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Palantir’s Manifesto Promises a Dystopian Future

The tech company’s CEO Alex Karp delivers a self-serving broadside that’s steeped in oligarchic hubris and authoritarian nihilism

Alex Karp seated before an image of his model of a visionary tech thinker during last year’s Hill & Valley Forum at the US Capitol’s Visitor Center.

Once upon a time, we lived in a society where the innermost thoughts of the one percent were largely confined to their own brains and the inner circles of their social and professional relationships. Then came the Internet, which gave anyone with a wireless connection or a smartphone the ability to broadcast their good and bad ideas to millions of people at once. Among the most aggressive adopters: Silicon Valley billionaires. When Marc Andressen wrote a 5,000-plus-word post titled “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” in 2023, it went viral, and became something of a template for kindred grandiose edicts from various CEOs and founders in the tech industry. At the time, I wrote that Andreessen’s manifesto had the pathos of the Unabomber manifesto but lacked its ideological coherence. Now another sort of manifesto has been produced by Palantir CEO Alex Karp in the form of a summary on X of his book, The Technological Republic. It shares the same intellectual lapses endemic to the genre Andreessen helped launch, but it’s bleaker, more antidemocratic, and nihilistic in its worldview.

As a longtime social-media user, I’m sympathetic to the inclination to post one’s every opinion to the Internet, no matter how idiotic. But this isn’t just a matter of the wealthiest people in the world floating iffy ideas about innovation or posting cat memes. Their posts serve as a kind of evangelicalism for a new order in which technocrats are in charge, equality is a naïve aspiration promoted by woke mediocrities, and technology customized to attain power is an unalloyed good.

That this roster of tech-bro shibboleths is remarkably tone deaf in the current environment of economic and political uncertainty bothers Valley propagandists not a whit. Someone recently threw a Molotov cocktail at Open AI CEO Sam Altman’s house, Elon Musk’s unfavorability is at an all-time high in recent polls, and a majority of Americans think AI will do more harm than good. But instead of treating this information as valuable feedback, the oligarchs have doubled down on exactly the things that give people pause about their metastasizing infiltration of all aspects of public and private life.

Karp’s manifesto-via-tweet asserts primarily that we can achieve peace through war, and that billionaires brandishing “grand narratives” in the manner of Elon Musk should be in the country’s driver’s seat, sending ordinary citizens to the battlefield whether they like it or not. (Among the recommendations in Karp’s unhinged rantings is a proposal to revive the military draft—a singularly boneheaded idea at a moment when the country is waging an unprovoked, illegal, and massively unpopular war.)

This is a convenient philosophy for a billionaire who runs a company engorged on defense contracts and likes to construct grand narratives himself. But we are at an inflection point where a big chunk of our economy is affected by AI and the incestuous circle of spending and investing that Karp, Musk, and their peers are perpetuating—to say nothing of the cataclysmic implications for labor markets as jobs get replaced or changed. The billionaire tech-bros’ insistence on telling us exactly what they aim to do, on saying the bad quiet parts out loud, is designed to indoctrinate you. But if it doesn’t, they don’t care. They’re going to proceed anyway, and if recent history is any indication, no one with regulatory power is going to stop them.

By way of analytic context: Palantir is a data analytics company and defense contractor that sells surveillance technology to the US government and allied countries, as well as to the private sector. It’s won $1.9 billion in US contracts since 2008, and Karp received $6.8 billion in compensation in 2024, making him the highest-paid public company CEO that year. Under the Trump administration, Palantir has won contracts to consolidate data on individual Americans and track migrants, raising concerns about data privacy and the government’s ability to surveil........

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