In 2025, Palantir CEO Alex Karp released his first book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. The work was co-authored by fellow Palantirian (as they fondly refer to themselves) Nicholas W. Zamiska, who serves as the firm’s head of corporate affairs and legal counsel. Part Pentagon funding proposal, part reassurance to current shareholders and plea to new investors, part undergraduate general humanities course term paper, The Technological Republic advances as its primary thesis that Silicon Valley executives were mistaken not to seize the opportunity to work directly with the U.S. government to help to realize “The American Project,” which stalled as a result and urgently needs to be resurrected.

The opening chapter, a rallying call of sorts, bears a great deal of resemblance to the manifestos of Klaus Schwab, former head of the World Economic Forum (WEF). Both Karp and Schwab are smitten with “grand projects” involving sprawling collectives, and they claim earnestly to be concerned to “save” what they regard as dangerously untethered, desultory groups of human beings. Schwab and Karp frequently employ the imperial plural and address their audiences as though we (humanity or America) require the enlightened guidance which only they and their associates can provide in order for us to survive.

A few readers have lavished praise upon Karp and Zamiska’s very unevenly written manifesto, passages of which appear to have been edited or even composed by A.I. One problem with this sort of work is incisively diagnosed by the authors themselves, albeit unwittingly: “Nothing much of substance, and certainly nothing lasting, will be created by committee.” Through reading The Technological Republic in its rather short entirety (which some reviewers appear not to have done), it becomes clear that the Palantirians’ most ardent quest is to form stable, even permanent, relationships with the most powerful U.S. institutions, above all, the executive branch of the federal government, which today controls all of the military, deciding when and where to wage war.

In 2001, the U.S. Congress effectively renounced its right and responsibility to rein in the reigning executive in matters of war by conferring an open-ended AUMF (Authorization for Use of Military Force) upon President George W. Bush, which every president since then has assumed as his own. In theory, the congress could reclaim its war powers, but to date this has not happened. Obviously aware of this possibility, the Palantirians are keen also to garner the favor of the legislature, as is illustrated by an otherwise inexplicable excursus on how the members of congress, whose salaries currently average $175,000, are inadequately compensated for their labor. (Are the authors unaware of the awe-inspiring stock portfolios of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), et al.? Or the radical increase in net worth of former bartender Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez since assuming her position as U.S. representative for New York’s 14th congressional district in 2019?)

As the Palantirians roll up their sleeves to help the government to do what in their view needs to be done, their oft-recited goal is said to be to make the companies which they “partner with” as good as they can be. What that “goodness” amounts to, beyond a rather blunt form of militaristic patriotism, remains entirely vague. At one point the authors opt for a via negativa approach to elucidating what they mean: “We are not advocating for a thin and shallow patriotism,” which would seem to imply that the Palantir conception is somehow “thick and deep,” but the only tangible content to emerge in later pages is the alleged necessity of reinvigorating the military, by all means necessary, including conscription. Like every other American military supporter, Karp & Co. focus primarily on the role played by the U.S. government in World War II, while minimizing, when not omitting, the series of military fiascoes since then.

Regarding the mythical “American Project,” Karp & Co. sprinkle a few hints throughout the text, amidst a bizarre array of references and tangential discussions about topics such as the supreme importance of Edward Said’s Orientalism, how Jean-Marie Basquiat was an original artist but those who appropriated his street-inspired vision are merely derivative, that Ludwig von Beethoven was able to compose music even as he lost his ability to hear, and, my favorite, the Palentirians’ eccentric interpretation of the Milgram experiments.

The authors share what they take to be an important lesson of the experiments, conducted at Yale University, which famously tested the effects of the presence of authority figures wearing white lab coats as they instructed their subjects to administer powerful, pain-inducing, and possibly deadly, electroshock punishments to persons in the next room who gave wrong answers in what was set-up to look (to the subjects) like a scientific study about learning. The Milgram experiments are often discussed in connection with the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, as the authors do explain. Understandably, many people have concluded from the study that human beings can be persuaded to do just about anything in the presence of what they take to be an authority figure.

Since the dawning of the Drone Age, for example, we have seen that soldiers located thousands of miles away, in hermetically sealed shipping containers in Nevada, who are in no immediate danger of being harmed, can be persuaded to fire missiles at men living at home with their families far from U.S. shores, even when there is no even remotely plausible force protection pretext available, as in Pakistan and Yemen during the Global War on Terror. But that is not the Palantirian take, for the company provides such troops with what is said to be the “actionable intelligence” needed to be able to do just that.

Rather, The Technological Republic reports that an important lesson of the Milgram experiments can be seen in the decision of many engineers and programmers in Silicon Valley to go along with the crowd and make quick and easy money through developing more and more videogames and shopping apps, rather than patriotically agreeing to help the U.S. government during the Global War on Terror:

“Some amount of what might be thought of as a sort of social deafness may, in this way, be productive in the context of building software. An unwillingness, or perhaps an inability, to conform to those around us, to the cues and norms put forth by others, can be an advantage in the realm of technology. A willingness to withdraw from the world, and to decline to engage with external views at certain critical moments of an organization’s evolution, has been vital in the context of building Palantir over the past two decades.”

That the U.S. military, throughout its collaboration with Palantir, has ended the lives of thousands of innocent human beings, destroyed families and ravaged communities, while degrading and corrupting entire governments, is never mentioned in this book.

Just as uncanny as this reading of the Milgram experiments, the military-industrial complex (MIC) warned about by President Dwight D. Eisenhower is invoked only to lament that “Our current era of innovation has been dominated by the indiscriminate construction of technology by software engineers who are building simply because they can, untethered from a more fundamental purpose.” Karp & Co. somehow seem not to grasp, or decline to acknowledge, that the only reason why the U.S. government is killing people in the Caribbean Sea, in Nigeria, in Somalia, in Venezuela, and beyond, is because the threshold to the commission of state-inflicted mass homicide has been significantly lowered by the advent of not only the invention of remote-control means to kill but also the emergence of officious teams of analysts who purport to be able to inform the military where and when the time for “warheads on foreheads” has arrived.

Ironically enough, there is a very tangible sense in which the only reason why Palantir has succeeded to the extent to which it has is because the company has provided bureaucrats with the equivalent of advisors in white lab coats—in the form of algorithms for action—making it possible for them to do what they otherwise might very well have declined to do, left to their own devices. The white lab coat fraud is especially evident in the case of Palantir because they provide “algorithmic products” to consumers who do not know what to do with their data. Palantir organizes the mass of collected data to offer what become directives to action, as in the case of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, in which the firm played an important role.

Who told the U.S. military to fire on Zemari Ahmadi and his family in Kabul, Afghanistan? The tragic slaughter of ten entirely innocent people on August 29, 2021, occurred because the persons with their fingers on the missile-launch buttons of the killing machine were advised that they were in possession of actionable intelligence, which was provided to them by the equivalent of white lab coat-costumed analysts. In the case of Ahmadi, the fact that he was driving a white Toyota Corolla and running around town acting “suspiciously” sufficed to warrant his obliteration by remote control by some drone operator who received his orders to kill from an officer whose decision was informed by analysts who claimed to have “connected the dots.” The consequences of applying such algorithms will always be decisively determined by prior decisions, built into the frameworks, about what constitutes “reasonable risk,” and what those writing the algorithms regard as an “acceptable” level of civilian casualties or “collateral damage.”

If the people writing code happen to believe that the lives of Americans (or Israelis) are far more valuable than those of Muslims (or Palestinians), then they may advise those in the kill chain that they should fire on schools, hospitals, refugee camps, weddings, and funerals, in pursuit of “the bad guys” allegedly present. It is telling that The Technological Republic offers a precise account of the number of victims of October 7, 2023, “more than eleven hundred people in Israel and the taking of some 250 hostages,” but not a word about the number of Palestinians killed, maimed or displaced by the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) since then. Moreover, those who expressed anything but unmitigated support of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruthless and indiscriminate revenge attack are subjected to withering criticism. The authors name names, in order to shame the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) for failing unequivocally to support the government of Israel, even as it razed Gaza.

Despite Palantir’s own role in many fiascoes, including botched missions throughout the disastrous Global War on Terror, the firm has done quite well on the stock market since going public on September 30, 2020. Why is that? Could it possibly have something to do with the fact that Karp & Co., were willing to do what other tech firms refused to do and thereby staked a claim as the world’s foremost leaders in facilitating the lucrative techno-death industry? Understandably, many software engineers wanted nothing to do with Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, Baghram, the bombing of weddings and funerals, and the obliteration of hospitals and schools. The Technological Republic casts Karp himself as a man of action who is willing to do what others will not. The obnoxious insinuation that the Silicon Valley companies which declined to aid and abet mass murder were not moral but cowardly is reiterated at regular intervals.

In reality, all of the soldiers who walked away, along with those who declined from the outset to participate in the bloodbaths and torture manifestly being orchestrated by the U.S. government since 2001, were in possession of a conscience. Apostate drone operators spoke out about what was really going on, and the Silicon Valley executives who declined to get in on the ever-expanding remote-control killing game obviously preferred not to have any part in the transformation of the U.S. republic into a fascistic regime, where corporate and government interests are so intimately intertwined as to compromise fundamental commitments to justice.

The word “fascism” is thrown around loosely these days, in what are often inappropriate ways. But if fascism is defined as “a system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism,” then the “American Project” envisioned by the Palantirians, who appear intent to infiltrate every aspect of the U.S government with a new military-technological complex headed up by none other than themselves, with Alex Karp as the Grand Master, is both “thickly and deeply” fascistic.

The CEO of Palantir is not a multibillionaire because he has had any truly ingenious ideas. Karp has formal education in neither computer science nor engineering, and until rather late in life had no discernible interest in either of those topics. However, he is willing to don the equivalent of a white lab coat and tell less ambitious people how to use their data, furnishing them with normative algorithms not based on any enlightened expertise in matters of ethics but instead designed to maximize company profits by all means necessary. Any sober, reasonably well-informed observer must recognize that Alex Karp and Palantir’s saga is the quintessential crony capitalist success story.

The majority of the company’s contracts are with the U.S. government, and therefore funded entirely by U.S. taxpayers. Savvy investors are well aware that the inertia of military bureaucracy, along with the deep state more generally, virtually ensures that a never-ending stream of readily available funds will continue to flow to the company. Palantir’s appeal to investors thus derives in large part from its predominance in the military intelligence sector and its success in garnering billions of dollars in contracts, many of which will no doubt be renewable with no end in sight. Indeed, once the agencies using Palantir’s algorithms become dependent upon them, they will be reduced to inaction or even paralysis in their absence, ensuring the company’s role potentially in perpetuity, even as control of the White House oscillates between the two halves of the War Party duopoly.

Having staked an early claim to uncharted territory and secured what could become a near monopoly on the government use of algorithmic advice, Palantir is an obvious choice for amoral investors, along with anyone vulnerable to seduction by patriotic propaganda. Unsurprisingly, many of the book’s allusions and suggestions are diaphanous promotions of the firm and its leader. We are apprised, for example, that companies which maintain their founders as CEOs tend to do substantially better than those which do not. That people who break rules are innovators (which is analytically true, is it not?), and that in order to “reconstruct the technological republic” (was there one before?) the United States will need everyone to be involved:

“The current model is utterly unsustainable. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.”

Note that former Palantir employees who broke away to start their own venture are being sued by the company. Alex Karp feigns that he wants everyone in tech to collaborate with the government, but in reality he puts up fierce resistance to anyone who challenges Palantir’s dominant role. Karp clearly does not wish for everyone in Silicon Valley to do what he and his company do. Rather, he wants to continue to dominate, if not monopolize, the military intelligence sector. Rules can be broken by “disrupters” like Karp, but if anyone else breaks the rules in ways which diminish his power, they will be subject to litigation. The specific charges against the Palantir “traitors,” as Karp appears to view them, is to have poached employees and pilfered software considered to be the firm’s own intellectual property, despite having been likely developed by some of the defectors themselves.

So what exactly is the substance of “The American Project” which the Palantirians insist must be pursued, lest the United States cede its preeminent role on the world stage? Most of the pleas of this work remain vague, if not vacuous, but at one point a literal call to arms appears: “We will find a way to build coalitions and bands of warriors. To deny the human need for such affiliation has been a mistake.” In reality, throughout much of the twenty-first century, while collaborating with Palantir, the comportment of the U.S. military has cohered not with U.S. law, much less the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the United Nations Charter, or even the Geneva Conventions. On the contrary, the never-ending bombing campaigns have been guided only by the government’s own version of might makes right: We Kill Because We Can. Now that the Trump administration has invaded Venezuela and abducted President Nicolás Maduro, it can scarcely be denied that the republic is transmogrifying into a bona fide military state. Having seen what the U.S. government is willing and able to do, with little push back from the international community, the citizens of Greenland, Canada, and Iran can only await their uncertain fate.

To be seduced into believing that CEO Alex Karp is some sort of heroic figure or Messianic wise man, as is continually intimated throughout The Technological Republic, is to completely misunderstand the true reasons for his success. The authors chide those in the technology sector who refused to aid and abet the U.S. government as it terrorized millions of human beings across the Middle East, and now in Latin America as well, which Palantir has been willing to do. This is not, as Karp’s carefully constructed façade of eccentricity might lead some to believe, because he is more ingenious or better informed than the competition, but only because he appears to be completely devoid of scruples.