CHICKENPIE.The Pope declared this week that we are spiraling toward annihilation. He was in a hat the size of a small car. Nobody in the room was coding.
This is the 2026 version of the irresistible-force problem. The Pope has moral authority. The tech industry has the data center. These are not the same kind of power, and everyone writing the checks has already done the math.
Leo XIV is the first American Pope, which already sounds like the setup to a joke the Catholic Church has been sitting on for a thousand years. He spoke on Peace Day. He called out two of the biggest industries on earth — AI and defense — by name and function. Not metaphorically. Not as a vague "be careful with technology" plea. Annihilation. The spiral kind.
He's right. That's the part nobody actually disputes.
The problem is that "right" doesn't have a deploy pipeline. There is no repo for moral clarity. You can't submit a pull request against a weapons procurement contract. What happens is this: Palantir is already deep in DoD AI. OpenAI walked back its weapons ban last year. Every major tech company has a "responsible AI" team that writes the policy document while the defense contract gets signed in a different building. The model ships. The next model ships. Each one needs more chips, more rare earth, more supply chains — all of which have their own spirals already.
Defense budgets just keep going up. Not because anyone thinks annihilation is good, but because the other guy's defense budget also just keeps going up. The spiral isn't hypothetical. It's the structure of every budget negotiation since the Cold War.
What's genuinely funny — if "funny" is even the right word — is the attention economy problem. Leo XIV said this from the Vatican. Historically significant institution. Billion-plus followers. First speech from the first American Pope. And it competed for the news cycle against Eurovision voting drama and a drunk deer in France.
The deer was a bigger story.
We built a world where the most consequential moral critique of the century arrives as a Thursday item. It gets 800 words. It gets a quote in the AI ethics newsletter. And then the spiral keeps loading.
Progress.
