What’s in Palantir’s ‘Technofascist’ manifesto?

American surveillance tech declarer Palantir released a 22-point pronunciamento o'er the weekend, calling for a “ young epoch” of AI-enabled US military supremacy. The internet went wild, with the text being labeled a blueprint for “technofascism.” 

Posted on X on Saturday, the document goes far beyond the typical mission statement of a Silicon Valley tech company. It outlines Palantir’s positions on the role of technology and military power in the 21st century, stating: “Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation;” “hard power in this century will be built on software;” “national service should be a universal duty,” “the postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone.”

Because we get asked a lot.The Technological Republic, in brief.1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.2. We must rebel…

To understand how a private corporation can feel empowered to demand such far-reaching policy changes from the state, it’s important to understand what Palantir is, and how enmeshed with the ‘deep state’ it really is.

Palantir – named after the obsidian seeing-stones from Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’ through which the dark lord Sauron keeps watch on his underlings – is a software firm primarily serving the defense and intelligence sectors. The company was established in 2003 by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale (who worked for Thiel’s Clarium Capital), Stephen Cohen (who interned at Clarium) former Sigmund Freud Research Institute researcher Alex Karp, and Nathan Gettings, a PayPal engineer.

Palantir was the brainchild of Thiel, who said that he realized “the approaches that PayPal had used to fight fraud could be extended into other contexts, like fighting terrorism.” Thiel’s idea was nurtured by the CIA, which invested $2 million in the company in 2005 via its in-house venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel. “I wish I had Palantir when I was director,” former CIA chief George Tenet – who set up In-Q-Tel – told Forbes magazine in 2013. “I wish we had the tool of its power.” 

Palantir is currently valued at around $352 billion, a valuation that represents roughly 80 times the company’s annual revenue. This apparent overvaluation is fueled by Palantir’s extensive contracts with the US government and its alphabet soup of defense and intelligence agencies.

Palantir’s flagship product is an operating system called ‘Gotham’. Not a surveillance system as such, it pulls together and analyses existing data that may otherwise take days to sift through. For example, if US Central Command is planning a missile strike in a foreign country, Gotham can combine maps and satellite footage from that country, data from other agencies, including human intelligence from the CIA and signals intelligence from the NSA, and local surveillance data to present CENTCOM with potential targets.

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