Alex Karp, cofounder of Palantir, says the tech industry has “an affirmative obligation to support the state that made its rise possible,” aka an obligation to partner with the US government. You probably know that Palantir has become one of the more important companies in the country virtually overnight. Its stock is up 1,700% since it went public just five years ago, it has numerous Pentagon contracts worth billions, and the founders have a direct line to the White House.
Peter Thiel, the more famous cofounder of Palantir, financed the rise of JD Vance and has deep ties to multiple other people in the regime. Thiel and Karp both fancy themselves eccentric intellectuals, with Thiel giving lectures about the antichrist and Karp ranting about Silicon Valley bending the knee to “woke,” which he calls “the central risk to Palantir, America and the world.” The truth of course is that they’re both infinitely greedy and power hungry, and that their empty intellectual screeds are “nothing more than an elaborate defense of the status quo” as Michael Eby writes.
These two men have set the tone for the new Silicon Valley, one that embraces Trump and the Pentagon and increasingly pivots to using technology to track and to kill. Meagan Day recently broke it down:
“Companies that once competed, however disingenuously, to appear socially conscious now scramble to demonstrate their willingness to abandon those principles entirely, openly positioning themselves as instruments of Western supremacy and cheerleaders for violent American military domination. What began as Palantir’s isolated position has metastasized into Silicon Valley’s new Trump 2.0–era consensus — a transformation that places the most advanced AI capabilities in service of an ideology that dehumanizes most of the world, and anyone at home who stands in their way.”
Karp doesn’t beat around the bush about this new phase of tech. He insists that America needs “a new Manhattan Project in order to retain exclusive control over the most sophisticated forms of AI for the battlefield.” He also happens to think that Palantir should be at the forefront of these developments, and so far he and his company are getting what they want. One deal between Palantir and the Pentagon is worth $10 billion, and includes the Army using more AI, despite the U.S. Army’s chief technology officer saying the experimental battlefield tech is “very high risk.”
The fascist strain in Silicon Valley, always an undercurrent as Big Tech worked hand-in-hand with the U.S. military, is now dominant. From Thiel to Musk to Zuckerberg to Bezos the power players are all in Trump’s pocket, and he’s in theirs. A deadly symbiotic relationship has formed, one that we have to disrupt if we want a decent future. At the center of this symbiosis sits AI, a technology that contains potentially destructive power, not primarily in the form of the supercomputers we’re told to be afraid of, but in the form of economic devastation, surveillance tech, and the concentration of power.
Like the dramatic rise of Palantir, AI was a virtual non-entity 10 years ago. Now, it’s ubiquitous. Google, Meta, Microsoft — the biggest companies on Earth are deeply invested in AI, and for that reason they’re trying to shove the tech down our throats. It’s easy to blame individuals for using ChatGPT, Sora, and other AI products, but that misses the real problem. Nothing illustrates what’s happening quite like an examination of the following tweet:
This tweeter understandably assumes the standard economic arrangement we’re taught, which is consumers wanting a product and business producing it. In many cases that’s how things work, but that’s not what’s happening with Walmart being inserted into ChatGPT. Sure, some people will love it, but we’re seeing an economic process here based on the opposite of organic demand. OpenAI is not profitable. They’ve pledged to spend a trillion dollars in the next five years, and are only bringing in about $17 billion a year. So what’s their next step? We’re seeing it — the company is attempting to coerce profits out of its users.
Walmart will benefit from this ChatGPT deal, but they’re not launching this partnership because their customers have been craving it, or because people can’t do anything without AI. This is being launched because OpenAI is desperate for revenue. The same process is being repeated with Meta and Amazon and Google, because every giant tech company is investing tens or even hundreds billions into AI, and getting very little in return. Each is afraid of being left behind, and in the wake of pouring massive sums into an unproven technology they’re now attempting to force mass AI adoption.
You can’t open Facebook, Instagram, or Google without coming across AI, and that’s because in their desperation Silicon Valley is manufacturing demand. Palantir is using its connections to get the Pentagon to adopt AI, Google and Meta and Amazon are using their monopolies to force AI on us, and OpenAI is using their chatbot dominance to push ChatGPT into greater profitability. The demand is not coming from the bottom → up, it’s coming from the top → down. As AI proponents keep saying, the new tech is here “like it or not.”
This is manufactured, even forced, demand. The corporations that control social media, online shopping, email and more are united in forcing AI on us. There are still choices we can and should make, but on a grand scale new tech and corporate concentration necessitates the regulation of technology and of monopolies; consumer choice is not enough. This lesson has been proven time and time again, and that’s the primary reason Big Tech is all in for Donald Trump. In return for their investment in him they’re getting exactly what they want, namely the ability to abuse their power in the absence of government oversight.
This is the heart of fascism, a corporate-governmental merger that benefits a handful of oligarchs at the expense of everyone else. You might point out that regular old capitalism already let Silicon Valley run amuck, and you’d be right. Our government has long been captured by oligarchy, and Congress and the President have long acted in accordance with the interests of the ruling class. But two crucial things happened in the last several years. One, a progressive wave finally started rising up, and while it didn’t seize power, it made inroads and influenced power. Lina Khan, Biden’s FTC commissioner, actually went after Big Tech. She launched suits against Amazon and Meta and Google and more, and that couldn’t be tolerated. It was finally receiving regulatory pushback that cemented Silicon Valley’s rightward swing. They were moved by the huge monetary incentives of a regime that would stop holding them accountable, and would even actively partner with them, not vague ideas about “wokeness.”
The second thing that happened to Silicon Valley was AI. Heralded as the transformative technology of the future, the development that would change the game, AI has certainly reshaped how the biggest companies in the world spent their money, even if it hasn’t quite transformed everything else yet. Trillion dollar companies have invested billions and billions, but several years later they’re still not seeing the payoff. AI is just not very profitable. Even ChatGPT, maybe the most profitable development in AI, is not a huge money maker — only 5% of users are currently willing to pay for the product.
The only way for AI to succeed is for it to be forced on us and for profits to be forced out of consumers. And with the entire economy resting more and more on AI investments, a crisis for AI becomes a crisis for capitalism. That is exactly where fascism comes in, attacking democracy in order to rescue capitalism through force. At times that looks like government violence and terror inflicted on our communities, and at times it looks like forcing profits out of masses of people without their consent.
This ugly fusion of tech oligarchs and fascist politicians isn’t a one way street. Silicon Valley needs a government willing to let them abuse us, shove AI down our throats, and force profits out of us, but fascists also need Big Tech. Just like the endless drive for profit leads capitalists to manufacture new avenues for profit, and eventually force profits out of us, the endless drive for power leads fascists to seek out new methods of manipulation and control. Surveillance tech turns out to be the perfect vehicle for those desires.
ICE, the agency that encapsulates so much of what’s wrong with Trump’s regime, is now embracing even more dystopian technology. As Eva Dou writes, ICE “has been rapidly building out its surveillance capabilities in recent weeks, signing a string of contracts for technologies to identify individuals by their irises or facial features and to monitor their cellphone activity, social media posts and physical movement.” And they’re planning to use this tech to go after “antifa” as well as migrants (and people who look like migrants). Documents secured by the Washington Post show that these new tech contracts with Palantir and Clearview AI are intended not just for going after immigrants, but for going after what “the administration regards as anti-ICE extremist groups.”
Fascism needs AI, just as AI needs fascism. While oligarchs attempt to force profits out of us because they’ve reached the limit of what they can consensually extract, fascists exert power over us because they’ve gone beyond the limits of what the populace will democratically consent to. Poll after poll shows that people are growing more skeptical of AI. Similarly, polling shows that people do not agree with how Trump is using ICE, attacking immigrants, and terrorizing communities.
But the White House and Silicon Valley are united in moving ahead despite us, creating an anti-democratic alliance to force profits out of us, and to force their will onto us all. This is where capitalism leads, to a society run by sociopaths who would rather have a violent reign of terror than allow democratic flourishing, because if people were empowered we’d reject their relentless push for infinite profits and the human toll it takes on all of us.
We must see this truth clearly, we must not settle at a resistance that sees Trump as the cause; he is the symptom of this fundamentally sick system. We have to know what we’re up against, so we can fight accordingly. Right now we have a long, drawn-out, difficult struggle on our hands. But if we don’t organize and fight we have something even more sinister ahead — a dystopian fusion of billionaire tech fiends and fascist sociopaths. No matter how hard it is to defeat them, it’s better than losing to this unholy alliance. - JP
P.S. The answer, of course, is not to give in, but to get better at fighting back:
9 Steps to Ground Yourself in the Fight
The chaos has, again, become relentless. Federal forces are in the streets of Washington, D.C. in a fascist incursion led by the President himself. Trump and his minions are threatening to do the same to numerous other cities. Texas Democrats are being stalked by police on orders from the state Republican Party because th…
Funny, I've always had a visceral resistance to AI, especially when it's offered up online. Thank goodness for good instincts.
Thanks for this excellent article, J.P.