GoKawiilA 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 . As things stand on Monday morning, the U.S./Israel-Iran ceasefire is at a crossroads after the Marines captured an Iranian-flagged container ship steaming toward the port of Bandar Abbas. Iran has thus far 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 . 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 , though it's a few days old. Our friends at American Prestige have been doing yeoman's work as well.
WHILE WE AWAIT the future course of a global catastrophe, Palantir, the data and AI giant that services such clients as ICE and Israel , 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 , 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 . 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 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 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 . But Palantir has spent the better part of a decade leaning heavily on this sort of language after engineers at Google grew uncomfortable with the company's expansion within the war machine.
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