Mad tech bosses must be stopped
“Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.” So where else to look? “The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.”
After all, “Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive”, and among them “no other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than [the US]” and “the ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.”
That means “If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software”, but it also means that “National Service should be a universal duty”. After all, “The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose.”
In all of this, it is important that “Public servants need not be our priests” because “We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act”, which basically means a three-paragraph hagiography to Elon Musk.
The “neutering” of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan after the war was an “over-correction” and should be reversed, crime fighting largely privatised, and we've got to stop accountability because “The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service.” Their ability to say anything they want is crucial because “Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.”
In the end, “We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism”, which, if you read on, means defining the US and the West as a white, Christian realm.
Elsewhere, we learn why; this whole process will “disrupt [the power of] highly educated, often female voters who vote mostly Democrat [and instead empower] vocationally trained, working-class, often male, working-class voters.”
The question is simple: would you give these political extremists all your most sensitive data? Because we are doing so just now. Everything above comes from a 'manifesto' published online yesterday by Palantir. It, in turn, is taken from a book written by Palantir CEO Alex Karp called The Technological Republic, which contains page after page of this material.
This has quite accurately been described as “the ramblings of a super-villain” and “ a parody of a RoboCop film”. It is a detailed manifesto for the universal militarisation of our societies, a return to imperial militaristic hard power, a racial, ethnic and cultural ordering of the world – all built on AI state surveillance of citizens.
It is a dystopian vision which flirts with the darkest trends of the 20th century and makes an unashamed plea for an elite ruling class set free from the constraints that are faced by ordinary people.
And the UK Government is currently paying them half a billion pounds to provide services for the police, the military, the NHS and is about to be given access to a massive cache of the most sensitive financial data in the country via a deal with the Financial Conduct Authority.
This is all being driven by the UK Labour Government and its intense closeness to the Tony Blair Institute, which in turn is the key player in Britain, along with Palantir, in driving this vision of AI surveillance and control in UK public policy. Tony Blair wants to create a repressive state of constant citizen surveillance and control in part using Palantir tools – and the Starmer administration is delivering.
It must be stopped. This is very clearly a national security risk and, at times, seems to flirt with something that looks somewhat like treason towards Britain. Palantir is an extremist organisation with a political agenda and, as such, should be locked out of Britain.
Then again, the above manifesto is tame in comparison to the views of Palantir's founder, Peter Thiel. He has been undertaking a tour in which he gives rambling lectures on his ongoing personal battle to bring down the antichrist. He does not treat this metaphorically; he believes state regulation is explicitly the work of the devil. Remarkably, we trust this group of people with anything.