On 18 April 2026, Palantir Technologies’ official account on X published a thread of 22 points summarising the book by its chief executive Alex Karp and its head of corporate affairs Nicholas Zamiska, The Technological Republic, released in February 2025. The text accumulated 32 million views in under 72 hours, not because it revealed anything unknown, but because it stated with unusual clarity what had until then circulated as implicit ideology. Palantir is not a technology company that occasionally works for the state; it is a defence and intelligence contractor that occasionally produces civilian technology. The distinction is not semantic; it organises every possible reading of the manifesto. That a chief executive holding a doctorate in philosophy should construct an argumentative architecture to justify contracts already signed does not constitute political thought; it constitutes high-budget institutional marketing.
The moral debt as a commercial argument
Palantir Technologies was founded in 2003 by Alex Karp and Peter Thiel, also co-founder of PayPal alongside Elon Musk, with initial funding from In-Q-Tel, the venture capital fund of the CIA (the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States). This affiliation is not a colourful footnote; it defines the nature of the business model from the outset. The company was born as an intelligence instrument, not as a startup in search of a market. Its early years were marked by contracts with security agencies in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks, when the American government channelled unprecedented sums towards the collection and analysis of mass data. Since 2009, Palantir has accumulated approximately three billion dollars in federal contracts, according to data from the Financial Times. In 2025, its revenues from the US government nearly doubled, driven by a contract with the Army valued at up to ten billion dollars and a multi-year agreement with the Department of Homeland Security, known by the acronym DHS, as part of the mass deportation operations of the Trump administration. These contracts arrived in the same temporal window in which Karp’s book was being published and prepared to become a viral manifesto.
The first point of the thread states that the engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative moral obligation to participate in the defence of the nation. The formulation presents itself as an ethical imperative, almost as a call to the collective conscience of a technological generation that would have betrayed its civic responsibility by building messaging applications and social media platforms. What the formulation does not say, but which becomes visible from its industrial context, is that the company writing it collects ten billion dollars for others to fulfil that obligation. The moral argument does not float in a philosophical vacuum; it is anchored in a specific revenue model. Eliot Higgins, founder of the open-source investigations platform Bellingcat, put it plainly when commenting on the manifesto, noting that Palantir sells operational software to agencies of defence, intelligence, immigration and policing, and that those 22 points are not philosophy suspended in space but the public ideology of a company whose revenues depend on the policy it is promoting.
The second point denounces the tyranny of applications and asks whether the iPhone might be the greatest achievement of Western civilisation. The question appears self-critical, even lucid. But it is written by a company that for years accused its technology competitors of having abandoned the field of national defence through cowardice or political correctness. Sectoral self-criticism functions here as commercial differentiation. Palantir is not Google, which rejected Project Maven (the Pentagon’s artificial intelligence programme) following internal employee protests in 2018; Palantir is the company that accepts those contracts and frames them as a patriotic obligation. The critique of technological banality serves to elevate the ideological profile of the contractor that proffers it, not to question the system from which it benefits.
Between 2009 and 2025, Palantir accumulated approximately three billion dollars in contracts with the US federal government. In fiscal year 2025, its American government revenues nearly doubled, driven by the TITAN contract with the Army and a multi-year agreement with the DHS as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation operations. The TITAN contract carries a maximum value of ten billion dollars over ten years; this is an available spending ceiling, not a committed amount. American government revenues represented more than 55% of the company’s total revenues in 2025, according to its own financial reports.
The genealogy of hard power
The expression “hard power”, which appears in the subtitle of Karp’s book and runs throughout the manifesto, designates the coercive capacity of the state exercised through military force or the technological control of populations, as opposed to the “soft power” of diplomacy and cultural persuasion. In Karp’s vocabulary, the hard power of the twenty-first century is built on software. The formulation is elegant, but it describes with precision the product Palantir has been selling since 2003. It is not that Karp arrived at the theory of hard power through intellectual inquiry and then built a company to materialise it; he has been running a hard power company since its founding and, twenty years later, has produced the corresponding philosophical rationalisation. The order of the factors matters.
In January 2024, Palantir announced a “strategic partnership” with the State of Israel. Since then, its presence in Gaza and the occupied West Bank expanded considerably. The company has recruited extensively among former members of Unit 8200, the elite cyberintelligence division of the Israeli army, specialised in electronic surveillance and the interception of communications at mass scale. This unit is known for its role in developing monitoring technologies applied to the management of the Palestinian occupation. That Palantir should build its technical capacity on that human capital is not ideologically neutral; it reveals what type of hard power is actually in operation. In parallel, the company maintains active contracts with the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known by the acronym ICE, for the tracking and management of migrants under the current administration.
The manifesto calls for an end to the post-war “castration” of Germany and Japan so that those countries can fully rearm, for the restoration of national military service, and for the return of religion to public life. It also asserts that some cultures have produced vital advances whilst others remain dysfunctional and regressive. This last formulation is the most revealing, not for its explicit content, which operates as a racial hierarchy constructed with the vocabulary of the social sciences, but because it appears in the same document that demands greater involvement of the company in the defence and intelligence systems of the West. Cultural hierarchy is not a marginal philosophical appendage; it is the justification for the ideal client and the type of operations that client funds.
The “strategic partnership” between Palantir and the State of Israel, announced in January 2024, was followed by a considerable expansion of the company’s operations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Palantir has built part of its technical capacity through the systematic recruitment of former members of Unit 8200, the Israeli army’s cyberintelligence division, specialised in electronic surveillance and the interception of communications at mass scale over civilian populations.
The philosopher and his inverted lineage
Alex Karp holds a doctorate in social philosophy from the University of Frankfurt. He trained under the influence of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, the twentieth-century German philosophical current associated with thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Jürgen Habermas, who developed a systematic critique of the mechanisms of cultural and economic domination in modern capitalist societies. Karp has invoked this tradition with public frequency, as though his intellectual formation certified the seriousness of his political project. The Frankfurt School was born as a theoretical response to the rise of European fascism; its founders built their analytical categories from direct experience of totalitarian power. Adorno and Horkheimer analysed the culture industry as a system for manufacturing consent; Habermas constructed a theory of communicative action oriented towards deliberative democracy. Karp, formed in that tradition, runs a company that provides mass surveillance tools to military occupation regimes and deportation agencies. The distance between that formation and that activity requires no further comment.
The journal Le Grand Continent, in analysing the manifesto in its edition of 21 April 2026, applies the distinction drawn by the political philosopher Leo Strauss between exoteric and esoteric register. The exoteric is that which is communicated publicly and destined for the broad audience; the esoteric is that which is reserved for readers capable of deciphering the real programme behind carefully chosen formulations. Karp maintains, at the visible level, the language of democracy, the defence of the West and liberal values. At the implicit level operates a will to total reform of the American state through technology and defence, in which public deliberation gives way to operational capacity and the efficiency of the system prevails over its formal legitimacies. It is not that Karp lies; it is that he speaks on two simultaneous registers. The company he co-founded with Thiel illustrates this principle at institutional scale. Thiel stated in 2009 that freedom and democracy are incompatible and has since argued for their explicit separation; Karp presents himself as a progressive liberal. The two founders of Palantir hold publicly opposed positions on the political system that, according to the manifesto, the company is meant to defend. The double register is not a peculiarity of the chief executive; it is the ideological architecture of the organisation.
The reactions to the manifesto ironically completed its ideological map. Alexander Dugin, the Russian philosopher considered the grey eminence of the Kremlin’s expansionist nationalism, described it as the plan of Western techno-fascism, purely capitalist, Anglo-Saxon and posthumanist. Nick Land, the British philosopher considered the intellectual father of accelerationism (the current that embraces the accelerated collapse of the liberal order as a vector of systemic transformation), celebrated it with unreserved enthusiasm. That a document should proclaim its defence of liberal democracy whilst being simultaneously celebrated by the most avowed enemies of that democracy does not constitute a paradox; it constitutes information about the real nature of the project.
The document that sells itself
A manifesto published on X is not an act of public reflection; it is an act of strategic communication. The decision to condense a 320-page book into 22 points and distribute them on the social network owned by Elon Musk, from the circle of Peter Thiel and co-founder of PayPal, is not innocent in terms of political positioning. The format guarantees virality; the content guarantees polarisation; polarisation generates visibility; visibility translates into a signal of political loyalty towards the current administration. The analyst Adil Husain identified what distinguishes a credible manifesto from a promotional leaflet, noting that the former contains statements carrying real reputational cost for whoever makes them. Cultural hierarchy, the critique of pluralism, the rehabilitation of religion in public life are of that order, and nobody writes them merely to maximise the share price in the next quarter. One writes them to demonstrate that loyalty is structural and not merely tactical, to build the kind of trust that is worth more than conventional marketing in the corridors where national security contracts are awarded.
The problem with that reading is not that it is inaccurate; it is that it proves insufficient. The manifesto also functions as an operational doctrine for a specific type of state. Its 22 points do not only describe what Palantir believes; they describe the state for which Palantir works with the greatest efficiency. A state that conceives security as the technological management of populations, that regards military power as the backbone of sovereignty, that hierarchises cultures and borders, that distrusts public deliberation and trusts in the capacity of software to make decisions that formerly required legal process or political validation. Palantir does not offer neutral tools that different actors can use for different ends; it offers infrastructure designed for a specific type of power, underpinned by a specific ideology, profitable under specific political conditions. The 32 million views of the manifesto confirm that the architecture is already built and that its publicity no longer carries a political cost for those who promote it. The manifesto does not inaugurate a project. It confirms that the project has been under way for too long for anyone to pretend not to have noticed…
G.S.
Sources
- El manifiesto de Palantir para la dominación, Le Grand Continent, 21 April 2026 [in Spanish — no English version available]
- Technofascism? Why Palantir’s pro-West ‘manifesto’ has critics alarmed, Al Jazeera, 21 April 2026
- Palantir’s ‘Progressive’ Manifesto: an AI Death Drive?, Novara Media, 20 April 2026
- Palantir posted a manifesto that reads like the ramblings of a comic book villain, Engadget, 19 April 2026
- Palantir posts mini-manifesto denouncing inclusivity and ‘regressive’ cultures, TechCrunch, 19 April 2026
- Palantir published a mini manifesto calling some cultures ‘harmful’ and ‘middling’, Fortune, 22 April 2026
- Palantir’s Manifesto Is as Subtle as a MAGA Hat, Tech Policy Press, April 2026
- Alex Karp’s War for the West, The New Republic, 2025
- Palantir’s Idea of Peace, The Nation, May 2025
- Palantir’s Political Manifesto: What It Means for Corporate Strategy, Adil Husain / Substack, April 2026
- Alexander Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, Crown Currency, 2025
