I kind of think every time a tech CEO publishes an online manifesto, they are a little bit doing it just to annoy me. That goes double for Palantir CEO Alex Karp. (The “F” in my last name is silent. Stop beclowning our shared last name, Alex!)
I have a new piece up at Tech Policy Press, discussing and dissecting Karp/Palantir’s latest manifesto. A couple key passages:
The book itself is an irredeemable mess. It is written in the rhetorical register of a peer-reviewed academic essay, without any of the argument-sharpening benefits that come from peer-review. Karp poses as a political philosopher-CEO, someone who thinks big thoughts, but the book functions as little more than a recruitment brochure for his defense tech company. The thesis of the book is, effectively, Palantir loves getting big contracts from the Department of Defense. And when you think about it, doesn’t that make Palantir kind of heroic?
in the immediate term, the gaudy techno-fascism of it all is probably the point. We saw last month with the Anthropic-Pentagon standoff what happens when defense contractors fail to adequately toe the party line. Palantir’s stock currently trades at a P/E ratio of over 230. That’s extreme meme-stock territory. Just two weeks ago, Trump praised Palantir in a Truth Social post, complete with the company’s stock ticker. That’s the clear subtext of the new manifesto: Palantir hates all the same people that the Trump administration hates, and it is eager to provide material support to its endeavors.
That, more than anything else, has been Palantir’s greatest innovation: So much of Silicon Valley has reached the conclusion that there is money to be made from American authoritarianism. Palantir reached that conclusion first, and its leaders don’t want anyone to forget it.
A few snarky comments that I left out of the piece, since I like to class it up when I write for serious outlets:
-Alex Karp looks like Taika Waititi after a three-day bender. That’s mean and petty of me to say. But if a billionaire is gonna go full mask-off fascist, then I’m gonna be a little mean and petty.
Alex Karp at the Dealbook summit. Having a normal one.
-Palantir is a real defense tech company, with significant government contracts. But it also has a price/earnings ratio of 230, which absolutely makes it a meme stock. For people wondering why Palantir would publish a garbled, authoritarian manifesto like this/right now, that seems like the answer. Expect the company to do a whole lot of “look at meeeee” shit to justify their outrageous valuation. None of that shit will age well, but memestock companies don’t worry about the medium term. They just string together absurd promises to make it through the next quarter.
-Like the Andreessen Manifesto, part of what Karp and Palantir are doing here is telling potentially employees “this is the party line that you have to believe if you want to work here.” It’s garbage writing, and garbage thinking. But there’s also power in it. This is all a downstream consequence of giving some of the worst people in the world access to practically unlimited capital.
Anyway, the point is that Alex Karp is the worst, and we should cyberbully him into changing his last name. Here’s a link to the Tech Policy Press piece, which has more substantive analysis and insights:
