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-up'ish drive and ambition in a mere twelve 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
wanna-be-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.
And
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 to read it through 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-strait-jackets-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 – primacy, as we’d say now in
American English – 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 by definition 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 second volume in the
age of mass distraction and attention deficit, so to speak – the twenty-two 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! (My exclamation mark.)
And these are not
over-reactions. Karp's Palantir Manifesto really is an astonishingly
open self-exploration of a very sick mind’s vision for the future of
humanity, arguing, in effect, for an open-ended AI arms race (a big
Kaching! for Palantir, by the way), 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, such as with on private islands having fun with a serial child
rapist - that sort of thing. How unselfish.
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
oh-so-unforeseen terror attacks of 11 September 2001, backed by totally
normal Epstein-buddy, "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.
The real shift is about control. Once your money becomes fully digital, it's no longer just something you hold—it's something that can be tracked, restricted, conditioned, and limited. Then consider where this leads: carbon tracking, usage caps, and allowances tied to behavior—fuel, energy, travel, consumption. At that point, it's no longer about how much money you have. It's about what you're permitted to do with 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 instane, 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. And we all know.
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 to
humanity. 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 display your perverse mind and announce your horrible aims in a
manifesto we should all call Alex Karp's Mein AI.
Quoted from:
Tarik Cyril Amar (April 26, 2026) - Mein AI: Palantir's Alex Karp wants us to know he has big plans.
Tarik Cyril Amar (b. 1969) is a German historian and geopolitical analyst focused on twentieth-century Eastern Europe, especially Soviet, Russian, and Ukrainian history. He studied at Oxford, the London School of Economics, and earned a PhD from Princeton (2006). He has taught at Columbia University, led the Center for Urban History in Lviv, and is now Associate Professor at Koç University in Istanbul.
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