Palantir: Not Supervillains
A Ten-Point Rebuttal to the Palantir Manifesto
by Floyd Webb
Issued April 28, 2026 — Chicago
In the tradition of those who built without permissionand resisted without apology
Opening Frame
Earlier this month, Palantir Technologies circulated a 22-point manifesto summarizing arguments from The Technological Republic, a 2025 book by its CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska. The document outlines a pro-Western, hard-power vision in which technology companies are not peripheral to the state but central to its military, surveillance, and strategic capacities.
Critics have described the document in apocalyptic terms, while supporters frame it as a necessary call for technological patriotism. Both responses overstate the case.
The language of “supervillains” belongs to fiction. It converts power into spectacle and replaces analysis with narrative. We reject it. We do not live in a comic book world. We live in a world where decisions made by corporations and governments shape real lives in material ways. To describe these actors as mythic is to obscure their accountability—and, in doing so, to quietly affirm the scale of their power.
It is something more familiar than that: a statement of belief, written by people operating from within a particular history, about what power is and how it should be used.
This is a response.
We speak from Chicago—not as metaphor, but as method. From a city built by those excluded from the nation’s promises and sustained by traditions of organizing that were never meant to survive, let alone scale.
I write in my own voice, but I use “we” to name a shared history and a set of practices I am part of—not to claim representation, but to locate the ground from which this argument is made.
Our legacy is not silence. It is resistance that adapts.
Our organizing does not disappear. It evolves.
Point One: On Who Is Owed
They say Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the nation that made its rise possible. We accept the framework of debt, but we reject their accounting.
The nation was not built by Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley was built on land taken by force, maintained by labor extracted by force, and defended by bodies conscripted by force—disproportionately the bodies of people this manifesto classifies as “middling,” “regressive,” and “harmful.”
Federal policy excluded Black Americans from the postwar wealth accumulation that funded Silicon Valley’s suburbs, while the GI Bill’s benefits were often denied to Black veterans by local administration and the research universities that produced the engineering elite remained legally segregated until forced open.
We did not receive the government–private sector partnerships that built satellites and pharmaceuticals. We received the partnerships that built prisons, surveillance systems, and early predictive policing infrastructures—tested in American cities, including Chicago, often without the knowledge of those being mapped.
The debt does not run from the people to the state.
It runs the other way.
“The debt does not run from the people to the state. It runs the other way.”
Point Two: On Hard Power
They celebrate hard power as the guarantor of Western democracy, but the historical record tells a different story.
Iran, 1953. Guatemala, 1954. Congo, 1961. Chile, 1973. These are not distant events; their consequences remain active in the present, shaping instability, displacement, and migration now treated as threats to be managed.
Calls to rearm former imperial powers in the name of stability ignore the historical conditions that made such rearmament necessary in the first place.
History does not begin at the moment of the threat—it begins at the moment of the wound.
We have read the documents. We know what hard power does when turned inward, and we know what it did to Fred Hampton, killed at 21 years old after organizing free breakfast programs and building multiracial coalitions the FBI deemed dangerous.
Hard power has rarely protected the people this manifesto does not see.
It has disciplined them.
Point Three: On What Surveillance Did Not Prevent
They build systems of total awareness and call it security, but the record of that security is uneven at best.
Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. were all under surveillance; in King’s case, that surveillance extended into active efforts to undermine and discredit him, while in Malcolm’s, infiltration shaped the environment in which he was killed. Fred Hampton and Mark Clark followed, casualties of a state that understood organization as threat.
Beyond the United States, the pattern repeats: Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, and Steve Biko in South Africa were all engaged not in destruction, but in construction—of movements, institutions, and futures.
These were not architects of violence. They were architects of possibility.
The question is not whether surveillance exists, but whom it serves—and whom it is prepared to turn against.
Because it always turns.
“The question is not whether surveillance exists, but whom it serves—and whom it is prepared to turn against.”
Point Four: On “Middling” Cultures
They describe certain cultures as middling, regressive, and harmful, but decline to name them. We will.
The Mali Empire sustained one of the largest economies of the fourteenth century, while Timbuktu housed scholarship in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and law well before Europe’s consolidation into modern states. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy developed systems of federated governance that influenced early American political thought, acknowledged even by Benjamin Franklin.
The democracy this manifesto claims to defend borrowed from people it later attempted to erase.
Culturally, the pattern continues. Entire global forms—Jazz, Blues, Rock and Roll, Hip Hop—emerged from communities excluded from the systems that later monetized them.
We are among the most studied and imitated cultural forces in the nation’s history.
What has been middling is not the culture.
It is the imagination applied to it.
Point Five: On Formation
Formation is not destiny, but it is architecture. It shapes what problems look like before they are named, what risks feel urgent before they are quantified, and what solutions appear inevitable before they are chosen.
Alex Karp’s intellectual formation occurred in Germany, in proximity to a tradition that spent decades examining how rational systems—classification, bureaucracy, procedural neutrality—can become instruments of domination without requiring explicit intent. That tradition’s central insight is that systems optimize, and what they optimize for is rarely what their designers believed.
Peter Thiel’s formative years in southern Africa unfolded within administrative structures organized around population classification, where categories determined movement, access, and life outcomes. In later writings and interviews, he has described the collapse of those systems less as liberation than as disorder—a framing that reveals as much about formation as it does about politics.
Formation does not determine outcome, but it shapes perception. It defines what feels like risk, what feels like order, and what kinds of control appear reasonable.
A company built to map, track, and analyze populations does not emerge in abstraction.
It emerges from history.
Point Six: On the Draft
They invoke calls to reinstate the draft as a mechanism of national cohesion, but we remember what that argument meant.
In 2003, draft proposals were introduced not to expand war but to constrain it, ensuring that those who decide on war share in its consequences. That was an argument about accountability.
This is something else.
This is logistics.
The difference is structural. One model distributes risk upward to restrain power. The other distributes bodies downward to sustain it. One raises the cost of war to those who decide. The other guarantees supply regardless of consequence.
That is not cohesion.
It is throughput.
Somewhere right now there is a seventeen-year-old who has made two hundred films on an outdated device before any institution recognized him.
This manifesto looks at him and sees a body not yet allocated.
We see a future not yet constrained.
Point Seven: On AI and the Warnings We Ignored
They describe AI militarization as inevitability, but inevitability is often a narrative applied after decisions have already been made.
The argument from adversarial parity—that China is building, therefore we must—is structurally identical to the security dilemma that drove the nuclear arms race.
This is not a new argument.
It is an old trap wearing new infrastructure.
As systems scale, the logic of the system overrides the intentions of its builders. The human becomes a variable to be managed rather than the purpose to be served.
The question is not whether such systems can be built.
It is whether they remain accountable once they are.
History suggests otherwise.
Point Eight: On What the Apps Built
They argue that Silicon Valley built distraction instead of defense, but the distinction is less clear than it appears.
The systems that capture attention, model behavior, and sort populations by psychological profile are extensions of the same logic used in governance and security.
They did not choose between apps and weapons.
They built the pipeline between them.
Point Nine: On the Nation They Remember
They mourn a nation that was never fully experienced by those now being asked to defend it.
What is described as decline is, from another vantage point, expansion—uneven, incomplete, but ongoing.
Point Ten: On What We Are Building
They end by rejecting pluralism. We end elsewhere.
Their critique assumes pluralism is dilution—a flattening of difference into coexistence without commitment. Ours is something else: pluralism as construction.
In Detroit, communities are building their own infrastructure.
They are not waiting, not asking. They are building.
“We are building in the space their models cannot map.”
We are building in the space their models cannot map.
And that is the Human Republic.
Not a territory. A way of building—and a record of what that building has already made possible.
Further Reading (Chicago Style)
Karp, Alex, and Nicholas W. Zamiska. The Technological Republic. New York: 2025.
Thiel, Peter. “The Education of a Libertarian.” Cato Unbound, 2009.
Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law. New York: Liveright, 2017.
Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.