The well-known and controversial technology firm Palantir Technologies recently published a manifesto. The document is neither a technical paper nor an economic vision. It is an explicitly political document that announces a new phase in the trajectory of digital capitalism, a phase in which it has abandoned its claim to neutrality and decided to reveal its full ideological face.
Palantir is not an isolated case. It is one of several major technology companies that sell their technologies to systems of repression and human rights violations. As such, it has been condemned by international human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Most damning of all, reports have revealed a direct partnership between Palantir and the Israeli military, where Palantir, like Amazon, Google and Microsoft, has supplied data and targeting systems used in military operations in Gaza, making these companies effective partners in documented war crimes against Palestinian civilians.
The manifesto is a declaration of a project for a digital fascist alliance, one that does not rest on traditional violence alone, but on digital surveillance and repression, data analysis, artificial intelligence and manipulation of public opinion. An alliance whose crimes are embodied today in their clearest form in Trumpism, its alliances and its aggressive wars.
1. From Silicon Valley to the White House
Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir and the most important financial backer of Trump’s political career, is not merely a businessman who supports a political candidate. He is the ideological mind that gives this project its political logic, and who has openly declared that freedom and democracy are incompatible.
This alliance is no coincidence. It is a fusion of two projects that share a single goal: the concentration of power in the hands of a financial and political oligarchy that believes itself to possess a “natural right” to govern its own societies and those of others.
This alliance finds its institutional expression today in what is known as the technological acceleration movement, which includes Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and others, who are moving in a coordinated manner with the second Trump administration.
What unites them is not full ideological uniformity, but class position and shared interest: the abolition of any regulatory or democratic constraint that limits their capacity for accumulation, domination and expansion of control.
2. The Manifesto
Palantir described the manifesto as a summary of its chief executive Alexander Karp’s book “The Technological Republic”. Within a few days it received millions of views and angered many people.
But anger must not be content with emotional reaction, for the strongly right-wing manifesto deserves a precise, left-wing reading, a reading that goes deeper than indignation.
The manifesto contains 22 points, constructed with deliberate architectural precision. Some points appear moderate or even humane on the surface, such as calls to respect politicians’ privacy or to avoid taking pleasure in an opponent’s defeat.
But these points are neither innocent nor coincidental. They are the calculated facade used to win over the hesitant reader and give the manifesto a “balanced” appearance before it reveals its true face. What appears logical in the manifesto is therefore not proof of its balance, but further proof of its cunning.
The manifesto is, in short, about promoting a comprehensive ideological agenda centered on militarization, domination and a hierarchy between civilizations.
3. Fatherland, Conscription, Control, Racism
Point 1 asserts that “the engineering elite in Silicon Valley has a moral obligation to participate in the defence of the nation.” This moral framing is not innocent. When military and security contracts are presented as a “moral duty”, social pressure becomes a mechanism to compel engineers and programmers to serve the war and repression machinery. Any dissenting voice within technology companies is silenced in the name of “patriotism.” This is the transformation of individual conscience into a commodity in the service of the military-security state and its institutions of repression and surveillance.
Point 2 calls for a “revolt against the tyranny of apps”, meaning the rejection of consumer technology in favour of deeper security and military systems. This is not a critique of consumer capitalism, as it may seem. It is a call to redirect technological capacity towards the war and surveillance machine rather than the entertainment market.
Point 5 declares that “the question is not whether AI weapons will be built; the question is who will build them.” This closed logic aims to eliminate any debate about refusing the militarization of technology. When the choice is presented as “us or the enemy”, the possibility of saying “no to weapons altogether” is erased. It is the same logic used by Cold War administrations to silence peace movements and restrict left-wing organizations. It returns now in digital disguise.
Point 6 demands that “conscription should be a universal duty” and calls for reconsidering the fully volunteer military in favour of mandatory conscription. This demand reveals the manifesto’s fascist face: when the state fails to recruit volunteers to fight its wars, it resorts to institutional coercion and calls it “shared responsibility.” Most revealing of all is that the company demanding young people sacrifice their lives in defense of “the West” simultaneously earns billions of dollars from the war contracts in which those young people die. Duty for all, profit for the few.
Point 17 claims that “Silicon Valley must play a role in handling violent crime.” This proposal appears pragmatic on the surface, but at its core it is an expansion of private security companies’ powers to bypass the state’s role and transform themselves into an independent force for social control. It operates according to profit logic rather than legal logic, independent courts and democratic accountability.
Point 20 demands “resistance to the pervasive intolerance towards religious belief.” This point does not spring from a genuine defense of freedom of conscience. It is an opportunistic use of religious discourse to build an ideological alliance with conservative and religious currents that are most receptive to mobilization behind war projects.
Point 21 is the most revealing of the manifesto’s deep ideological dimension when it declares that “some cultures have produced vital advances, while others remain dysfunctional and backward.” This sentence is the theoretical foundation of colonial racism, which justifies domination, occupation and the killing of peoples under the guise of “rational management of civilization.”
This logic does not differ fundamentally from “the white man’s burden” that justified colonialism in earlier centuries. It is reproduced today in the language of algorithms and big data. What makes it more dangerous than its predecessor is that it does not require visible colonial forces. A database and a targeting algorithm are sufficient.
4. The Algorithms of Death
Reports have revealed that Palantir has established strategic partnerships with armies and security institutions to build targeting databases that are actually used in military operations. In Palestine, the use of artificial intelligence systems to build targeting lists is extensively documented. This has led to massacres of civilians in Gaza.
What the company calls an “intelligent targeting system” is in practice a machine for administering killings with industrial efficiency. Killing no longer requires a responsible human decision. It requires an algorithm, sufficient data and a green light from an apparatus that is not subject to any democratic accountability.
Most important in this context is that the use of these systems cannot be separated from the discourse that justifies classifying entire societies as backward or threatening. The crime does not begin with the bomb. It begins with the classification.
The danger of the model that Palantir is building lies not only in its direct military applications. Even more dangerous is what can be described as the “surveillance society”, when control becomes internal rather than external.
When an individual knows they are being monitored at every moment, they begin to impose surveillance upon themselves. They change their language, avoid sensitive subjects, distance themselves from radical dissenting ideas. This voluntary self-surveillance limits and weakens left-wing and progressive movements from within, without any need for arrests or direct restrictions.
5. The Left-Wing Alternative
The Palantir manifesto is not merely a document from a technology company. It is an alarm bell that progressive forces must hear clearly: the battle over the future of technology is no longer lurking in the wings. It has stepped into the open.
The fundamental question is not how technology is used. It is who owns it and who determines its goals. Technology will not become a tool for emancipation as long as it remains in the hands of digital monopolies allied with right-wing, war and repression projects.
Any serious discussion must begin with the necessity of collective ownership over digital infrastructure, and with subjecting algorithms and artificial intelligence to genuine democratic control that represents the interests of peoples rather than monopolistic elites.
It is not sufficient to produce intellectual criticism without building actual technological alternatives: social platforms free from monopoly and repression, search tools that respect the privacy of all users, artificial intelligence systems managed in a democratic and transparent manner. These are not hobby projects for the future. They are an urgent strategic necessity.
6. Technological Disarmament and the Silence of the Workers
Building alternatives alone is not sufficient unless it is accompanied by an organized campaign to strip the monopolies of their technological weapons. Just as the historical workers’ movements fought to disarm capital in factories and on farms, there is today a need for an equivalent struggle to collectively wrest lethal algorithms, targeting systems and mass surveillance from the grip of these companies.
This struggle takes several forms: boycotting their services, exposing their secret contracts with governments, prosecuting their leaders before international courts for complicity in war crimes, and pressuring public institutions to sever their ties with these companies.
It is striking and deeply suspicious that the Palantir manifesto does not mention a single word about workers, trade unions, the right to organize, or the strike. This silence is not accidental. It is an admission that the fascist technological project cannot confront the workers’ question, because workers alone, if they organize themselves, are capable of halting the production lines of death. A general strike in Silicon Valley or even in Palantir’s own offices is this project’s nightmare.
7. Digital Fascism by Its True Name
The Palantir manifesto clearly reveals that we are facing a new form of fascism: the alliance between monopoly capital and aggressive national political power, and the use of violence, repression and civilizational hierarchy to protect this alliance from any popular threat.
The only difference is that this fascism’s tools today are algorithms, big data and artificial intelligence, and it is precisely this that makes it more closed and more difficult to resist than what came before.
While Palantir CEO Alexander Karp finishes his philosophical manifesto in his elegant office, the algorithms his company has built continue their work of identifying targets, tracking migrants at borders and supporting the machinery of militarism across the globe. Philosophy and crime are two sides of the same coin.
The struggle for social justice and emancipation passes today inevitably and substantially through the struggle to liberate technology from this aggressive class alliance. It is not a technical question or an abstract ethical question.
It is a political question all the way through, and part of a historical struggle over who shall have control of the future.
