The Shocking Palantir Manifesto: A Guide to Post-Democracy Technofascism
Welcome to our dystopian future, brought to us by our Techbro overlords.
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy novel, Lord of the Rings, a Palantir is an indestructible crystal stone that can see into the future or the past. The user of these stones must possess great strength of mind and intent over less powerful forces and can selectively decide what to show and what to reveal.
Last weekend, Palantir, the AI-driven company that’s been described by the American Friends Service Committee as providing “mass surveillance in the service of State violence,” revealed what it thinks prevailing power should be in our tech-centered age. Palantir was co-founded by Peter Thiel – a dual German and U.S. citizen who lived in South Africa before moving to the U.S. It’s micro manifesto was posted on the company’s X site and quickly went viral with over 30 million views.
The startling glimpse of the not-so-distant dystopian future that Palantir dictates should serve as both a warning and a call to action for those who oppose the post-democracy technofascism within which we may already be immersed.
“Every alarm bell for democracy must ring,” Professor Shannon Vallor, chair of ethics of data and AI at Edinburgh University, told the BBC, after Palantir’s corporate confession was published. In this vision, government institutions are simply roadblocks to an inevitable takeover by billionaire technocrats convinced that democracy is merely an adorably cure remnant of the past. Palantir’s disturbing design summarizes a book by its chief executive, Alex Karp, titled, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.
Palantir’s plan foreshadows a rising, hard-right-leaning technology sector elite, that uses its increasing societal control to dismantle progressive culture, intellectual influence, and even politics writ large. Instead of valuing academic learning, scientific knowledge, and governance for and by the people, there is an omniscient technocracy whose aim is to gain and maintain power by embedding itself in every facet of governance from the Pentagon to the IRS.
In this post-democracy philosophy, power is all that matters – common folk are merely along for the ride.