The surveillance giant is not even hiding its truly evil plans for humanity anymore, and its only downfall might be its hubris
Once the Nazis were done, quite a few people started scratching their heads. Obviously one thing to baffle any sane observer was the sheer enormity of their crimes, accomplished, moreover, with frenetic, really start-upish drive and ambition in a mere 12 years: World War? Check. Genocides? Check. Bad hairstyle? Check.
But then, there also was another puzzle: How could their self-besotted visionary-in-chief, hobby philosopher (with a bent to sinister German stuff), and obviously mentally less-than-stable wannabe genius of a leader have gotten a whole nation of, apparently, reasonably educated people to go along? And not just go along, but go along to the very, very bitter end.
That question was all the more disturbing in view of the fact that Adolf Hitler had not been shy about displaying his insanity and extremely bad intentions well before conservative elites installed him in power in 1933. Hitler’s book-length – indeed two-volume – manifesto of German fascism (AKA Nazism) Mein Kampf was published in 1925 and 1926, sold more than 12 million copies and was translated into over a dozen languages.
Those ready to brave its pathological me-me-me-and-HISTORY narcissism, daft hodge-podge ramblings about the better and the lesser parts of humanity, and brownshirt-bro bombast could not say that the future Leader had been concealing where he intended to lead Germany and, really, the world.
Indeed, Hitler’s manifesto could have served as an all-alarms-howling, bright-red-lights-flashing-everywhere, get-the-straitjackets-now warning. The main points of Nazi Germany’s evil to come were all there, laid out in general but with stunning honesty: empire building with industrial-strength brutality, extermination or at least slavery for those considered inferior and superfluous, and last but not least, eternal primacy of one master country, to be achieved and maintained by all and any means, because that country – in Hitler’s case Germany – was defined as superior to all others and called upon to lead the world, forever.
It is one of those bitter ironies of history that Alex Karp, CEO of the very peculiar software company Palantir, who regularly refers to his Jewish family background and what it would have meant for him under the Nazis, has recently released a manifesto that also should serve as a warning to the rest of us. A summary of his longer tract ‘The Technological Republic’ (co-authored with Nicholas Zamiska) the 22-point X post has provoked a great backlash.
Cas Mudde, well-known expert on the far right, has called it “Technofascism pure!” (with an exclamation mark in the original). Yanis Varoufakis feels that “if Evil could tweet, this is what it would!” (with another exclamation mark). Mudde has also called for a full stop to all cooperation with Palantir by European companies and government agencies. Even Eliot Higgins, founder of Cold War re-enactment tool and Western information war front Bellingcat has been moved to mild irony. How daring! (Exclamation mark mine.)
These are not overreactions. Karp’s Palantir Manifesto really is an astonishingly open exploration of a very sick mind’s vision for the future of humanity, arguing, in effect, for an open-ended AI arms race, bringing back German and Japanese militarism, racism masked as realism about cultural backwardness (as it happens, also a Nazi “Kulturträger” move, which Karp should have heard about in his German years), and, last but not least, letting our brilliant billionaires and new elites in general off the hook when they mess up. How unselfish.
It is also painfully, criminally badly written in a style that combines mock-Oswald Spengler Götterdämmerung kitsch (“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.”) with sheer non-sequitur inanity (Why, again, can’t we have economic growth and security without any of that “ruling class decadence”?).
There are passages that read like young Jordan Peterson – age 15 and on too much Diet Coke – trying to be deep, really, really deep for the first time: “Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed” and “our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.”
After the inimitable practice of America’s war idiot-in-chief Don Tzu of Hormuz, Alex and his Palantir friends are giving us their I Ching of the tech dim. Lucky us: So much American primacy and then we get Silicon Valley meta, too!
Yet farcical as Karp’s manifesto is, it is, of course, a deadly serious matter. After all, we live in a world where Palantir has already risen to far too much power. Founded as a CIA spin-off after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, and backed by totally normal “transhumanist” and Antichrist-obsessive Peter Thiel, Palantir has grown into a bloody monster, combining, in true fascist style, the logics of efficiency and extermination with its software tools, such as Gotham, Foundry, or Maven, while mass-spying on everything and everyone it can, and systematically embedding itself in international business and government to become – or appear – indispensable.
Palantir – named after all-seeing magic stones used by the villains of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (again: don’t say you weren’t warned) has already produced so much evil that a short worst-of-the-worst sample must do: The company has officially denied being involved in genocidal Israel’s use of AI to mass-murder Palestinians faster. Curiously enough, Alex Karp has, however, smirkingly admitted the fact in public. Regarding the deployment of Palantir’s targeting software in the American-Israeli war of aggression against Iran, the company is not even denying it.
But Palantir never rests. While deeply and proudly involved in genocidal slaughters and imperialist warfare, it also subverts peacetime societies pervasively. In Britain, for instance, a backlash has set in against the state’s reckless handing over of police powers and extremely sensitive data (for instance, in the spheres of finance and health) to the American CIA-offshoot gone rogue. In Germany, Palantir systems are used for policing in at least three of its federal states, Hesse, North-Rhine Westphalia, and Bavaria. In the US, Palantir has, of course, already so deeply invaded the state that it does not only help it fight its criminal wars abroad but also, for instance, terrorize its migrants and some non-migrants, too, at home.
Indeed, Palantir is so evil that even its own employees are beginning to wonder if they might, actually, be the bad guys. Hint: Yes, you are.
For the rest of us, that is, almost all of us on this planet afflicted by Silicon Valley: It’s time to believe them when they tell us to our faces that they are coming for us. Palantir is a clear and present danger. Its CEO is an extremely dangerous maniac, its mission is subversion, surveillance, and violence, and its only Achilles heel may be that old nemesis of the wicked: hubris. The sort of hubris that makes you announce your horrible aims in a manifesto we should call Alex Karp’s Mein AI.
~ Tarik Cyril Amar, a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory
