Palantir Technologies posted a 22-point summary of its CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska’s book, The Technological Republic, on X on a Sunday. Just like that — between the morning coffee and the afternoon news cycle — one of the most powerful and least scrutinised companies in the world published its ideology. They called it a summary. It reads as something considerably more deliberate than that.

About Palantir

In Tolkien’s mythology, the palantíri are ‘seeing-stones’. Beautiful, ancient, and cursed. Sauron used them to watch and to bend minds toward his will. They were the means by which the great antagonist of Tolkien’s masterpiece surveilled and manipulated, with the end goal of dominating middle earth. Peter Thiel and Alex Karp knew this, and they named their company after them anyway. Whether that reflects a total absence of self-awareness or an extraordinary abundance of shamelessness is, in a sense, the question this article is about.

Palantir holds hundreds of millions in government contracts across the United States and Europe. Its software runs inside the NHS, the Ministry of Defence, and the FCA. Its co-founder Peter Thiel financed JD Vance from obscurity into the Vice Presidency of the United States. Its targeting infrastructure is embedded in the Israeli military’s operations in Gaza. These are the people writing about civilisational duty and hard power. They have the contracts to prove they mean it.

What follows is a detailed look at each of the 22 points — what they say, what they mean, and what they reveal about the world this company is actively building.

The Manifesto

Point 1: “The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.”

The debt is real — DARPA built the internet, public money built the infrastructure, and Silicon Valley harvested the returns. But the repayment plan Karp and Zamiska propose is remarkable in its specificity. Not taxes at a rate commensurate with the wealth extracted. Not civic digital infrastructure. Not even the restoration of the public institutions their lobbying has helped erode. It all ultimately rests on defence contracts. Conveniently, the creditors happen to be companies exactly like Palantir.

Point 2: “We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps.”

A genuinely interesting observation, cynically deployed. The most talented engineers of a generation have spent their careers optimising notification algorithms and refining the infinite scroll, and that is, by any honest measure, a squandering. But Karp and Zamiska take the argument and drive it somewhere quite specific: military software. For all its civilisational ambition, the manifesto turns out to have a remarkably narrow horizon. It ends at the Pentagon’s door.

Point 3: “The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.”

The bargain Silicon Valley offered the public — free services in exchange for total surveillance of their behaviour, attention, and desires — has delivered genuine convenience alongside genuine harm, and the ledger is considerably less flattering than the industry acknowledges. Karp and Zamiska identify the decadence correctly, and then pivot immediately toward hard power as the answer. The question of what Silicon Valley actually owes the people who live in it — in wages, in taxes, in democratic accountability — goes entirely unasked.

Point 4: “Hard power in this century will be built on software.”

It is worth being precise about what hard power means in Palantir’s vocabulary, because the manifesto uses the language of defence while describing something closer to dominance. Defence is reactive, proportionate, bounded by protection. Dominance is expansive, self-perpetuating, and requires an ever-widening definition of threat to justify itself. Palantir’s entire business model is built on that widening. A company that profits from the identification of threats has a structural interest in ensuring threats are always being identified, and soft power, in such a framing, becomes civilisational weakness — the preference of societies too decadent to do what is necessary. This is the language of empire, not defence.

Point 5: “The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose.”

In January 2024, Palantir announced a strategic partnership with the Israeli military. By the following spring, AI targeting systems were generating strike lists in Gaza at a speed no human committee could match. Entire residential buildings were reduced to data points in an operational pipeline. Karp and Zamiska wrote this manifesto while that was happening, and point five declares, with the serenity of a done deal, that the debate is already over.

It is one of the oldest moves in the authoritarian playbook — the bomb exists, adversaries will build it regardless, hesitation is naivety. What the manifesto never asks is who defines the enemy. Palantir’s software has already been deployed against undocumented immigrants and domestic populations across multiple jurisdictions. An algorithm does not distinguish between a combatant and a dissident. It distinguishes between a target and a non-target, and that classification belongs to whoever holds the contract.

Point 6: “National service should be a universal duty.”

The men writing this are worth, between them, billions of dollars. They will not be serving, nor will their children. The principle of shared sacrifice is important to them, nonetheless. Universal conscription is, stripped of its rhetorical dressing, a deeply illiberal idea sitting in grotesque contradiction with the manifesto’s repeated invocations of freedom and democratic values. The men who profit most directly from the existence of war are calling for the young to fight it. Duty for all, but contracts for the few.

Point 7: “If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software.”

Nobody argues against equipping soldiers properly. The rifle metaphor is designed precisely to make opposition feel monstrous, which is why it is worth stating what Palantir actually builds. Not rifles. Surveillance infrastructure and targeting systems. AI-assisted pipelines that process human lives into operational data. The marine is a decoy. Behind him stands a company seeking to position itself as indispensable to the entire architecture of modern warfare, with fewer constraints, less oversight, and more public money.

Point 8: “Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.”

Public servants do deserve better compensation — that much is true and worth saying. But in Karp and Zamiska’s hands the argument does something more specific. It frames government bureaucracy as fundamentally inefficient, a drag on the serious business of national power, staffed by people whose mediocrity is guaranteed by their salaries. This is the ideological groundwork for privatisation, dressed as concern for talent. The implication is clear enough: if the state cannot attract the best people, perhaps the best people should run it. Companies like Palantir are ready to help.

Point 9: “The eradication of any space for forgiveness may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.”

Grace toward public figures is a reasonable enough value in the abstract. In practice, the public figures this manifesto is most concerned with protecting from scrutiny are the ones buying Palantir’s products, passing the legislation that expands its contracts, and populating the administration that its co-founder bankrolled into existence. The call for forgiveness arrives, conveniently, at the precise moment when those figures are facing the most sustained public accountability in years.

Point 10: “Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self will be left disappointed.”

Telling people to care less about politics is extraordinarily convenient for a company that profits from political decisions. Emotional investment in democratic outcomes is here reframed as a kind of psychological weakness, a category error committed by people who have confused politics with therapy. The citizens best served by this advice are the ones least likely to organise, protest, or demand accountability. Palantir, meanwhile, remains very emotionally invested in politics. It simply prefers to conduct that investment through Peter Thiel’s chequebook rather than the ballot box.

Point 11: “Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies.”

A sentiment that sounds almost noble, until you recall that Alex Karp was filmed screaming that Palantir must “scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them” to an audience of cheering employees. The company that builds the systems that find, track, and target people is asking society to be more measured about its opponents. The restraint Karp and Zamiska prescribe for the public is not one they have notably applied to themselves.

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

The atomic age produced Hiroshima, Nagasaki, three generations of civilisation-ending anxiety, and at least two dozen documented moments where accident nearly did what policy had not. Palantir surveys that record and sees a template worth repeating, this time faster, cheaper, and administered by algorithms that require no human hand to pull the trigger. The confidence is extraordinary.

Point 13: “No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one.”

The United States has produced genuine democratic achievements, and the people who fought for them deserve acknowledgement. They were, for the most part, fighting against the concentrated power of exactly the kind of financial and political elite that Palantir represents. The civil rights movement did not win its victories with the help of defence contractors and surveillance infrastructure. It won them in spite of a state apparatus that deployed those same tools against it. Karp and Zamiska steal the credit without acknowledging the contradiction.

Point 14: “Nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict.”

“Some version of peace”. That qualification is doing considerable work. The wars in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Gaza are among the things apparently covered by that version. The people of those countries, who have lived and died inside America’s long peace, might describe it differently. The manifesto’s horizon, like its conscience, extends only as far as the borders of the Western powers it claims to defend.

Point 15: “The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price.”

Germany was defanged after the Second World War because it had murdered six million Jews and plunged the world into its most destructive conflict in recorded history. The postwar settlement was not an overcorrection; it was a reckoning. There are defence contracts to be won in a remilitarised Germany, naturally. But the eagerness with which this particular argument is made reveals something about the manifesto’s deeper currents that no amount of philosophical dressing can fully conceal.

Point 16: “The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves.”

A billionaire defending another billionaire from criticism, in a manifesto designed to expand the political influence of billionaires, is a remarkable deployment of civilisational concern. The defence of Musk here is not incidental at all. It is reciprocal. These are not independent thinkers arriving at similar conclusions. They are allies describing the world they are building together.

Point 17: “Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime.”

Violent crime in the United States has been on a sustained statistical decline for decades. The manifesto does not mention this. What it does gesture toward is an expanded role for private technology companies in policing, surveillance, and social control — a market Palantir has been cultivating aggressively for years through predictive policing programmes that aggregate personal data to flag individuals as future criminals before any offence has been committed.

Point 18: “The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service.”

The public figures this manifesto is most anxious to protect are the ones currently under the most sustained scrutiny for corruption, conflicts of interest, and the systematic dismantling of democratic institutions. Accountability, in Karp and Zamiska’s framing, becomes a kind of cultural pathology — a petty, vindictive impulse that drives serious people away from public life. The possibility that serious people might be driven away by the conditions serious people have created does not appear to have occurred to them. Or perhaps it did, and they decided not to mention it.

Point 19: “Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.”

Boldness in public life is worth defending. The boldness Karp and Zamiska have in mind, however, is the boldness of executives who announce that their company must “scare enemies and kill them,” of politicians who dismantle oversight bodies by executive order, of co-founders who declared war against democracy.

Point 20: “The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted.”

Peter Thiel, Palantir’s co-founder, has suggested that artificial intelligence regulation risks producing the antichrist. This point does not mention that. What it does is position Palantir alongside the religious conservative movements most susceptible to mobilisation behind military and nationalist projects, building the broad coalition that every such project has historically required. The defence of religious freedom is real in the abstract. In this manifesto, at this moment, in this company’s mouth, it is a recruiting tool.

Point 21: “Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive.”

The manifesto does not specify which cultures it has in mind. It does not need to. That studied vagueness is itself the argument, leaving the reader to fill in the blank with whatever hierarchy feels most natural to them while the authors maintain plausible distance from the conclusion.

This is the theoretical foundation of colonial racism dressed in the language of honest inquiry — the same intellectual tradition that gave the world the white man’s burden, updated for an era in which the burden is administered by algorithm rather than gunboat. What makes it more dangerous than its predecessors is the precision of the tools now available to act on it.

Point 22: “We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?”

And there it is. After twenty-one points of careful construction — the moral obligations, the hard power, the civilisational hierarchies, the manufactured reasonableness — the manifesto arrives at its destination. Pluralism itself is the problem. Half a century of opening democratic societies to previously excluded people is reframed as a loss of identity, a hollowing out, a failure of nerve.

The question “inclusion into what” is not innocent philosophical inquiry. It is an invitation to define, and therefore to exclude. The company that published this question builds the surveillance systems that would enforce the answer, holds the contracts that would fund it, and has the allies in government who would implement it.

Final Remarks

This manifesto is not trying to convince a sceptic. It is informing the public of an arrangement that is already in place, dressed in the language of duty and civilisation so that the arrangement feels inevitable rather than chosen, natural rather than constructed, philosophical rather than profitable.

The palantíri, in Tolkien’s telling, were not simply tools of surveillance. They were instruments of despair. Those who looked into them saw only what Sauron wished them to see — a world so dominated by his power that resistance seemed absurd.

That is the function of this manifesto. Not to persuade, but to exhaust. To make the reader feel that the age of AI weapons and civilisational hierarchy and hard power concentrated in the hands of a technical elite is simply the world as it is, as it must be, as it has already become. Karp and Zamiska knew exactly what they were building when they chose that name. The question for the rest of us is whether we look away, or look back.