Peter Thiel’s recent private lecture series in Rome on the Antichrist should not be dismissed as another exercise in billionaire eccentricity. In unusually stark form, it condensed a worldview that is gaining influence across parts of Silicon Valley, the American right and sectors of the European far right as well. Thiel routinely invokes the spectre of a one-world government — one capable of regulating artificial intelligence or tackling climate change — as “the Antichrist”, a framing that casts democratic restraint and supranational authority as existential threats while elevating exceptional elites as the true bearers of freedom. The Rome lectures were revealing not as a cultural curiosity but as a symptom of a broader political convergence.

This became especially clear at the end of last year. Around the same time that Elon Musk escalated his attacks on the European Union after regulatory action against X, and even called for the Union’s abolition, the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy denounced the EU as anti-democratic and declared that the United States should help Europe “correct its current trajectory“. What is at stake here goes well beyond a disagreement over digital-market regulation or a diplomatic quarrel. It is a struggle over private power and, more specifically, over who gets to govern the deployment of technology in our societies.

As I argued in a recent keynote for FES – Future of Work, nowhere are the stakes of this confrontation between technology and democracy more visible than in the workplace: in the employment relationship, in managerial prerogative, and in the legal institutions that determine whether workers remain citizens at work or are reduced to subjects of command.