The Tech Oligarch's Republic

A look at the Palantir manifesto, a logical conclusion of the War on Terror

Edited by Sam Thielman

THANKS FOR BEARING WITH our pause in publication last week. Both Sam and I had inflexible deadlines for other projects. We should be back to a normal, if somewhat lighter, publication schedule now. 

I feel it would be foolish for this edition to forecast the next few days in the Iran War or to recap the past week. The only thing certain is insider trading. As things stand on Monday morning, the U.S./Israel-Iran ceasefire is at a crossroads after the Marines captured an Iranian-flagged container ship steaming toward the port of Bandar Abbas. Iran has thus far not sent a delegation to Islamabad for a second round of negotiations toward either extending the ceasefire—set to expire Wednesday—or expanding them to pursue a durable diplomatic resolution. The Trump administration is caught between its political and economic imperatives to end the war and its political imperative to avoid or obscure an unambiguous loss. That has resulted in the self-defeating spasm of blockading Iranian-controlled passage through the Strait of Hormuz, a flailing countermeasure against Iran throttling Strait access. The further the administration tilts in that direction, the more distant the diplomatic accord it requires becomes. 

You can find a good recap of the dynamics of the past week in this episode of the Turbulence podcast, though it's a few days old. Our friends at American Prestige have been doing yeoman's work as well. 

WHILE WE AWAIT the future course of a global catastrophe, Palantir, the data and AI giant that services such clients as ICE and Israel, published something like a manifesto on Saturday. Its CEO Alexander Karp's high-profile book The Technological Republic is not something I've read—I had to return it to the library before I got very far—but the company posted its summary of the book, and in the process collapsed whatever difference existed between Karp's perspective and Palantir's. 

There is much in here that's vague and question-begging, but I can't very well complain about a summary of a book I haven't read. Still, the interpretation of the book Palantir presented reflects the id of the War on Terror: the only way to protect the United States (sometimes presented as "the West") from a conflated package of threats ranging from violent attack to multipolarity is to assert unbridled military dominance, in this case through artificial-intelligence superiority. Here it's helpful to remember that Palantir began with a $2 million investment from the CIA in 2004, when the War on Terror was the organizing principle of the U.S. government. 

You will notice the summarized thesis of The Technological Republic is one that will line Palantir's pockets while presenting that fleecing as a strategic imperative, even a moral one. That much is par for the course for the military-industrial complex. But because Palantir is talking about AI dominance, embracing its perspective creates a national-security dependency on AI purveyors and on the providers of the interfacing tier between the government and AI, like Palantir's Maven Smart System. That is not par for the course for the military-industrial complex, which has for seven decades operated as a self-dealing partnership, not a dominance battle. The February clash between Anthropic and the Defense Department is the result of the discomfort that goes along with the dawning AI dependency. 

What that dependency will mean is the increasing integration of siloed data sets within the collection-heavy U.S. government—the sort of integration that even before the War on Terror, many worried would render privacy a null concept, where the all-seeing state rebalances the social contract in its favor. Integration of massive datasets are exactly what Palantir's policing interface Gotham and its military interface Maven are engineered to accomplish. Palantir treats this as inextricable from "the ability of free and democratic societies to prevail." 

The manifesto dresses up all this power acquisition in the language of social obligation. Silicon Valley must not simply provide the market with consumer products. It owes "a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible," by which Palantir means Silicon Valley must make weapons for the Pentagon. It's an ahistoric perspective predicated on an imagined clash between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon: The rise of the military-industrial complex is the story of Silicon Valley, as you can read in Malcolm Harris' book Palo Alto. But Palantir has spent the better part of a decade leaning heavily on this sort of language after engineers at Google grew uncomfortable with the company's expansion within the war machine. 

Notice as well that Palantir is obscuring a labor dispute through the synecdoche "Silicon Valley." Sundar Pichai had no such discomfort with militarizing AI. While the internal pressure prompted Pichai to let Google's Project Maven contract with the Pentagon expire, Google continued with its Project Nimbus AI partnership with Israel for cloud services that facilitate the Palestinian genocide. It's the engineers themselves, on which each Silicon Valley giant depends, whom Palantir accuses of moral turpitude, precisely because those engineers' discomfort with servicing mass death and unfreedom is the only force threatening what we might call The Tech Oligarch's Republic. The workers’ assertion of their labor power, particularly through the Alphabet Workers Union and the No Tech for Apartheid coalition, has been a crucial driver of the tech oligarchy's recent political interventions. Here especially, we see the wedge of culture wars deployed eagerly by plutocrats to justify and distract from the entrenchment of their power. 

Palantir asserts that hesitation about, say, the use of AI to scale up targeting packages for a genocide, is "theatrical," devoid of moral content, unserious. That is a large tell that Palantir is not interested in the defense of "democratic" societies. It's interested in resisting the advance of democracy, since such challenges from below are the only forces inhibiting the deepening integration of AI, and with it Palantir, and the state. That's why the AI oligarchs are spending so much money to counter them. 

A careful reader will also notice that the Palantir summary is aimed at those within "public life." These dire—theatrical, you might say—assertions of a lost digital arms race to China and internal social decadence feed the anxieties of nervous elites. They are not attempts to persuade a mass public. You don't need to offer any such persuasion when you have the money for elite capture. In our system, you can just buy your way to dominance and fund politicians to ratify it. It's worth reading Eliot Higgins' critique of the anti-democratic character of the summary. This part is just an exhortation to class war:

Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

By "violent crime," Karp and Palantir mean disfavored populations—what Adrian Vermeuele last year called "pervasive social disorder which does not necessarily result in any 'crime' in the strict legal sense." Later on, there's a riff on "dysfunctional and regressive…cultures" – I guess I'll have to read the book to learn if I've correctly guess which cultures Karp thinks are the right ones; then I'll count up the genocides those cultures have committed –  and exhortations to reject "a vacant and hollow pluralism." This is gutter racism in the language of respectability, and a portent of what the rise of Palantir has to offer. They try their best to present an ethical face by warning that "the vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice," a farcical comment when watching Karp dismiss Palantir's role in the genocide of Palestine. I didn't expect Palantir to have regrets over denazification, but when the company writes that "the defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price," I suppose I should trust in its sincerity. 

This is what the rising tech oligarchy intends for the United States as it purchases politicians to consolidate and expand its power: war for dominance abroad and at home. It is no wonder that people are exploring violent reprisals for the coming world of their economic redundancy and social dispossession. And all this because Jurgen Habermas clocked Karp as an imbecile. 

SPEAKING OF THE DOMINANCE CLASH between the Pentagon and Anthropic, the National Security Agency—a Pentagon agency—is using Anthropic's new Mythos client, which, if it works as directed, identifies security vulnerabilities at unrivaled scale and speed in every piece of software it encounters. The NSA possessing Mythos has been framed as a cybersecurity cheat code. As someone who has done quite a lot of reporting on the National Security Agency, I can tell you that the NSA, twinned with the offensive-minded U.S. Cyber Command, is not going to be scrupulously identifying bug fixes. It's going to exploit the shit out of whatever it can before the bugs get fixed. I don't know what sort of cybersecurity model is going to exist if Mythos is what Anthropic says it is. 

MY FRIENDS NOAH SHACHTMAN AND BOBBY SILVERMAN have a deeply reported look into the future of oligarch surveillance via the security apparatus built by James Dolan, owner of Madison Square Garden, the Sphere in Las Vegas, the Knicks and the Rangers. It's an incredible story for both surveillance and basketball sickos. It ought to win a National Magazine Award. 

TWO PUBLIC APPEARANCES OF MINE are coming up! On May 14, come to the Brooklyn Institute for a discussion I'll be part of about the Jewish anti-Zionist past and future, hinging on Molly Crabapple's bestselling (!!!) book Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of The Jewish Bund. Tickets are available here. Then, on June 30, I'll be speaking with my brother from another mother, Colin Asher, about his hopefully-bestselling book The Midnight Special, the best book about American music and the carceral state you'll ever read. It's going to be the first time Colin and I have been onstage since our teenage punk band 30 years ago. RSVP here. Hope to see you at both!