Earlier this month, multibillion-dollar US tech company Palantir posted on X a summary of its chief executive Alex Karp’s recent book, the portentously titled The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.

The book and the post offer a kind of manifesto, making sweeping claims about a hierarchy of civilisations, the rejection of pluralism, Silicon Valley’s moral obligation to US military power, the necessity of AI-powered weapons, and the case for compulsory military service.

The manifesto has met widespread criticism. Some commentators have compared the rhetoric to the monologue of a comic-book villain: grand, moralising, tinged with a sense of historical destiny.

But the manifesto is more than just corporate posturing: it’s helping to construct a new geopolitical reality and normalise a worldview that concentrates power beyond democratic accountability.

From tools to worldviews

For the past two decades, large technology firms have mostly presented themselves as benevolent service providers. They build tools; governments and users decide what to do with them.

That distinction has always been convenient, but it is looking less and less tenable. For some, Karp’s manifesto offered a grim sense of confirmation of the change. As Austrian philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh put it, “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 is........

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