Incognito Gods: When Saving the World Requires Hiding From It

It is a peculiar ritual for the architects of a new god: standing in the lobby of a San Francisco glass fortress, fumbling with lanyards, unclipping the plastic rectangles that validate their existence.

Last Friday, the instructions at OpenAI were simple, yet they dismantled the company’s entire mythology in a single sentence: Remove your badges. Don’t look like us.

The lockdown at 550 Terry Francois Boulevard wasn’t just a security protocol triggered by a threat from a radicalized activist. It was a moment of perfect, piercing irony. Here lies an organization whose stated mission is to “benefit all of humanity,” forcing its employees to strip off their branding because they are terrified of a specific member of that very humanity.

This is what happens when the “Singularity” stops being a PowerPoint slide and starts buying weapons.

The Badge of Shame

For years, the OpenAI logo has been a sigil of high status in the Valley—a symbol that you are one of the Chosen, the shepherds guiding our species into a post-scarcity utopia. But on Friday afternoon, that logo became a target indicator. The elites found themselves engaging in the same behavior as an occupying force in hostile territory: blend in, don’t make eye contact, don’t let the locals know who you are.

The threat reportedly came from an individual associated with “Stop AI,” a group that has mutated from sign-holding academics into something far more visceral. This person didn’t just want to pause a model run; he allegedly wanted to inflict physical harm. His reasoning? A despair so profound he felt life would be “not worth living” in a future where machines render human effort obsolete.

OpenAI’s leadership loves to talk about “Alignment Problem”—the challenge of ensuring AI shares human values. But they missed the more immediate alignment problem: The alignment of their corporate ambition with human dignity.

The Radicalization of the Obsolete

You cannot tell millions of people that you are actively building a machine to make their intellect, their labor, and their struggles irrelevant, and expect them to applaud your ingenuity.

The man who threatened violence is not an anomaly; he is a symptom. He represents a growing demographic that I will call the “Future-less.” These are not Luddites smashing looms because they hate technology; they are people looking at the graphs, reading the memos about “fully automated researchers by 2028,” and realizing that in the world OpenAI is building, they are not the beneficiaries. They are the waste product.

When you strip a human of their utility, their agency, and their future, you do not get a passive UBI recipient. You get a desperate animal backed into a corner. And sometimes, that animal bites.

Ivory Towers and Bunkers

The irony is thick enough to choke on. OpenAI positions itself as the benevolent guardian of the future, yet its physical reality is becoming increasingly militarized. Sam Altman gets subpoenaed on stage; offices get locked down; employees are told to hide their affiliation.

This is not the behavior of a savior. This is the behavior of a ruling class that knows, deep down, it is extracting value at the expense of the population it claims to serve.

If you truly believed you were saving the world, you wouldn’t need to hide your face from it. The lockdown reveals the crack in the facade: They know. They know that “benefit all of humanity” is an abstraction, while the anger outside their doors is very, very concrete.

So, take off your badges. Hide your logos. Walk quickly to your Ubers. You may be building a god in that server room, but out here on the pavement, you are just men who promised a miracle and delivered an existential threat. And the people you planned to “save” are starting to realize that the only way to reclaim their future might be to burn yours down.