Karp’s Techno-Fascism Through the Eyes of Frantz Fanon

Palantir's co-founder, Alex Karp’s book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, co-authored with Nicholas W. Zamiska, was published by Crown Currency on February 18, 2025.¹ Almost a year later, in April 2026, Palantir published a 22-point manifesto on X, based on the same book.² Karp’s ideology can be read as an ode to the Western military-colonial complex, making Palantir an explicitly ideological organization with a business profile. In this period of unprecedented technological upheaval, possibly the greatest we have ever experienced, one could easily characterize Palantir as a political project that produces the ideology it profits from.

Our time is not just marked by a technological revolution capable of changing human life, thinking, and creativity, but also by a systemic shift toward an expansionist capitalist order that acts with little regard for the post-war rules-based world order. Wars are raging, colonialism is resurfacing, and with it come the technological and ideological engineers who shape and profit from its existence. It is in light of this latest crisis of capitalism that Karp’s book and manifesto appear not merely as a tech manifesto, but as a civilizational-war manifesto: an argument against consumer-tech liberalism, which it claims has failed, and for hard power through software.³ Karp’s business model is to place software, including Palantir’s own, at the heart of military and state power. In this view, Silicon Valley has a duty to align itself with the American war machine, dressed in the language of “national defence.”

Karp moves on to argue that Western societies need a thicker identity than pluralism and soft power. Citizens, in this vision, must honor their “affirmative obligation to participate in the defence of the nation,” and society must move away from purely voluntary military service toward a more universal-duty model.⁴ Why? Because war and dominance are the raison d’être of Palantir’s business model: a militarist, anti-pluralist, surveillance-capitalist world that wields AI weapons against its supposedly uncivilized and backward enemies.

Is it not logical, then, that Palantir advocates for stronger state-tech fusion and stronger defence while also signing multi-billion-dollar contracts with Western governments and militaries? In 2025, the U.S. Army consolidated multiple Palantir contracts into an enterprise agreement worth up to $10 billion over ten years.⁵ How should we understand Palantir’s logic when this same defence ideology is extended to crime, domestic order, and a quasi-fascist ranking of cultures according to their supposed superiority? Why is this synergy between power, dominance, fascism, and technology happening now?

Western imperialism, in Frantz Fanon’s view, is sustained by a global system in which violence abroad is more a structural necessity than an exception. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon describes how European powers built wealth and stability through colonial domination, normalized military intervention, repression, and racial hierarchy as instruments of order.⁶ The imperial war complex is as much psychological and economic as it is military. The imperialist project has produced, and still produces, a world divided into zones: the colonizer’s zone of privilege and humanity, and the colonized zone of dispossession and dehumanization. Wars are not episodic interruptions; they are a perpetual part of the everyday functioning of empire.

How is this order motivated? How are people convinced, or coerced, to accept perpetual violence against the oppressed? Fanon argues that the violence of the colonized, which in Karp’s worldview appears as something the West must fear and defend itself against, is not the origin of disorder but a response to an already violent system that presents itself as civilized and progressive.⁷ In this crisis of capitalism, where fascism marches through Western countries and where societies and the world are divided into zones, what is better than a business model that creates, feeds, and profits from the ultimate crystallization of the Western military complex? Advocating violence against the “barbarians” and total surveillance of all are merely the basic ingredients of the Brave New World now taking shape.

CounterCritical