The Fog Machine at Palantir

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Published: https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/the-fog-machine-at-palantir

Palantir

US defence contractor Palantir recently published a twenty-two point list, drawn from a book co-authored by its CEO Alex Karp and his head of corporate affairs Nicholas Zamiska. Reactions have ranged from "technofascism, pure" (Cas Mudde, one of the world's leading scholars of the European far right) to "if evil could tweet, this is what it would tweet" (Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister). A column on RT, the Russian state broadcaster, simply labelled the points "Mein AI".

The reactions are loud, but the document itself is curiously quiet. Twenty-two numbered items, each orbiting a sentiment without quite committing to a position, written in a voice that aspires to gravitas and arrives at grievance. Mood, not policy.

What was Alex Karp really hoping to convey?

"The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray"

The numbered list of theses is normally the form that forces intellectuals into clarity. Luther nailed ninety-five of them to a church door, not ninety-five impressions. The American Declaration of Independence is a four-minute read. Marx and Engels wrote a pamphlet you could finish on a tram ride. Each item in such a list is meant to be acceptable or rejectable on its own terms.

Karp is writing in the lineage of the HP Way and "Don't be evil" rather than Luther's, and corporate manifestos rarely manage that kind of clarity. But even by the forgiving standards of the form, his twenty-two points are unusually evasive. They function more like a sermon than a list. And once that is noticed, the question changes.

It is no longer "what is Karp saying?"

It is "why is he saying it this way?"

The philosopher in the valley

The formative intellectual experience of Alex Karp was neither technical nor American. His undergraduate degree, from Haverford, was in philosophy. His law degree is from Stanford, where he met Peter Thiel, the contrarian billionaire investor who would later co-found Palantir. After that, Karp spent roughly a decade in Frankfurt, earning a doctorate in what he calls neoclassical social theory.

As Moira Weigel first showed in her 2020 essay on Karp's intellectual formation, his 2002 dissertation, "Aggression in der Lebenswelt", written in German, extends the Frankfurt School's critique of "jargon" — a particular kind of public speech that formally affirms a society's official norms while smuggling through the forbidden wishes those norms exist to suppress, serving as a coded beacon for like-minded persons in search of a community.

Karp wrote his doctorate on the very rhetorical device he now deploys as CEO of a defence contractor worth over $330 billion.

"Hard power in this century will be built on software"

Karp is the philosopher at Palantir, not the technologist. From the very founding, his role has been to function as the company's cultural and commercial face — winning over governments, recruiting engineers who might otherwise choose not to build machines of destruction, and articulating how all of this is morally grounded work. The twenty-two points are not the bullet points of an American chief executive. They read as the prose of a German social theorist who has read Adorno on jargon and decided to use the technique rather than expose it.

Karp is not failing to be clear. He is succeeding at something else. The reader is not supposed to parse the argument, but to feel its mood.

What the fog accomplishes

Not every point is evasive. Point twenty-one's claim that "some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive" leaves little room for misreading, and the call to rearm Germany and Japan is unambiguous. The strategy works through the combination: blunt provocations draw the eye, while operationally consequential claims hide in fog.

Here is what that fog accomplishes.

Plausible deniability. A clear version of point five — the one about who builds AI weapons and why — would have to say that Palantir believes the United States and Israel are justified in striking Iran's nuclear programme, in targeting Iran's political and military leadership, and in striking civilian infrastructure, and that Palantir's software is widely reported to have contributed materially to those operations. But stating this plainly would expose Palantir to legal, diplomatic and reputational consequences in jurisdictions where wars of aggression are considered illegal.

"The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose"

Karp and Palantir can nod at the position without owning it. If asked later, he can say he was just speaking abstractly. The same mechanism operates at point seven, on better software for soldiers; at point seventeen, on Silicon Valley addressing violent crime; and at point fifteen, on rearming Germany and Japan. Each is adjacent to a specific operational commitment that the document never openly embraces.

Coalition-building. Palantir's diverse audiences do not naturally agree with one another. Engineers wary of working on weapons need to hear that their company holds the moral high ground. National-security conservatives need to hear that the West must recover its nerve. Religious traditionalists need to hear that elite secularism is corrosive. Disaffected liberals need to hear that they are still liberals, albeit serious ones. The Ayn Rand crowd needs to hear that ambition is being unfairly punished.

A more precise message to any one of these groups would cost Karp on the others. Vagueness lets each audience hear what it wants and supply the missing precision in its own preferred direction. This is the rhetorical structure of coalition-building, and it depends on imprecision the way a wall depends on mortar.

Mood over argument. Points nine, ten, eleven, eighteen, and nineteen are not arguments at all. They are atmospheric claims about contemporary public life: shallow, cruel, hostile to seriousness, driving capable people away. Point nineteen — "the caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive; those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all" — does not commit to anything one could agree or disagree with. It just sets a tone.

Once the mood is accepted, the harder claims arrive in a context already prepared. The reader who would not have accepted the position that some cultures are simply regressive has by then been softened by a dozen smaller agreements about the texture of the present.

Dodging falsification. Specific predictions can be wrong, and being wrong has costs. Point twelve — the atomic age is ending, a new era of deterrence built on AI is set to begin — cannot be falsified, because no specific prediction has been made. Vague claims age better than precise ones, and a man who expects to be quoted for decades has good reason to write claims that cannot be wrong because they are not specific enough to be either right or wrong.

Shifting the burden of interpretation onto critics. The only way to charge a vague claim is to first make it more concrete — and Palantir's critics have accordingly been forced into attacking positions of their own construction, rather than what Karp himself has committed to. Unclarity also flatters the reader patient enough to decode it, making the reader a co-author of whatever meaning they supply.

Power without accountability emerges as the unifying principle. The art of influencing important debates without being pinned to specific positions. A coalition of incompatible allies held together by what is not said. A worldview that survives pretty much any outcome. A document that cannot be refuted because it has not made itself precise enough to be charged with anything in particular.

This is precisely the rhetorical structure Karp's dissertation described: speech that affirms public norms while smuggling forbidden wishes past them, binding members of a community through what they recognise without having to say. The dissertation diagnosed it as a symptom. The manifesto deploys it as a method.

Two hats

A philosopher writing in his study can be as elliptical as he likes. The cost of his obscurity falls mostly on himself, in the form of being misunderstood or ignored by readers who lack the patience to decode him.

The words of a CEO, on the other hand — Alex Karp at Palantir in this instance — attach to governments, concern military and intelligence operations, and software involved in determining who lives and dies. They attach to shareholders. And they attach to a public whose taxes fund it all.

Karp wants to wear both hats at once: the philosopher's freedom to gesture without committing, and the CEO's power to act on what the gestures imply.

Watching Karp perform in interviews — because that is what he is doing, performing — is to witness an enfant terrible uncomfortable with the consequences of adulthood, carefully avoiding any real rapport with his audience.

In a democracy, understanding how a government partner at this scale and of such political reach actually views the world is not idle curiosity — it is foundational.

Alex Karp runs a corporation whose software is being used, right now, in hot wars, in anger, on actual human beings. His decisions help shape procurement worth tens of billions of dollars of public money. He is increasingly a political figure in his own right, not merely a commercial one. He has clearly embraced a worldview centred on American power. In that position, clarity is not a stylistic preference. It is part of the social contract between him and the public his company answers to. Karp could have been clear. He chose not to be.

Because we get asked a lot.

The Technological Republic, in brief.

1. 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.

2. We must rebel…
— Palantir (@PalantirTech) April 18, 2026

Apr 18

Because we get asked a lot.

The Technological Republic, in brief.

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.
We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.
Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.
The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. 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.
The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.
National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.
If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.
Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.
We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.
The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. 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.
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.
The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.
No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.
American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.
The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.
We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.
Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.
The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.
The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.
The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. 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.
Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.
We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Excerpts from the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska