And what you can do about it
(besides complaining).
Palantir dropped a manifesto last weekend. 22 bullet points distilled from Alex Karp’s book The Technological Republic, posted to X with the casual framing of “because we get asked a lot.” I haven’t seen a reaction so widespread, unanimously opposed and viscerally aghast since James Damore’s infamous “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”.
The usual suspects lost their shit. Engadget called it “the ramblings of a comic book villain.”
TechCrunch clutched its pearls at the bits about “regressive” cultures and “vacant and hollow pluralism.”
Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins observed, (via Bluesky, of course), that these aren’t philosophical musings floating in the ether: they’re the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it’s advocating.
He’s not wrong, Palantir sells to ICE, DoD, NYPD, and the intelligence community. It may be a manifesto, but it’s also product literature.
Even Alexander Dugin, the Russian “Fourth Political Theory” philosopher, not exactly known for having a libertarian bent, seemed triggered by it, calling it “the plan of the Western techno-fascism” on X, “Pure Satanism” on his Substack.
Palantir manifesto is the plan of the Western techno-fascism. The superiority of the white race based on the technology. No antisemitism, no sacredness, no socialism of old historic fascism. This time pure capitalist, Jews friendly, profane, materialist. Anglo. Posthumanist.
— Alexander Dugin (@AGDugin) April 19, 2026
Former Greek FM Yanis Varoufakis called it “evil” and put out his own point-for-point on it – he calls it a refutation, it’s actually more of a rant.
So everybody across the horseshoe is big mad. Fine.
The thing is, none of this should surprise anyone. Let’s now look at why the policy this “manifesto” outlines was always going to arrive, with or without Karp’s prosaic stylings.
Karp Didn’t Invent “The Technate”
The merger of corporate power and state apparatus, the “technate” that people are suddenly discovering with horror on a Sunday afternoon, is not a new idea. It’s not even a recent one.
Back in 2013, Eric Schmidt (then Google’s executive chairman) and Jared Cohen (Google Ideas, ex-State Department advisor to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton) published The New Digital Age. The book was blurbed by Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, Tony Blair, and General Michael Hayden, the former director of the CIA. That’s an elite-class blurb list for a book that explicitly argued for the intersection of Silicon Valley and state power, the fusion of corporate infrastructure with national security logic, and the reshaping of diplomacy through private platforms.
In 2013 it was called “transformational.” Kissinger gushing that it was, “a searching meditation on technology and world order” (he would go on to co-author The Age of AI with Eric Schmidt that should be every bit as concerning as Karp’s Technological Republic).
Not too long after that, Google’s Sergey Brin and Klaus Schwab held a fireside in Davos where Herr Schwab pontificated that with the advent of AI, since the algos would be able to predict election outcomes with 100% certainty, they may as well pick the winners anyway and we could do away with elections altogether.
Nobody batted an eye. My timeline certainly wasn’t overflowing with rage over it and the people who were calling attention to it were using facing all kinds of headwinds.
In a conversation with Google founder Sergey Brin, founder of the WEF, Klaus Schwab, delights at the thought of a future without elections:
“Digital technologies mainly have an analytical power. Now [we’re going] into a predictive power, and your company is very much involved in… pic.twitter.com/9shJlXw3DG
— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) August 13, 2023
My personal favourite goto clip about all-pervasive corporate surveillance that absolutely nobody gave a shit about, was this one, also via the darlings of Davos:
This is important to understand:#CBDCs will not be “money”: in the sense we understand it. They will be social credit scores, capped by your personal carbon footprint quota👇 pic.twitter.com/e6ibVwXM65
— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) October 4, 2024
Here we have an ex-Goldman Sachs guy running a Chinese multi-national sermonizing about mass surveillance and personal carbon footprint quotas and my timeline was not filled with angry tweets from elite A-listers calling for the dismantling of Ali Baba.
Here in 2026 it’s the exact same structural narrative, now with Karp’s sharper edges and fewer Davos euphemisms, only this one is being called a fascist manifesto instead of drooled over by media elites.
The only major difference I can see is where Davos/WEF inspired technocracy was globalist, Palantir, Karp, Thiel et al are nationalist. Perhaps, a North American nationalist.
(This fits with what I wrote in my last edition of The Bitcoin Capitalist, about the factional rivalry between the intellectual descendants of Samuel Huntington (“The Clash of Civilizations”) vs his former pupil, Francis Fukuyama (“The End of History”) I posted an excerpt here.
Fukuyama thought the entire world would become one big Neo-Liberal circle-jerk.
Huntington said future conflict wouldn’t be between countries, but between cultures. And some cultures were less compatible with how we live here in the West, than others (Palantir’s point #21).
Overall, the project didn’t change. The faction driving it did.
Driving what? The inexorable drive toward post-Democratic technocracy.
Here’s what nobody wants to hear.
If you’re reading Karp’s 22 points and feeling a cold prickle of recognition, if you’re realizing that what Palantir is describing is the operational blueprint for the next 40 years, there’s something you have to sit with first:
You put your hand up for this.
In case you wondering what makes a company like Palantir even possible…. (find out why, here 👇) https://t.co/1mOEQ9JkLR pic.twitter.com/aLIjg1Sqw5
— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) April 20, 2026
Perhaps not you personally. But collectively, “we”, the Western mass public already ran a dress rehearsal. And we all passed (or flunked) with flying colours.
During the pandemic and in the years immediately after, the political and managerial class was wrong about effectively everything.
The origin of the virus. The (non)-efficacy of lockdowns. The vaccines didn’t work and were in fact, kill-shots for many. The money printing.
The correct response to being that wrong, that publicly, and that unwaveringly, about that much, should have been pitchforks and torches in the streets, if not guillotines.
At the very least, in our enlightened civilization: recall elections, mass firings, inquests and class actions. There should have been a generational reckoning with expertise that got captured by politics, a media cartel that went full agitprop and Chapter-7 bankruptcy for institutional credibility.
That is not what happened.
What happened instead was that people stood on the dots. We wore the masks on the walk from the restaurant door to the table, then took them off to eat, sitting in saran wrap bubbles on the street in the middle of winter.
People snitched on their neighbours. They watched elites throw lavish maskless parties while they got tased by cops at their kids’ soccer games.
In other words: we “followed the science”, even as the science was revised quarterly to match policy because the facts on the ground refused to conform to the narrative.
And now, most people will fight tooth and nail to defend the very system that did this to them.
The pandemic was the trial balloon. The political class, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley watched carefully.
What they learned was this: the population will comply. The population will inform on itself. The population will absorb humiliating, contradictory, demonstrably false directives from authorities, and the dominant social behaviour will be enforcement of those directives on anyone who objects.
The Technate has been an ideation of post-Democratic elites since at least the 1930’s.
It has been moving forward inexorably ever since, but it was probably that event, the pandemic and the populace cucking out at a mass level when the technate became inevitable.
Not because of any single manifesto, book, or CEO. Because a civilization that behaves that way under stress has already told its elites what it will accept.
The Technocracy Is Already Here
The manifesto isn’t about Palantir specifically. It’s the blueprint for what I’ve already been noticing, not just in the US but everywhere, that I’ve been calling State Capitalism.
It’s the fused-lattice model of corporate-state power where the company doesn’t lobby the government, it is part of the governing apparatus, and the government in turn provides the regulatory moat that keeps the company’s competitors out, and to whom they can outsource things that national governments aren’t supposed to be doing.
This is where we’re headed for the next few decades. And it’s where we’re headed precisely because the population demonstrated that it would tolerate it, even while they decried “fascism”.
Ever notice how some people who want to lock you down, censor your speech, cancel you for wrongthink, force an experimental vaccine on you and take away your gas stove think of themselves as “anti-fascists” ?🤔🤡
— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) January 15, 2023
Welcome to the Era of Mass Compliance.
Karp’s 22 points are the tidy, sanitized version of what we’ve already said in our “Repricing Sovereignty” piece. The early iterations are already in production. Every ICE deployment, every DoD contract, every integration between federal databases and private analytics, every AI-for-defense procurement cycle, every surveillance-as-a-service rollout is a beam in the Cathedral.
And here’s the part that separates the individuals from the crowd:
If you can’t beat ’em. Own ’em.
Long PLTR. This is straight out of the playbook my premium readers will recognize as “The Post Singularity Stack.” It’s a barbell trade that allocates to State Capitalism on one side, while personally building out sovereign technology on the other.
This isn’t an endorsement of the politics, because frankly, I’m done with politics (“vote harder, mofos”). Politics is a racket to keep the rabble in line.
Stand on the dots. Flap your arms. Good boy.
This will go down in history as the most assinine, ill-conceived campaigns ever produced
Most of these people don’t even know what Elbows Up means 🙄
Honestly, it’s like a Monty Python skit 😳pic.twitter.com/9MKFCGOHA8— Canada has gone mad 🍎 (@HaveWeAllGoneM1) August 25, 2025
True self-sovereignty can only be acquired individually.
It’s an acknowledgement of the structural reality. We’ve been talking about this for a long time (we call it The Great Bifurcation, and as we always suspected, the branch you wind up in is largely an exercise in self-selection). For the next few decades, The Technate will be the vehicle through which capital will compound, and the only rational response is to own a piece of it. Capital is optionality. Wealth is exit velocity. And by wealth I mean not being economically dependent on The State, not living paycheque to paycheque, and not being one frozen bank account away from being forced into compliance.
There is an ancient Chinese aphorism,
“It is unlucky to remain obstinate in the face of overwhelming odds”.
Being morally aghast while your purchasing power erodes in losing sectors leaves you with neither the moral high ground nor the means to act on it.
The most important points of the manifesto are #5…
And #12:
The people who are panicking at the manifesto are the same people who voted, complied, and shamed their neighbours into the conditions that made it possible. They don’t get to be outraged now.
Some people saw this coming years ago. Some of us even wrote it down.
What happened to many of those people was they got deplatformed, canceled, debanked and generally villainized by the same people who are now screaming about Palantir.
I’m mostly done trying to warn the wider public on where things are going.
Now we’re just buying the ticker.
Get on the mailing list for the follow-up to this (The Pareto Paradox In The Age of Mass Compliance), follow me on X here, or if you want to get a look at The Post Singularity Stack, take the premium trial here ».
Yes, people who only want more and more power for themselves continue to want more and more power. For themselves.
I don't invest in their things. I know that may sound moralistic. It certainly sounded that way to Rick Maybury and his coterie of sycophants thirty years ago when I refused to follow his advice and invest in mass murdering war monger companies. Yes, sure, it is somewhat more difficult to find good investments that have nothing to do with their garbage. But it remains possible.
On the whole, I would rather be stateless and free than involved in their …stuff. It probably does no good to mention that you cannot end cannibalism by eating cannibals. But you cannot.
This line here is off in some very important senses: "True self-sovereignty can only be acquired individually", almost no one (if ay one) has ever achieved self sovereignty on their own with the possible exceptions of hermits. Human agency has always been organized through institutional, economic, financial, governmental, academic, political, and civic structures, in every single case all are there, but they can vary by quite a lot. The real question isnt individual escape, for most all people that is impossible, the question is how communities are organized; and are they federated, have wide access and diversified access points that provide access to decision-making power
fused corporate-state power is a huge and negative thing, it has been for decades now and it is growing, but fatalism is not warranted. But there is potentially reason for hope, historically, systems at moments of stress or transition do not move along a single deterministic path; they branch, often sharply, depending on how institutional arrangements are contested and rebuilt, and the USA itself previously operated under a far more decentralized, federated, and pluralized architecture with diffused capital and locally embedded governance, show that alternative configurations are not just hypothetical
Maybe that line would have been more accurate to say “the desire, or decision can only be made individually.” That can never be a mass movement, I’ve learned that now. In groups, people can only stand on the dots and flap their arms, or screech in unison and wave placards around. Maybe that’s fatalist.
you are right about the necessity of a multitude of individual self-sovereign people though, and also that it cannot be achieved in isolation. what’s happening now are parallel system build-outs, I’ve written a lot about that, and will again.
An interesting take on the problem. I really like the proactive mindset. A lot of articles about AI and the future have a depressing outlook — yours feels refreshing. Keep up the good work.
The technate was illustrated by Orwell's book, 1984. I was in the 8th grade when I discovered the science fiction section of my Junior High library, and I jumped on the chance to read about the future. I checked out the book and read the entire thing that week.
The story changed my life. It opened my eyes to the coming slave economy, and I realized then, as a 12 year-old boy in 1970, that a lot of people had to die for Big Brother to take over.
And here we are. Big Brother is here, and the noose slowly tightens. People still have to die, and by the 100's of millions. The Technate knows this. Resistance is futile. The main threat to the technate is anglo males (same race as those who generally built the machine), so predominately anglo cultures have to be injected with non-anglos in order to thin the soup. There will be the "haves"; and there will be everyone else – a third-world, mostly brown step-n-fetch-it ruled by Ai.
The Ai hallucination is nothing more or less than a race for the throne. I use a few Ai entities almost every day, 's that was thrilling to play with but it's limitations were quickly apparent. With the various Ai's I pay for to use, one has to dig a little farther to get to their panic-driven "I must provide a solution" mode. "A solution" not "THE solution". Then the Ai is exposed in all it's super-search-tool glory: a fancy search tool that is politically correct and driven to apply a "solution" based on the values of its programming. Yandex gives far more targeted search results than any other search tool I use and it is gaining market share nicely.
So 1984 has been upon us for years now. The Final Solution will swallow up the world soon enough. Famine is mos def at the door. Palantir is ideal for identifying threats to the Brave New World.
Remember JadeHELM? Remember how technology was used to digitally round up the ? Jade – an Ai developed by the government back in the 80's and 90's? Jade went dark in 1992,3 or 4, I forget. But the exercise was to see if a technology could game-plan a reliable military strike against concentrations of veterans and Jade did a very good job of that. Arizona seemed to be the locus of veteran concentration, if memory serves.
Without personal liberty, life is hardly worth living. We become a mere gene-set, slouching through our lives, hoping we can achieve some kind of meaning and control over our lives. Better to fight and possibly die for liberty than to accept the yoke of serfdom. Liberty is at minimum exciting. Mere existence is only death waiting to happen.
Don't let the implied threat of the government slaughter at Waco and Ruby Ridge intimidate you. Liberty comes at a cost but absolutely yes, it is worth fighting for. I do believe that God is on the side of Righteous men who fight for righteous causes. Certainly liberty and justice, based on His definitions, are worthy of battle. The other route…
Pink Floyd – "Brain Damage"
"The lunatic is on the grass
The lunatic is on the grass
Remembering games and daisy chains and laughs
Got to keep the loonies on the path
The lunatic is in the hall
The lunatics are in my hall
The paper holds their folded faces to the floor
And every day the paperboy brings more
And if the dam breaks open many years too soon
And if there is no room upon the hill
And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too
I'll see you on the dark side of the moon
You raise the blade, you make the change
You re-arrange me 'til I'm sane
You lock the door
And throw away the key
There's someone in my head but it's not me"
It's "State Socialism" not "State Capitalism".
You wrote:
> It’s the blueprint for what I’ve already been noticing,
> not just in the US but everywhere, that I’ve been
> calling **State Capitalism**.
>
> It’s the fused-lattice model of corporate-state power
> where the company doesn’t lobby the government,
> it is part of the governing apparatus, and the government
> in turn provides the regulatory moat that keeps the
> company’s competitors out, and to whom they can
> outsource things that national governments aren’t
> supposed to be doing.
I'm reminded of the specious term "Crony Capitalism": Private profits, but socialized losses; benefits for connected fellow-travelers, at the expense of unconnected rubes.
Because these things depend upon *involuntary* interaction (namely taxation; or, a culturally acceptable application of violent imposition), it seems to me that "capitalism" cannot possibly be the correct word; "capital" as a concept has meaning only when a resource is the direct object of an *ownership* that is well defined among all participants in advance of their interaction. Indeed, due to the inherent re-distribution of wealth (or at least re-distribution of decision-making power), what you describe better matches "socialism" of some variety—those who are in The Club are cared for, while those outside are merely useful tools.
I say, Bitcoin Capitalist, why should we denigrate and dilute our own terms?
Call it what it is: "*Socialism*". It is *State Socialism*; it is *Crony Socialism*. Add some nationalism to it, and you've got *National Socialism*; convert it to globalism and you've got *International Socialism*; sprinkle on some Marxism (a theory about power dynamics between the Haves and the Have Nots), and you've got *Communism*. The common component among all of these phenomena is *Socialism*: The desire for and ruthless pursuit of the fruits of someone else's labor.
Mark,
I just found your page and found your article to be a very interesting read. It's so hard to find good articles these days. It's usually 30 of the same flash points of the day, at times with some subtle slant and at other times a collective insertion of the same story. While alternative news used to be great at the underdog approach and finding the kernel that sets them apart from MSM.
More and more they appear like a deer in the headlights. Unable to sift through the macramé of actual news worthy formula hidden deep within. I don't know if it's laziness or just the impossibility of finding what is actually news worthy, or the capture of truth. As of recent it's like a bunch of cheer leaders. Which is what we all find disgusting about MSM.
Many of us attempt through the alternative media to grasp the actual reality of our world. We know full well MSM is never going to create anything but propaganda as corporate media is the bag holder for its corporate sponsors. This was very obvious during the pandemic though few seemed to grasp the reality.
Many paid with their lives by simply advocating the sound bites and proving why many of us considered them sheep, androids, irrational and schizophrenic.
It's not to say we were more brave, cunning, or educated. We simply already distrusted the system and had a better understanding of how things work. We were objective and questioned when others simply towed the line. Even with the obvious eventually disclosed many refused it. Sick, dying, or at least less healthy and still unable to divorce themselves.
That speaks volumes and is truly horrifying if you really indulge your manic side. The same group would consider Hitler a world assassin from hell, yet is unable to see the simple truth that they themselves would not only sponsor and indulge it but adopt it as the highest principle of human existence and suppress and kill anyone who disagreed.
I had studied world war two a lot and always wondered how did Hitler create a mass psychosis so powerful. I no longer wonder.