A number of tech billionaires have released manifestos. Palantir CEO Alex Karp is in a strong position to make his a reality.
Ryan Ward || This week Palantir CEO Alex Karp set off a firestorm when he released his tech manifesto on Twitter. The post was actually a 22-point summary of his book from last year entitled The Technological Republic. I haven’t read Karp’s book. I may get around to it. I don’t have much time to hate-read stuff these days.
There have been plenty of tech billionaires who have posted some sort of manifesto. Before Karp, the most recent one that made a bit of a splash was from Marc Andreessen. These things are usually taken much more seriously than they should be, as is everything said by tech billionaires. They are usually a blend of transhumanism mixed with either allusions to, or outright lionizing of historical fascists and a healthy helping of libertarian moralism. It’s too bad that we live in a world where the mostly junior high Reddit-level ramblings of these guys has to be taken seriously. What all of this stuff amounts to, in the end, is an attempt to dress up a ruthless capitalist system in some sort of philosophical and moral justification.
Like clockwork, people started dissecting Karp’s manifesto. The pieces on Substack and in the media have been flowing. I’m not really interested in dissecting or trying to trace the philosophical or sociological underpinnings of Karp’s manifesto or the psychological schemas that make him the way he is. I think Black Lodges has the most useful diagnostic analysis of the bigger picture meaning of Karp’s manifesto here.
My position is that Karp represents a particularly dangerous brand of fascism. Not because of his ideas, because his ideas are a dime a dozen for any tech bro that considers themselves deep a.k.a. Curtis Yarvin. No, Karp is dangerous because he represents true fascism, which is the fusion of corporate and state power in the service of capital. Most discussions of fascism, especially in recent years, have focused on whether Trump or some other rightwing politician like Nigel Farage are actually fascists or just authoritarians. These discussions focus on ideological definitions of fascism. Nationalism, racism, Christian fundamentalism, and others are thought to be important ingredients in the recipe. And if one or more is missing, well then we just aren’t looking at fascism folks.
But these discussions miss the point. Of course fascism looks different in different places. But the thread that runs through all brands of it is the fusion of state and corporate power in the service of propping up the ruling class during periods of unrest. As an instrument of class rule, the state will always turn to fascism when the ruling class is threatened, and corporations will lend their assistance to preserve their profits and freedom to exploit. Fascism is less an ideological stance than a functional strategy taken when capitalism is in crisis.
So Karp is a fascist, but his manifesto comes at a time where his company has been integrated into large sections of the US federal government. This reality makes his ramblings about fighting to preserve the West and making sure that American hard power is superior in the world all the more terrifying. In short, Karp finds himself in the position which most tech billionaire fascists want to be in, which is on the verge of having the means to make his vision a reality.
To understand just how enmeshed Palantir is in the US government, we can take a look at their contracts. Lots of media stories have covered this over the years, especially since the beginning of the second Trump administration which saw a flurry of contracts with the company. Much of this coverage has been on the surveillance capabilities that Palantir offers to the government. The company specializes in developing software that collates and aggregates data across a large number of sources into a single, useable interface for making decisions and executing (often literally) them. So by that rubric, it’s not just the fact that Palantir software is being used by a lot of departments within the federal government that should be of concern, but how that data will be aggregated and manipulated and for what purpose.
And this purpose can be pretty much summed up under the umbrella “the worst shit imaginable”. If you don’t know the kind of stuff Palantir is being used for you’ve probably been living under a rock. There’s oodles out there on this, I covered a bit of its more insidious military applications recently in this post. I’m not going to discuss it any more here.
What I want to do here is to give a quick and dirty rundown of just how embedded Palantir is in the US government. Luckily for us, all US government contracts are public and searchable on USAspending.gov. A search for Palantir brings up two entities, Palantir Technologies Inc and Palantir USG Inc. Palantir Technologies Inc is the parent company, and Palantir USG Inc is a subsidiary that was created to specifically handle business with the US government. This is a common practice by companies that transact a significant amount of business with the government and allows them more legal flexibility and opportunity to secure contracts through both companies.
A search for all contracts since 2008, the earliest date available, indicates that there are a total of 392 contracts. Palantir Technologies Inc has had a total of 146 contracts worth $338.3 million while Palantir USG has had 140 contracts worth $866.5 million. The two figures below show both the dollar amount and the number of new contracts each year for both entities. The top figure shows the data from Palantir Technologies Inc and the bottom shows the data from Palantir USG Inc.
What is immediately obvious is the difference in the distributions of both the dollar amounts (bars) and the new contracts (lines; keep in mind that FY 2026 is not complete, so we can ignore those data). Palantir Technologies has had a rise in new contracts up until 2015, after which there was a drop, followed by a rise again since 2021. The dollar amounts for contracts has been on a steady increase since 2008. Contrast this to the data from Palantir USG. This company had very few contracts until 2020, after which there was a slight bump, followed by a large increase over the next four years with the number of new contracts doubling each year from 2022 to 2025.
As I said above, Palantir Tech is the parent company, and Palantir USG is the subsidiary set up for US government contracts. What is also clear is that Palantir USG also handles significantly more high-dollar business with the government than Palantir Tech, more than doubling the dollar amount of the contracts. When you look a bit further into who in the government is doing business with both entities, we can start to make sense of where the money is going.
The following tables show the contracting department, the dollar amount, and the percentage of total spending for each Palantir entity. Again, top is for Palantir Technologies and bottom for Palantir USG.
For Palantir Tech, the number one contractor is the Department of Agriculture, at 28.84% and $97.58 million, with the Department of Homeland Security second at 24.1% and $81.54 million. For Palantir USG 92.8% of the entire contract amount at $804.11 million was spent by the Department of Defense, with the second department at only 6.05% and $52.41 million.
Those interested can comb through the individual contracts for details, but suffice it to say that Palantir is well and truly embedded within the US government. Even the dollar amounts and number of contracts do not totally do justice to the scale of the involvement that Palantir now has across branches of government. The company’s involvement in US government is to break down the barriers between data use and transfer between government agencies, eventually consolidating data from all branches of government into a single analyzable and actionable platform. Their involvement has corresponded with Executive Order 14243 signed by Trump on March 20, 2025 entitled “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos.” This order is framed as being to stop wasteful government spending and bureaucracy but in reality what it will do is to force data sharing across government departments and even from state databases to the federal government. Palantir programs like Gotham and Foundry can then be used to aggregate, synthesize, visualize, and action government priorities in close to real time.
So what does Karp’s manifesto actually mean? In style and substance, it is not too dissimilar to those that have come before. The difference here is that Karp is actively calling on tech companies to help the US government in their project of imperial hegemony. And this call is not coming from someone outside of the machine of government. Rather, this is a statement of purpose and strategy from a company that on a very real level has provided the tech that the government runs on. And the tech itself isn’t the problem. The problem is the people who are using it. And Palantir represents the fusion of corporate and government power in the service of the ruling class in a way and with a sophistication that we haven’t seen before. That’s the real danger.
The only way to fight effectively is to organize alternative systems and structures of power outside of those that are subject to Palantir’s ever-expanding gaze and to participate in politics that push for a toppling of the capitalist system, rather than advocating for a more humane capitalism. The ruling class is continually showing us that they are willing to sacrifice us all for their accumulation of profit. Karp and his technofascist friends are both a symptom of this system and the machinery that makes its continuation possible. We know what to do with capitalist machinery.
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