At schools like Cornell and UPenn, bus stop posters on a stark black background led with an ominous warning— “A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West” — before charging that most tech companies fail to consider “national purpose” when deciding “what ought to be built.” By contrast, Palantir, the data-analysis defense contractor behind the posters, declared it doesn’t just build tech products “to ensure America’s future,” but “to dominate.” The ads’ implicit message echoes the conviction of Palantir’s leadership, including founder Peter Thiel and CEO Alex Karp, that Silicon Valley’s true mandate is cementing U.S. and Western military supremacy — a reactionary nostalgia for the Cold War fusion of state, engineering and capital. Some former employees, alarmed at the company’s work advancing Trump’s repressive agenda, recently published an open letter, “The Scouring of the Shire,” warning that Palantir — and Big Tech more broadly — is “normalizing authoritarianism under the guise of a ‘revolution’ led by oligarchs.” As technology scholar Jathan Sadowski writes, “From inception, Palantir’s purpose has been to provide…the ‘ontology layer’ of fascism — helping to give its ideological goals a material reality.” In other words, Palantir is creating digital infrastructure for the multiple forms of state violence and control that contemporary authoritarianism relies on, from the software facilitating mass deportations to the AI wielded in wars against colonized people.
Author: Alberto Toscano
Published at: 2025-06-04 22:00:00
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