This month, Palantir released a kind of manifesto which has caused much consternation. This should not come as a surprise. Palantir, founded by the billionaire wannabe philosopher, Peter Thiel, is a complex company that utilises data and develops software to mobilise the power of the state — including clients like the US military.
This work includes significant use of AI. Anyone who has been paying attention knows that developing and using AI leads us into a moral minefield. AI companies have employed philosophers and writers as well as engineers in an attempt to steer their technology through a moral framework of some sort — both supposedly for the good of humanity as well as the company.
For example, AI’s disruptive effects on job markets, our social lives, and information gathering, makes AI a transformative technology. Theories of economic abundance may tell us how to support displaced workers economically, say, but this tells us little of how a political order should be imagined. Capitalism’s dynamism is, for better and for worse, destructive to previous ways of life.
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As Walter Russel Mead has argued in Power, Terror, Peace, and War, capitalism has been a transformational exercise that has never stayed the same. Just as Fordism was replaced by neoliberal capitalism, the arrival of millennial capitalism was designed to try to safeguard effective competition. However, as Hettie O’ Brien’s new work Asset Class highlights — and as Schumpeter predicted — the desire for growth consumes the rules that are designed to hem in monopolies and the domination which comes with them. The unleashing of the hyper-mobile and the hyper-wealthy does not just affect our material conditions but also our social and political environment.
The desire to dominate makes the intersection between politics and the economy clear. Palantir represents a dangerous intersection of politics and business. Its manifesto represents a private company redefining our politics. This amounts to a fundamental societal shift — not least when the private company, and its involvement in AI, data and surveillance, questions the nature of the state as the unquestionable manufacturer of force. For example, who holds Palantir accountable if their vision of the “moral debt” that Silicon Valley owes to America is incompatible with citizen expectations? What right does a private company have to rule on the “postwar neutering of Germany and Japan”?
Nowhere in the “manifesto” is there a discussion of the role of society. Nowhere does this manifesto talk of philosophy, art, creativity or the importance of public debate. Its narrow focus on “hard power” is reminiscent of the pugilistic and hubristic foreign policy that Trump has pursued.
One of the core differences between conservatism and fascism is on the role of power. Both recognise the transformative force of power, but whereas conservatives treat power cautiously, fascists demand its unleashing to reform society along the homogeneous lines that it desires.
It reminds me of the difference between Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt. Whereas Hobbes envisaged a powerful state to avoid chaos, its power was designed to be constrained. Schmitt, the man who aligned with the Nazis, criticised Hobbes as a proto-liberal and demanded an end to pluralism and the emergence of homogeneity.
Palantir’s deference to hard power and scorn for soft power and pluralism evokes, no doubt unconsciously, an imagery much closer to the fascism of Schmitt than to the cautious state-building of Hobbes. The assumption that political order needs to be arranged on the altar of hard power is a reductive form of politics that conservatives should naturally reject.
Palantir’s manifesto should make conservatives fear such companies wielding societal influence
Today we see the natural limits of hard power. Trump’s adventurism in Iran, despite US military supremacy, should have demolished faith in sweeping unilateral adventurism. Indeed, rubbishing of international treaties ignores the success of the non-proliferation treaty, which has been mostly successful in keeping weapons out of rogue states’ hands for the past 70 years. North Korea has developed such technology only out of the utmost determination to do so. The reduction in conflict and death that the manifesto praises was only made possible precisely because of interconnection and globalisation, which made war more costly for everyone involved, as well as developing norms and safeguards. To negate the international community’s ability to regulate AI weapons, then, only increases the likelihood of the very conflict Palantir claims to want to avoid.
Palantir’s manifesto should make conservatives fear such companies wielding societal influence. They could undermine the political order which has sustained Western Europe and America for generations. Far from embracing a bizarre neo-feudalism, with companies acting as the new land barons, conservatives should challenge their power.
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