The Explicit Manifesto of Digital Fascism: "Palantir" and the Alliance of Monopoly Capital with the Far Right

The Explicit Manifesto of Digital Fascism: "Palantir" and the Alliance of Monopoly Capital with the Far Right

A Leftist Reading of the Palantir Technologies Manifesto

Rezgar Akrawi

The manifesto published by Palantir Technologies is neither a technical document nor an economic vision. It is an explicit political document announcing a new phase in the trajectory of digital capitalism, a phase in which it has abandoned its claim to neutrality and decided to unmask itself, revealing its full ideological face. Palantir is not an isolated case in the global technological landscape.

It is one of several major technology companies that sell their technologies to systems of repression and human rights violations, and has been condemned by international human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, for its role in enabling forced deportations, mass surveillance, and the persecution of dissidents.

Most damning of all, documented reports have revealed a direct partnership between this company, alongside other Western technology companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, and the Israeli military, providing data and targeting systems that were used in military operations on Gaza, making it an actual partner in documented war crimes against Palestinian civilians. In this regard, it does not differ in substance from other major digital capitalist companies that practice the same thing in different forms and varying degrees of openness.

It is a class declaration of a project for a digital fascist alliance that relies not on traditional violence alone, but on digital surveillance and repression, data analysis, artificial intelligence, the manipulation of public opinion, and the suppression of dissent through imperceptible yet deeply impactful methods. An alliance whose crimes do not remain within elite circles and corporate offices, but extend to battlefields and the bodies of civilians, embodied today in its clearest form in Trumpism, its alliances, its crimes, and its aggressive wars.

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From Silicon Valley to the White House: The Organic Alliance

To understand the Palantir manifesto outside its isolated context, we must summon the image of the alliance that has formed in recent years between a segment of the technological elite and the project of the extreme nationalist right. Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir and the most significant financier of Trump's political career, is not merely a businessman supporting a political candidate. He is the ideological mind that provides this project with its political logic, one who sees existing representative liberal democracy as an obstacle to the technocratic elite's project, and who has openly declared that capitalism and traditional liberal democracy are incompatible. This alliance is no accident, and no passing intersection. It is an objective convergence between two projects that share a single goal: concentrating power in the hands of a financial and political oligarchy that believes it possesses a "natural right" to govern its own societies and others.

This alliance finds its institutional expression today in what is known as the technological acceleration movement, which includes Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and others, who have begun moving in coordinated fashion with the second Trump administration. What unites them is not complete ideological alignment. What unites them is class position and shared interest: the elimination of any regulatory or democratic constraint that limits their capacity for accumulation, domination, and the expansion of control.

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The 22-Point Manifesto: A Reading of Its Class Content

Palantir published what it described as a summary of its CEO Alexander Karp's book, "The Technological Republic," amid wide global engagement and mounting political outrage that surpassed millions of views within days. But outrage must not settle for emotional reaction alone, because the manifesto is at its core a class roadmap that deserves a precise leftist reading, one that goes deeper than indignation.

The manifesto contains 22 points, constructed with deliberate architectural precision, not randomly. Some points appear moderate or humane on the surface, such as calls for tolerance toward politicians in their personal lives, or against rejoicing at an opponent's defeat. These points are neither innocent nor incidental. They are the calculated facade used to win over the hesitant reader and grant the manifesto a "balanced" image before it reveals its true face. This is what ideological studies call the structure of manufactured consent: you are given a dose of reasonable-sounding language to help you swallow the toxic dose alongside it. What appears logical in the manifesto is therefore not evidence of its balance, but additional evidence of its cunning.

All these points are deployed as cover to advance a comprehensive ideological agenda that ties all these concerns to a project of militarization, domination, and civilizational hierarchy. I will therefore focus on the points most revealing of the true class and ideological content of this project, while addressing the other concepts within the body of the text.

Point One asserts that "the engineering elite of Silicon Valley is morally obligated to participate in the defense of the nation." This moral framing is not innocent. When military and security contracting is presented as a "moral duty," social pressure becomes a mechanism for compelling engineers and programmers to serve the machinery of war and repression, and every dissenting voice within tech companies is silenced in the name of "patriotism." This is the conversion of individual conscience into a commodity in service of the military and security state and its repressive and surveillance institutions.

Point Two calls for "rebellion against the tyranny of apps," meaning the rejection of consumer technology in favor of deeper security and military systems. This is not a critique of consumer capitalism as it may appear. It is a call to redirect technological capacity toward the war and surveillance machine rather than the entertainment market.

Point Five declares that "the question is not whether AI weapons will be built; the question is who will build them." This closed deterministic logic aims to eliminate any debate about rejecting technological militarization at its roots. When the choice is framed as "us or the enemy," the possibility of saying "no to weapons altogether" is erased. It is the same logic used by Cold War administrations to silence peace movements and restrict leftist organizations, and here it returns in a digital guise.

Point Six demands that "national service be a universal duty," calling for reconsideration of the all-volunteer military in favor of mandatory conscription. This demand reveals the manifesto's classically fascist face: when the state fails to produce voluntary willingness to participate in its wars, it resorts to institutional coercion and calls it "shared responsibility." Most tellingly, the company demanding that young people offer their lives in defense of "the West" simultaneously earns billions of dollars from the war contracts in which those young people die. Duty for all, profits for the few.

Point Seventeen asserts that "Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime." This proposal appears pragmatic on the surface, but at its core it is an expansion of the powers of private security companies to bypass the role of the state and transform into an independent force of social control, operating by the logic of profit rather than the logic of law, independent judiciary, and democratic accountability.

Point Twenty demands "resistance to the pervasive intolerance of religious belief." This point does not stem from a genuine defense of freedom of belief. It is an opportunistic deployment of religious discourse to build an ideological alliance with conservative and religious currents that are most susceptible to mobilization behind war projects. History teaches us that every fascist project needed an alliance with religious institutions to lend violence a sacred character.

Point Twenty-One is the most revealing of the deep ideological dimension, when it declares that "some cultures have produced vital advances while others remain dysfunctional and regressive." This sentence is not a passing cultural opinion. It is the theoretical foundation of civilizational colonial racism that justifies domination, occupation, and the killing of peoples under the cover of "rational management of civilization." This logic does not differ fundamentally from the "white man's burden" that justified colonialism in previous centuries, and it is being reproduced today in the language of algorithms and big data. What makes it more dangerous than its predecessor is that it requires no visible colonial forces. A database and a targeting algorithm suffice.

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Trumpism as a System, Not a Person

The common mistake is to reduce Trumpism to the person of Donald Trump. Trumpism is a comprehensive class project combining national financial capital with chauvinistic nationalism and hostility toward immigrants and minorities. At its core, it is an expression of the crisis of capitalism when it can no longer reproduce the liberal illusion for its audience, so it resorts to aggressive nationalist discourse to divert attention from the real class contradictions. What the Palantir manifesto does is link digital monopoly capital to this project and supply it with the technological tools needed to transform it from electoral political discourse into an actual system of control.

The documented cooperation between Palantir and immigration authorities and security agencies in tracking and deporting migrants is a practical model of this alliance. Technology here is not used to serve "security" in any neutral sense. It is used to implement repressive and racist policies with high operational efficiency. The digital tool makes repression faster, more precise, and less in need of public justification.

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Digital Feudalism and Its Fascist Phase

As I have previously argued in my analyses of digital capitalism, we are living through the advanced phase of digital feudalism, in which large corporations monopolize digital infrastructure and impose their conditions on users, just as feudal lords once monopolized land and controlled peasants. What the Palantir manifesto reveals is that this digital feudalism is now entering its fascist phase, the phase in which capital no longer contents itself with silent economic exploitation but moves toward explicit political and ideological mobilization and control to protect its system from any popular threat.

Under digital capitalism, it is no longer only traditional manual and intellectual workers who are victims of exploitation. Every user produces daily data that is converted into raw material for the production of surplus value without compensation. Digital serfs work within systems they do not own and are subject to rules over which they have no real influence. What the manifesto adds to this picture is militarization: these same exploitative systems are now directed toward framing the human mind, waging wars, suppressing dissent, forcing deportations, and managing systems of security control.

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Algorithms of Death

The manifesto cannot be read in isolation from what is happening in contemporary wars. Documented reports have revealed that Palantir has established strategic partnerships with armies and security institutions to build targeting databases that are actually used in military operations. This is not a theoretical possibility. It is a documented daily practice: algorithms that convert human lives into data points, and data points into military targets.

In Palestine, journalistic and investigative reports have documented the use of artificial intelligence systems to build targeting lists that resulted in massacres against civilians in Gaza. In Venezuela, Iran, and other countries that Washington classifies as "threats," surveillance and data systems are used to support militarism, aggression, and wars that violate international law.

What the company calls a "smart targeting system" is in practice a machine for managing killing with industrial efficiency. Killing no longer requires a responsible human decision. It requires an algorithm, sufficient data, and a green light from an apparatus that is subject to no democratic accountability. This is the field application of what the manifesto calls "real-time decision-making capacity," where kill decisions are made instantaneously within closed technical systems.

Most importantly in this context, the use of these systems cannot be separated from the discourse that justifies classifying entire communities as backward or threatening. The crime does not begin with the bomb. It begins with the classification. When entire communities are defined as a threat, the killing and targeting of civilians becomes "security management" rather than a crime whose perpetrators must be held accountable.

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The Illusion of Technological Neutrality, Self-Surveillance and Digital Repression as Tools of Control

The danger of the model Palantir is building does not lie solely in its direct military applications. More dangerous still is what can be described as the "surveillance society," when control becomes internal rather than external. When an individual knows they are being watched at every moment and feels that every digital interaction is being recorded and analyzed, they begin to impose surveillance on themselves. They modify their speech, avoid sensitive subjects, distance themselves from radical dissenting ideas. This voluntary self-surveillance restricts and weakens leftist and progressive movements and labor organizations from within, without the need for arrests or direct restrictions.

The manifesto's call for "deep understanding of human behavior" as a condition for security is in reality a call to build a comprehensive system for disrupting collective political action before it emerges. Predicting protest behavior and dismantling it before it becomes an organized movement is the dream that security services have long pursued, and Palantir's technology is moving closer to realizing it.

Among the most prominent ideological mechanisms of the manifesto is its reliance on closed deterministic logic. "There will be no technological neutrality," "the question is not whether AI weapons will be built," "democracies cannot rely on moral discourse alone." This approach aims to convert political choices into inescapable natural facts and to eliminate any questioning of the nature of the existing system from the sphere of legitimate debate. It is the same approach used by neoliberals when they declared in the 1990s that "capitalism is the end of history." Now the same logic returns in a security formulation: there is no choice but digital militarization.

This determinism is not a neutral description of reality. It is a tactic for emptying politics of its content. When you are convinced there is no alternative, you stop searching for one. And that is the primary goal behind this language.

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The Leftist Alternative: The Question of Ownership and Collective Control

The Palantir manifesto is not merely a document from a tech company announcing its positions. It is a loud alarm bell that progressive forces must hear clearly: the battle over the future of technology is no longer lurking backstage. It has stepped into the open, announcing itself without shame. Those who delay in grasping this shift delay their entry into the most decisive arena of struggle in this century.

The fundamental question is not how technology is used. It is who owns it and who determines its objectives. Technology will not become a tool of liberation as long as it remains in the hands of digital monopolies allied with projects of the right, war, and repression. Any serious discussion must begin from the necessity of collective societal ownership of digital infrastructure, and from subjecting algorithms and artificial intelligence to genuine democratic oversight that represents the interests of working masses rather than monopolistic elites.

This requires leftist, progressive, and human rights forces to engage with the arena of technology in full seriousness as an important field of class struggle. Producing intellectual critique, however important, is not enough without building actual technological alternatives through coordination and joint work via digital internationals: social platforms free from monopoly, restriction, and repression; search tools that respect the privacy of all users; artificial intelligence systems managed in a democratic and transparent manner; and other digital applications. These are not recreational projects for the future. They are an urgent strategic necessity for any serious liberatory project.

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Necessary Addition: Technological Disarmament as a Prerequisite

Building alternatives alone is not sufficient unless paired with an organized campaign to strip these monopolies of their technological weapons. It should be noted here that Palantir is not an exceptional case or an anomaly in the technological landscape. It is the most explicit and bold expression of what many other companies practice with greater silence and softer discourse. What makes it a point of focus in this analysis is that it revealed what others are accustomed to concealing, not that it differs from them in substance. The system is one; the only exception is the degree of frankness.

Just as the historical labor movements struggled to disarm capital in factories and farms, today an equivalent struggle is necessary to wrest lethal algorithms, targeting systems, and mass surveillance from the grip of these companies collectively. This struggle takes multiple forms: boycotting their services, exposing their secret contracts with governments, prosecuting their executives before international courts on charges of complicity in war crimes, and pressuring public institutions to sever their relationships with these companies. Every government contract with this system is direct financing of the killing and deportation machine. Stopping this financial flow is the first line of confrontation.

This path cannot be completed without working simultaneously at both the domestic legislative and international levels. At the domestic level, pressure must be applied to enact strict laws requiring security technology companies to maintain full transparency in their contracts with governments, criminalizing the use of artificial intelligence systems in military targeting outside any independent judicial oversight, and compelling these companies to submit to the same accountability standards to which public institutions are subject.

At the international level, work must be done to subject these companies to international human rights conventions, particularly the Geneva Conventions prohibiting the indiscriminate targeting of civilians, the United Nations charter on the protection of personal data, and the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. A company that builds targeting databases in war zones cannot be permitted to operate outside this legal framework, and if it does, the governments that contract with it bear shared criminal responsibility. This is not a luxury reformist demand. It is the minimum required by the humanity of law in confrontation with the inhumanity of the algorithm.

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Second Addition: Exposing the Labor Silence at the Heart of the Manifesto

What is striking in the Palantir manifesto, indeed what is deeply suspicious, is that it does not mention a single word about workers, about unions, about the right to organize, about the strike. In a document that speaks of the "engineering elite," "moral duty," and "backward cultures," there is no place for the manual and intellectual workers who build these algorithms, operate them, and live under the weight of the same surveillance. This silence is not incidental. It is an implicit admission that the fascist technological project cannot face the workers' question, because workers alone, if they organize themselves, are capable of stopping the lines of death production entirely.

A general strike in Silicon Valley, or even in Palantir's own offices, is this project's nightmare. Supporting technology workers' unions and linking their struggle to a global struggle is therefore an act of resistance of the first order.

This technological struggle cannot be separated from the popular struggle on the ground. Technology is a supporting tool for the struggle, not a substitute for it. Real power remains in political, labor, and popular organization, in social movements, in international solidarity among the toiling masses of this system, whether in wars, at borders, or in workers' neighborhoods surveilled by algorithms that require no one's permission.

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Conclusion: Digital Fascism by Its True Name

The Palantir manifesto reveals clearly that we face a new form of fascism, not only in the narrow historical sense, but in its essential meaning: the alliance of monopoly capital with aggressive national political power and the deployment of violence, repression, and civilizational hierarchy to protect this alliance from any popular threat. The only difference is that the tools of this fascism today are algorithms, big data, and artificial intelligence, and this is what makes it more airtight and more difficult to resist than what preceded it.

When Alexander Karp finishes writing his philosophical manifesto in his elegant office, the algorithms his company built continue their work of identifying targets, tracking migrants at borders, building databases of dissidents around the world, and supporting the machinery of militarism and repression across the globe. Philosophy and crime are two faces of the same coin.

The struggle for social justice and liberation today passes inevitably and substantially through the struggle to liberate technology from this aggressive class alliance. This is not a technical question or an abstract ethical question. It is a political question through and through, and part of a historical struggle over who holds control over the future and human consciousness: the monopolistic minority allied with projects of killing and repression, or the working masses who must impose their authority over the tools that shape their lives and their destiny.

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Sources and References

First: Primary Source — The Palantir Manifesto

1. Palantir Technologies — The Technological Republic, in brief (Official X post, April 2026) https://x.com/PalantirTech/status/2045574398573453312

2. Karp, Alexander C. and Zamiska, Nicholas W. — The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. Crown Currency, New York, 2025. https://techrepublicbook.com/

Second: Journalistic Reports and Analyses on the Manifesto

3. Al Jazeera English — "Technofascism? Why Palantir's pro-West 'manifesto' has critics alarmed," April 21, 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/21/technofacism-why-palantirs-pro-west-manifesto-has-critics-alarmed

4. TechCrunch — "Palantir posts mini-manifesto denouncing inclusivity and 'regressive' cultures," April 19, 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/19/palantir-posts-mini-manifesto-denouncing-regressive-and-harmful-cultures

5. Engadget — "Palantir posted a manifesto that reads like the ramblings of a comic book villain," April 2026. https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/palantir-posted-a-manifesto-that-reads-like-the-ramblings-of-a-comic-book-villain-181947361.html

6. TRT World — "Internet explodes in outrage over Palantir's dystopian tech manifesto," April 2026. https://www.trtworld.com/article/e3c96555543c

7. Reason — "Palantir's new manifesto wants the military draft reinstated," April 20, 2026. https://reason.com/2026/04/20/this-big-tech-firm-wants-to-reinstate-the-draft

Third: Human Rights Reports on Palantir and Big Tech Complicity in Gaza

8. Amnesty International — Report on the global political economy enabling Israel's genocide, naming Palantir among key contributors, September 2025. https://www.democracynow.org/2025/9/18/amnesty_international

9. Truthout — "Amnesty Calls for States to Pull the Plug on Economy Backing Israel's Genocide," September 2025. https://truthout.org/articles/amnesty-calls-for-states-to-pull-the-plug-on-economy-backing-israels-genocide

10. Business and Human Rights Resource Centre — "Palantir allegedly enables Israel's AI targeting in Gaza, raising concerns over war crimes." https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/palantir-allegedly-enables-israels-ai-targeting-amid-israels-war-in-gaza-raising-concerns-over-war-crimes/

11. Business and Human Rights Resource Centre — "Amazon, Google and Microsoft fuel Israeli military aggression in Gaza, investigation reveals," February 2025. https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/amazon-google-microsoft-fuel-israeli-military-aggression-in-israels-war-on-gaza-investigation-reveals/

12. Business and Human Rights Resource Centre — "Google, Amazon and Microsoft allegedly complicit in war crimes amid Israel's war in Gaza." https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/google-amazon-microsoft-allegedly-complicit-in-war-crimes-amid-israels-war-in-gaza/

13. Business and Human Rights Resource Centre — "Google did not respond to allegations over its complicity in war crimes amid Israel's war in Gaza," April 2025. https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/google-did-not-respond-to-the-allegations-over-its-complicity-in-war-crimes-amid-israels-war-in-gaza/

14. Business and Human Rights Resource Centre — "Amazon did not respond to allegations over its complicity in war crimes amid Israel's war in Gaza," April 2025. https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/amazon-did-not-respond-to-the-allegations-over-its-complicity-in-war-crimes-amid-israels-war-in-gaza/

15. Business and Human Rights Resource Centre — "Microsoft did not respond to allegations over its complicity in war crimes amid Israel's war in Gaza," April 2025. https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/microsoft-did-not-respond-to-the-allegations-over-its-complicity-in-war-crimes-amid-israels-war-in-gaza/

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Rezgar Akrawi
Left-wing writer, researcher, and theorist of the digital left
[email protected]