A Memo From Our Overlords: The Palantir Manifesto
The mini-manifesto that surveillance tech company Palantir posted on X last weekend reads a bit like what you might get if you asked ChatGPT to write you a monologue for a techbro supervillain. The post, summarizing a 2025 book called The Technological Republic co-authored by company CEO Alex Karp, is weirdly rambling, a paean to software-enhanced “hard power” that manages to find time to complain about the vapidity of iPhone apps and how terribly unfair it is that people sometimes make fun of Elon Musk.
It’s so disorderly and badly written that it takes a little while for the full creepiness of the thing to sink in. But sink in it does, and you realize it’s not just a laundry list of techbro self-congratulation and petty complaints; it presents a vision of an authoritarian technological future that’s a strange blend of Mein Kampf and Starship Troopers.
Karp’s imagined Technological Republic, the one his company is helping to bring about, is much closer in spirit to Plato’s Republic than it is to any genuinely democratic kind of government. It’s a world run by techbro philosopher kings like himself, with the help of artificial intelligence, in which the ordinary deliberations of democracy are seen as something of a luxury, one that we allegedly can’t afford in these perilous times. As historian John Ganz put it in a review of the book itself last year, Karp and his co-author are basically proposing “some kind of merger or acquisition of the United States government by Silicon Valley, a state run by an engineering elite that would be empowered to ‘ruthlessly’ pursue ‘outcomes.’”
Karp is contemptuous of those who disagree with him, accusing them of “indulg[ing] in theatrical debates” on topics like developing tech for the military and the rearming of Japan. In this he echoes fellow Brotopian Marc Andreessen, who in his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” accused those who want to regulate AI of effectively committing murder. Karp once likened the ideas held by anti-Gaza-genocide protesters at Columbia to “an infection inside of our society,” according to The Guardian; he also suggested that protestors be sent to live in North Korea on some sort of ersatz exchange program.
Though he makes passing references to the need to protect democracy, Karp seems to see it in practice as inefficient at best and suicidal at worst because restrictions on his obviously correct “hard power” agenda could lead to the destruction of western civilization at the hands of our enemies.
As he sees it, neither our decadent civilization nor our (liberal) ruling elites have been sufficiently invested in making the sorts of sacrifices they need to make in an age where “soft power” has been “exposed” as inadequate. Perhaps inspired by the Starship Troopers slogan “Service Guarantees Citizenship,” he demands that the government bring back the draft, arguing that we should “only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost,” which is certainly an interesting way to phrase it, given that he’s a 58-year-old bachelor with no kids to draft who’s made a considerable fortune from war and preparations for war. The only cost of war to him is the time he has to spend counting up his money.
Of course, in his mind, he’s already sacrificing for our country. After all, unlike some in Silicon Valley, he’s fulfilling what he sees as a general techbro “obligation to participate in the defense of the nation” by leading a company getting fat off military contracts. And all he gets in return, aside from the $14 billion in net worth he’s already accumulated, is disrespect from mean liberals! Karp devotes a truly remarkable portion of the manifesto to lamenting the criticism that public figures like him get from an insufficiently appreciative public. “We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life,” he sniffs, waxing particularly indignant at a “culture [that] almost snickers at [Elon] Musk’s interest in grand narrative,” which is one way to describe Musk’s crackpot idea of deserting Earth to live on the completely inhospitable Mars I guess.
Musk must have appreciated the shoutout: Gil Duran, a longtime critic of what he calls the techbro “nerd reich,” was actually suspended from X after noting the strong whiff of fascism coming off of Karp’s manifesto. I doubt that Karp asked Musk to do him this favor; it’s just that Musk and his hired censors know how this particular game is played. Karp’s position is based on a fundamental double standard: he wants those who disagree with him to face consequences for expressing their opinions (like the protesters he “joked” he would like to send to North Korea), but he thinks that subjecting tech elites who think like him to any sort of accountability for their words or actions is a threat to civilization itself.
Indeed, in one remarkable passage, Karp actually has the chutzpah to complain about the “ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures.” That’s right, the guy running a company devoted to destroying what remains of the privacy of others is lamenting (as he often has in the past) that he doesn’t have the privacy he once had. Cue the extremely tiny violins.
Karp ends his manifesto with a Volkish broadside against what he calls “the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism.” In his mind, “inclusivity” is a bad thing because some cultures are just plain better than others, presumably making too much intermingling of different sorts of people a bad idea. “Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive,” he insists, yet liberal “dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.”
Karp’s company makes software that the US military uses to target sites in Iran, that ICE uses to round up brown people here in the US, that the IDF uses to make “kill lists” as part of their ongoing genocide in Gaza. He likes to boast, as he once put it, that his company’s products are used to “scare enemies and on occasion, kill them.” In his mind, I guess, this counts as “producing wonders.”
Save us from the techbro philosopher kings!
