The Tech Oligarch's Republic

# The Tech Oligarch's Republic Source: [https://www.forever-wars.com/the-tech-oligarchs-republic/](https://www.forever-wars.com/the-tech-oligarchs-republic/) A look at the Palantir manifesto, a logical conclusion of the War on Terror - [](https://www.forever-wars.com/author/spencer-ackerman/) Alex Karp at Davos in Jan\. 2026\.[Via the office of the president of Ecuador\.](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:REUNI%C3%93N_CON_ALEX_KARP,_CEO_DE_PALANTIR_TECHNOLOGIES._DAVOS,_21_DE_ENERO_2026._(55053421059).jpg)Public domain\.**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](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/18/iran-war-bets-ethics-concerns?ref=forever-wars.com)\. As things stand on Monday morning, the U\.S\./Israel\-Iran ceasefire is at a crossroads after the Marines[captured](https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/seized-iranian-flagged-ship-was-part-of-fleet-that-frequented-china-e18b6b70?ref=forever-wars.com)an Iranian\-flagged container ship steaming toward the port of Bandar Abbas\. Iran has[thus far](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/20/pakistan-ready-for-multi-day-us-iran-talks-but-tehran-unsure-about-joining?ref=forever-wars.com)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](https://www.forever-wars.com/so-you-lost-a-war-to-iran/)\. 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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eTCYi2zI68&ref=forever-wars.com), though it's a few days old\. Our friends at*American Prestige*have been[doing yeoman's work](https://americanprestigepod.com/episodes/4965619080?ref=forever-wars.com)as well\. **WHILE WE AWAIT**the future course of a global catastrophe, Palantir, the data and AI giant that services such clients as[ICE](https://immpolicytracking.org/policies/reported-palantir-awarded-30-million-to-build-immigrationos-surveillance-platform-for-ice/?ref=forever-wars.com#/tab-policy-documents)and[Israel](https://www.palantir.com/assets/xrfr7uokpv1b/3MuEeA8MLbLDAyxixTsiIe/9e4a11a7fb058554a8a1e3cd83e31c09/C134184_finaleprint.pdf?ref=forever-wars.com), 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](https://twitter-thread.com/t/2045574398573453312?ref=forever-wars.com), 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](https://blog.palantir.com/maven-smart-system-innovating-for-the-alliance-5ebc31709eea?ref=forever-wars.com)\. 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](https://www.forever-wars.com/when-the-war-goes-ai-the-data-centers-will-be-targets-f-engadgets-devindra-hardawar/)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](https://www.palantir.com/platforms/gotham/?ref=forever-wars.com)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*](https://www.amazon.com/Palo-Alto-History-California-Capitalism/dp/031659203X?ref=forever-wars.com)\. But Palantir has spent the better part of a decade leaning heavily on this sort of language after[engineers at Google grew uncomfortable](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-ceo-pentagon-project.html?ref=forever-wars.com)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](https://www.forever-wars.com/these-corporations-are-the-true-winners-of-the-war-on-gaza-directors-cut/?ref=forever-wars-newsletter)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](https://www.forever-wars.com/kill-lists-in-the-age-of-artificial-intelligence/), is "[theatrical](https://twitter-thread.com/t/2045574398573453312?ref=forever-wars.com)," 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](https://www.ft.com/content/a65c93af-abf9-427c-a2ee-a9f5b3d518b9?syn-25a6b1a6=1&ref=forever-wars.com), and the state\. That's why[the AI oligarchs are spending so much money](https://www.ft.com/content/c1823595-d0f6-49a4-8a10-3d91c92da8f6?utm_medium=email&utm_source=substack&syn-25a6b1a6=1)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](https://bsky.app/profile/eliothiggins.bsky.social/post/3mjtqdh52rk2h?ref=forever-wars.com)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\."](https://www.forever-wars.com/crime-and-the-occupation-of-d-c/?ref=forever-wars-newsletter)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](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJSGh3ntlQd/?ref=forever-wars.com)\. 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](https://wwmt.com/news/nation-world/arson-warehouse-massive-fire-arrest-arrested-employee-worker-paper-goods-storage-distributor-distribution-flames-burn-burning-smoke-watch-video-firefighters-extinguish-sprinklers-alarm-evacuate?ref=forever-wars.com)violent[reprisals](https://fortune.com/2026/04/14/sam-altman-openai-ceo-attacked-molotov-cocktail-gunshots-san-francisco-anti-ai-data-centers-tech/?ref=forever-wars.com)for the coming world of their economic redundancy and social dispossession\. And all this because[Jurgen Habermas clocked Karp as an imbecile](https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/habermass-bastards?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=112019&post_id=192717500&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoyNTc2NzAxLCJwb3N0X2lkIjoxOTI3MTc1MDAsImlhdCI6MTc3NTA0OTA1OSwiZXhwIjoxNzc3NjQxMDU5LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMTEyMDE5Iiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.tgdX7PxFjNGJj6PVCNpaasTd9oOzJpobu81b2lK-VRo&r=1j871&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email)\. --- **SPEAKING OF THE DOMINANCE CLASH**between the Pentagon and Anthropic, the National Security Agency—a Pentagon agency—is using[Anthropic's new Mythos](https://www.axios.com/2026/04/19/nsa-anthropic-mythos-pentagon?ref=forever-wars.com)client, which, if it works as directed,[identifies security vulnerabilities at unrivaled scale and speed in every piece of software it encounters](https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/anthropic-mythos-security-software-updates-573cc9b3?ref=forever-wars.com)*\.*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](https://www.wired.com/story/madison-square-garden-jim-dolan-surveillance-machine/?ref=forever-wars.com), 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 wina National Magazine Award\. --- **TWO PUBLIC APPEARANCES OF MINE**are coming up\! 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No one is prouder of**WVW**than her older sibling,[**REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP**](https://bookshop.org/p/books/reign-of-terror-how-the-9-11-era-destabilized-america-and-produced-trump-spencer-ackerman/15725547?gclid=CjwKCAjwqZSlBhBwEiwAfoZUIC2Uib4p_B7cMqWC1-X2Nh27ovRVqeHoMPCbw9Ol4yuKZhAMWu93tRoC_tMQAvD_BwE&ref=forever-wars.com), which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition\. And on the way is a new addition to the family:[**THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN**](https://foreverwars.ghost.io/book-two-majid-khan-iran-troops/?ref=forever-wars.com)**\.**