As if the current authoritarian technological dystopia wasn’t bad enough, someone had to go out and say most of the evil bits out loud.

Palantir, the tech company that helps spread surveillance tech across private companies and governments, laid out a 22-point summary of the 2025 book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.

The book, written by Palantir chief executive Alex Karp and corporate affairs head Nicholas Zamiska, and this X summary have apparently been likened to a Palantir recruiting tool. The X post, meanwhile, attempts to sum up the post and, by extension, what’s inside Karp and Zamiska’s heads.

It seems like a good time to dissect this summary for all the ills it tries to pursue, especially if Karp and Zamiska and whoever published this post on Palantir’s X account want to push such thoughts out into the internet uncontested.

What’s Palantir?

Palantir Technologies is an American tech company that basically sells defense and intelligence software. The software it peddles to governments and the commercial sector is varied, but essentially is meant for data analysis. Governments can use Palantir’s suite of offerings to sift through data they have on Americans and any other people they have information on while corporate accounts can do similarly with whatever data they have aggregated.

The US defense department, for its part, adopted Palantir’s Maven artificial intelligence system as a core military system in March.

The criticisms against Palantir are many, with detractors accusing it of expanding government surveillance and artificial intelligence use for military purposes, and with helping US Immigration and Customs Enforcement deport undocumented immigrants because of their software and surveillance.

A bunch of horrid points

The 22-point summary on X tries to outline the points of The Technological Republic in a way that might make people want to buy the book or, heaven forbid, apply to Palantir because of their leanings.

Point 1 argues that “Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.”

Tech businesses should advance the interests of the United States (and of western civilization) because, according to point 13 of the Palantir post, “No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than the United States.”

According to points 4 and 21, soft power needs hard power — in this case the artificial intelligence and other software developments of Palantir — to succeed as non-western civilizations are inferior and treated as an ideological other.

It adds, through points 5, 7, and 12, that the development of AI and other software to fight this “other” is a given and should be focused on shoring up Western civilization because, as per point 11, “Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.”

It can be argued that point 11 can be interpreted in light of the other parts of the Palantir post as “fighting among civilizations is inevitable, and will not stop unless one civilization wins it all.”

There are other points in here that beg discussion — such as point 15 saying the “postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone” because the “defanging of Germany was an overcorrection” and continued Japanese pacifism will “threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia” — but the overall tone is mostly the same for the Palantir post (and presumably, the book it’s based off of) and veers dangerously close into fascist rhetoric.

Warmongering for profit

Entrepreneur and geopolitical commentator Arnaud Bertrand called the screed and its 22 points a dangerous “ideological agenda” couched in a crappy assumptive argument.

“It all rests on a pretty massive assumption: that coexistence is impossible. Why would ‘free and democratic societies’ (by which they obviously mean Western-style liberal-democracies) need to ‘prevail’? Why can’t they simply coexist with other civilizations or political systems out there?” Bertrand asks.

Bertrand added, “The problem, in other words, has almost always been exactly the worldview Palantir is now selling. Their manifesto isn’t warning against the cause of some of the worst periods in history: it’s arguing for reviving them!”

Eliot Higgins, the founder of investigation outfit Bellingcat, also posted his take on Bluesky analyzing the post from the democratic lens of verification, deliberation, and accountability. In other words, can people establish shared facts, reason together about what they mean, and hold power to account?

In Higgins’ analysis, “Healthy accountability is triggered by evidence, points upward at power, and happens in public. Disordered accountability protects insiders and aims its punishment outward.” Palantir’s post argues for the second item while calling it the first.

An Al Jazeera report added that Mark Coeckelbergh, a Belgian philosopher of technology at the University of Vienna, called the post an “example of technofascism.”

Further, Greek economist and former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis weighed in, saying the Palantir post signaled a willingness “to add to nuclear Armageddon the AI-driven threat to humanity’s existence.”

To not belabor the point, the argument of Palantir is phrased in a way that puts conflict as inevitable because that’s what they make money from. The Palantir post is an advertisement by a company that profits from war and conflict to convince people that war and conflict are inevitable and, if you’re on Palantir’s side, even downright advisable.

It’s an ideological post framed as a business ethos that I hope bites them back because, as Bertrand also noted, “A state that outsources its threat assessment to a company with an explicit ideological agenda is not gathering intelligence, it is essentially subscribing to propaganda.”

Governments would at the very least be better served by fostering peace and coexistence, serving the people by providing better opportunities for advancement and progress, and as evidenced by Palantir’s ideological agenda, not using Palantir because of its inherent problematic nature from a security (and dare I say moral) mindset. – Rappler.com

A mirror of the 22-point summary is available here.