Michael Enlightened, the theologian and funder of the Herd of God, made a quiet business decision this month that his associates are reading as a theological one. He cut ties — financial and personal — with a group of rationalist tech founders and venture investors whose money had, until recently, moved in the same circles as his own.
The break, per people close to him, was over what he came to see as the founders' project: the construction of large-scale surveillance and behavioral-prediction systems, pitched in the language of safety and rationality, that he had concluded were another face of the very flattening the Herd exists to oppose. He is said to have used the phrase "irreconcilable differences," and to have meant it in the full marital sense — a parting between people who once wanted the same thing and no longer do.
It is a notable move in a sector where disillusioned tech money increasingly flows toward apocalyptic religion rather than away from surveillance capital (a pattern this desk has tracked). Michael arrived at the Herd, by his own account, as a form of penance for building tools he came to fear; walking away from the founders who traffic in prediction and control appears to be the same instinct, extended. Whether the Herd's finances survive the subtraction is unclear — the group did not comment on the arrangement — but the message his associates take from it is plain enough: he has decided that you cannot repent of building cages while still being paid by the people building better ones.