Lat month the tech company Palantir published what was widely described as its manifesto. According to the company’s post on X it was meant as a brief version of the book The Technological Republic, co-authored by Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir and Nicholas W. Zamiska, head of corporate affairs and legal counsel at Palantir. The manifesto claims among other things that AI will replace nuclear weapons as the new deterrent, calls for the return of a universal national service and argues that Silicon Valley has a moral obligation to participate in the defence of the United States.

The bullet points of the manifesto don’t seem on the surface to be advancing a coherent philosophy, having been described as “the ramblings of a supervillain” by a British MP. But Alex Karp has an usual background for a tech CEO, having completed a PhD in philosophy in 2002 at the J.W. Goether University in Frankfurt Germany, with a thesis entitled Aggression in the Life-World. So, does Karp’s training in the philosophy of the Frankfurt School find expression in Palantir’s manifesto? Is this a version of technofascism? And what can we do when powerful tech companies start thinking they have deep insights into geopolitics, public policy and the state of “Western civilization”?

Moira Weigel is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University and Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She writes and teaches about the history, theory, and social life of media and communication technologies, from the early nineteenth century to the present. She is the author of the book,  Labor of Love: the Invention of Dating (2016) and co-editor with Ben Tarnoff of Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do and How They Do It (2020). She is also author of the essay, Palantir goes to the Frankfurt School. She regularly contributes to general interest publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, and The New Republic.

Anthony Burton is a postdoctoral researcher in the Media Studies department at the University of Amsterdam. He completed his Ph.D. in Communication at Simon Fraser University, where I was a Mellon-SFU Data Fluencies Fellow at the Digital Democracies Institute. My dissertation is about the relationship between social theory, intelligence, desire, and mimesis in contemporary late fascist politics. He is the co-author of the book, Algorithmic Authenticity (2023).

Alexis Papazoglou is Managing Editor of the LSE British Politics and Policy blog. He was previously senior editor for the Institute of Arts and Ideas and a philosophy lecturer at Cambridge and Royal Holloway. He is also host of the podcast, “The Philosopher and the News”.