In his farewell address this January, then US President Joe Biden delivered a striking warning: a “tech oligarchy”, he said, now threatens American democracy. Echoing Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex, Biden pointed to ultra-wealthy tech leaders whose influence over war and governance imperils not just the U.S., but democracy itself.

He’s not wrong—but he’s late.

This is not a glitch. As early as the 1910s, sociologist Robert Michels described oligarchy as the inevitable outcome of bureaucratic organization. Today, that old dynamic has been reprogrammed. Tech elites and companies aren’t just rich—they’re politically embedded and ideologically driven. Palantir is the clearest example.

Founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, with early backing from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm, Palantir has since evolved into a tech-military behemoth. CEO Alexander Karp, once a student of Jürgen Habermas, now runs a company deeply embedded in the US defence and intelligence establishment. Between 2018 and 2022, the Pentagon awarded more than $53 billion in contracts to tech firms, with Palantir among the top recipients. The war in Ukraine further cemented its role, with Karp boasting of the company’s battlefield operations. As of 2025, Palantir’s market value exceeds that of Lockheed Martin’s.

The Technological Republic

Now, with The Technological Republic, co-authored with Palantir executive Nicholas Zamiska, Karp sets out a polished, unapologetic blueprint for a militarised tech oligarchy. Beneath its rhetoric of patriotism and “Western values” (p. 83), the book lays out a blueprint for corporate-state fusion. Palantir isn’t merely serving the state—it’s subsuming it. This is not a corporation supporting government functions; it’s a corporation becoming government. While Google sells ads and Apple sells phones, Palantir sells governance.

The book’s vision is explicit. Karp and Zamiska call for merging military and technological power, placing software engineers at the center of national defense. Their “ownership society” (p. 178) imagines founders as sovereigns and engineers as citizens. Democracy, with all its compromises, is replaced by the “efficient” rule of a self-appointed tech aristocracy.

One pillar of their argument is nostalgia—for the wartime collaboration between U.S. scientists and the state. Silicon Valley, they argue, has “lost its way” (p. 3). Engineers, they insist, must now serve a higher calling: war. The shift from social platforms to military tech is cast as moral redemption. Karp argues that talent wasted on “trivial consumer products” (p. 3) must now be redeployed for algorithmic warfare. Engineers become soldiers; code becomes a weapon. Citizenship is reduced to a data entry in its databases. Algorithms make decisions once left to elected officials. Their “collective identity” (p. 89) is a hollow simulation of democracy—participation without power. The “technological republic” is a euphemism. It’s a corporation-as-state—a world where public institutions outsource their sovereignty to proprietary platforms. The irony is sharp: Karp critiques “late capitalist culture” (p. 9) even as Palantir’s value soars with every new war contract.

But the deeper irony runs through Silicon Valley itself. The real offense of its so-called “wunderkinder” (p. 34) wasn’t building trivial apps. It was proving that tech could flourish outside Pentagon control. That autonomy didn’t last. The valley’s best minds have now been reabsorbed into the military-industrial complex, drafted into service under the banner of national security. This is Peter Thiel’s fantasy realized: a world where engineers rule, democracy is obsolete, and disruption is the new doctrine. In this future, democracy is legacy software: patched, bypassed, and eventually deprecated. True governance, in Karp and Zamiska’s vision, flows not through parliaments but through Silicon Valley’s server farms and surveillance feeds—where AI extends what Pasquinelli calls “the eye of the master”—encoded into algorithms that dominate labour, logistics, and life itself. This isn’t just a shift in infrastructure—it’s a shift in ideology.

Imperial mindset in the age of algorithmic power

The book’s second pillar—its warning about the “Hollowing Out of the American Mind” (p. 55)—reveals the deeper ambition: not simply redirecting Silicon Valley toward warfare, but reviving an imperial mindset fit for the age of algorithmic power. Karp and Zamiska’s critique of “technological agnostics” (p. 69) is not a call for more ethical consideration but a rejection of it. In essence, they demand that tech leaders stop asking “should we?” and focus solely on “can we?” when developing military applications. This shift in focus underscores their broader vision: a world where moral constraint is treated as strategic weakness, and unchecked technological expansion becomes both a goal and a justification. 

In this logic, ethical deliberation is not just inconvenient—it’s dangerous. By casting global competition as a zero-sum game where power alone determines legitimacy, Karp and Zamiska resurrect the darker doctrines of the Cold War, stripped of their ideological pretense and rebooted for the age of AI. The “wishfulness of the current moment” (p. 32) they criticize in political leaders is, in fact, the democratic impulse to question perpetual militarization. What they term the hollowing out of the American Mind is, in reality, the democratization of technological development—the uncomfortable reality that, in an open society, both engineers and citizens may reject working on weapons systems. Their solution—reviving blind faith in the state-technical complex—is not an intellectual revival, but the complete surrender of Silicon Valley’s critical capacity to Pentagon priorities. The “American Mind” they seek to restore is one that conflates technological dominance with moral authority. Questioning this supremacy is not seen as an act of deliberation, but of weakness.

Entrenching the tech oligarchy

Karp and Zamiska’s manifesto is not a call to civic duty, but a blueprint for entrenching a tech oligarchy. In their vision, unelected technocrats and corporate giants—not democratic institutions—would control the levers of power, reshaping sovereignty into a private, profit-driven enterprise. Their “prodigal son” narrative attempts to shame engineers for creating democratic technologies rather than weapons, recasting Silicon Valley’s moral failure as its refusal to militarize. The “Western values” they invoke are hollow, reduced merely to preserving U.S. tech dominance over China. This is not a revival of Cold War idealism but rather the digitalization of imperialism: a world where writing drone algorithms is considered the highest form of patriotism, and Palantir’s stock price becomes synonymous with the national interest.

In their admiration for Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power (p. 51)—centralizing control, sidelining rivals, and expanding his rule beyond previous boundaries—Karp and Zamiska present authoritarianism as a blueprint for effective governance. They argue that leaders, much like startup founders, must navigate instability and act with unwavering decisiveness to stave off collapse, positioning strategic dominance as a higher priority than democratic principles. In their view, the autocrat is not just a ruler but a risk manager, someone who neutralizes opposition before it emerges, shaping the future through suppression. As they argue, authoritarian rule offers a level of decisiveness and predictability that democratic systems, with their built-in checks and balances, inherently lack. The book doesn’t just valorize autocratic efficiency. It treats authoritarianism as a necessary safeguard against global chaos, mirroring Silicon Valley’s own drift toward militarized solutions.

In Karp’s vision, the future belongs to a tech elite who claim to defend “Western values” by sidelining the democratic institutions that once defined them. This isn’t framed as a rejection of democracy, but as its necessary upgrade: a more “efficient” model for an age of crisis. But behind the patriotic packaging lies a deeper shift. The book recasts the consolidation of private power as national duty. What it offers isn’t a defence of democracy, but a blueprint for its displacement by a new class of militarised technocrats.

We must take this seriously. Karp’s vision is not inevitable, but it is coherent, seductive, and spreading. If we don’t resist it, the tech oligarchy Biden warned about won’t just threaten democracy. It will replace it. If AI is dominated by corporate giants and integrated into national security, what becomes of fairness, equity, and justice? For the engineers of the tech oligarchy, those values are mere bugs in the code. For the rest of us, they mark the boundaries of a world still worth fighting for.

 

Ali Rıza Taşkale, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social Sciences and Business (ISE) at Roskilde University, is the author of Post-Politics in Context (Routledge, 2016). His work has appeared in leading journals, and his current research examines the critical intersections of speculative fiction and speculative finance. He also serves on the editorial board of Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory.