Tech companies like Palantir now find themselves in a bind. Wanting government contracts, they have a reason to stay politically neutral. At the same time, they rightly suspect that the greater part of the left has already marked them for destruction. The hostility has little to do with Silicon Valley’s enthusiasm for Austrian economics, or its occasional calls for a property-based franchise – an old National Liberal demand rather than a fascist one. Rather, the left is hostile to technology because it is America’s conservative party, suspicious of anything that threatens to undermine old solidarities. MAGA was quick to forgive corporate America after it called a, at least temporary, halt to DEI – but there is a strong sense that the converse is not true, that the US Democrats and the British Greens will simply pursue Palantir to the ends of the earth no matter what it says.
Silicon Valley is a new force in society and is still feeling its way around politics
And so, what to do? Palantir might submit, selling the surveillance technology that will be deployed by organizations like the Bundesverfassungsschutz against political radicals. Or it might choose defiance, allying with those same radicals to overturn society and make the world safe for Palantir. As we might have expected the real policy has been a muddle of the two. The company’s founder Peter Thiel supported MAGA in 2024 and furnished Trump with his running mate, but its necessary closeness to the security establishment has since spooked people like Joe Rogan and Theo Von.
Out of this muddle emerged The Technological Republic, a manifesto written in 2025 by the company’s CEO Alex Karp and its head of corporate affairs Nicholas W. Zamiska, and recently republished in listicle form on X.
Its purpose is to square this circle as much as possible: to present Palantir as a voice for moderate center-right reform that can nevertheless do business with anyone. The list has been variably described as the “ramblings of a supervillain” but the 22 items reveal a set of priorities that would not have looked very much out of place in the Republican party of 2004. Points 21 and 22 denounce cultural relativism, because “certain cultures and indeed subcultures… have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful,” but this has been the boilerplate of moderate right and Christian Democratic forces for about 30 years. Angela Merkel and David Cameron said much the same in the early 2010s.
The document is consciously moderate in other ways. The interests of Palantir’s shareholders and the desire to chart a course between reform and reaction all lead to its central demand: that the United States ready itself for great power conflict with “adversaries” such as China. It calls for Americans to be less squeamish about adopting new weapons systems, including AI ones, and it declares that “free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal.” Silicon Valley’s social role is less to provide a leadership caste or to patronize learning than to “participate in the defense of the nation.” The country should also “seriously consider” bringing back the draft.
Superficially there is something here for almost everyone. A great collective effort like this is meant to stitch a divided country together, offering the Establishment purpose anew and the populists a certain national swagger. But in trying to in some way duck the cultural war by gesturing towards the national interest, the document invokes something that does not exist. There is no sense of a common national interest in America at all; both sides perceive the state to be in hostile hands. Palantir offers fighting talk about “adversaries” but bald appeals to “universal duty” will only leave people cold.
Nor is rearmament necessarily a reformist policy. Along with censoring the internet Establishment politicians like Germany’s Fredrick Merz, Mark Carney and Keir Starmer now believe that in rearmament they have found a sham “synthesis” between populism and globalism. Rearmament crowds out demands for reform with an appeal to patriotism, and it puts all the sullen young people into uniform and into barracks, where they can’t cause trouble. Liberal democracy finds coherence and meaning again, in holy war against Russia. A President Newsom or a President Harris is likely to hit on the same idea. What’s more, the Establishment is quite capable of accomplishing this without Palantir’s help. Since rearmament is meant as a social policy rather than a military one it can do without the latest tech; it does not require the company and its innovations.
The manifesto tacks to the middle in still another way. It regrets cancel culture, but much like Bill Maher, the Free Press and CBS under Bari Weiss it seems to regret it mostly insofar as it has affected academics and rich and powerful people. It is against the “ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures,” but nothing is made of the whites without money who find themselves shut out of the elite universities for ideological reasons, still less the ways in which cancellation and DEI continue to affect ordinary people. Anti-woke politics without social revolution eventually starts to look cynical: an agreement among rich people to forgive each other for their peccadillos. MAGA voters did not risk social ostracism so that Kevin Spacey could be in movies again.
In other ways the manifesto is far-sighted. Point 15 calls for the “postwar neutering of Germany and Japan” to be undone, which is novel and interesting. If the United States rolled back the Nuremberg international settlement it imposed in 1945 it would relieve itself of its need for a vast national security state to garrison the world – from which sinister figures like Abigail Spanberger emerge. By freeing the rest of the world the Americans would do quite a bit to free themselves.
But all in all the effect of the manifesto is to further provoke Palantir’s adversaries while doing little to reach out to MAGA. Trying to chart a middle course seems to have availed the company nothing; its choice now is probably either to prostrate itself or to swing hard in the other direction, declaring openly against Woke and entering into full alliance with the radicals, becoming to MAGA what Bismarck was to the German nationalists.
Silicon Valley is a new force in society and is still feeling its way around politics. Thiel and Palantir are further along than most; unlike Musk they had the good sense to recognize that calling for more immigration risked cracking the tech-demagogue coalition and handing Woke the day. Over the course of the 19th century the European bourgeoise learnt, in a stumbling way, how to act politically: how to compromise, how to appeal to the masses, and what its class interests truly were. As its list of enemies grows, one gets the sense that Silicon Valley will have to learn these lessons more quickly.
Comments