Sunday, April 26, 2026

Palantir Technologies, under CEO Alex Karp, is openly...

Editor's note: ...advancing a model in which AI, state power, and corporate fascist power are tightly fused, presenting this as a deliberate and ideological shift rather than a neutral technological evolution. Palantir's vision, and it damn sure isn't our "vision" as this technology is militarized, is centered on state surveillance, military integration ("...and when necessary kill them", according to Alex Karp), and the expansion of data-driven control. Palantir's longstanding ties to intelligence and defense institutions is being built with a broader push for AI-enabled dominance in security and governance, and of course "when necessary killing." Palantir's direction is explicit, programmatic, and reflective of a wider transformation how technology is being deployed as Mein AI.
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The Technate Was Always Coming

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

And what you can do about it (besides complaining).

Palantir dropped a manifesto last weekend. 22 bullet points distilled from Alex Karp's book The Technological Republic, posted to X with the casual framing of "because we get asked a lot." I haven't seen a reaction so widespread, unanimously opposed and viscerally aghast since James Damore’s infamous "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber".

The usual suspects lost their shit. Engadget called it "the ramblings of a comic book villain."

TechCrunch clutched its pearls at the bits about "regressive" cultures and "vacant and hollow pluralism."

Bellingcat's Eliot Higgins observed, (via Bluesky, of course), that these aren't philosophical musings floating in the ether: they're the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it's advocating.

He's not wrong, Palantir sells to ICE, DoD, NYPD, and the intelligence community. It may be a manifesto, but it's also product literature.

Even Alexander Dugin, the Russian "Fourth Political Theory" philosopher, not exactly known for having a libertarian bent, seemed triggered by it, calling it "the plan of the Western techno-fascism" on X, "Pure Satanism" on his Substack. [Editor's note: Also because Dugin is a Russian Orthodox Christian.]


Former Greek FM Yanis Varoufakis called it "evil" and put out his own point-for-point on it – he calls it a refutation, it's actually more of a rant.


So everybody across the horseshoe is big mad. Fine.

The thing is, none of this should surprise anyone. Let's now look at why the policy this “manifesto” outlines was always going to arrive, with or without Karp's prosaic stylings.

Karp Didn’t Invent "The Technate"

The merger of corporate power and state apparatus, the "technate" that people are suddenly discovering with horror on a Sunday afternoon, is not a new idea. It's not even a recent one.

Back in 2013, Eric Schmidt (then Google's executive chairman) and Jared Cohen (Google Ideas, ex-State Department advisor to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton) published The New Digital Age. The book was blurbed by Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, Tony Blair, and General Michael Hayden, the former director of the CIA. That's an elite-class blurb list for a book that explicitly argued for the intersection of Silicon Valley and state power, the fusion of corporate infrastructure with national security logic, and the reshaping of diplomacy through private platforms.

In 2013 it was called "transformational." Kissinger gushing that it was, "a searching meditation on technology and world order" (he would go on to co-author The Age of AI with Eric Schmidt that should be every bit as concerning as Karp's Technological Republic).

Not too long after that, Google's Sergey Brin and Klaus Schwab held a fireside in Davos where Herr Schwab pontificated that with the advent of AI, since the algos would be able to predict election outcomes with 100% certainty, they may as well pick the winners anyway and we could do away with elections altogether.

Nobody batted an eye. My timeline certainly wasn't overflowing with rage over it and the people who were calling attention to it were using facing all kinds of headwinds.


My personal favourite goto clip about all-pervasive corporate surveillance that absolutely nobody gave a shit about, was this one, also via the darlings of Davos:


Here we have an ex-Goldman Sachs guy running a Chinese multi-national sermonizing about mass surveillance and personal carbon footprint quotas and my timeline was not filled with angry tweets from elite A-listers calling for the dismantling of Ali Baba.

Here in 2026 it's the exact same structural narrative, now with Karp's sharper edges and fewer Davos euphemisms, only this one is being called a fascist manifesto instead of drooled over by media elites.

The only major difference I can see is where Davos/WEF inspired technocracy was globalist, Palantir, Karp, Thiel et al are nationalist. Perhaps, a North American nationalist.

(This fits with what I wrote in my last edition of The Bitcoin Capitalist, about the factional rivalry between the intellectual descendants of Samuel Huntington ("The Clash of Civilizations") vs his former pupil, Francis Fukuyama ("The End of History") I posted an excerpt here.

Fukuyama thought the entire world would become one big Neo-Liberal circle-jerk.

Huntington said future conflict wouldn't be between countries, but between cultures. And some cultures were less compatible with how we live here in the West, than others (Palantir's point #21).

Overall, the project didn't change. The faction driving it did.

Driving what? The inexorable drive toward post-Democratic technocracy.

Please go to Burning Platform to continue reading.
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UK Dependence on Palantir is Growing, at Great Public Cost

By G. Calder | April 26, 2026

The growing presence of Palantir in the UK is no longer just a procurement story. The company now holds roughly £600 million in public contracts across the NHS, the Ministry of Defence, local councils and policing, while two petitions calling for ministers to sever ties with the firm have drawn more than 229,000 signatures. The concern is not limited to cost or outsourcing. It is that a company built in the worlds of intelligence, surveillance and military analysis is moving deeper into some of the UK’s most sensitive institutions at the same moment its leadership is becoming more explicit about the kind of technological order it wants to build.

News-style banner with two suited men shaking hands; background shows NHS, Metropolitan Police, and Palantir logos, matching a headline about UK petitions to cut ties with Palantir when influencing public life.

The immediate focus remains the contracts. Palantir leads the consortium behind the NHS Federated Data Platform, a £330 million deal intended to help hospitals and health bodies use operational data more efficiently. Fresh reports this week confirmed that the Metropolitan Police has held talks with Palantir about using its AI tools to automate intelligence analysis in criminal investigations, a move that would extend the company's role further into UK law enforcement. That combination is the point: Palantir is no longer supplying niche software to distant corners of government, but becoming embedded in health, defence and policing all at once.

The larger issue, however, is not really the contracts themselves. It is what Palantir is, how it sees its own mission, and why that mission increasingly sits uneasily with democratic public life. WIRED reported this week that employees inside the company are beginning to question whether they are "the bad guys," with current and former staff describing growing alarm over Palantir’s role in immigration enforcement, military operations and the broader moral direction of the firm.

According to their report, internal Slack discussions featured employees questioning leadership decisions, the legality of how some data is used, and whether the company's rhetoric has drifted toward something more openly authoritarian. That finding suggests the unease around Palantir is no longer confined to activists, privacy campaigners or hostile politicians. It is now present inside the company itself.

That unease has been sharpened by Palantir's own public messaging. Last weekend, the company published a 22-point "mini manifesto" derived from The Technological Republic, the recent book by chief executive Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska. The text argued that Silicon Valley owes a "moral debt" to the United States, that the next era of deterrence will be built on AI, and that American technology companies should be building advanced AI weapons rather than hesitating over military work.

It also described some cultures as "middling" or "harmful" and promoted a harder vision of civic duty and strategic power. This is not the language of a neutral software supplier. It is the language of a company that sees itself as part of a political and civilisational project.

In the UK, MPs and campaigners have reacted sharply. Liberal Democrat MP Martin Wrigley said Palantir's manifesto, which he said embraced AI state surveillance and national service, was either "a parody of a RoboCop film" or "a disturbing narcissistic rant." Another MP, Victoria Collins, said it sounded like "the ramblings of a supervillain." Those are vivid lines, but they are not merely performative. They reflect a wider fear that Palantir is no longer even pretending to separate its technology from a much broader ideological vision of power: one built around surveillance, militarisation, elite technical authority and a very thin patience for democratic hesitation.

Please go to The Expose to continue reading.
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Continue with more reporting on Palantir:

The Neocon Upgrade and the New Totalitarianism


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