Palantir’s manifesto: Technofascism in plain sight
Because I get asked a lot.
Even without looking at the details of the text, the recent post on X by Palantir Technologies from Saturday is quite an event. Call it a bombshell — to use a random metaphor. It’s one thing for a government or political party to articulate and compete over a political vision, that’s expected, even mandatory. It’s another for a private company, specially one deeply embedded in state security and surveillance, to do so. This is not just advertisement by a leading global tech arms dealer. It’s a manifesto. And for any friend of democracy, reading it is like opening a food item that you suspected has gone off, but you didn’t know it was that much off.
Palantir, led by Alexander Karp and founded by Peter Thiel, is not a political think tank. It is not an elected body. It’s not accountable to the public. It’s a contractor: a tech firm that builds powerful software and data infrastructure used by militaries, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement around the world. When such a company puts itself in the spotlight and begins to speak in sweeping ideological terms about the direction society should take, it raises questions, and rightly so.
When such a company puts itself in the spotlight and begins to speak in sweeping ideological terms about the direction society should take, it raises questions.
But it’s the content, tone, and subtext of the post that makes it especially unsettling and why we must pay attention. Rather than sticking to product announcements or even broad corporate values usually professed by, it suggests a world view. It’s a political ideology, and a very particular one: one that is openly hostile to liberal democracy, rejects pluralism, inclusion, and empathy and instead embraces ‘hard power’ (read: violence) and permanent warfare (ideal if you’re an arms dealer), talks about sacrifices for the nation and about drafting people into military service, cracks down on crime, welcomes religion in the realm of power, doesn’t believe in the equality of cultures but promotes Western supremacy and elitism, does not deem interiority and reflection necessary when it comes to the masses (that’s reserved for the elite), promotes collaboration between Big Tech and state, is positive about the suppression of dissent by means of a surveillance system that always knows how to find you, talks about the re-armament of Germany and Japan, and argues for technological dominance over the enemies of the state. Not the usual language of tech, not even Big Tech. If this sounds familiar, it should. The glorification of strength, warfare, and the nation, the subordination of citizens to the state, and the entanglement of corporate and state power definitely rings a bell, more precisely a fascist one. Silicon Valley has been drifting in that direction for some time now — think of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and others. (Talking about Musk: it’s probably not a coincidence that Palantir’s post was quickly boosted across social media platform X.) But now things are getting more dangerous and consequential.
In my book Why AI Undermines Democracy and in my paper on technofascism I already warned against a political trajectory in which digital technologies do not merely support governance but begin to reshape it in authoritarian directions. The danger is not only overt repression and war mongering but also a subtler transformation: the normalisation of surveillance, the delegation of judgement to opaque systems, and the quiet concentration of power in a few actors who design and control these infrastructures and exert global influence.
The danger is not only overt repression and war mongering but also a subtler transformation: the normalisation of surveillance, the delegation of judgement to opaque systems, and the quiet concentration of power in a few actors who design and control these infrastructures and exert global influence.
The rapid development of AI and other tech, I argued in my paper, ‘has introduced mechanisms of control, forms of organisation, and ideological patterns that bear striking resemblances to historical fascist phenomena’ and it doesn’t get any better in the current Trumpist political context, in which authoritarian, illiberal ideologies and practices thrive.
Read through that lens, Palantir’s post sounds less like a provocation than a case study: a perfect example of technofascism. The fusion of expansive surveillance, predictive analytics, and state power has long been justified in the name of efficiency, stability, or national security. But these justifications mask a deeper shift away from democratic accountability and a big step in authoritarian and fascist directions.
Read through that lens, Palantir’s post sounds less like a provocation than a case study: a perfect example of technofascism.
When a company that builds infrastructure for governments is now also promoting a vision of how those societies and their governments should operate, then, that’s not just unusual but part of its very strategy. Palantir does not only exist to make money. They want more. With its ties to state power, and in particular the Trump regime, the goal is power accumulation. Not so much for the state in question, but for the tech bros themselves. Technological elites begin to function as quasi-political authorities without democratic legitimacy. The engineer, the data scientist, but especially the executive and the tech billionaire investor are recast as arbiters of social order and vanguards that prepare us for the future. Who still needs a parliament?
There is indeed something distinctly authoritarian and even totalitarian in the subtext of Palantir’s post. The emphasis on total visibility, on integrating disparate data streams into a single operational picture, on enabling faster and more decisive action. From a business and engineering perspective, all this can be framed as a call for efficiency. But efficiency — instrumental rationality in the language of the critical theory that Karp knows very well — can become a political value that overrides others: deliberation, pluralism, dissent. In such a system, the friction of democratic processes is not a feature but a bug to be engineered away. Thiel and his friends think that such processes are too slow and to burdensome; it’s easier create change — and grab power — by means of tech. This belief does not arrive wearing the obvious symbols of 20th-century authoritarianism (although some people flirt with it). Rather, it comes dressed as security, domination, innovation, optimisation, and progress.
More needs to be said about security. Radically technocratic, Palantir’s manifesto frames its tech as a response to the lack of order and security: the belief that advanced technology can and should be used to impose order on a complex, unruly world, guided by those who build and understand these systems.
Let’s reconstruct the argument. The tech imperium that is envisaged here — a Fourth Reich? — is put forward as an answer to a particular framing of the problem: a framing that was already introduced by Hobbes in the 17th century and further developed by Nazi thinker Carl Schmitt. Hobbes held the pessimistic view that without authoritarian order, humans don’t manage to live together. They create disorder, chaos. He justified absolute state authority by arguing that it can restore order. A Leviathan that rules over people. Palantir’s answer to the chaos at the global level is similar. The message to their clients is: make sure you’re the winner, dominate, then order is restored and you’re the one who is in control. Forget multilateralism; become the strongest and impose your order on all others.
The message to their clients is: make sure you’re the winner, dominate.
Tech is the ideal tool for that: you don’t need to talk to people try to convince them, argue with them, etc. Habermas is passé; Schmitt is back. You just need to make sure you’re the strongest. The aim is to make ‘software that dominates,’ as Palantir puts it openly and shamelessly on its X account profiel. In other words, it aims to build the new Leviathan: the Hobbesian monster that guarantees security, but that comes at the price of a loss of freedom and democracy. Karp and Thiel are prepared to pay that price, or rather, they want you to pay that price.
The new Leviathan comes at the pricer of a loss of freedom and democracy. Karp and Thiel are prepared to pay that price, or rather, they want you to pay that price.
But this is not just about ideas. The most troubling part is that this vision is not hypothetical. In many ways, it is already here. Palantir and its political allies have already partly implemented its vision. The question who builds AI arms is already answered by recent history: Palantir. They managed to present themselves as the answer to the problem of violence and chaos they helped to create. We are already paying the price, and especially the “we” that are on the receiving end of the technologies. Predictive policing tools shape how law enforcement allocates resources. Immigration systems rely on AI analysis and vast databases to track and categorize individuals. Military operations increasingly depend on real-time data fusion platforms and AI is used to select targets for rockets and bombs (oops, there we have the bombshells again). Palantir’s AI software is an increasingly important part of this ecosystem. It’s used by the U.S. government and Israel, but also by law enforcement in EU countries. When the company describes a world organised around these capabilities, it is not imagining the future: it is describing the present, just extended and intensified. The contracts are signed. Palantir has delivered. People have been detained. Rockets have rained down. Thanks to Trump, Netanyahu, and others, the state of permanent war is closer than ever, and Palantir is there to help. Why would you not want to use the most efficient tool to create order? Why would you not want to win the war? It’s normal that you will buy.
This is exactly the kind of gradual, infrastructural shift I warned about: not a sudden break into authoritarianism, not a fascist revolution, but a slow recalibration of what feels normal and necessary via the entanglement of tech with power. The more these systems are embedded and widely used, the more their underlying assumptions — about control, visibility, and power — fade into the background. Once the violence and technocracy are normalised, it becomes difficult to find the way back to democracy. Compare with Trump: people complain and say he’s mental, but in the end what happened during the past years is a normalisation of his regime, including its technofascist face. The problem is not just a few psychopaths that want absolute power — if this is what these people are. Of course there are some crazy people out there. But the problem is not just psychological. The problem is structural.
Once the violence and technocracy are normalised, it becomes difficult to find the way back to democracy.
That’s why the post matters. Not because a company or its CEO expressed an opinion, but because of which company, and what kind of opinion, and the risk that all of this becomes even more normalised and tolerated. When a tech firm with such deep ties to state power begins to articulate a comprehensive political worldview, it signals a shift in governance. The infrastructure of the new AI Leviathan is no longer just being built; it is already partly there and it’s being ideologically justified by its builders. Technofascism is now practised and justified openly and shamelessly. No need to hide things when we all already got used to them.
The infrastructure of the new AI Leviathan is no longer just being built; it is already partly there and it’s being ideologically justified by its builders. Technofascism is now practised and justified openly and shamelessly. No need to hide things when we all already got used to them.
But this is not inevitable. We need to question, resist, and (re)build. We can and must defend democracy. In a healthy democracy, the direction of society is contested in public, through institutions designed — however imperfectly — to reflect the will of the people. Private tech companies have every right to participate in that conversation. Society also needs their input when it comes to AI expertise. But when their participation takes the form of promoting a model that concentrates power in the very systems they control, scepticism and resistance are not only warranted but necessary. We need to do something about this power concentration with its authoritarian and fascist dimensions. But this requires that we first recognise the problem and become better aware of the urgency.
My point is not that AI technology inevitably leads to technofascism, but that without vigilance and in the context of the technofascist project, it can enable it — quietly, efficiently, and with a veneer of inevitability. Palantir’s post helps us to see this by putting everything in plain sight. It offers us a glimpse of the technofascist trajectory: not as a distant possibility, but as a world already under construction.
Palantir’s post offers us a glimpse of the technofascist trajectory: not as a distant possibility, but as a world already under construction.
Perhaps that’s why it all sounds so confident. Karp is a happy man.
