Introduction
The ‘bad guys’ in James Bond and Spider-man hatching over-the-top sinister schemes to take over the world were boogeymen, but have they come to reality now?
In the last few years, the influence of tech billionaires in American and world politics has grown at an exponential rate. While overinfluence of any businessmen is bad for a sovereign nation’s policymaking and governance, some of these tech giants have telegraphed their intent for such a dystopian future for the planet, that it draws parallels with pop culture supervillains now.
Up until recently, the tech industry was content with being away from politics and decision-making, but with the rise of Donald Trump’s republicans, a few private citizens like Elon Musk and Alex Karp are starting to use the tools at their behest – social media, data troves, and surveillance – to exert influence over the governmental and international organs. At the very top of the pyramid is Karp, the CEO of Palantir Technologies – a software and AI conglomerate with deep ties with the American Military Industrial Complex. Inspired by the modern-day epic Lord of the Rings, Palantir aspires to be the all-seeing crystal ball of fantasy as depicted in Tolkein’s work and later in the films – using Artificial Intelligence and mass surveillance on the people of Earth to become an all-knowing omnipotent data processing platform. And when power like that goes without regulations or checks, the people behind it become more and more influential. Now the world is worried that they may have underlying intentions of shaping the world in their own image and benefit.
Historical Background
Palantir Technologies came into being in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, and Steven Cohen – names now easily recognizable in the global software industry. All of the founders grew up in the Gen X era, absorbing contemporary culture and media; and as ‘nerds’ did back in that time, being engrossed with science fiction and fantasy – the foremost being Lord of the Rings, the fantasy franchise by J.R.R. Tolkien.
Alongside culture, they also grew up with the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of Reaganist economics and the corporate giants, and an uptick in previously fringe ideologies like libertarianism and alt-right. In their adulthood, the views of Thiel – who is working towards building a global monopoly in data processing, and Karp, who is the focus of this article – show a dangerous affinity with violent, dystopian ideologies where capitalism is taken to its absolute limits. This had shown when Palantir was out to find its initial fundings, when Silicon Valley was still populated by freethinking visionaries who built the early internet for the people of the world. Most investors were unwilling to fund a firm with right-leaning views like Thiel and Karp had, and the initial launch was done with help from investors like In-Q-Tel, a VC firm with ties to the US Intelligence community , especially the CIA.
Palantir began as a ‘mission-oriented’ company selling fraud detection systems like that of PayPal. Eventually, it diversified into other aspects of software and surveillance, and after a time large law-enforcement organizations and even military and intelligence apparatuses began to utilize their systems. After the Russo-Ukraine war since 2022, the advent of drones and AI-based systems dawned a new age in warfare, and Palantir was one of the pathfinders in the MIC. Now, it has become one of the biggest defense contractors in the world, selling AI-based surveillance and weapons that have been used in Ukraine, Gaza, and probably many other battlefields by now, using massive databases built on GWOT-era mass surveillance by the USA and advanced machine learning capabilities to develop a terrifyingly lethal, automated killing machine.
But the more problematic part of the conversation is the nature of Palantir’s organogram. Thiel and his associates came from similar beliefs and views, and they protected the ownership of Palantir from outside investors, never giving up a seat in the Board of Directors. In 2013, Karp refused to pursue an IPO and keep the company as strictly private, stating “going public would make running a company like ours very difficult”. More than a decade later, the question arises that whether their goal was just business, or were they looking forward towards something greater, like shaping the world in their image?
Palantir’s Manifesto: A Shocking Reveal
On April 19, the official X handle of Palantir posted a 22-point manifesto based on Karp’s book, “The Technological Republic”. The manifesto claimed to be a short version of the book, and brought up some points-of-view that are, to be simply, said, dystopian. Social media went afire with criticism, both for and against, the post, and global mainstream media itself is also discussing their concerns regarding Palantir’s worldview.
The manifesto had opinions mostly regarding the government and military of the USA, and strongly advocated a sort of techno-militaristic alliance between US and the Silicon Valley tech giants. It also criticized government subsidies, regulations regarding defense and weapon making, and public criticism of billionaires. It was, in summary, a summary of outbursts of an elite class against the common mass – dressed up in modern, politically correct talk; and all the while somehow reaching out to the fringest of far-right by appealing towards their religious sentiments.
The initial points talk about the tech sector’s duty towards the nation, which mutates into advertising a technomilitarist alliance of military, intelligence, and tech conglomerates. Palantir shows its warhawking by telling US soft power has become obsolete in point 3, and doubles down on it by suggesting conscription should be mandatory again in point 6 . It then goes on to insinuate that nuclear deterrence has become unnecessary, and the future of warfare has become that of AI (i.e. a battle of tech giants like Palantir itself), a point no doubt to appeal for greater funding and importance. This begins the tirade of approaching techno-militarism in the manifesto, where Palantir criticizes government inefficiency (point 8), praises billionaires (points 9, 11, 16, and 18), and talks about gaining access of law enforcement information to tech giants and even more integration of systems like Palantir into daily life (point 17).
However, the author notes, that these are not the most problematic points in the entire manifesto, as awful as it may sound. There are points that make the above examples pale in comparison with them, like deregulation of the defense industry (point 5), demeaning value-based politics (point 10), and most worryingly, vouching for racial and cultural supremacy and rejecting pluralism in points 21 and 22.
The Hidden Message Behind The Manifesto
After two decades of its establishment, and gaining access to important positions in the American and global financial/political order, Palantir is not afraid anymore to preach their ideals. A terrifying mix of socially ostracized nerd culture (a point common in other tech billionaires like Musk and Zuckerberg) mixed with an affinity towards libertarian politics and deregulation shows a sort of worrying disregard for basic human tenets of civilization seen time and again in Thiel and Karp’s public appearances. Their blatant advertising towards tech conglomerates being allowed into every aspect of daily life, to run unregulated mass surveillance, and insinuating that the financial elite should not be held in the same standards as the common mass, shows their affinity towards a technomilitaristic nation, which may eventually lead to technofeudalism or corporatist state. These views tie in strongly into libertarian politics and the writings of Ayn Rand, an economist who seems to have had a lasting impression on many current conservative politicians in the East and West.
Yet another notable factor, not just from the manifesto, but from the founders’ lives, is their disregard towards left-leaning politics, social services, and any sort of tolerance dialogue. Thiel especially, while studying in Stanford, faced resistance against the left-leaning politics of the campus, which seems to have been common experience for a lot of tech billionaires and conservative faces in the current American scenario.
Social scientist Yanis Varoufakis had coined the term “Technofeudalism”, which he also calls “Techlordism”. In his words, “Born from the ashes of Bretton Woods, it sanctified the emancipation of financial capital from the regulatory shackles of the New Deal”. Indeed, the inception of Reaganist economics led to the 2008 global financial disaster; and the lack of checks and balances in the global financial market against large conglomerates has led to an unprecedented accumulation of capital within the top few percent of the world’s rich. Amongst them are these tech billionaires, who now plan to not only control the market; but to ensure the flow of profit, the entire world order. It’s a process to colonize everything, and end the era of a rules-based world.
Predictive Policing & Dynamic Pricing: Controlling People’s Lives with Data
But regardless of the civilizational battle they seem to portray themselves fighting, the ultimate goal of Palantir and any other proponents of technofeudalists is making money. Through money comes influence, and through influence comes the power to be above the law. Palantir’s predictive policing methods have been criticized before, with critics calling it dystopian. One of the primary pillars of modern law is evidence. The equitable principle of presumption of innocence and the burden of proof lying with the accuser stands to protect any abuse of law so that no one innocent might be punished. Predictive policing, a combination of algorithmic softwares and mass surveillance, trumps that by using a person’s previous information to predict the likelihood of them committing any sort of crime. However criticized, several law-enforcement organizations and the Ukrainian military have been using these predictive softwares. Irrespective of their effectiveness, the question of ethics come up. While human beings are a slave to their habits, and habitual routines may be indeed useful for algorithms to correctly predict the occurrence of crimes, algorithms aren’t capable of nuance, and biased data may result in flawed or outright dangerous results. In algorithmic mathematics, a dynamic called feedback loops is present, where “such systems also hit critical thresholds beyond which false alerts become essentially certain. This suggests that differential impact on minority communities may be structurally inevitable as a matter of mathematics, not fixable through better algorithms or cleaner data”.
This is without taking into consideration the possibility of corrupting or altering such data to produce favorable results. But most importantly, it is inherently unethical because a human must always be trusted to be able to better himself; and a “minority report” scenario must not condemn a person before he commits a crime.
The Endgame of Techno Billionaires
The extreme end of libertarian ideals like the ones Karp and Thiel hold dear cross the bounds of technocracy and almost reach towards racial supremacist fascism. The open declaration of beliefs like ‘some cultures are better than others’come from a renewed sense of mass support and beliefs. The rules-based world order and the modern nation-state has been at risk ever since the fall of the Soviet Union and the era of Pax Americana, but after GWOT and the rise of social media – which has given the common mass a voice unlike any before – has seen in a rise of conservative ideals like never before. The failures of modern liberalism to solve global problems are also to blame here. According to the theory of Samuel P. Huntington, the world is about to enter another era of civilizational great powers, where religious and ethnic identity trump the national identity. And some of these great powers will inevitably be focused on autocracy, theocracy, and other forms of authoritarianism; and they will see the West and the rules-based world order as a relic of olden times and obsolete to solve modern problems. We already see the rise of fringe far-right rhetorics across social media, which is an example of these ideologies already gaining traction.
What’s problematic is that, Thiel, Karp, and similar billionaires like them have decided to not back the modern democratic state; instead, they have decided that the best way to combat the threat of upcoming autocracy is with an autocracy of their own – a technofeudalistic state with the powers of the most powerful military ever assembled on the planet and those of an unimaginably potent tech base.
With the advent of the internet, something happened that has never happened before – billions of people willingly gave their information to conglomerates, and this allowed the establishment of the largest repository of information in the history of mankind. Whoever holds this data holds the future of the world in their hands. Peter Thiel has stated more than once his dream to establish monopoly on this data; and it is visible already that this data is used not to improve peoples’ lives, but to loop them into a consumerist cycle controlled by the algorithm. With the unlawful usage and abuse of trust that digital platforms have done with their users, tech giants gain access to confidential and private information that should not be accessible to anyone but the state – and use it not just to forward their products, but their agenda.
Palantir’s 22-point manifesto is not the beginning, neither it is the zenith – things will get worse before it gets better. It is rather obvious that we will see a rise of more far-right ideologies in the near future backed up by tech money. The connection of STEM studies and conservatism, which has been noted by psychologists and engineers before, may continue to rise.
But more importantly, absolute power corrupts absolutely; and the current crop of tech giants have tasted the fruits of their first endeavors already, by controlling the lives of billions with puppet strings made of ones and zeroes. They will no doubt try to force a new world order upon the common mass where they are untouchable demigods, beyond law and order, beyond questioning. Peter Thiel’s obsession with immortality signifies that he, and by extension, the others too, have a long-term goal for the world and they aspire to reshape the world in their own image. And all of this they will accomplish using the tools modern democracy, law and order, and the nation-state have provided.
What We Should Focus On
The world has beaten back fascism before, and there is no doubt it will again. Just like in the 20th century, the fight will be long and hard, but it is certainly possible. The question is, how does a world unite against such authoritarianism when opinions have never been more varied, and the primary discourse is a culture war that keeps everyone from noticing the encroachment of all-encompassing capitalism?
The rise of Silicon Valley tech giants, the growing influence of billionaires in American and global politics, and the rising trends of far-right conservatism across the world can be summed up to one thing – unregulated capitalism. Since the Reagan era of American politics, the global economy has sustained a boom like never before, at the expense of regulation, checks and balances, and oversight. The failed dream of “trickle-down economics” has led to more and more tax cuts for the rich, and greater constraints on the poor. The gradual collapse of the global climate and dwindling fossil fuel reserves, unchecked growth of population – all of these factors have complicated the already-hard lives of the common man across the world; and in his need to have someone to blame, he shifted towards fringe far-right beliefs. From ISIS in the Islamic world to radical Christian nationalists in the US and Europe, the common people are being blindsided by a bread-and-circuses routine, by engulfing them in a culture war that keeps the actual perpetrators at bay.
In a way, billionaire entrepreneurs like Thiel, Karp, and Musk are also a victim of this system. The conflict across human society and culture had led them to ideologies like libertarianism and technocracy; and just like a corporate organization looks out to maximize profit and efficiency, they too look forward to that, in a global scale. This is where the ideas like racial supremacy, isolationism, and corporatization of the government comes in. These are all textbook symbols of fascism.
Where these tech billionaires are wrong is, the government is not for maximization of profit or efficiency, it is for the maximization of service to its people. As a rule, the government must look at the lowest common denominator when forming policies, for a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Nations are to look after their people and ensure their progress, even when the short-term picture makes it look inefficient.
Government regulations, taxes on wealth, and other methods that were enacted to remove inequality in a society before the era of Reaganist policies are to be brought forward again. The economy should be once again focused towards stable growth, not unchecked profits.
The other issues surrounding the current problems can also be solved by addressing the lack of laws and boundaries in them. The growth of social media, AI, cryptocurrency, and unchecked digital growth is one of the biggest threats human culture has ever faced. All of these need to be regulated and controlled through internationally recognized statutes and treaties. News media and journalism need to be held to a higher standard than it is now, and the encroachment of “opinion pieces”, talk shows, and podcasts also need to be regulated with the requirement of journalism having to have a minimum threshold of consistency, truthfulness, and transparency.
Internet has been the biggest boon of the century, but its ill effects are coming out now. With the world entirely dependent on digital communication and yet, the tools of it controlled by a select few, is a terrifying prospect that has only a few comparisons in the entirety of human history; never have been the fates of so many been in the hands of so few. The lack of globally recognized statutes on digital spaces and communications is woefully lacking, and so is a overseeing legal body for it. To stop the rise of technofeudalism and tech giant overlords, the only way is to bring them under laws that treat them not as Palantir’s manifesto dreams of, but as regular humans that they are.
In the early days of science fiction, when current technologies were nothing more than fever dreams, authors were concerned about the unchecked growth of technology, a trend that has subsisted till today. In 1950, Issac Asimov developed the three laws of robotics – a set of legislations developed for fictional worldbuilding; yet it has surprising levels of relevance in this world. It described how the threat of technologies can be mitigated, and disappointingly, what even sci-fi writers in the last century predicted and developed countermeasures against, have been ignored by policymakers and economists. The laws of robotics say that a robot cannot harm a human, must obey his orders, and to protect its own existence only if it does not conflict with the first two laws. While it may sound infantile, the laws of robotics may have real life impact and insights while developing jurisprudence and precedence to protect humanity against digital threats.
International Law is catching up only now on AI and the digital market like cryptocurrencies. The principles of checks and balances need to catch up with the rampant rush of technology. The EU had created a landmark example when they forced Apple, Inc. to conform to the European standards of a C-type USB port instead of Apple’s proprietary one; establishing a precedent that fair usage policy and greater concerns like environmental issues must come before the free market. Similarly, in the cases of Epic Games vs. Apple and Epic Games vs. Google; where the gaming platform sued both tech giants regarding their predatory commission policies in app stores, was yet another instance where need for regulation became apparent. In the great duopoly of android vs iOS, both parties are short-changing competitors, and the verdict from a US court had displayed why such practices are harmful for the economy and society at large.
These practices are the ones that need to be followed and expanded upon, to instill shackles of regulation over the tech giants, because their predatory nature over the free market is leading everyone to a very dark future.
Conclusion
The gross deregulation of corporate business and global finance is the reason we are in this scenario now. Libertarian ideologies like Ayn Rand’s writings may make it look like the perfect version of freedom and creativity, but the truth is, profit must always be regulated to defend peace from it. Constant growth is unnatural, and it cannot be sustainable at any format in the world. The pursuit of growth had first compromised peace, then living standards, and at last it is now attacking the institution itself. Law and order, social contracts, sovereignty, diplomacy are all enemies of the profit graph, and thus, to ensure profit margin grows, they must be destroyed. That is the end goal of unchecked capitalism.
To stop the gradual decline into a neofeudal world order where billions of people have their fates decided by a select few billionaires, the source of those billions must be regulated. By now, it has become clear that Reaganist economic policies don’t work; but on the other hand, social democracy like in the Nordic nations actually do. Indeed, to run a country, a government must adopt a mixture of capitalist and socialist policies, to ensure economic stability and citizen’s peace. Only an economic reform can save the US, and by extension the global economy.
Muhtasim Fahmid
Lawyer