The Palantir manifesto doesn’t go far enough |
Tech companies like Palantir now find themselves in a bind. Wanting government contracts, they have a reason to stay politically neutral. At the same time, they rightly suspect that the greater part of the left has already marked them for destruction. The hostility has little to do with Silicon Valley’s enthusiasm for Austrian economics, or its occasional calls for a property-based franchise – an old National Liberal demand rather than a fascist one. Rather, the left is hostile to technology because it is America’s conservative party, suspicious of anything that threatens to undermine old solidarities. MAGA was quick to forgive corporate America after it called a, at least temporary, halt to DEI – but there is a strong sense that the converse is not true, that the US Democrats and the British Greens will simply pursue Palantir to the ends of the earth no matter what it says.
Silicon Valley is a new force in society and is still feeling its way around politics
Silicon Valley is a new force in society and is still feeling its way around politics
And so, what to do? Palantir might submit, selling the surveillance technology that will be deployed by organizations like the Bundesverfassungsschutz against political radicals. Or it might choose defiance, allying with those same radicals to overturn society and make the world safe for Palantir. As we might have expected the real policy has been a muddle of the two. The company’s founder Peter Thiel supported MAGA in 2024 and furnished Trump with his running mate, but its necessary closeness to the security establishment has since spooked people like Joe Rogan and Theo Von.
Out of this muddle emerged The Technological Republic, a manifesto written in 2025 by the company’s CEO Alex Karp and its head of corporate affairs Nicholas........