The Internet has erupted in condemnation of Palantir’s manifesto. Understandably so. It is the open declaration of a private company to take over government systems and dictate policy. It is the admission by a concrete group that they have enough power to state their claim openly.
I have been arguing through different forms of analysis what I consider to be one of the main drivers of events in the U.S. and, by extension, much of the world in recent years. A new class of people has arrived at the upper echelons of system power through the development of new digital technologies that have allowed them to amass massive wealth and, through the implementation of that technology, considerable influence.
The way we work, communicate, consume, travel, and even rest is now mediated through their technologies. Not only does that allow the owners of those technologies to extract a rent and monitor our behavior, but also to influence it. We have become dependent on their hardware and software devices to do some of the most routine everyday tasks, like checking the weather.
The people who have developed and manage these technologies are not an abstract group. There are countless anonymous foot soldiers, middle managers, and small entrepreneurs—I have relatives involved—who are just doing their jobs. But there is also a defined group with some very well-known faces, like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg, and some less well-known, like Alexander Karp (though he’s eager to be in the well-known group), David Sacks, Balaji Srinivasan, or Palmer Luckey.
There are some who are allegedly less ideologically motivated, like Zuckerberg or Bezos, but who nevertheless orbit the core group and follow their lead. See, for example, when Zuckerberg published a video, after Trump came to power for the second time, in which he walked back some of his company’s previous policies in order to comply with the new administration, which this core group backed.
This core group is a tight-knit network of founders, venture capitalists, and thinkers—including Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin—who control some of the biggest hardware and software companies, venture funds, and media companies. They have their own think tanks, usually in the form of podcasts, like the “All-In Podcast,” but they also publish books and articles, and back public-facing institutions, politicians, and campaigns. They have a very particular idea—though, as in any group, there are different strands—of what the world is and how society should function.
The ideological core of this group—often referred to as the “Thielverse” or the “New Right” of Silicon Valley—is a synthesis of radical technological optimism, deep skepticism of modern democracy, and a desire to rebuild the world through “Exit” rather than reform (i.e., accelerationism). They support politicians who might help them achieve those aims, for example, Donald Trump, and have an ideological commitment to Israel.
Through their companies and their financing, they have extended their influence to the U.S. government. They have helped finance the Trump campaign and they have made J.D. Vance, who was Thiel’s long-term protégé and employee, vice president. In exchange, they have gained access to sensitive data of citizens through DOGE, classified information through federal and defense contracts for their companies, like Anduril or Palantir, and government finance to build their mechanisms of control: data centers and computational algorithms. They have become part of the military-industrial complex, creating an alliance between Tel Aviv, Washington, and Silicon Valley.
This is the context in which Palantir’s recently published manifesto must be understood. It is not simply a wordy memorandum to comply with a current ideological trend, like the many corporations that were putting out mission statements including protecting the environment or “diversity” a few years ago. It is their political agenda expressed through the mission statement of one of their foremost companies, which is becoming so indispensable to the government to an extent that we might not know where one ends and the other begins.
Nat published a piece when the manifesto dropped which is an excellent recap of reactions and analysis—some of which will be highlighted here again for the sake of the argument. But if you haven’t read the manifesto yet, you should. Here is the link.
There has been poignant analysis of what Palantir’s manifesto entails. For example, Varoufakis took the time to write what they actually mean in each of the 22 points. According to him, the real meaning of the first point is:
Silicon Valley owes an immeasurable debt to the ruling class who bailed out the criminal bankers that wrecked the livelihood of the majority of Americans. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley will defend that ruling class to the death (literally!), in the name of the majority of Americans whom they treat with contempt – i.e., like cattle that have lost their market value.
This points to a very interesting dynamic that Varoufakis has elaborated on in other places. We will return to it. Let’s continue with what Arnaud Bertrand had to say:
They basically promote a clash of civilizations worldview in which there exists a “they” – the supposed enemies of Western civilization, whose cultures the document codes as inferior – and a “we” who must stop indulging in decadent restraint and invest massively in AI weapons and defense software (which conveniently makes Palantir’s product catalog the civilizational cure).
I believe this is the result of the binary thinking—0s and 1s—which underpins their worldview. They are glorified software engineers, after all. Another X user, adds, commenting on one of the lines in the manifesto:
“Hard power in this century will be built on software” is the key sentence of the entire manifesto because this is where Karp reveals the real thesis; he’s saying whoever controls the software layer of national defense, controls the nation itself.
Christophe Boutry, writing in French (machine translation), further refines that thought:
When a private company sets itself the mission of defining who must be surveilled, targeted, predicted, neutralized, and simultaneously publishes a text explaining why contesting that would be civilizational weakness, we’re no longer in corporate strategy. We’re in the privatization of sovereignty. The right to decide on the enemy—which has always been the founding political gesture of States—is being bought up by a company listed on Nasdaq.
Finally, Alexander Dugin, after calling the manifesto “Pure satanism. Ayn Rand. The logical conclusion of the capitalist age,” states that:
The techno-fascism is on the rise. The masks are off. Palantir speaks openly of its plans. That means they reached advanced positions in world governance already.
When we identify these different points of analysis as referring to one group, not an abstract entity, the pattern becomes clearer and the image begins to emerge:
The system’s elites in politics and finance invested in the development of a new digital industrial base that could substitute for lost manufacturing capacity. This digital industrial base was based in Silicon Valley, which had a history of technological innovation. The investment came in waves. For example, in the 1960s, NASA sourced 60% of the integrated circuits necessary for the space race from companies established there.
The digital revolution, brought about by personal computing, the Internet, and the smartphone, also saw explosive waves of investment and the consolidation of certain companies. But this was still the era of hardware. Profit came, mostly, from selling devices. And this was constrained by production capacity, global supply chains, and consumer demand.
With the turn of the century, a new and more efficient way to continue propping up the market economy was developed after the dot-com bubble: Software as a Service, the app economy, and the rise of social networks. Here, there was a growth opportunity that was not constrained by previous challenges. In 2008, after the crisis and to avoid financial collapse, banks and investment funds were saved by taxpayers’ money. This was money which went, as investments, to Silicon Valley. This is what Varoufakis was referring to and what made Silicon Valley explode with companies that produced nothing physical being valued at a billion dollars.
Some of those engineers, founders, and venture capitalists, who knew each other, had access to incredible wealth and were propelled into contact with the system’s power elite. Not only because of the wealth, but also because the technologies that they were developing were an extremely useful tool for the state. This class—that some refer to as the “PayPal Mafia” because some of them, like Thiel and Musk, founded that company—arrived with a worldview that was different from either the traditional industrialist or globalist financier.
They believed in technology as the solution to social problems, which they saw as a reflection of the stagnation of the state. They believed that technology could surpass humans, so we had to merge with it. They believed that digital technology could rebuild the world better, but for that, it had to first be brought to the point of collapse. They saw all this as inevitably coming. It was the “disruption” culture.
The basis of these ideas, which have evolved into a worldview with Peter Thiel even speaking about the antichrist, is a binary comprehension of the world. It’s not even numerical in the mathematical sense; it is literally based on 0 and 1.
For example, at the heart of it is what they call the “Zero to One” stagnation hypothesis. They argue that the Western world has been in a state of technological and cultural stagnation since the 1970s. While we have seen massive progress in “bits” (computers and the internet), we have failed in “atoms” (energy, transportation, and medicine). They reject incrementalism and believe that the only way to save civilization is through vertical progress—creating entirely new things (0 to 1) rather than just optimizing what exists (1 to N).
Because the thinking processes of this group are built on a binary system, their worldview is incredibly narrow: you are with us or against us. And if you are against us, we have the right to control you, detain you, or kill you. In order to do that, we are going to build the tools and the system that permits it. But they are not building a new system, only simplifying to the idiotic the current one, down to the binary of 0 and 1.
Human creatures are language-based. To envision a different future, we must be able to speak it. Have you seen Thiel or Musk speaking? They mumble.
What the ascent of this group is creating is a readjustment of the system’s power elite. To take their seat, they are displacing others. And that is creating friction. This then reverberates through the system. But the system will discard the useless, adjust, and continue. That is, I believe, the source of much of what we are seeing happening in the U.S. and, by extension of its diminishing reach, the world.
Palantir’s manifesto is the agenda of a new class that is reconfiguring the upper echelons of the system’s power structure, and it feels confident enough to state it publicly
