Palantir’s “Technological Republic” would be technocracy, the depoliticized political structure, driven by AI, organized as the Benthamite panopticon, in which scientists and engineers act as philosophical guardians. Junte-se a nós no Telegram , Twitter e VK . Escreva para nós: info@strategic-culture.su Palantir, already notorious as a megacorporation dedicated to data control and analysis, but also as the most properly and consciously “ideological” of the IT services companies, has recently launched a political manifesto that opens a revealing, though not very surprising, window into its vision of the future.
The 22 points, which would represent steps toward establishing what they call the “Technological Republic,” deserve to be reproduced here:
“1. Silicon Valley has a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. […]
- We must rebel against the tyranny of apps. […]
- - Free email is not enough. […]
- - The limits of soft power, of grand rhetoric alone, have been exposed. […]
- - The question is not whether AI weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. […]
- - Military service must be a universal duty. […]
- - If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we must build it; and the same goes for software. […]
- - Public servants do not need to be our priests. […]
- - We must show far more benevolence toward those who have submitted to public life. […]
- - The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. […]
- - Our society has become too eager to hasten, and often rejoices in, the ruin of its enemies. […]
- - […] An era of deterrence, the atomic age, is coming to an end, and a new era of AI-based deterrence is about to begin.
- - No other country in world history has promoted progressive values more than this one. […]
- - American power made an extraordinarily long peace possible. […]
- - The post-war neutralization of Germany and Japan must be reversed. […]
- - We should applaud those who try to build where the market has failed to act. […]
- - Silicon Valley must play a role in combating violent crime. […]
- - The relentless exposure of public figures’ private lives drives an excessive number of talented people away from public service. […]
- - The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. […]
- - The widespread intolerance toward religious beliefs in certain circles must be fought. […]
- - Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. […]
- - We must resist the superficial temptation of empty, meaningless pluralism. […]
- But the main key to deciphering the thinking behind Palantir lies in the work “The Technological Republic,” co-authored by Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, who are not only senior Palantir executives but also its leading intellectuals. And this alone – the fact that Palantir has “intellectuals“ – already marks a certain difference in how Palantir sees itself and its mission.
Because the principal critique by Karp and Zamiska (and, by extension, Thiel) of the way Big Tech has been conducting its business is that American technology companies have abandoned the effort to think about their activities within the framework of a worldview co-created by them together with the state.
The call for Big Tech + State integration, but above all for the “technocrats” to assume the mission of giving meaning and purpose to state action, is therefore a recurring theme in these reflections. Here we would have to point out, somewhat Hegelianly, that it is in the ethical nature of the state to shape the meaning and direction of society’s development, and that the absorption of this primarily state function by a private technocracy in partnership with the state, besides being a usurpation of functions, represents the final triumph of liberalism over traditional conceptions of the state – but a liberalism that is no longer Popperian; that is, we are speaking here of a “closed-society liberalism” rather than an open-society liberalism, concepts that, incidentally, we have taken as synonyms thanks to the catechism of Karl Popper. Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir, has in fact publicly stated that he believes “democracy” and “freedom” are incompatible.
We have already discussed several times the nature of the contemporary political crisis, which leads to the rise of populism, as expressed by the split between democracy and liberalism. Liberal elites realize that the demands of the people are incompatible with their interests and begin to ignore the masses. The resentful masses elevate tribunes of the people who organize national-populist parties structured around anti-elitist and anti-liberal sentiment. This is at the root of Trumpism, the strengthening of Le Pen, the growth of the AfD, etc. Palantir’s ideologues, in their discourse, appear as the formulators of the liberal reaction to democratic populism – which is peculiar, given the populist nature of Trumpism, so close to these actors, but it may help explain Trump’s co-optation and his surrender to the “Deep State.”
The tone of the work is that of those who trust and believe in the genius of scientists and engineers as ideologues, capable of creating a tablet of values and defining national objectives for the United States, with the supposed political and civilizational “agnosticism” of Big Tech’s big names and their focus on meeting the demands of consumer society seen as the great tragedies of the generation.
Also striking is the fact that Palantir’s authors seem to believe not only that Big Tech should ideologically shape the state and determine its objectives, but that the state itself should organize itself more similarly to Big Tech megacorporations. Some might find it curious that points 18 and 19 of the manifesto, for example, call for greater tolerance of corruption. The same idea appears in “The Technological Republic.” In fact, it is a discreet defense of the confusion between “public” and “private,” including in the realm of assets, but mainly in the realm of responsibility – that is, precisely this defense of a fusion or confusion between state and Big Tech.
And all of this is said from a fairly specific geopolitical focus. Palantir’s philosophers situate their project within the framework of defending U.S. planetary hegemony, that is, maintaining the old unipolar order of the post-Cold War era. It is therefore a defense of a “retreat” by Big Tech from its cosmopolitan and universalist bias, in favor of a technocratic patriotism.
Very clearly, the contours of this thinking point to this technocratic ideology as an “emergency” formulation – that is, a project to deal with the crisis of U.S. decline. And as such, it is properly an expression of that crisis and that decline, no matter how much its goal is to try to overcome them. One proof of this is the defense of the need for a military mobilization of society, with the reintroduction of compulsory recruitment within the U.S., extinct since 1973.
Even if the intrinsic merits of compulsory recruitment are relevant, the reality is that during its hegemonic period, the U.S. was quite comfortable with an all-volunteer force, so a possible return to compulsory recruitment can only come from the recognition of U.S. decline and the rise of other rival powers.
But Palantir not only defends a certain militarization of the U.S., but also of Germany and Japan. Again, regardless of whether Germany and Japan should have full armed forces again, it seems quite obvious that this agenda, on Palantir’s part, is driven by the desire to have some regional military power that could serve as a shield or buffer, respectively, against Russia and China.
In this regard, therefore, Palantir’s intellectuals think like “realists” in geopolitics, intending to use the “pass the bucket” strategy – that is, instrumentalizing other states to assume responsibility for containing some rival rising power.
Furthermore, Palantir is best known for its relationship with Artificial Intelligence technologies and its effort to militarize them and integrate them into public security policies. The main argument of its intellectuals is that the U.S. needs to militarize AI because its rivals “will not think twice about doing so.” It seems obvious to us that, for example, China and Russia have an interest in the topic; but contrary to what Karp and Zamiska claim, both China and Russia have publicly positioned themselves in favor of strict AI regulation, aiming to limit its impact on the labor market as well as in the military field.
In this sense, the argument for a laissez-faire stance on AI may serve Palantir’s own corporate and social control interests more than it would correspond to an objective description of reality. Karp and Zamiska also do not sufficiently address concerns and risks regarding citizen privacy, sweeping these concerns under the rug in the face of the imperative of internal security – needless to say: the U.S. already had good safety records between the 1940s and 1970s, a time when artificial intelligence did not exist.
One cannot underestimate the control Palantir ALREADY has over the U.S.. Elements of its influence underlie the entire text of the Manifesto. When speaking of Silicon Valley’s debt to society, it is important to consider, when talking about this debt, that Palantir already profits over $1.5 billion per year from government contracts, with the rest coming from private clients who cede their systems to Palantir precisely because of the credibility guaranteed by government connections.
ICE, in turn, charged with tackling illegal immigration, has already transferred to Palantir responsibility for mapping neighborhoods and tracking people’s movements to direct its work. The logic there is the very transformation of the human being and their actions into controllable and financiable algorithms by Big Tech. In this sense, despite the criticism of other companies focused on apps for services and consumption, without the tentacular work of those companies – which have come to manage every aspect of our existences (music, food, shopping, movies and series, transportation, education, etc.) and, in doing so, appropriated our data – or, even more specifically, deconstructed us into data; data that will now be used by Palantir in its purpose of redirecting Big Tech from prioritizing the satisfaction of desires to controlling dissent and preserving U.S. planetary hegemony.
Finally, the term attributed by Karp and Zamiska to their project is interesting: “Technological Republic.” The terminology possibly refers to that duality so present in the American political-philosophical debate between “republic” and “democracy.” But it is impossible not to see in the concept a certain reference to the Platonic utopia, “Platonopolis,” an ideal city governed by a philosopher-king supported by a caste of altruistic guardians. The comparison is not absurd considering the links between Peter Thiel and neo-reactionary ideologues, defenders of something like techno-feudalism – that is, a political system properly governed feudally by technological megacorporations.
Palantir’s “Technological Republic” would therefore be technocracy, the depoliticized political structure, driven by AI, organized as the Benthamite panopticon, in which scientists and engineers act as philosophical guardians, reigning over a mass of ignorant drones, alive only to consume and wage war.
That does not seem to us really like what Plato intended. It truly seems like the inversion of the Platonic Republic, a cyberpunk dystopia that may well lead humanity to its self-destruction.