Palantir Technologies’ manifesto, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, is neither a technical document nor an economic vision. It is an explicitly political document announcing a new phase in the trajectory of digital capitalism. Abandoning claims to neutrality, the manifesto reveals digital capitalism’s true ideological face.
Palantir is not an isolated case in the global technological landscape. It is one of several major tech companies that sell technologies used for repression and human rights violations. Palantir has been condemned by international human rights organisations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, for its role in enabling forced deportations, mass surveillance and the persecution of dissidents.
Most damning of all, documented reports have revealed a direct partnership between the company (alongside Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others) and the Israeli military, providing data and targeting systems used in military operations in Gaza. This makes it a partner in documented war crimes against Palestinian civilians. In this, it does not differ in substance from other major digital capitalist companies, which practice the same thing in different forms and with varying degrees of openness.
The Technological Republic is the declaration of a class project for a digital fascist alliance, which relies not on traditional violence alone, but on digital surveillance and repression, data analysis, artificial intelligence (AI), manipulation of public opinion, and suppression of dissent through imperceptible yet deeply impactful methods. An alliance whose crimes do not remain within elite circles and corporate offices, but extend to battlefields and civilian areas, and embodied today in its clearest form in Trumpism and its alliances, crimes and aggressive wars.
From Silicon Valley to the White House: An organic alliance
To understand Palantir’s manifesto outside its isolated context, we must look at the alliance formed in recent years between a segment of the tech elite and the extreme nationalist right.
Peter Thiel, Palantir co-founder and the most significant financier of Trump’s political career, is not merely a businessperson supporting a political candidate. He is the ideological mind providing this project with its political logic; one who sees representative liberal democracy as an obstacle to the technocratic elite’s project and openly declares that capitalism and traditional liberal democracy are incompatible.
This alliance is no accident. It is an objective convergence between two projects that share a single goal: concentrating power in the hands of a financial and political oligarchy that believes it possesses a “natural right” to govern its own societies and others. This alliance finds its institutional expression in the technological acceleration movement, which includes Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and others, who have begun moving in coordinated fashion with the second Trump administration.
What unites them is not complete ideological alignment but class position and shared interest: the elimination of any regulatory or democratic constraint limiting their capacity for accumulation, domination, and expanded control.
The 22-point manifesto: A leftist reading of its class content
Palantir published a summary of its CEO Alexander Karp’s book amid wide global engagement and mounting political outrage, with views of it on X reaching into the millions within days. The manifesto is at its core a class roadmap, which deserves a precise leftist reading that goes beyond simple outrage.
The manifesto contains 22 points, constructed with deliberate architectural precision. Some points appear moderate or humane on the surface, such as calls for tolerance toward politicians in their personal lives or against rejoicing at an opponent’s defeat.
These points are neither innocent nor incidental. They are the calculated facade used to win over the hesitant reader and grant the manifesto a “balanced” image before revealing its true face. This is what ideological studies call the structure of manufactured consent: you are given a dose of reasonable-sounding language to help you swallow the toxic dose alongside it. What appears logical in the manifesto is therefore not evidence of its balance, but additional evidence of its cunning.
These points are deployed as cover to advance a comprehensive ideological agenda that ties these concerns to a project of militarisation, domination and civilisational hierarchy. Here, I will focus on the points that most reveal the project’s true class and ideological content, while addressing other issues further below.
Point 1 asserts that “the engineering elite of Silicon Valley is morally obligated to participate in the defense of the nation.” This moral framing is not innocent. When military and security contracting is presented as a “moral duty,” social pressure becomes a mechanism for compelling engineers and programmers to serve the machinery of war and repression. Every dissenting voice within tech companies is silenced in the name of “patriotism.” This is the conversion of individual conscience into a commodity in the service of the military and security state, with its repressive and surveillance institutions.
Point 2 calls for “rebellion against the tyranny of apps,” meaning the rejection of consumer technology in favour of deeper security and military systems. This is not a critique of consumer capitalism. It is a call to redirect technological capacity toward the war and surveillance machine, rather than the entertainment market.
Point 5 declares “the question is not whether AI weapons will be built; the question is who will build them.” This closed deterministic logic aims to eliminate any debate about rejecting technological militarisation at its roots. When the choice is framed as “us or the enemy,” the possibility of saying no to weapons altogether is erased. It is the same logic used by Cold War administrations to silence peace movements and restrict leftist organisations, simply in a digital guise.
Point 6 demands “national service be a universal duty,” calling for reconsideration of the all-volunteer military in favour of mandatory conscription. This demand reveals the manifesto’s classically fascist face: when the state fails to produce voluntary willingness to participate in its wars, it resorts to institutional coercion, calling it “shared responsibility.” Most tellingly, the company demanding young people offer their lives in defence of “the West” simultaneously earns billions of dollars from war contracts. Duty for all, profits for the few.
Point 17 asserts “Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime.” This proposal appears pragmatic on the surface, but at its core represents an expansion of the powers of private security companies. It would allow them to bypass the state and transform themselves into an independent force of social control, operating under the logic of profit rather than the logic of law, an independent judiciary and democratic accountability.
Point 20 demands “resistance to the pervasive intolerance of religious belief.” This point does not stem from a genuine defence of freedom of belief. It is an opportunistic deployment of religious discourse to build an ideological alliance with conservative and religious currents most susceptible to mobilising behind war projects. History teaches us that every fascist project needs an alliance with religious institutions to lend violence a sacred character; that is what this point seeks under the cover of “freedom of faith”.
Point 21 is the most revealing of the manifesto’s deep ideological dimension, declaring “some cultures have produced vital advances while others remain dysfunctional and regressive.” This sentence is not a passing cultural opinion. It is the theoretical foundation of civilisational colonial racism, which justifies domination, occupation and the killing of peoples under the cover of “rational management of civilisation.”
This logic does not fundamentally differ from “white man’s burden,” which justified colonialism. It is simply reproduced today in the language of algorithms and big data. What makes it more dangerous is that it requires no visible colonial forces — a database and a targeting algorithm suffice.
Trumpism as a system
A common mistake made is to reduce Trumpism to Donald Trump the individual. Trumpism is a comprehensive class project, combining national financial capital with chauvinistic nationalism and hostility toward immigrants and minorities.
It is an expression of the crisis of capitalism when it can no longer reproduce the liberal illusion for its audience, resorting to aggressive nationalist discourse to divert attention from the real class contradictions.
What the Palantir manifesto does is link digital monopoly capital to this project and supply it with the technological tools needed to transform it from electoral political discourse into an actual system of control. The documented cooperation between Palantir and immigration and security agencies in tracking and deporting migrants is a practical model of this alliance.
Technology is not used to serve “security” in any neutral sense. It is used to implement repressive and racist policies with high operational efficiency. The digital tool makes repression faster, more precise and less in need of public justification.
Digital feudalism and its fascist phase
As I have argued in my analyses of digital capitalism, we are living through the advanced phase of digital feudalism, in which large corporations monopolise digital infrastructure and impose their conditions on users, just as feudal lords once monopolised land and controlled peasants.
What the Palantir manifesto reveals is that this digital feudalism is now entering its fascist phase, where capital no longer contents itself with silent economic exploitation but shifts towards explicit political and ideological mobilisation and control to protect its system from any threat.
Under digital capitalism, traditional manual and intellectual workers are no longer the only victims of exploitation. Every user produces daily data, which is converted into raw material for the production of surplus value without compensation. Digital serfs work within systems they do not own and are subject to rules over which they have no real influence.
What the manifesto adds to this picture is militarisation: these same exploitative systems are now directed toward framing the human mind, waging wars, suppressing dissent, forcing deportations and managing systems of security control.
Algorithms of death
The manifesto cannot be read in isolation from what is happening in contemporary wars. Documented reports have revealed that Palantir has established strategic partnerships with armies and security institutions to build targeting databases used in military operations. This is no longer a theoretical possibility, it is a documented daily practice: algorithms convert human lives into data points, and data points into military targets.
In Palestine, journalistic and investigative reports have documented the use of AI systems to build targeting lists resulting in massacres of civilians in Gaza. In Venezuela, Iran and other countries that Washington classifies as “threats,” surveillance and data systems are used to support militarism, aggression and wars that violate international law.
What the company calls a “smart targeting system” is in practice a machine for managing killing with industrial efficiency. Killing no longer requires a responsible human decision. It requires an algorithm, sufficient data and a green light from an apparatus subject to no democratic accountability. This is the field application of what the manifesto calls “real-time decision-making capacity,” where kill decisions are made instantaneously within closed technical systems.
Most importantly, these systems cannot be separated from the discourse that justifies classifying entire communities as backward or threatening. The crime does not begin with the bomb; it begins with the classification. When entire communities are defined as a threat, the killing and targeting of civilians becomes “security management,” rather than a crime whose perpetrators must be held accountable.
Self-surveillance and digital repression as tools of control
The dangers of Palantir’s model do not lie solely in its direct military applications. More dangerous is what can be described as the “surveillance society” — when control becomes internal rather than external.
An individual who knows they are being watched at every moment, and feels every digital interaction is being recorded and analysed, begins to impose surveillance on themselves. They modify their speech, avoid sensitive subjects, and distance themselves from radical dissenting ideas. This voluntary self-surveillance restricts and weakens leftist and progressive movements and labour organisations from within, without the need for arrests or direct restrictions.
The manifesto’s call for “deep understanding of human behavior” as a condition for security is in reality a call to build a comprehensive system for disrupting collective political action before it emerges. Predicting protest behaviour and dismantling it before it becomes an organised movement is a dream that security services have long pursued. Palantir’s technology is moving them closer to realising it.
The illusion of technological neutrality
Among the most prominent ideological mechanisms of the manifesto is its reliance on closed deterministic logic: “There will be no technological neutrality,” “the question is not whether AI weapons will be built,” “democracies cannot rely on moral discourse alone.”
This approach aims to convert political choices into inescapable natural facts and eliminate any questioning of the existing system from legitimate debate. It is the same approach used by neoliberals when they declared in the 1990s “capitalism is the end of history.” Now the same logic returns in a security formulation: there is no choice but digital militarisation.
This determinism is not a neutral description of reality. It is a tactic for emptying politics of its content. When you are convinced there is no alternative, you stop searching for one. That is the primary goal behind this language.
The leftist alternative: Collective ownership and control
The Palantir manifesto is not merely a document from a tech company announcing its positions. It is a loud-sounding alarm bell, which progressive forces must hear clearly. The battle over the future of technology is no longer lurking backstage. It has stepped into the open, announcing itself without shame. Those who delay in grasping this shift delay their entry into this century’s most decisive arena of struggle.
The fundamental question is not how technology is used. It is who owns it and determines its objectives. Technology will not become a tool of liberation as long as it remains in the hands of digital monopolies allied with projects of the right, war and repression.
Any serious discussion must begin from the necessity of collective societal ownership of digital infrastructure, and from subjecting algorithms and AI to genuine democratic oversight that represents the interests of the working masses, not monopolistic elites.
This requires leftist, progressive and human rights forces to seriously engage with the arena of technology as an important field of class struggle. Producing intellectual critique, however important, is not enough without building actual technological alternatives, through coordination and joint work via digital internationals: social platforms free from monopoly, restriction and repression; search tools that respect the privacy of all users; AI systems managed in a democratic and transparent manner; and other digital applications.
These are not recreational projects for the future. They are an urgent strategic necessity for any serious liberatory project.
Technological disarmament as a prerequisite
Building alternatives is not enough unless paired with an organised campaign to strip monopolies of their technological weapons.
Palantir is not an exceptional case or an anomaly in the technological landscape. It is the most explicit and bold expression of what many other companies practice with greater silence and softer discourse. What makes it a point of focus in this analysis is that it reveals what others are accustomed to concealing. The system is one, the only exception is the degree of frankness.
Just as historic labour movements struggled to disarm capital in factories and farms, today an equivalent struggle is needed to collectively wrest lethal algorithms, targeting systems and mass surveillance from the grip of tech companies.
This struggle takes multiple forms: boycotting their services, exposing their secret contracts with governments, prosecuting their executives before international courts on charges of complicity in war crimes, and pressuring public institutions to sever relationships with these companies. Every government contract is directly financing the killing and deportation machine. Stopping this financial flow is the first line of confrontation.
This path cannot be completed without working simultaneously at the domestic and international levels. At the domestic level, pressure must be applied to enact strict laws that require security technology companies to maintain full transparency in their contracts with governments, criminalise the use of AI systems in military targeting outside any independent judicial oversight, and compel these companies to submit to the same accountability standards public institutions are subject to.
At the international level, work must be done to subject these companies to international human rights conventions, particularly the Geneva Convention’s prohibition on the indiscriminate targeting of civilians, the United Nations’ Principles on Personal Data Protection and Privacy, and the UN’s Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
A company that builds targeting databases in war zones cannot be permitted to operate outside this legal framework. If it does, the governments that sign contracts with them bear shared criminal responsibility. This is not a luxurious reformist demand. It is the minimum required by the humanity of law in confrontation with the inhumanity of the algorithm.
Exposing the labour silence at the heart of the manifesto
What is striking about the Palantir manifesto — indeed what is deeply suspicious — is that it does not mention a single word about workers, unions and the right to organise and strike. In a document that speaks of the “engineering elite,” “moral duty” and “backward cultures,” there is no place for the manual and intellectual workers who build these algorithms, operate them and live under the weight of their surveillance.
This silence is not incidental. It is an implicit admission that the fascist technological project cannot face the workers’ question, because workers alone, if organised, are capable of stopping the lines of death production. A general strike in Silicon Valley, or even in Palantir’s own offices, is this project’s worst nightmare. Supporting technology workers’ unions and linking their struggle to a global struggle is an act of resistance of the first order.
This technological struggle cannot be separated from grassroots popular struggle. Technology is a supporting tool for the struggle, not a substitute for it. Real power remains in political, labour and popular organisation, in social movements, and in international solidarity among the toiling masses, whether in wars, at borders or in workers’ neighbourhoods surveilled by algorithms that require no one’s permission.
Digital fascism by its true name
The Palantir manifesto clearly reveals we face a new form of fascism, not only in the narrow historic sense, but in its essential meaning: the alliance of monopoly capital with aggressive national political power, and the deployment of violence, repression and civilisational hierarchy to protect this alliance from any popular threat. The only difference is that the tools of fascism today are algorithms, big data and AI. This is what makes it more airtight and more difficult to resist.
Karp may have finished writing his philosophical manifesto, but the algorithms his company built continue their work of identifying targets, tracking migrants at borders, building databases of dissidents, and supporting the machinery of militarism and repression across the globe. Philosophy and crime are two faces of the same coin.
The struggle for social justice and liberation today passes inevitably and substantially through the struggle to liberate technology from this aggressive class alliance. This is not a technical question or an abstract ethical question. It is a political question and part of a historic struggle over who controls the future and human consciousness: the monopolistic minority allied with projects of death and repression, or the working masses who must impose their authority over the tools that shape their lives and destiny.
Sources and references
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