Supervillain or Cicero? Why Palantir’s manifesto has such sinister vibes

Earlier this month, multibillion-dollar US tech company Palantir posted on X a summary of its chief executive Alex Karp’s recent book, the portentously titled The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.

The book and the post offer a kind of manifesto, making sweeping claims about a hierarchy of civilisations, the rejection of pluralism, Silicon Valley’s moral obligation to US military power, the necessity of AI-powered weapons, and the case for compulsory military service.

The manifesto has met widespread criticism. Some commentators have compared the rhetoric to the monologue of a comic-book villain: grand, moralising, tinged with a sense of historical destiny.

But the manifesto is more than just corporate posturing: it’s helping to construct a new geopolitical reality and normalise a worldview that concentrates power beyond democratic accountability.

From tools to worldviews

For the past two decades, large technology firms have mostly presented themselves as benevolent service providers. They build tools; governments and users decide what to do with them.

That distinction has always been convenient, but it is looking less and less tenable. For some, Karp’s manifesto offered a grim sense of confirmation of the change. As Austrian philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh put it, “reading it is like opening a food item that you suspected has gone off, but you didn’t know it was that much off”.

Palantir is not just any tech company. Its software, offering “AI-powered automation for every decision”, is embedded in military, intelligence and policing systems – not just in the United States, but in many other countries across Europe, the Middle East and Australia.

When a company in that position denounces “regressive” cultures and “hollow” pluralism, it is asserting a worldview rather than just selling technology.

As the manifesto puts it: “the ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power.” Here, “hard power” means not just military force but the technological systems that shape how force is used.

Palantir’s systems shape how threats are identified, interpreted and acted upon. So when the company advances claims about civilisational decline and the necessity of strength, it is also helping define the terms on which power is exercised.

A stakeholder letter or something older?

In one view, the manifesto is a corporate position paper or a statement of values aimed at investors, partners, the public and policymakers. But there is something older in its form.

It is reminiscent of Cicero, the Roman statesman and master of rhetoric, in its talk of decline, virtue, duty and the survival of the republic. It frames technological development not as a market activity but as a moral obligation tied to the fate of civilisation.

Like classical republican oratory, it asserts that survival depends on strength. And today, that strength is technological.

Cicero wasn’t simply expressing his own opinions when he spoke. He was asserting a right to speak on behalf of the republic. In the same way, Palantir is positioning itself as a legitimate interpreter of civilisational stakes.

The shift from argument to atmosphere

The manifesto does not argue via carefully reasoned policy claims. Instead it offers declarative statements: that some cultures are “harmful”, that pluralism has become “vacant”, that technological strength is the ultimate guarantor of civilisation. These establish a mood: urgency, decline, necessity.

The effect is to manufacture a sense of inevitability. It works via tone and framing rather than evidence, setting the background conditions under which certain policies feel necessary rather than debatable.

Once that atmosphere is in place, the range of acceptable responses shrinks. Palantir is helping to construct geopolitical realities, rather than respond to them.

Supervillain or Cicero? It’s both

Palantir’s rhetoric does bear comparison to the ranting of fictional supervillains. Both feature sweeping claims about decline and the need for decisive action.

Palantir also exempts itself from the accountability that might accompany its claims. Comic-book villains believe they see more clearly than others, but they also place themselves above constraints that apply to everyone else.

The structure of the argument feels familiar. The world is in crisis, the options are narrowing, and power must be expanded beyond normal limits.

Seen this way, the villain tone and the Cicero-like register are two expressions of the same underlying move. It is an effort to define reality at a civilisational scale, from a position that answers to no one.

An infrastructure project

This worldview did not emerge overnight. It has been developed over years through op-eds in prestige newspapers and published by major mainstream houses before being compressed into a social media thread that reached millions in hours.

When companies that build and operate core security technologies put considerable resources into developing and promoting stories about civilisation and its future, their language is not just expression. It is a kind of infrastructure for their actions in the real world.

By the time most people notice the rhetoric, the infrastructure it justifies is already in place.

But the future trajectory of this worldview is not set. The history of democratic politics is, in part, a history of people recognising when power has overreached and building the collective capacity to say so.

That work is not heroic in the comic-book sense. It doesn’t focus on a single figure or decisive moment. It starts with understanding precisely how the manufacture of inevitability works, so what is presented as necessary can be seen as a choice – before it is made for us.