Copyright newstatesman
If Alex Karp didn’t exist, Peter Thiel would have to invent him. The antichrist-obsessed PayPal co-founder (Mr Thiel) and the jingoist CEO of Palantir (Mr Karp) met in college, where the pair bonded as intellectual outsiders. “We argued like feral animals,” reminisces Karp. In 2004, Thiel invited Karp to head up Palantir, an AI, surveillance and data analytics firm created in the wake of 9/11. Karp was drafted in part for his ability to sell the company’s vision of an increasingly violent and volatile world in which data was key to managing risk. Unconventional in outlook but socially magnetic, Karp reportedly performed “mind tricks” on customers and colleagues alike to secure their contracts and their loyalty. Thiel’s bets – on Karp as a leader and global instability as a growth market – have paid off. Last year, Palantir’s stock was the best performer in the S&P 500 and Karp himself received $6.8bn in total compensation. As the CEO memorably put it in an interview in 2022, the year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: “Bad times are incredibly good for Palantir.” In The Philosopher in the Valley – the first biography written about Karp – journalist Michael Steinberger argues no one else could have managed this trajectory quite so ably. He describes Palantir as a projection of Karp’s character and Karp’s character as one defined by insecurity. Karp is a germaphobe who thrived during the isolated routines of the pandemic; the son of a German Jew, he stridently backed Israel in its genocide in Gaza. He’s not quite the world-soul on horseback, but a corporate manifestation of the paranoia and bellicosity of our age. Karp was born in 1967 and raised in a progressive household in Philadelphia. His mother was a black artist and his father a Jewish paediatrician. The pair took Karp to political protests from a young age, instilling in him leftist politics that he would nurture through his twenties but later shed. Karp’s schooling was shaped by a learning disability, and it’s this combination of identities that fostered a desire for self-preservation. As Karp tells Steinberger: “You’re a racially amorphous, far-left Jewish kid who’s also dyslexic – would you not come up with the idea that you’re fucked?” In 1989, he graduated from Haverford College in Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy before heading to law school at Stanford, describing his time there as “the worst three years of my adult life”. The sole bright spot was friendship with classmate Thiel. “It sounds too self-aggrandising, but I think we were both genuinely interested in ideas,” says Thiel. “He was more the socialist, I was more the capitalist. He was always talking about Marxist theories of alienated labour and how this was true of all the people around us.” Summer trips to Europe convinced Karp to go to Goethe University in Frankfurt for his PhD, where he hoped to gain (in Steinberger’s description) “a deeper understanding of why Germany, a pillar of European civilisation, had descended into barbarism”. He sought out the mentorship of Jürgen Habermas, the acclaimed philosopher of democratic legitimacy, but Habermas turned down a request to be the second reader of his dissertation. (Karp maintains that Habermas was for a while his doctoral adviser, and tells Steinberger he does not understand why the 96-year-old philosopher now seeks to minimise their relationship – a deflection one assumes stems from diplomacy rather than a lack of imagination.) The resulting paper – “Aggression in the Lifeworld: Expanding Parsons’ Concept of Aggression Through the Description of the Relationship Between Jargon, Aggression and Culture” – explores the phenomenon of secondary anti-Semitism, a tendency summed up by the observation, often attributed to the Israeli psychiatrist Zvi Rix, that “the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz”. Given the centrality of Karp’s academic background to his image, many have parsed this work for clues to his current position. Most notably, the Harvard scholar Moira Weigel saw in Karp’s dissertation something like a prefiguration of Palantir’s data analytics business. Per Weigel, Karp’s work reinterprets Theodor Adorno’s book The Jargon of Authenticity, which describes how existentialist rhetoric was used in postwar Germany to conceal reactionary politics. For Adorno, the point of examining jargon is to attend to the social problems it obscures. But Karp is satisfied with simply mapping how hidden linguistic aggression binds communities together. Weigel says this “systematisation” of Adorno is akin to the methods of big data, which expend great effort to map surface-level patterns without addressing underlying causality. Steinberger describes Weigel’s reading as “strained and implausible”. He misses the point. It’s not that Karp’s dissertation is like data analytics, but that his approach reveals something of the cast of his mind: analytical but ahistorical. The paper also shows Karp’s social and linguistic intelligence: his ability to understand subtext and hear what people aren’t saying out loud when they speak. Judging by Steinberger’s account, Karp’s charisma is formidable, and is what recommended him to Thiel for the Palantir job on Karp’s return to the United States. Founded in 2003, Palantir’s early years are dogged without being particularly inspiring. It received funding from In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA, which had been embarrassed by the intelligence failures of 9/11. The company began forging relationships with government clients – which now account for just over half of its revenue and include not only the CIA, but also the FBI, the NSA and pretty much every branch of the US military – as well as a few commercial clients. It failed a lot in this early era, seemingly because its software couldn’t deliver the magical insights Karp would promise. This led to rejections from established Silicon Valley venture capitalist firms for much-needed funding. Karp took this personally. To this day he inveighs against an industry which pours money into attention traps and targeted advertising, while ignoring what he sees as far more meaningful technological advances like data analytics. From a financial point of view, the venture capitalists weren’t exactly wrong. For many years, Palantir haemorrhaged money, recording a net annual loss of $600m as late as 2018. It only made its first profit in 2023, by which point it had honed its software offerings. Its eventual financial success partly stems from its function as a “meme stock”, which Steinberger doesn’t address. Palantir went public in 2020, and its share price has been buoyed by a large number of retail investors whose faith in the firm’s value became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Meme stocks are part-pyramid scheme, part-social media fad, relying on jokes and shitposts to spread the gospel and make the dry work of investment feel fun and edgy. Palantir’s backers gather on Reddit, where they praise “Daddy Karp” and vent about his pusillanimous critics. It’s here that we see the financial utility of employing (in Karp’s words) a “batshit-crazy CEO”. As with Elon Musk and his fanboys, the unrestrained nature of Karp’s public statements breeds a particular strain of giggling, vindictive loyalty. When Karp mocks his doubters in interviews (“I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts who try to screw us”) his supporters share the clips, kick up their heels and reach (as they say online) for their “tendies”. If a company’s value in the 21st century rests as much on online perception as business fundamentals, it helps to have a CEO whose emotional volatility plays so well in the theater of social media. What does Palantir actually do? It’s a question that comes up time and time again in social media. It’s also surprisingly easy to address, despite the company’s occult reputation: Palantir collates disparate sources of data and makes them easy to search. It is Google for chaotic organisations, whose software connects various databases and computer systems into a single unified platform. If the company’s services could be applied to your life, it would look like a team of specialists who arrive at your house and rifle through your desk, updating your to-do lists, contacts and calendars; syncing and sorting the files you have scattered across a half-dozen old phones and and hard drives, and generally Making Things Organised. Wouldn’t you pay good money for such a service? Of course you would. Now, imagine you’re a country and this pandemonium is not personal but institutionalised – encompassing not just a few email inboxes and old USBs, but, say, an entire healthcare system, including payroll, procurement, and insurance, or a medium-sized war. Wouldn’t you then pay a lot of money? Wouldn’t you in fact pay millions and millions and be extremely thankful to whoever sorted this mess on your behalf? Thus: Palantir’s rise. This boring truth makes for a boring narrative. As such, Steinberger’s well-researched accounts of Palantir’s milestone commissions during the Covid-19 pandemic or the 2021 Afghanistan evacuation are unavoidably dry. Yes, there is human drama latent in these scenarios, but accounts of Palantir’s interventions reveal their banality. To paraphrase the testimony of one CIA analyst: “Well, I searched for someone’s name in my database, and thanks to Palantir’s software the results included the names with typos in them as well as the right spelling and I gotta say that was pretty useful.” Or there are the stories about what the company grandiosely refers to as its “forward-deployed engineers”. Can you guess what such a macho title describes? That’s right: on-site tech support. This is one of Palantir’s grand innovations. When it lands a contract it will send employees directly to customers in order to answer questions in person; to explain how its software works; and (one assumes) occasionally to be shouted at by important people for the purpose of stress relief and ego management. Such emotional labour can be vital. And while there may be glamour in the fact that the job sites in question are occasionally war zones, this doesn’t mask either the banality or utility of such a service. Against such mundane practices the company has hedged its own mystique, and this is perhaps where Palantir has been most successful. The name is typical: a reference to the seeing stones of JRR Tolkien’s legendarium. It offers an innocuous meaning (communication over long distances) but also has troubling connotations, too (in The Lord of the Rings,the palantíri are notably a conduit for corrupt visions). Surely, an evil company wouldn’t actually name itself after an evil thing? But what if? Such disconcerting playfulness is balanced by Karp’s strident rhetoric and his oft-repeated mission statement: to defend liberal democracy and Western values. Karp has preached this gospel from the company’s inception, and though such talk was unusual in the tech industry of the 2000s and 2010s, it now seems prescient. The sector has since aligned with the chauvinistic culture of Donald Trump’s Republican Party. Similarly, long before the president’s tariffs began to obstruct the flows of goods and capital between East and West, Karp declared that he would not do business with global adversaries like China. In a letter to investors earlier this year, he even approvingly quoted Samuel Huntington of “clash of civilisations” fame, highlighting his claim that the rise of the West was not made possible “by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence”. This year, Karp’s fondness for exposition reached book length with The Technological Republic (co-written with Palantir’s head of corporate affairs, Nicholas W Zamiska, but best treated as Karp’s own). The book is more interesting than some have claimed, providing insight into the mind of an ascendant elite, but it is curiously empty despite its claim to provide a blueprint to rejuvenate the American republic. Admittedly, there are a few practical suggestions which would find support across the political spectrum. To encourage technical professionals to take up political office, for example; to lure bright minds into public service with higher pay and make science part of popular culture. But despite the philosophical ambitions of the book’s title, Karp’s directives are more platitudinous than Platonic. Most of the book feels like filler, with a few key words and phrases recombined mechanically throughout like symbols in a slot machine. There must be a “meaningful project” of “national purpose” that uses “shared mythology” to create a “collective identity” encouraging “human progress”. As the writer John Ganz has noted, there’s an eerie similarity between this rhetoric and Karp’s PhD on the reactionary jargon Adorno identified in postwar Germany. It is a gesture towards meaning, but one made by empty hands. The most concrete prescription of The Technological Republic – and the one seen most clearly in Palantir’s actual practices – is the fusion of state and private enterprise, particularly for policing, security and war. For a company like Palantir to be involved in this work is perhaps not surprising. States exercise violence. They use information to select targets for this violence. If you sort information for the government, then you will end up assisting in such work as a matter of course. Call it the banality of data. However, the use of corporations for this work creates unique and dangerous incentives. The expansion of surveillance becomes a business plan rather than a response to credible threats; there is a loss of accountability as civil servants are replaced by private contractors; and the state’s technical capacity is diminished, leaving it unable to vet the results of its own policies. The fusion of state and corporation is one in which sovereignty itself becomes privatised. Palantir has encouraged this privatisation by enthusiastically entering the most volatile domains that shape US politics in the 2020s. In Israel, after 7 October, Palantir signed a new strategic partnership with the IDF, with Karp holding a board meeting in Tel Aviv the following year to signal its unwavering support for the nation. It has responded to accusations that it is facilitating genocide with carefully worded rebuttals and claims it has a “long-standing commitment to the preservation of human rights”. The company has also deepened its relationship with the Department for Homeland Security and the US’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency, which it has contracted with for many years. As Trump pours money into these bodies, Palantir reaps the rewards. In April it was revealed the company had won a $30m contract to build a platform called ImmigrationOS for Ice, which will not only aggregate government data but also mine social media and phone location records. Palantir maintains it doesn’t set policy but merely provides tools. This is disingenuous. If the government lacks the expertise to know what conclusions can be confidently drawn from data, then it’s the tooling that will steer its hand. And this is before we consider the fact that the policies Palantir now supports include abductions on US streets by masked agents, racial profiling and unlawful detention. Due in part to the timing of his book, Steinberger is unable to give this transformation of Karp, his company and his politics the detailed examination they deserve. In an epilogue, he recalls meeting Karp over the Fourth of July weekend, following protests outside Palantir’s offices and staff resignations over the company’s contracts with the IDF. The conversation is mostly paraphrased and far from satisfying. Karp – a long-time supporter of the Democrats who said as recently as August 2024 that he wouldn’t vote for Trump – seems unfazed by the moral turpitude now attached to his life’s work, and instead blames progressives for the administration’s policies. “I’m sick and tired of left-wing people fostering right-wing populist movements because they won’t be adults about these issues,” he says, before adding: “Being unpopular pays the bills.” It’s an off-the-cuff comment, but it works as a motto for Karp’s technological republic. This is the communal myth and national purpose he has been seeking: the exercise of power, unburdened by ethics and richly rewarded. James Vincent is the author of “Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement” (Faber & Faber) The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir and the Rise of the Surveillance State Michael Steinberger Simon & Schuster 304pp, £25 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops
