Supervillain or Cicero? Why Palantir’s manifesto has such sinister vibes

By Daniel Baldino, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of Notre Dame Australia

Earlier this month, multibillion-dollar US tech company Palantir posted on X a summary of its chief executive Alex Karp’s recent book, the portentously titled The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.

The book and the post offer a kind of manifesto, making sweeping claims about a hierarchy of civilisations, the rejection of pluralism, Silicon Valley’s moral obligation to US military power, the necessity…

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