The article argues that the rise of a corporate state technocracy, or a Technate, is not a sudden development but an inevitable outcome of long standing trends in Western society. The author highlights a recent manifesto from Palantir, based on CEO Alex Karp’s book The Technological Republic, which outlines a fusion of technology and state power. While critics across the political spectrum have reacted with horror, calling it fascist or satanic, the text suggests this outrage is late to the party. The merger of Silicon Valley and national security has been explicitly promoted for over a decade by figures like Eric Schmidt and organizations like the World Economic Forum.
The core of the argument is that this shift toward post democratic technocracy was cemented during the pandemic. The author contends that the mass public’s willingness to comply with contradictory and restrictive directives served as a successful dress rehearsal for the managerial class. By following mandates, snitching on neighbors, and accepting revised narratives without major political consequences for elites, the population demonstrated that it would tolerate a high degree of control. This behavior signaled to the political and corporate establishment that the public is ready for an era of mass compliance.
The manifesto is described as an operational blueprint for the next several decades, representing a model of state capitalism. In this system, corporations do not merely lobby the government; they become an integral part of the governing apparatus. This arrangement allows governments to outsource surveillance and social engineering to private entities that are shielded from the traditional oversight applied to public institutions. The author notes that while previous iterations of this technocratic vision were globalist, the current version spearheaded by Palantir and similar firms is more nationalist in nature, focusing on Western or North American dominance.
Faced with this structural reality, the author suggests that moral outrage is a futile response, especially from those who complied with the systems that built this foundation. Instead, the text advocates for a pragmatic and individualistic approach to maintaining autonomy. This involves a strategy of owning the companies driving the Technate to preserve capital while simultaneously building or utilizing sovereign technology to ensure personal freedom. The goal is to achieve enough wealth and independent infrastructure to avoid economic dependency on the state.
Ultimately, the text views the Technate as an unavoidable force resulting from a civilization that prioritized compliance over accountability. It concludes that the most rational response is to acknowledge the transition from traditional democracy to technocracy and to position oneself financially and technologically to survive it. By treating wealth as exit velocity and capital as optionality, individuals can attempt to navigate the Great Bifurcation between those who are absorbed by the state apparatus and those who maintain a degree of self sovereignty.
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/te ... ays-comingThe Technate Was Always Coming
Tyler Durden's Photo
by Tyler Durden
Sunday, Apr 26, 2026 - 04:00 AM
Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,
And what you can do about it (besides complaining).
Palantir dropped a manifesto last weekend. 22 bullet points distilled from Alex Karp’s book The Technological Republic, posted to X with the casual framing of “because we get asked a lot.” I haven’t seen a reaction so widespread, unanimously opposed and viscerally aghast since James Damore’s infamous “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”.
The usual suspects lost their shit. Engadget called it “the ramblings of a comic book villain.”
TechCrunch clutched its pearls at the bits about “regressive” cultures and “vacant and hollow pluralism.”
Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins observed, (via Bluesky, of course), that these aren’t philosophical musings floating in the ether: they’re the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it’s advocating.
He’s not wrong, Palantir sells to ICE, DoD, NYPD, and the intelligence community. It may be a manifesto, but it’s also product literature.
Even Alexander Dugin, the Russian “Fourth Political Theory” philosopher, not exactly known for having a libertarian bent, seemed triggered by it, calling it “the plan of the Western techno-fascism” on X, “Pure Satanism” on his Substack.
Former Greek FM Yanis Varoufakis called it “evil” and put out his own point-for-point on it – he calls it a refutation, it’s actually more of a rant.
So everybody across the horseshoe is big mad. Fine.
The thing is, none of this should surprise anyone. Let’s now look at why the policy this “manifesto” outlines was always going to arrive, with or without Karp’s prosaic stylings.
Karp Didn’t Invent “The Technate”
The merger of corporate power and state apparatus, the “technate” that people are suddenly discovering with horror on a Sunday afternoon, is not a new idea. It’s not even a recent one.
Back in 2013, Eric Schmidt (then Google’s executive chairman) and Jared Cohen (Google Ideas, ex-State Department advisor to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton) published The New Digital Age. The book was blurbed by Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, Tony Blair, and General Michael Hayden, the former director of the CIA. That’s an elite-class blurb list for a book that explicitly argued for the intersection of Silicon Valley and state power, the fusion of corporate infrastructure with national security logic, and the reshaping of diplomacy through private platforms.
In 2013 it was called “transformational.” Kissinger gushing that it was, “a searching meditation on technology and world order” (he would go on to co-author The Age of AI with Eric Schmidt that should be every bit as concerning as Karp’s Technological Republic).
Not too long after that, Google’s Sergey Brin and Klaus Schwab held a fireside in Davos where Herr Schwab pontificated that with the advent of AI, since the algos would be able to predict election outcomes with 100% certainty, they may as well pick the winners anyway and we could do away with elections altogether.
Nobody batted an eye. My timeline certainly wasn’t overflowing with rage over it and the people who were calling attention to it were using facing all kinds of headwinds.
My personal favourite goto clip about all-pervasive corporate surveillance that absolutely nobody gave a shit about, was this one, also via the darlings of Davos:
Here we have an ex-Goldman Sachs guy running a Chinese multi-national sermonizing about mass surveillance and personal carbon footprint quotas and my timeline was not filled with angry tweets from elite A-listers calling for the dismantling of Ali Baba.
Here in 2026 it’s the exact same structural narrative, now with Karp’s sharper edges and fewer Davos euphemisms, only this one is being called a fascist manifesto instead of drooled over by media elites.
The only major difference I can see is where Davos/WEF inspired technocracy was globalist, Palantir, Karp, Thiel et al are nationalist. Perhaps, a North American nationalist.
This map is from 1940
(This fits with what I wrote in my last edition of The Bitcoin Capitalist, about the factional rivalry between the intellectual descendants of Samuel Huntington (“The Clash of Civilizations”) vs his former pupil, Francis Fukuyama (“The End of History”) I posted an excerpt here.
Fukuyama thought the entire world would become one big Neo-Liberal circle-jerk.
Huntington said future conflict wouldn’t be between countries, but between cultures. And some cultures were less compatible with how we live here in the West, than others (Palantir’s point #21).
Overall, the project didn’t change. The faction driving it did.
Driving what? The inexorable drive toward post-Democratic technocracy.
Here’s what nobody wants to hear.
If you’re reading Karp’s 22 points and feeling a cold prickle of recognition, if you’re realizing that what Palantir is describing is the operational blueprint for the next 40 years, there’s something you have to sit with first:
You put your hand up for this.
Perhaps not you personally. But collectively, “we”, the Western mass public already ran a dress rehearsal. And we all passed (or flunked) with flying colours.
During the pandemic and in the years immediately after, the political and managerial class was wrong about effectively everything.
The origin of the virus. The (non)-efficacy of lockdowns. The vaccines didn’t work and were in fact, kill-shots for many. The money printing.
The correct response to being that wrong, that publicly, and that unwaveringly, about that much, should have been pitchforks and torches in the streets, if not guillotines.
At the very least, in our enlightened civilization: recall elections, mass firings, inquests and class actions. There should have been a generational reckoning with expertise that got captured by politics, a media cartel that went full agitprop and Chapter-7 bankruptcy for institutional credibility.
That is not what happened.
What happened instead was that people stood on the dots. We wore the masks on the walk from the restaurant door to the table, then took them off to eat, sitting in saran wrap bubbles on the street in the middle of winter.
People snitched on their neighbours. They watched elites throw lavish maskless parties while they got tased by cops at their kids’ soccer games.
In other words: we “followed the science”, even as the science was revised quarterly to match policy because the facts on the ground refused to conform to the narrative.
And now, most people will fight tooth and nail to defend the very system that did this to them.
The pandemic was the trial balloon. The political class, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley watched carefully.
What they learned was this: the population will comply. The population will inform on itself. The population will absorb humiliating, contradictory, demonstrably false directives from authorities, and the dominant social behaviour will be enforcement of those directives on anyone who objects.
The Technate has been an ideation of post-Democratic elites since at least the 1930’s.
It has been moving forward inexorably ever since, but it was probably that event, the pandemic and the populace cucking out at a mass level when the technate became inevitable.
Not because of any single manifesto, book, or CEO. Because a civilization that behaves that way under stress has already told its elites what it will accept.
The Technocracy Is Already Here
The manifesto isn’t about Palantir specifically. It’s the blueprint for what I’ve already been noticing, not just in the US but everywhere, that I’ve been calling State Capitalism.
It’s the fused-lattice model of corporate-state power where the company doesn’t lobby the government, it is part of the governing apparatus, and the government in turn provides the regulatory moat that keeps the company’s competitors out, and to whom they can outsource things that national governments aren’t supposed to be doing.
This is where we’re headed for the next few decades. And it’s where we’re headed precisely because the population demonstrated that it would tolerate it, even while they decried “fascism”.
Welcome to the Era of Mass Compliance.
Karp’s 22 points are the tidy, sanitized version of what we’ve already said in our “Repricing Sovereignty” piece. The early iterations are already in production. Every ICE deployment, every DoD contract, every integration between federal databases and private analytics, every AI-for-defense procurement cycle, every surveillance-as-a-service rollout is a beam in the Cathedral.
And here’s the part that separates the individuals from the crowd:
If you can’t beat ’em. Own ’em.
Long PLTR. This is straight out of the playbook my premium readers will recognize as “The Post Singularity Stack.” It’s a barbell trade that allocates to State Capitalism on one side, while personally building out sovereign technology on the other.
This isn’t an endorsement of the politics, because frankly, I’m done with politics (“vote harder, mofos”). Politics is a racket to keep the rabble in line.
Stand on the dots. Flap your arms. Good boy.
True self-sovereignty can only be acquired individually.
It’s an acknowledgement of the structural reality. We’ve been talking about this for a long time (we call it The Great Bifurcation, and as we always suspected, the branch you wind up in is largely an exercise in self-selection). For the next few decades, The Technate will be the vehicle through which capital will compound, and the only rational response is to own a piece of it. Capital is optionality. Wealth is exit velocity. And by wealth I mean not being economically dependent on The State, not living paycheque to paycheque, and not being one frozen bank account away from being forced into compliance.
There is an ancient Chinese aphorism,
“It is unlucky to remain obstinate in the face of overwhelming odds”.
Being morally aghast while your purchasing power erodes in losing sectors leaves you with neither the moral high ground nor the means to act on it.
The most important points of the manifesto are #5…
And #12:
The people who are panicking at the manifesto are the same people who voted, complied, and shamed their neighbours into the conditions that made it possible. They don’t get to be outraged now.
Some people saw this coming years ago. Some of us even wrote it down.
What happened to many of those people was they got deplatformed, canceled, debanked and generally villainized by the same people who are now screaming about Palantir.
I’m mostly done trying to warn the wider public on where things are going.
Now we’re just buying the ticker.