated by Henri Bergson (and developed by Teilhard). For many Cosmists, the relationship between humans and the universe is one of microcosm–macrocosm, with the same principles guiding both, and with human purpose manifesting in active participation in cosmic evolution. Here, traditional supernatural powers “are replaced by physical laws, cosmic energies, vibrations, extra-terrestrial beings, and human intellect that render the world a meaningful, interconnected, and controllable place” (Terbish 2020, 767). The movement offers an alternative to conventional religion by conferring meaning to the superconnected universe, notably in the form of our species’ capacity to “upgrade” to immortal godlike status—a vision stamped with the imprimatur of techno-science and bearing traces of Orthodox belief in theosis, according to which God created humans that they might progress to godlikeness. In short, Cosmism was always a “techno-religion in the making” (Terbish 2020, 769)

Rather than dismiss the movement as pseudoscience or pseudotheology, then, it is important to understand Cosmism as “a crossover area between science and magic,” the mingling of thaumaturgy—the realm of wonder and miracles—with academic knowledge and pursuits (Young 2012, 9). Significantly, this cosmic orientation always contained a kernel of Slavophilic nationalism, a chauvinistic tendency that persists alongside “the international, interplanetary, intergalactic scope of their vision” (Young 2012, 9). Federov, for example, was invested in “complex theories about the ‘manifest destiny’ of Russia in Eurasia” (Bernstein 2014). Nationalist/ethno-nationalist strains of Cosmism have often surfaced as Eurasianism or Neo-Eurasianism, a form of Cosmism oriented toward nationalist ends (Terbish 2020; Laruelle 2019; Smith 2018) and driven by a “right-wing occult theory which espouses that certain cosmic events will dictate the strengths and weaknesses of different races” (Genovese 2023, 164). And like contemporary tech culture’s self-identification as the cognitive elite, some Cosmists believed leadership by geniuses like themselves was critical to moving the masses toward evolutionary stages associated with higher beings.

A universal orientation mingled with ethno-nationalist and autocratic tendencies led some Cosmists to posit the need for specifically Russian “strongman” figures to oversee the task of immortality, a “godman to direct the masses” (Terbish 2020). Similarly, in the proto-transhumanism of Federov passed down in modified form to today’s tech elites, we see how visions of an extraplanetary, transhumanist future for all are narrowed significantly to become an “ethnocultural claim upon outer space and upon the technologies to arrive there” (Smith 2018). For the space travel-obsessed Tsiolkovsky, the process of perfectibility by which humans ultimately merge with cosmic energy meant that lifeforms deemed defective—human, animal, or plant—would have to be weeded out (Young 2012, 152). The purported universalism of the Cosmists’ vision, in other words, has often been reframed, not least by some of the movement’s key figures, to advance nationalist agendas and claims of ethnic superiority.

Parallels with this parochial and ethno-nationalist planetary turn are evident in tech culture today. Musk, for example, believes that inferior sectors of humanity, propped up by DEI programs, are inhibiting progress toward colonizing outer space. General concerns among tech giants about demographic, policy, and economic impacts of falling birthrates conceal a deeper preoccupation with “social engineering and the idea that the best people are being replaced” (Swisher 2025). The alignment of tech entrepreneurs with pronatalism—policies promoting reproduction—is another outgrowth of ethno-nationalist, techno-eugenic enthusiasm. Anita Say Chan (2025, 26) documents the rise of “contemporary strains of techno-eugenics among leading voices in Silicon Valley, who project the risk of Western technology stagnation as rooted in an undervaluing of the innovative capacity of the cognitive elite.” This agenda dovetails with other articles of Silicon Valley faith, like longtermism, which, as discussed, prioritizes humans who will live in the (possibly quite distant) future—a superior stock of humanoid pioneers of extraplanetary existence.

Meaningful Evolution and the Manufacture of Inevitability

On the whole, as I have argued, cosmic thinkers, whether Russian, Teilhardian, or those more broadly influenced by noospheric frameworks and “good” Anthropocene expectations, often imagine a universe that is self-organizing and yet dependent upon the agentic participation of (some) humans in evolutionary processes to propel it forward. The idea that humans can participate in and transform the system in which we find ourselves, a system whose deep meaning and direction is revealed through our own active engagement, creates a profound sense of purpose. It is also this teleological investment, particularly when combined with other Silicon Valley creeds, that enables the evasion of negative impacts and social justice concerns. To say this is not, however, to declare these cosmic prophecies nihilistic. What remains somewhat underappreciated, and what comparisons with cosmic philosophies bring into view, is how these visions are animated by broader investment in active evolution. Moreover, in attending to the numinous quality of this underlying teleology, common to cosmist philosophies and Silicon Valley alike, we can better appreciate that escape and exit are not simply geographical but structural—that is, less about securing a safe bunker somewhere (on Earth or beyond) than escaping ethical consequences and responsibilities, both in the short term and in the (very) long-term balance sheet of the universe itself. Built into melioristic evolution is the assumption that some will advance at the expense of those left behind. While a teleological worldview can elevate ethics, it can also “divorce us from the present” for the sake of future payoff (Rushkoff 2019, 157). All else is simply fuel, energy, and resources to be extracted.

In the worldview of tech elites, cosmic teleology allows for a justificatory and normative strain of technological determinism that decouples technology from culpability, rendering technology “opaque and beyond political intervention and control” (Wyatt 2007, 175–76). To be sure, teleology and determinism are not the same thing, since the former implies some degree of openness, an effort of seeking or directing actions toward a goal (a possibility that thoroughgoing determinism would foreclose). Yet, both are means of banishing chance and randomness. In Silicon Valley narratives that combine the two, an inherently progressive trajectory simultaneously requires human participation (or rather, the participation of a coterie of ingenious seers who perceive futures unavailable to others). At the same time, in its justificatory mode, technological determinism functions as a rhetorical strategy, invoking narratives of progress and inevitability to legitimize decisions and foreclose debate.⁹ In this cluster of ideologies, then, the agency of the cognitive elite is preserved, even as culpability is evaded. Put differently, cosmic agency becomes the purview of tech innovators, a privilege denied to inferior others forced to live in the worlds, real or virtual, that elites choose to create, without our consent.

In-depth analyses of the Silicon Valley ethos converge, intriguingly, on the frequency with which tech entrepreneurs dispense a “rhetoric of inevitability” (O’Sullivan 2025; Becker 2025, 87). Through rhetorical repetition, “speculative scenarios acquire the weight of destiny. This process—the manufacture of inevitability—reveals how power operates through prophecy” (O’Sullivan 2025). In this way, AI/AGI comes to seem a “natural force” rather than something created consciously by humans. Tech executives who once pored over “quarterly earnings and user growth began speaking like mystics about humanity’s cosmic destiny” (O’Sullivan 2025). The mystical, prophetic framing makes the arrival of superintelligence seem like the “inevitable next rung on the ladder” (O’Sullivan 2025). The teleological premise, enshrined in the intrinsic directionality of evolution or in the law-bound exponential progress of AI development—the two trajectories ultimately merge in these prophecies—effectively justifies collateral damage to the planet and less fortunate humans. It obscures the reality that technological development and its acceleration are choices humans make.

Belief in a deeply purposeful structure of the universe connects what Taylor Genovese calls the “affective ontologies” of Silicon Valley to other cosmic thinkers. For Musk, Thiel, Bezos, and others, “the essence of the universe is informational, and the teleological, intrinsic value of that base information will always naturally organize itself into intelligence” (Genovese 2022, 162). I would argue, for example, that this constellation of creeds is evident in Andreessen’s manifesto. While he repeats optimistic mantras about a wide-open future (declaring his position neither apocalyptic nor utopian), he delineates a purposeful role for “humans” in fulfilling goals inherent in the larger order of things. In affirming a steadfast allegiance to lawlike accelerationism, he cites tech prophet Kurzweil:

Ray Kurzweil defines his Law of Accelerating Returns: Technological advances tend to feed on themselves, increasing the rate of further advance. We believe in accelerationism—the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development—to ensure the fulfillment of the Law of Accelerating Returns. To ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever . . . We believe in competition, because we believe in evolution. We believe in evolution, because we believe in life. (Andreessen 2023)

We believe in evolution. Kurzweil’s vision of Singularity, technological growth, and progress depends upon cherry-picking certain milestones both in technological and human evolution, suggesting, in Teilhardian fashion, a trend and direction that culminates in complexly conscious humans, as if our species “is the ultimate goal of evolution.” Kurzweil “is inferring a kind of teleology, a purpose and trend, where none exists” (Becker 2025, 59–60).¹⁰ Here we see a techno-meliorist faith according to which the universe, propelled forward (even against its own entropic forces) by exponential growth in intelligence, grants a transcendent purpose to human effort.

American Cosmism

Silicon Valley today presents a recognizable but somewhat distorted version of earlier Cosmist philosophies. The same “enchanted logics” of these earlier thinkers are evident in efforts to achieve greater longevity and defeat death, to accelerate “life” toward transcendent states, and in repeated refrains about the urgency of making “humanity” a multi-planetary species (Genovese 2023, 162). At the same time, we discern a narrowing of cosmic universalism to nationalist fervor, along the lines of the nationalist/ethno-nationalist impulses displayed in some strains of Russian Cosmism and embodied in the emergence of planetary nationalism, outlined previously. Genovese (2023) identifies a distinctly American variant of Cosmism, a modified but recognizable version of the Russian variety. A highly influential figure in this context is Aleksandr Dugin, whose ideas have also inspired idealogues in the United States, including Bannon, alt-right figures, Thiel, and others in Trump’s orbit (and Putin’s in Russia).¹¹ Dugin himself absorbed nationalist influences via Russian thinkers drawn to Vernadsky, notably Lev Gumilyov, a historian who sought to direct Cosmist ideals toward “nationalist ends” by promoting ethnogenetic and Eurasianist theories (Genovese 2023, 165). Vernadsky’s contention that nature and humanity were fused—an assumption embodied in the noosphere —was appropriated by Gumilyov to advance arguments that distinct ethnic categories arise deterministically from the physical environments in which they were embedded. As transmitted to Dugin, and thence to contemporary tech figures including Thiel, these ideas have congealed into the spiritually inflected planetary nationalist politics we are seeing enacted today.

A critical question, then: Are these resemblances between Cosmist philosophies and Silicon Valley merely that—a convergent, parallel evolution? While they remain somewhat speculative, historical lines of influence can be traced between the two, particularly in the context of the uniquely Californian blend of New Age spirituality with the libertarian, capitalist ethos of the burgeoning tech industry (Barbrook and Cameron 1996). A key hub for the transmission of various strands of esoteric and New Age thought to Silicon Valley was the Esalen Institute, a New Age center located in Big Sur, California, founded in 1962 by two Stanford graduates, Michael Murphy and Richard Price (Kripal 2007; Rushkoff 2022).

Around 1980, the Esalen Soviet-American Exchange program, later named the Russian-American Center, or Track Two, initiated a citizen diplomacy program. It was at Esalen that Silicon Valley capitalists came into direct contact with Cosmic thought and its offshoots. Key figures at Esalen like Murphy were taken with mystical musings of Russian Orthodox theologians influenced by Cosmism (Cosmism was experiencing a resurgence in the Soviet Union). Among these was Vladimir Solovyov, who shared Federov’s interest in immortality and bodily resurrection. “A type of esoteric Christianity with its own unique enlightenment of the body,” Jeffrey Kripal observes, “was an intimate part of the cultural landscape” of Esalen (2007, 320). A lesser known genealogy indicates that Russian Cosmists were themselves drawn into the Theosophical writings of Madame Blavatsky (1831–91), whose blend of science and religion emphasized spiritual progression through active, stadial evolution in ways consonant with the orthogenetic—directional—evolutionary progress popularized by the Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer (Terbish 2020; Mühlematter 2023) and with striking parallels to the multi-stage evolutionary scheme proposed by Kurzweil.

This esoteric, evolutionary blend resonated strongly with a cluster of initiatives central to Esalen philosophy. Known collectively as the human potential movement, it emphasized self-actualization through a mix of counterculture and New Age spiritualities, psychedelics, humanist psychology, and Eastern philosophies and spiritual disciplines. The ambition of liberating oneself from mental and physical constraints to achieve one’s highest potential aligned with the interests of Russian Cosmists in transcending physical limits, both bodily and planetary, and perfecting human consciousness. We hear echoes of these ideas today when Musk promotes Neuralink, a neurotechnology company piloting implantable brain–computer interfaces, as “unlock[ing] new dimensions of human potential.” Even where precise historical ties are harder to establish definitively, the affinities of Cosmism with tech spirituality are remarkable (Genovese 2023).

Narrative Warfare

We can conclude this lengthy analysis by returning to a set of questions posed at the outset. Are these trends toward greater insularity—nationalism and ethno-nationalism—perversions of planetary mindsets and cosmic orientations as they have come down to us through concepts like the noosphere and the (good) Anthropocene? Or were such darker tendencies always present, perhaps latently? Some have suggested that contemporary tech billionaires, as well as officials in Putin’s orbit, have “weaponized” planetary concepts like the noosphere; whereas Vernadsky and Teilhard envisioned universal awakening, global unity, and shared knowledge—an “open, cooperative, and transcendent” noosphere—tech elites twist such concepts into tools of “surveillance, fragmentation, and control” (Trippi 2025).

I am not fully persuaded by such claims. Weaponization (perhaps literally) of planetary concepts and creations is one of the dangers of planetary nationalism. And yet it is not the case that cosmic philosophies generally, or the noosphere concept in particular, were originally devoid of sinister elements. We have seen that Teilhard’s vision of cosmic evolution raises concern in some circles about his entanglement with eugenic theories and predictions. More generally, Russian Cosmism was, and is still in its contemporary expressions, entangled with ethno-nationalist worldviews (Laruelle 2019, 201). For its own part, tech visionaries are repeatedly mired in plausible accusations of xenophobia, ableism, sexism, and racism (Gebru and Torres 2024). That racism, eugenics, ethnic hierarchies, and nationalist zeal surface again and again in these expressions of cosmic worldviews is surely not coincidental. Put differently, the combination of “planetary” and “nationalism” seems less an aberration of an otherwise benevolent universalism than a matter of emphasis. Melioristic views of evolution as leading toward a perfecting climax almost invariably coincide with racial hierarchy and eugenics, as these ideas have long been shaped by colonial encounters and the attendant ranking of different cultures and ethnic groups. The very idea of a leading edge, an “advancing wing” of humans and their artifacts, is integral to progressivist accounts of evolution. No such vision—particularly one encompassing all of humanity and the cosmos—is possible without perceived benchmarks and anticipated thresholds. Meanwhile, as I have argued, perception of a cosmic telos combined with purposeful human effort (we might call it merit) subsumes all harms under a banner of inexorable growth.

Klein and Taylor argue that we can resist the techno-fascist juggernaut by telling different stories—narratives of interdependence and collective survival, stories of better times, rather than end-times. But have “we” not been telling such stories? Tales of universalism and collective consciousness, as I suggested at the outset, have been disseminated widely for decades or more, perhaps nowhere more earnestly than in discourse on religions, science, and ecology. Yet perhaps they remain too mired in meliorist evolutionary frameworks that are both their source and ultimate undoing. Maybe the fracturing we are witnessing is, to borrow a phrase from the tech industry, not so much a bug as a feature of the universalizing impulse of the noospheric/Anthropocenic imaginary. Stories of cosmic solidarity, past or present, have not proven victorious in the narrative warfare the technocracy is waging. By all means, we need better, more humane, and more inclusive stories. But for such narratives to succeed, whatever they might look like, we must first comprehend and confront the deeply rooted forms of enchantment and meaning that possess the narrative warriors—those traitors to the Earth, as Klein and Taylor aptly dub them—who are now positioned to dictate the course of our planetary future.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Terra Schwerin Rowe for her careful reading of an earlier draft of this article and to two anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions.

Competing Interests

This author declares that they have no competing interests.