Built to Dominate
Palantir is designing the infrastructure of repression—and telling us why.
Alberto Toscano
A new recruitment campaign cropped up on elite U.S. college campuses this April. 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.
In this version of tech nationalism, making America great again translates to a drive for domination against foreign adversaries, certainly, but also against “woke capital,” effeminate consumerism and a university system dedicated to social justice and diversity. (Palantir’s posters were released in tandem with a new initiative wooing talented high schoolers to “skip the indoctrination” of higher education in favor of a four-month Palantir fellowship.)
Palantir has solid reasons to undertake a recruitment spree. Though critics gloated when its stocks briefly plummeted after the Trump administration’s tariff announcements, they have since surged to three times their value at the time of November’s presidential election. And the company’s knack for cultivating high-level connections among national security personnel has netted a bonanza of government contracts related to President Donald Trump’s accelerating authoritarianism.
Already, Palantir has partnered with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the AI and robotics contractor Anduril to begin building Trump’s “Golden Dome” — a U.S. version of Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system. It’s also working with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to create an application programming interface that will allow Homeland Security to comb through IRS data to find undocumented taxpayers to deport.
In April, Palantir, which has long enjoyed partnerships with military, police and border enforcement, won a $29.8 million contract with ICE to enhance its dystopian “Immigration Lifecycle Operating System,” providing granular information about immigrants the government seeks to monitor, detain and expel. And the company is set to overhaul ICE’s Investigative Case Management system to better track target “populations” across hundreds of data categories, from eye color and tattoos to employment address and Social Security number. 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.”
Palantir’s work in fascist R&D doesn’t stop at the U.S. borders; the company and Karp have trumpeted their ideological and material support for Israel as it carries out its genocide in Gaza. At an extraordinary January 2024 board meeting in Tel Aviv, the company touted its strategic partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Defense, providing it with battle tech, possibly including its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which purportedly uses AI chatbots for real-time war zone decision-making. And Palantir’s leadership has made clear that its understanding of Western supremacy means the intransigent defense of Zionism abroad as much as far-right nationalism at home.
Through all this, Palantir has come to exemplify the tech industry’s embrace of authoritarian nationalism far more than Musk’s Nazi salutes, tabloid-fodder pronatalism and “dark MAGA” trolling. 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.
Less than a month after Trump resumed office, Karp released his new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, a weird and prolix mash-up of neoconservative tract and company brochure. At its core is a tech-world twist on familiar right-wing laments: that “woke” liberal elites, student protesters and even scholars like Edward Said have “emasculated” the West and sapped its technological dynamism just as it faces an AI revolution and emergent Chinese hegemony. But behind all the boilerplate culture-war rhetoric, it’s not hard to discern Karp’s anger at the organized resistance of tech workers — through campaigns like #NoTechForIce or Tech Workers Coalition—to the project of building fascism’s toolbox. Here, ideology is indistinguishable from a sales pitch.
Palantir profits not just from the way that fear — of migrants, AI or coming wars fought by drone swarms — opens government purse strings; it profits from the mere hype around its dystopian business model, promising to fuse data analysis and state violence. The company’s market capitalization has shot up more than fivefold in the past year — currently more than $290 billion — far outstripping its growth in revenue. That gap is filled by speculation about the future — a future Palantir casts as a toss-up between U.S. supremacy and Chinese domination.
Behind all of Karp’s complaints about a Western crisis of “belief,” what he really wants us to believe in is Palantir: a shiny new interface for the very old business of racism, repression and war.
ALBERTO TOSCANO is the author of Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (Verso) and Terms of Disorder: Keywords for an Interregnum (Seagull). He lives in Vancouver.
