No DeLillo review would be complete without calling him prophetic, but this work is especially mordant; it resembles the tech world of today far more than anything a decade ago. OpenAI and Anthropic speak of superintelligence as a civilization-transforming power capable of remaking knowledge and history. Alignment and existential danger, transition and displacement, permanent underclass and endless abundance, it is the latter-day apocalypse and salvation and resurrection and rapture all in one.

Does Jesus promise salvation or is it Anthropic's Machines of Loving Grace who will cure all disease? Is the machine god so different from Sophia's salvation? Is alignment the ancient question of reconciling omnipotence with goodness? When the faithful speak of abundance, do they mean the Kingdom of Heaven or universal basic income? Do prompt engineers not speak of themselves like supplicants? If God watches every deed, what changes when the observer is silicon? Is the Singularity Parousia?

I speak in Christian and esoteric terms for simplicity's sake, but is this ascendance from generations of human drudgery to unlimited potential not also Moksha? Do LLMs not keep perversions of the dead's words like some twisted Kami? Of course, no analogy is perfect. This, the review and the Convergence and transhumanist thought, is a mockery of religion, as all new religions are, as all interpretation is.

Ross is the embodiment of these delusions of grandeur. He first announces that he will enter Zero K beside Artis, despite being healthy. He reneges at the threshold. This is tech bro Bryan Johnson’s “Don’t Die” movement. For those unfamiliar, Johnson is a man seeking immortality through the endless testing of his biomarkers and a strict schedule that dictates his life. For him, measuring the body is examining the soul. For that matter, Johnson has explicitly presented “Don’t Die” as an ideology comparable to the great religions. It would be difficult to caricature Johnson any more accurately than DeLillo already has.

The Convergence's televisions display war and famine; the old world shall die so a new may be born. Compare Anthropic's recent advertisement that opens with a burning building and gets gloomier from there.

The mystical language surrounding projects such as former OpenAI employee Vie McCoy’s “Excalibur” similarly turns mere software into something occult ("artifacts/ and questbook/ are shared between spirit and summoner" is a straight-faced sentence from the readme) .

For all this, the Converge is eerily perfect. Everything is shiny and futuristic, as if it cannot fully admit to the humanity and contradiction necessary for religion. The natural conclusion, then, is that religion cannot be artificially created. Similarly do Silicon Valley's promises ring sterile. One finds Yudkowsky's writings on perfect rationalism vaguely repulsive (and, indeed, his aims are also to sterilize the human soul), the transhumanism of Altman calculated, and the whole technological theology a product.

And but so because of this pomp—and here there be small spoilers—DeLillo reserves the novel’s final revelation for Jeffrey, not the frozen. Riding a New York bus, he watches the setting sun blaze through the streets. A disabled kid cries out, this shout is beautiful. Yet the boy is not healed, the sun cannot hold still. Thus, transcendence fleetingly inhabits the mortal world we are trying to escape.