The book “Technological Republic”, published by Alex Karp in February 2025, is as much a political program as it is a prefiguration of a dystopian future of the West that is taking shape. Palantir, the company he leads and co-founded with Peter Thiel, recently made a synthesis of it public, in the form of a manifesto in 22 theses, as a way of asserting its disproportionate power.
This text is published at a time when the USA is embroiled in Iran and diplomatically isolated. “Palantir accompanies the radicalization of the Trump administration in its warlike adventures, because it lives and thrives on public and military contracts,” emphasizes Olivier Tesquet, co-author of “Apocalypse Nerd.”
Un parasite au cœur de l’appareil d’État (A parasite at the heart of the state apparatus)
Since its creation in 2003 with public funds from the CIA, Palantir claims to fill the gaps of the state. “It was about creating the company that would have been able to prevent 9/11 with, in the background, a critique of public intelligence agencies that failed to detect the weak signals announcing the attacks,” analyzes Valentin Goujon, a sociology PhD student at the Media Lab of Sciences Po.
Since then, Palantir has maximized profits from all crises. With the Covid pandemic, the company has access to health data from many countries; after the 2015 attacks in France, it signed a contract with the DGSI (the French domestic intelligence service); with the war declared by Donald Trump on migrants, it found itself in…
