On Palantirism

Abstract

This article develops the concept Palantirism to name the philosophical and ideological formation that underwrites and legitimates the operations of Palantir Technologies. Taking as its occasion a 22-point manifesto posted to Palantir’s corporate account in April 2026, it reads the document not as corporate communication but as the public arrival of a philosophical project several decades in the making. That project is unusually legible: co-founder Peter Thiel and CEO Alex Karp share a Stanford training in philosophy, and Karp holds a doctorate in social theory from Frankfurt; the firm’s intellectual genealogy runs through mid-century political theology, civilisational decline thinking and neoreaction (NRx). Working within the zemiological tradition, the article argues that Palantir’s harms are not those of a rogue actor but of a firm and state constituting one another, producing harm jointly through shared infrastructure. Three analytical claims follow. First, the manifesto’s 22 points do three kinds of ideological work: diagnosing civilisational crisis, protecting the powerful from accountability and recruiting a broader coalition. Second, the formation’s gender politics are constitutive rather than incidental: the intellectual lineage requires masculinism to function, and the manifesto reproduces that requirement in its central warrior-builder figure. Third, the formation’s eschatological register – most explicit in Thiel’s Antichrist Lectures and in point 20 of the manifesto – converts political contestation into cosmic struggle, recasting those who resist as enemies of the good.