Palantir's Quest to Privatise Democracy
Peter Thiel's company now admits they want to govern for us. Will we let them?
Peter Thiel’s Palantir drew a lot of attention last weekend for a tweet that reads like the monologue of a cartoon villain. In a long post, they endorse the arguments made in The Technological Republic, a 2025 book written by the company’s CEO Alex Karp and his lawyer Nicholas Zamiska.
If, understandably, you haven’t read it, it’s not a business self-help book or a meditation on leadership and disruption. It’s a radical political manifesto. In essence, it sketches out a world in which democratic deliberation gives way to technological necessity, and where those who build and control software systems claim a central role in the exercise of power. As opposed to, you know, the people.
Coming from the official channels of a data analytics company that’s thoroughly embedded as a contractor in public services around the Western world – from America’s ICE to Britain’s NHS – it gives significant cause for concern.
So how do we best understand this tech bro stab at philosophy? The arc of the book’s (and the tweet’s) argument is actually quite simple, and it echoes the rhetoric of authoritarians past.
There is a crisis, they say, stemming from weak and “decadent” leadership, as well as multiculturalism and pluralism. A violent new world of AI warfare and technological conflict is coming soon. Soft power and compromise are dead, we’re told, and instead surveillance software (conveniently, their industry) will be the new foundation of “hard power.”
Silicon Valley must therefore be given ever more control over our lives, put in charge of not just our news and interactions but our nations’ very sovereignty and self-determination.
This is a vision of government as a hard-nosed endeavour for the military-minded. Elon Musk’s idea that empathy will lead to “civilisational suicide” seems to have caught on, the notion that it’s inherently weak to care for, work with, and learn from one another.
“If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle,” they write, “we should build it; and the same goes for software.” The state should fund their terrifying AI weapons, they say. But of course when the public asks – for better healthcare, better pay at work, or a stronger democracy – the answer is far less certain.
Their dark vision for the world does contain kernels of truth. We are, undeniably, in a period of geopolitical instability (in part thanks to the President that Palantir backed). Surveillance is expanding, while civil liberties are under pressure (in part due to the software they create). And politics can often feel curiously hollow – our leaders cautious, managerial, and lacking in conviction.
The conclusion Palantir draws from this, however, is not to deepen or strengthen democracy, but to move beyond it.
They warn against “the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism.” But the problem today is not an excess of competing visions, but a shortage of them. Political life feels thin not because too many voices are heard, but because so few are able to shape outcomes in any meaningful way.
The same logic runs through their critique of the “psychologisation of modern politics.” Stripped of its academic language, this is an argument against emotional investment in public life – against people caring, identifying, and finding meaning in collective political projects. But this capacity to “find expression in people they may never meet” is not a flaw of democracy. It’s what makes it possible. Without it, politics becomes something much colder: less about shared purpose, more about management and control from above.
Palantir apparently no longer see themselves as an ordinary tech company, but as the unelected elites destined to rule our future by surveillance and force. Pair this manifesto with what we’ve seen from their ally Donald Trump across the Atlantic – masked agents using their tech to round up migrants and crush dissent. I have little doubt that a Reform-led government here in Britain would trend in the same direction.
While conversations about Palantir’s role in the NHS and beyond are vital in light of their anti-democratic views and anti-privacy reputation, there is a more systemic problem at play here. It goes well beyond any one company.
I recently interviewed historian Quinn Slobodian, who has quite a useful framework for understanding what’s happening here. His latest book cites The Technological Republic as a defining example of what he calls “Muskism” – the political and economic doctrine characterised by Elon Musk.
Muskism, he says, is a system where states and people alike become dependent on privately controlled technological infrastructure to carry out even basic functions. Where power is routed away from democratic institutions, and towards networks controlled by engineer-overlords who can supposedly “optimise” Government without all the messy consensus-making and bureaucracy.
“Elon Musk ends up seeing people themselves in quasi-digital terms – as contaminants within a system,” Slobodian told me.
“The ‘illegal immigrant’ becomes, in effect, an embodied computer virus – something that disrupts the optimisation of the system in the same way malicious code disrupts a network. And just as you would clean a codebase, the implication is that you cleanse the territory of these elements to restore proper functioning.”
Palantir’s ‘X’ manifesto applies the same logic to freedom and liberty. Not as rights to be exercised collectively, but as systems to be managed from above.
But democracy is not a technical problem to be solved. It never has been. It is the insistence that ordinary people retain control over the forces that shape their lives – even when that control may be messy, contested, and sometimes inefficient.
Liberty, in the end, means having a say over the systems that govern us. And refusing to give it up.
