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The Fog Machine at Palantir
By Christopher Hell | April 29, 2026
US defence contractor Palantir recently published a 22-point list which was drawn from a book co-authored by CEO Alex Karp and Head of Corporate Affairs Nicholas Zamiska. Reactions have ranged from "technofascism, pure" (Cas Mudde, one of the world's leading scholars of the European far right) to "if evil could tweet, this is what it would tweet" (Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister). A columnist on RT, the Russian state broadcaster, simply labelled the points "Mein AI".
The reactions are loud, but the document itself is curiously quiet. These 22 numbered items, each orbiting a sentiment without quite committing to a position, are written in a voice that aspires to gravitas and arrives at grievance. They share a mood, not policy.
What was Alex Karp really hoping to convey? Point 10, for example, reads, "The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray".
The numbered list of theses is normally the form that forces intellectuals into clarity. Luther nailed 95 of them to a church door. The US Declaration of Independence is a four-minute read. Marx and Engels wrote a pamphlet you could finish on a tram ride. Each item in such a list is meant to be acceptable or rejectable on its own terms.
Karp is writing in the lineage of The HP Way and Google's past motto 'Don't Be Evil' rather than in Luther's style, and corporate manifestos rarely manage that kind of clarity. But even by the forgiving standards of the form, his 22 points are unusually evasive. They function more like a sermon than a list. And once that is noticed, the question changes.
It is no longer: "What is Karp saying?"
It is: "Why is he saying it this way?"
The Philosopher in the Valley
The formative intellectual experience of Alex Karp was neither technical nor American. His undergraduate degree, from Haverford College in Pennsylvania, was in philosophy. His law degree is from Stanford University, where he met Peter Thiel, the contrarian billionaire investor, with whom Karp and others would later co-found Palantir. After that, Karp spent roughly a decade in Frankfurt, earning a doctorate in what he calls neoclassical social theory.
As Moira Weigel showed in her 2020 essay on Karp's intellectual formation, his 2002 dissertation, 'Aggression in der Lebenswelt', written in German, extends the Frankfurt School's critique of 'jargon' — a particular kind of public speech that formally affirms a society's official norms while smuggling through the forbidden wishes those norms exist to suppress, serving as a coded beacon for like-minded persons searching for a community.
Karp wrote his doctorate on the very rhetorical device he now deploys as CEO of a defence contractor worth over $330 billion.
Point 4 says, "Hard power in this century will be built on software".
Karp is the philosopher at Palantir, not the technologist. From the very founding, his role has been to function as the company's cultural and commercial face, winning over governments, recruiting engineers who might otherwise choose not to build machines of destruction, and articulating how all of this is morally grounded work. The 22 points are not the bullet points of an American chief executive. They read as the prose of a German social theorist who has read Adorno's The Jargon of Authenticity and decided to use the technique rather than expose it.
Karp is not failing to be clear. He is succeeding at something else. The reader is not supposed to parse the argument, but to feel its mood.
What the Fog Accomplishes
Not every point is evasive. Point 21's claim that "some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive" leaves little room for misreading, and the call to rearm Germany and Japan is unambiguous. The strategy works through the combination: blunt provocations draw the eye, while operationally consequential claims hide in the fog. Here is what that fog accomplishes.
Plausible Deniability. Point 5 says, "The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose." A clear version of this point would have to say that Palantir believes the US and Israel are justified in striking Iran's nuclear programme, in targeting Iran's political and military leadership, and in striking civilian infrastructure. It would also have to say that Palantir's software is widely reported to have contributed materially to those operations. But stating this plainly would expose Palantir to legal, diplomatic, and reputational consequences in jurisdictions where wars of aggression are considered illegal. [Editor's note: Nuclear weapons were the biggest financial fraud of the 20th century.]
Karp and Palantir can nod at the position without owning it. If asked later, he can say he was just speaking abstractly. The same mechanism operates at Point 7, on better software for soldiers; at Point 17, on Silicon Valley addressing violent crime; and at Point 15, on rearming Germany and Japan. Each is adjacent to a specific operational commitment that the document never openly embraces.
Please go to UK Column to continue reading.
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A conversation with JD Vance. Maybe Vance should be asked about that data facility Palantir donated to being constructed underneath the White House?
A conversation with JD Vance. Maybe Vance should be asked about that data facility Palantir donated to being constructed underneath the White House?
Watch JD Vance play dumb On Palantir with Theo Vaughn, on the surveillance state.
— The Constitutionalist 🇺🇸 (@WeWillBeFree24) May 9, 2026
Keep in mind Vance was plucked from Yale and mentored by Peter Thiel, who hired him into Mitheil Capital. Thiel donated $15 million to Vance's Senate campaign. pic.twitter.com/T5C3Fci6CV
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