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Coffee Break: Palantir’s Manifesto Drops and So Does Objection

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Palantir’s manifesto has dropped and co-founder Peter Thiel has a scary new company called Objection. I’ll round up some reactions.

Palantir Manifesto Says What?

In ancient days the priests of an imperial death cult would have dropped their manifesto on giant graven metal tablets, in 2026 they just tweet that crap with a footnote saying “Excerpts from the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska”:

There are 22 points but I’ll only highlight a lucky 7 plus 1:

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

6. National service should be a universal duty. 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.

12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

17. 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.

18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

Fun stuff!

“Extremely Creepy”

Multiple responses to Palantir’s manifesto worth reviewing have already dropped.

I’ll start with John Ganz (known as @lionel_trolling on X.com) who reviewed Palantir CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska’s book upon which the manifesto is based in February, via Bloomberg:

The Technological Republic is a terrible book: badly written, tedious, and — when they can be gleaned in between the jargon, clichés and repetitions — full of bad ideas, ranging from the merely dubious to the execrable and disturbing. This book is dismal on the level of both form and content. It heralds a dark and depressing future.

The book is quite literally a call to arms. Its rough argument, or rather its repeated assertion, is that “At some point, Silicon Valley lost its way.” What started out as a bold partnership between the US government and the private sector to develop innovative new technologies has degenerated over the past 50 years to cater to consumers and the market. The Valley built social media platforms, e-commerce sites and food delivery programs, but — either out of principle or expediency — would not help its Daddy, the US Department of Defense, build neat new guns.
…
The book is also essentially an advertisement for Palantir Technologies Inc. Its authors, Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, both hail from the C-suite of the data analytics software concern that specializes in defense and security applications. Karp is the CEO and co-founder, along with Peter Thiel, and Mr. Zamiska went to Yale Law School, worked at the white shoe firm Davis Polk, and now works in the Office of the CEO as legal counsel.

…the book’s entire vision is deeply undemocratic and elitist. The idea is to enshrine an unaccountable elite of engineers who will ignore the will of a public that might mislead them. They are special souls who must be cloistered away from the world…

In Karp and Zamiska’s telling, these special few will apply a “ruthlessly pragmatic” engineering mindset to national issues and problems. And who decides what are the national issues and projects? Well, the engineers, of course.

Ganz elaborated on his Substack:

The book is extremely creepy: It becomes clear in the course of reading this “Technological Republic” the authors propose is essentially some kind of merger or acquisition of the United States government by Silicon Valley, a state run by an engineering elite that would be empowered to “ruthlessly” pursue “outcomes.” It’s a proposal for a kind of tech oligarchy: “no public “oversight for me, surveillance for thee.” I contend it’s a work of reactionary modernism.

If the ideas are bad, so is the writing. In fact, I strongly suspect the authors, who are big proponents of the technology throughout the book, used A.I. to write it.
…
Businessmen routinely write stupid books, that’s not surprising, but Mr. Karp is a little bit of a different case. He’s a highly educated man: he has a PhD in critical social theory from the Goethe University Frankfurt, where Jürgen Habermas was his dissertation supervisor, until they apparently had some sort of disagreement. Ultimately, he wrote his thesis under the supervision of Karola Brede, a sociologist whose work incorporates Freudian psychoanalysis. Karp’s thesis is entitled “Aggression in the Life-World: Expanding Parsons’ Concept of Aggression Through a Description of the Connection Between Jargon, Aggression, and Culture.” In 2020, Moira Weigel wrote a penetrating analysis of the dissertation. And you can read the whole thing translated here.
…
So, this is all very weird. To recap, Karp wrote his dissertation on a form of rhetoric that employs aggression to bind a community together and then he goes and writes a terrible, jargon-filled, cliché-riddled book about how the United States needs to rearm with the help of Silicon Valley. The shittiness, one might say, is the point: is Karp intentionally using jargon in this technical sense to create his own vision of Volksgemeinschaft? Maybe, but the rhetoric is not stirring! As for “aggression in the life-world,” Karp is saying “Yes, please!” In the book, Karp explicitly says how he wants to cultivate a more martial society to defend “the West.”

The idea of reverse engineering the Frankfurt School’s critique of low-key fascism to do a little low-key fascism yourself might strike one as crackpot stuff. But, if you haven’t noticed, the crackpots are running the show these days!

I had noticed that!

‘Silicon Valley must be free to do in America’s cities what it did in Gaza’

Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis did a point-by-point rebuttal of Palantir’s manifesto, I’ll pull his responses to the 7 I featured above:

1. Silicon Valley owes an immeasurable debt to the ruling class who bailed out the criminal bankers that wrecked the livelihood of the majority of Americans. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley will defend that ruling class to the death (literally!), in the name of the majority of Americans whom they treat with contempt – i.e., like cattle that have lost their market value.

4. Glory to brute force! Ethics is for suckers. The West needs more of Palantir’s murderous software.

5. AI-powered killer robots are coming. The task is to profit magnificently by building killer robots first and ask questions later. To be able to do so, Palantir will do whatever it takes to avoid at all cost any international treaties that limit AI-driven killer robots.

6. Every poor sod (lacking the connections to avoid being thrown into the trenches with killer drones targeting them from the sky) must be drafted into the army. Forget paying soldiers a salary. All payments should be directed to Palantir, where our own people will be serving their ‘national service’ – leaving the dying to non-shareholders.

12. Palantir makes no nuclear weapons but is happily developing other weapons of mass destruction. We proudly announce that we are now ready to add to nuclear Armageddon the AI-driven threat to humanity’s existence.

17. Silicon Valley must be free to do in America’s cities what it did in Gaza. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it came to granting Palantir the right to annihilate all remaining civil liberties and human rights. This must end.

18. Epstein’s syndicate should be forgotten lest lovely people like Trump and the Clintons are deterred from entering government. The public arena must be scrutiny-free unless subversives like Sanders or Mamdani enter it.

21. Time to bring back Hitler’s hierarchy of races, with Palantir’s founders and Elon at its Aryan pinnacle. The idea that it is wrong to judge someone by the colour of their skin or their ethnicity or their religion must be jettisoned.

Another Counter Manifesto

An X poster calling themselves Silicon Valley Fodder also has an interesting point-by-point response to Palantir’s manifesto:

A More Pithy Response

Seth Harp, author of The Fort Bragg Cartel, made his points about Palantir’s manifesto with more brevity:

Palantir wants you to think they’re the dark overlords of the coming technofascist 4th Reich. The truth is rather more pathetic: Alex Karp is just a kooky right-wing sociologist & lawyer who bribes the Trump admin to buy his company’s useless product. Wow so scary and Nietzschean.

Alex Karp pretends to be an engineer because it makes it seem like he has practical skills. In reality all he has are his sophomoric political opinions and a complete lack of shame around openly bribing the most corrupt presidential administration in American history.

Preposterous manifesto for an industry that hasn’t invented anything important since about 2007, in a country that hasn’t won a war since 1945. Just a bunch of rich drug addicts who’ve bought off the government huffing the fumes of imagined past greatness while the planet burns.

‘A shareholder letter cosplaying as Cicero”

Podcaster and anti-crypto activist Aaron Day drops some zingers worth quoting:

Alex Karp, the dance PhD who runs a surveillance contractor valued at sixty billion dollars off ICE targeting tools and IDF kill lists, has written 22 commandments demanding Silicon Valley develop weapons for the state. He is very concerned we are not developing enough weapons for the state. He neglects to mention that his company already does this, extensively, and that every bullet point is a Palantir invoice with a Nietzsche footnote.

Point 1 informs the engineering elite it owes a moral debt. Point 5 asks who will build AI weapons, rhetorically, as if we do not know. Point 7 says if a Marine asks for a better rifle we must build it, which is convenient because Palantir has a billing department standing by. Point 15 helpfully calls for rearming Germany and Japan, two nations that happen to represent large untapped enterprise markets. Point 17 suggests Silicon Valley must address violent crime, by which he means predictive policing contracts written in Denver.

The document is not a civic manifesto. It is a shareholder letter cosplaying as Cicero. Karp has produced a number one bestseller arguing that the public owes his company money, and millions of people are nodding along because he included the word republic in the title.

What he calls the Technological Republic is the technocracy itself, slightly embarrassed, asking to be called something else.

Two more responses before we move on to Peter Thiel’s latest project.

CIA Cut Out Says What?

I was reading the TechCrunch response when I noticed they were quoting an unlikely critic, Bellingcat CEO Eliot Higgins.

Here’s how TechCrunch summarized Higgins’ posts on Bluesky (of course he posts on Bluesky):

Eliot Higgins, the CEO of the investigative website Bellingcat, dryly remarked that it was “extremely normal and fine for a company to put this in a public statement.”

Higgins also argued that there’s more to the post than a simple “defense of the West” — in his view, it’s an attack on what he said are key pillars of democracy that need rebuilding: verification, deliberation, and accountability.

“It’s also worth being clear about who’s doing the arguing,” Higgins wrote. “Palantir sells operational software to defense, intelligence, immigration & police agencies. These 22 points aren’t philosophy floating in space, they’re the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it’s advocating.”

Presumably Higgins is attempting to compete with Palantir for CIA and MI6 money.

Putin’s Rasputin Chimes In

I kid, I kid, but that’s how Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin is generally seen in the Western media and I can’t resist a cheap yuk.

Dugin sees the Deep State in Palantir and who am I to argue:

Palantir’s Manifesto is much more important than Trump. Trump is insignificant pawn on the serious chess board. His role is total destruction. The preparations stage. Palantir is much more serious. It is the plan to safeguard the declining dominance of the West by radical means.

Palantir’s manifesto is the plan of the Western techno-fascism. The superiority of the white race based on the technology. No antisemitism, no sacredness, no socialism of old historic fascism. This time pure capitalist, Jews friendly, profane, materialist. Anglo. Posthumanist.

Palantir’s manifesto. Illiberal, anti-humanist, post-globalist. The techno-state of the global West as hegemonic pole. Unipolarity, technological racism, individualism. Epstein style. Quite compatible with Israelism (Tucker Carlson definition). Absolutely disgusting. Antichrist.

Palantir’s manifesto. Pure satanism. Ayn Rand. The logical conclusion of the capitalist age. The real end of history without liberal lenses. Quite compatible the degenerative ratchet and Fanged Noumen. Totally incompatible with multipolarity and Fourth Political Theory.

Palantir’s manifesto: real agenda of Trump’s rule. In spite of Trump himself used and abused by much more serious and autonomous powers.

Alright, I know I promised Dugin was the last reaction to Palantir’s manifesto, but there’s one more that will let us pivot to Karp’s mentor Peter Thiel and his latest.

The Philosopher’s Stone of All-Seeing Eyes

Turkish academic Emre Şan sees the philosophical fingerprints of René Girard in Palantir’s manifesto (the below is Grok’s translation from the Turkish):

Now let’s look at the latest project from Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel and Network State author Balaji Srinivasan.

Wait, Maybe I Do Have an Objection?

So what in the family blog is this fresh Hell?

Objection Explained

I’ll go back to Aaron Day:

Full text:

In 2007 Gawker outed Peter Thiel as gay.

In 2016 Thiel secretly funded $10M in lawsuits that bankrupted them.

This week he funded the AI that grades journalists.

Here’s what’s inside it:

1/ It’s called Objection. The founder is Aron D’Souza, the same lawyer who personally ran the Gawker takedown for Thiel.

2/ Backers include Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan.

3/ Anyone pays $2,000 to trigger a “public investigation” of any reporter.

4/ The “investigators” are former FBI, NSA, and CIA officers.

5/ The jury is a panel of AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, and xAI.

6/ The output is an “Honor Index” score on the journalist.

7/ Anonymous whistleblowers are ranked dead last in the evidence weighting.

8/ Corporate emails and government filings are ranked at the top.

9/ What used to take 5-10 years in court, they say, now takes 72 hours.

The man who spent a decade using the legal system to destroy a newsroom just automated the process.

Surveillance-state veterans score the reporter. AI trained by Thiel and Musk renders the verdict. Whistleblowers count least. Power’s paper trail counts most.

Speech for me. A score for thee.

And while I’m blogging about Palantir, there’s one more story worth highlighting.

Memetic Warfare and the People Who Do It

Barrett Brown has a new piece in Byline Times that’s well worth reading, highlighting some names that are well worth following in future:

NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence’s official journal StratCom, published a paper entitled ‘It’s Time to Embrace Memetic Warfare’.

Its author was Jeff Giesea, an investor and political operative, who had run companies on behalf of pro-Trump billionaire Peter Thiel, co-founder of defence surveillance giant Palantir and business partner of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

At the time Giesea defined memetic warfare, a term he coined, as “a subset of information operations or psychological warfare tailored to social media”.

To illustrate its applications, he drew on the expertise of a co-contributor he described as “an annoying gadfly or guerrilla warrior, depending on one’s perspective”: far-right activist and disinformation operator Charles C. Johnson.

The paper proposed methods by which to undermine ISIS: “systematically lure and entrap” recruiters; subvert its messaging via “fake ‘sockpuppet’ accounts” – online personas manufactured to simulate grassroots support or opposition – and “expose and harass people” within its funding network, “including their family members”.
…
The proposal included fabricating fake online personas, planting false information, and running coordinated harassment campaigns to discredit targets. Palantir suspended the employees involved and issued an apology, but the documents had already established that this tactical repertoire existed, was operational, and ran through Thiel’s own firm.

Those tactics had been developed and deployed over years by a loose network of far-right organisations – funded, in part, by figures directly connected to Thiel.

That infrastructure centred on a cluster of white supremacist and hard-right online platforms – among them the neo-Nazi publication Daily Stormer — covertly funded, according to participants, by Giesea. The same platforms served as testing grounds for the harassment campaigns, disinformation operations and memetic tactics that Giesea would later present to a NATO-affiliated journal as a respectable strategic toolkit.

Connecting those platforms to Thiel’s wider network was a single figure: Andrew Auernheimer, a hacker and neo-Nazi provocateur known online as “Weev”. His ties to Thiel had been rumoured in leaked Epstein correspondence, but had never previously been corroborated. They can now be established — through Auernheimer’s own private statements and a decade of documented network activity — for the first time.

Auernheimer was, in effect, a bridge. He moved between the anarchic image-board subcultures of the early internet and organised white supremacist movements. He connected the PayPal and Palantir milieu around Thiel to the alt-right he helped create and harness. And he linked the first generation of online harassment operations to the contemporary influence networks that today increasingly shape mainstream political discourse.

Birds of a feather, flocking together, and family blogging everyone else.

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38 comments

    1. Michaelmas

      @ Nat —

      Everything they say is stupid BS. The weapon systems that Palantir, Karp, and Thiel are making such claims for would be swatted aside as ineffective, overpriced junk by Russia and China — and probably by now the likes of Iran or Ukraine — in a real battlespace in a few minutes or hours.

      That’s because their dependence of electronic networking is almost total. Modern EW, such as the Russians possess, can jam it totally. The systems that Karp et al are trying to sell the world on depend on:

      – Radio/datalink connections between sensors, platforms and commanders
      – Satellite uplinks (GPS, ISR feeds)
      – Tactical data networks like **Link 16** and **JADC2** (Joint All Domain Command and Control)
      – Cloud or edge computing nodes that must communicate

      In fact, Palantir right now doesn’t manufacture weapons, but builds the data integration and AI decision-support platforms that connect weapons systems, sensors, and commanders. Their key military products are:

      – Palantir Maven Smart System (MSS) — AI-assisted targeting and ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance)
      – Palantir MetaConstellation — satellite data integration
      – Palantir Gotham — intelligence analysis
      – TITAN (Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node) — ground-based targeting system for the US Army

      All this creates total vulnerability and this is widely discussed in in even US defense circles, which I suspect is why we’re getting this book and manifesto, so they can bypass the real defense thinkers and get buy-in from the pols in Washington. The dependence of their systems on electronic networking means:

      – Electronic warfare (jamming) could degrade or blind the system
      – GPS denial disrupts targeting
      – A peer adversary like Russia or China with sophisticated EW capability could not merely degrade Palantir-dependent operations but spoof and fake them out.

      IMPORTANT QUALIFICATION; Now the above being said, autonomous AI weapons systems are going to appear on the battlefield, I’m afraid. But the reason will be precisely that any dependence of operator control and radio networking is an attack surface/vulnerability for the enemy and so will be removed.

      1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

        Good info and yes, Palantir is a meta-database company that uses AI but doesn’t make its own models. “Ontology” is their preferred descriptor of what they do. And I’m absolutely not surprised it’s not actually set up for success for a modern peer-level conflict.

        1. motorslug

          Is that mainly because their masters are the zionazis who are incompetent, to say the least, against ‘peers’? They are only successful against unarmed civilians.
          Hezbollah used pagers FFS!

          1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

            The pagers decision was a sound one — they disavowed smart phones because they’re too easily tracked. What they didn’t account for was Isreal corrupting the manufacturing process of the pagers.

            1. motorslug

              Agreed but they had help from non-little hats outside West Asia, Czech based actual nazis IIRC..
              They are failing miserably against the advanced Iranian systems and their Russian and Chinese helpers.

        2. David in Friday Harbor

          Obviously, the ontological “war” proposed in this manifesto is on us, the citizenry, and the “violent crime” that they propose to fight is wrongthink pre-crime such as any criticism of the State of Israel or of the Mad King.

          These clowns would have no chance against state actors of the magnitude of China or Russia.

  2. leaf

    I wonder if the god awful NAFO thing was a test program for their “memetic warfare”. On one hand I suppose they succeeded in getting a decent amount of people to adopt their poorly edited doge profile pictures and attack people online, but it also seems like they just repulsed a lot of people too. Maybe they’ll write it off as a success?

    1. leaf

      Probably add the “BAP” movement and its like to the list too, seems very aligned with Thiel

  3. PVDSteve

    I admit to being confused at the ominous tone Day takes describing Objection, which sounds like a re-heated version of Hillary’s dead on arrival post-2016 fact checking website Verrit. Thiel was able to shut down Gawker by bankrupting them via lawsuits, not by starting a campaign to discredit them and turn readers away. Absent that ability to use the legal system to take an outlets resources, I’m not sure how this is supposed to be any more powerful than any of the other already existing news rating websites.

    Similarly, Palantir’s “manifesto” would be far more ominous if the techno-fascism it stumps for were actually popular. As it stands, mass opposition to data centers is one of the few areas popular political mobilization is seeing tangible success! So in that context, it reads much more as the ramblings of a self-important contractor too high on his supply of free government funds than the herald of an actual fascist *movement.* Sure our elites are evil and dismiss the very concept of democracy, but that’s nothing new in this country. Glad to see so many others also assess it as a bunch of reactionary hot air.

    1. Bugs

      Thiel financed pre-existing litigation that probably would have failed without his angry cash injection. Investing in litigation is a plague and its mercenary practitioners should be disbarred and shunned, and if they’ve hurt anyone, jailed. Thiel had no case against Gawker, because they were truthful. And they were arguably truthful in the “Hulk Hogan” case but were outspent.

    2. vao

      “So in that context, it reads much more as the ramblings of a self-important contractor too high on his supply of free government funds than the herald of an actual fascist *movement.*”

      This is a relevant point: genuine fascist movements were very repressive and made sure to organize the society so that firms could extract as much value as possible from labour, but

      1) they put firms under the thumb of the State and the party — not vice-versa, as Palantir & co seem to prefer (government by technocrats from the business world);

      2) they offered a few, not many, but genuine carrots to labour: well-known is the universal healthcare system in Germany, but other fascist regimes also ensured a few real advantages to the populace; Palantir & co do not even make an effort to reserve something positive for the masses — just work, surveillance, absence of freedom, and glory of dying at the service of their masters.

      There are thus reasons to doubt that this purely elitist ideology will grow to become a strong movement.

      1. hk

        So, what Heinrich Bruening’s regime tried to be they were overtaken by the Austrian corporal?

        I kid a bit, but I think there is a logic to this: Bruening’s government was centrist, undemocratic (perhaps even anti democratic), “technocratic,” and unelected, depending on the dysfunction of the Reichstag fo maintain its existance and was essentially conspiratorial and militarist (depending on machinations of alt-fascist (that is, fascist, but also an enemy of the Nazis) Kurt von Schleicher. While the eventual Nazi takeover was itself dependent on intra-Reichstag machinations than any expression of popular will, one could almost say that it was still more “democratic” in the sense that the public was solidly against the existing regime and the Nazis were at least willing to give the masses a sop that their predecessors were not.

      2. Indian Jones

        The neo-fascism of this “purely elitist ideology” wills a way in spite of the masses.

    3. Trish S.

      Unfortunately for us, this is no longer an “effort” or “attempt”. While across the internet people debate whether or not Mr. Thief will succeed in his efforts, he in fact already has. About 30 main US Gov agencies already are being ran by one of the three P systems. While a US Senator is on the major broadcast stations warning us of things that in fact already have taken place. Some of these agencies more recently, like the USDA, and some awarded the contract(s) as far back as 2018.

      This is public information, by the way. There is a Wikipedia page with listings of the various contracts awarded and the dollar amounts. While we have been distracted by chaos, this is what they have been quietly implementing. This is a non exhaustive list of some of the agencies currently on Mr. Thief’s little system:

      Depts of Justice & Treasury, Alphabet agencies- FBI, DHS, FDA, USDA, various branches of defense and weaponry and the military, including but not limited to the ARMY and Air Force. There are about 29 agencies right now and they are working fast to get more, I guess before people quit worrying about being ” woke” and wake the hell up.

      While searching the net for somebody even mentioning our gov already taken over, I found this site. It is very informative and thank you so much..

  4. jp

    Nat – I find your set of Related Posts links, which you often append, very useful. Please keep doing it!

    1. Michaelmas

      Indian Jones: So warfare is an extension of business

      Oh, all sorts of folks from Lenin to Adam Smith* have been clear about that tendency — i.e. what the highest form of capitalism is — over the centuries.

      * Smith in regards to the East India Company.

        1. Michaelmas

          AI is agnostic, in principle, like electricity. But Palantir’s applications of it in weapons systems are rather stupid BS. See my comment after Nat’s added information links above.

          1. Indian Jones

            Thank you for your elaboration above of their weapon’s stupidity but ultimately, you concede defeat: “autonomous AI weapons systems are going to appear on the battlefield”.

            Stupid and aggressive BS has got them very far (I expect you know what that says about their clients). While AI in your theory is agnostic, AI in their practice is aggressive. I wonder which will earn the title? The Karpageddon would make theory obsolete, so their AI, implemented, would win even though Palantir’s systems are stupid BS.

            Will capitalism suicide? Will Palantir’s stupidity and bullshit incapacitate it?

            “The technologies we are building […] are themselves the product of a culture whose maintenance and development we now, more than ever, cannot afford to abandon. It might have been just and necessary to dismantle the old order. We should now build something together in its place.”

            Is Iran our real savior?

            1. Michaelmas

              Indian Jones: you concede defeat: “autonomous AI weapons systems are going to appear on the battlefield”.

              In wars the opposing players each do whatever is necessary to win. Wars are existential contests. That’s just the way it is.

              Indian Jones: While AI in your theory is agnostic, AI in their practice is aggressive. I wonder which will earn the title?

              I don’t know what this means, or is meant to mean? What ‘title? Why ‘earn’?

              Indian Jones:The Karpageddon would make theory obsolete, so their AI, implemented, would win even though Palantir’s systems are stupid BS.

              No. I doubt Palantir, Karp et al have the capability — the technological competencies — to develop autonomous AI weapons. The Chinese, for instance, do and almost certainly are, on the other hand. I’m not knocking the Chinese: if one goes to war, one does whatever’s necessary to win and EW means that the likely countermeasure will be autonomous AI weapons.

              I’m saying that’s the likely direction of travel, not that I like it. It’s terrifying. Here’s a short film from 2017, ‘Slaughterbots’ warning about it —

              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU&t=2s

              –made under the expert advice of Stuart Russell who, with Peter Norvig, wrote Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, which has been the leading textbook on the subject through various editions for decades.

  6. Mikel

    “I kid, I kid, but that’s how Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin is generally seen in the Western media and I can’t resist a cheap yuk.

    Dugin sees the Deep State in Palantir and who am I to argue…”

    Then there are those like Kirill Dmitriev who has come across in some social media posts as having a hard-on to be a part of elements represented in the manifesto.

  7. dingusansich

    Karp, Thiel—remarkable how many of these so-called tech bros are, upon closer examination, neither inventors nor engineers but corporate lawyers with crackpot notions and an outsize will to power. It’s as if they’ve upgraded Gordon Gekko. Greed is good—that goes without saying—but aggression is good too!

    On the subject of aggression, my preferred weapon is frivolity. Therefore may I observe that “Palantir” is an anagram for air plant. What is an air plant? It is a plant with no need of soil. For support it requires only a platform. Nutrients it sucks out of the air. It offers a congenial setting for The Reptile.*

    *An anagram for “Peter Thiel.”

  8. Mikel

    And nothing new about the “technological era” they are proposing.
    It’s a rebrand and extension of the same Taylorism that actual revolutionary thinkers have been trying to get away from for decades.
    Then, to emphasize how much they lack in original ideas, they add tired old racism to seem “edgy”.

  9. dingusansich

    Apex Lark indeed. Moira Weigel says Karp’s thesis posits that unconscious aggressive impulses enable social bonding. Well and good. That makes “Palantir” fair game. A lark for a Lark.

  11. communistmole

    “The idea of reverse engineering the Frankfurt School’s critique of low-key fascism to do a little low-key fascism yourself might strike one as crackpot stuff.”

    I have made a similiar argument on Karp in a comment section on this website (including a link to Karps dissertation), but i don’t consider it crackpot stuff, but rather a logical conclusion resulting from inherent shortcomings of the so-called Fankfurt School.

    1. JL

      So from what I gathered from some past comments on this web site, the Frankfort School (Institute for Social Research) is responsible for all the DEI identarians. Now it also seems they are responsible for Karp, who was brushed off by Habermas the designated inheritor of the “School” and wrote his dissertation on Parsons, and his little excurses into fascism light. The first generation of the Frankfort School did not self-identify as jews, emphatically. They believed doing so was giving Hitler a post-facto victory of sorts.
      But as the jews of old who were both the epitomes of Plutocrats and Bolsheviks they too are the agents of the updated versions: DEI (bolsheviks) and tech bro fascism (plutocrats).

  12. skippy

    Time machine 2010 video:

    Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇺🇸
    @jimstewartson
    Thiel said this in 2010:
    “The basic idea was we could never win an election… because we were in such a small minority. But maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world without constantly having to convince people… through a technological means.”

    https://x.com/jimstewartson/status/2046259764812988627

    1. skippy

      Bolt this on:

      Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇺🇸
      @jimstewartson
      ·
      4h
      A year before Thiel said this, he wrote that he “no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible” and blamed women’s suffrage for America’s problems.

      No one who says this shit should get a dime of our money.
      It is a total failure of the system that he exists. Period.

      Now why am I getting flash backs to the opines of those that headed up the old FEE head shrinking tankie mob ….

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