Pinchbeck examines the twenty-two-point manifesto Palantir posted on X, which Yanis Varoufakis called an AI-driven threat to humanity's existence and which distills Alex Karp's 2025 book The Technological Republic. The document claims Silicon Valley owes the country an affirmative obligation to help defend it, that hard power this century rests on software, and that some cultures are vital while others are dysfunctional and regressive. Pinchbeck sets this beside Curtis Yarvin's joke about processing the underclass into biodiesel, Peter Thiel's closed-door lectures defining the Antichrist as any global authority that would limit AI or tax billionaires, and Thiel's writing on women's suffrage. He notes the National Defense Authorization Act's amendment automatically registering men aged eighteen to twenty-six for Selective Service, and argues the right's new masculinity is a synthesis rather than a restoration.
In brief
- Pinchbeck argues the Palantir manifesto sorts cultures into those that have produced vital advances and those it treats as dysfunctional and effectively disposable, while dismissing pluralism as a shallow temptation.
- He argues the legal infrastructure for a draft is already in place, since the National Defense Authorization Act amended the Military Selective Service Act to register young men automatically through federal databases.
- He warns that Palantir's integration into US government and military systems could consolidate location, financial, biometric and social media data into a single database that renders private life legible and manipulable by the state.
- He notes that Thiel defines the Antichrist as a global government that might limit AI, tax billionaires, address climate change or halt nuclear weapons development.
- He argues that totalitarian projects require endless foreign wars, which occupy the military, enable profiteering and justify domestic surveillance.
- He calls for a shift from the achievement subject, who treats the self as an enterprise, toward a participatory subject, rejecting both progressive victim identity and the nihilism of the techno-fascist project, and points to Minneapolis organizing against ICE as an example.
Full text
Last month, Palantir posted a 22-point manifesto on X. It went super viral within hours. Yanis Varoufakis called it an AI-driven threat to humanity's existence. The document distills the worldview of Palantir's CEO, Alex Karp, the one who likes to carry a samurai sword around. From his 2025 book, The Technological Republic, the manifesto argues that Silicon Valley, {quote} owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible, holding an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. It states that hard power in this century will be built on software. It goes so far as to divide cultures into those that, {quote} have produced vital advances, {unquote} and those that are, {quote} dysfunctional and regressive, insinuating that the second group is more or less disposable.
Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel's house philosopher, has jokingly proposed processing the underclass into biodiesel. The Palantir manifesto also calls for resisting, {quote} the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism, {unquote}. Like all authoritarians, Karp yearns to restart the draft. He had stated that national service should be a universal duty. The recent National Defense Authorization Act amended the Military Selective Service Act so that every American man between 18 and 26 is now registered automatically through existing federal databases. In other words, the infrastructure for a draft is already being put in place. While it was hard to fully understand the reasons for Trump's Iran war, generally totalitarian projects need endless foreign conflicts.
War keeps the military occupied, making a domestic coup unlikely. It allows massive war profiteering while providing a rationale for surveillance and control of the population as a whole. Palantir's software now underwrites the Pentagon's targeting and ISIS surveillance. Palantir's software is being deeply integrated into the US government and military infrastructure. This includes a master database that assimilates granular personal data on every citizen, including real-time location, telemetry derived from sharp smartphone metadata, interconnected financial transaction records, social media sentiment analysis, and biometric identification logs, cross-referenced with public and private surveillance feeds. By consolidating these disparate data silos into a singular operational structure, this software could render the private life of each of us fully legible and manipulable by the state.
Honestly, to say this is a dire development is an understatement. Meanwhile, Peter Thiel, Karp's co-founder and long-time backer, has spent recent months delivering strange closed-door lectures on the Antichrist. Thiel defines the Antichrist as a global government system that might even seek to limit AI or tax billionaires or address ruinous impacts of climate change or stop the further development of nuclear weapons. The apocalypse as presented in the biblical framework as symbols of spiritual realities or the apocalypse as plain prediction about how the world could or indeed will end. Uh yeah, it's um let's see. It It is um the um the way Girard would have put it and the way I came to see it as well was that in some sense the apocalyptic prophecies are just a prediction of what humans are likely to do in a world in which they have ever more powerful technologies um in which there are no sacred limits on on the use of these technologies, in which human nature has not you know, maybe not gotten worse, but has not gotten better.
And uh and it has this sort of, you know, limitless uh violence aspect uh aspect to to it. It's um and and yeah, I I think Girard had all these sort of provocative formulations like it is it is just a scientific prediction of what humanity is likely to do. Um Thiel has written that allowing women to vote makes what he calls capitalist democracy an oxymoron. We saw the SAVE Act as an initial attempt to reverse this by requiring married women who have changed their names to produce extra layers of identification at the voting booth. Clark has suggested that AI, as it assimilates the jobs of the professional classes from lawyers to programmers, is going to destroy the traditional power base of Democrats and also women while benefiting white working class men.
The the real problem we have in society is not your listeners or Palantir's customers or our partners is like, well, what happens to everyone else? Are they going to lynch us? Cuz like that's the real problem. Like these products, like what we're building, like our our our agents, mean that like the most I mean, the most powerful people in the Democratic Party are highly educated female voters. And these technologies, like they love they I mean like yeah, I actually get along with all these people in private and there's a public dispute, but like largely I've talked to Dario over and over and it's like, "Yeah, you love one company cuz they they're not pro-Trump.
That company's taking your job." How are you going to feel about that company when you find that you have no job? And what what What do you think the the Republican Party's going to do to products that do not support our military? What do you think the Democratic Party's going to do to products, even if you're voting for them, that are taking away the jobs of every one of your constituents and saying, "Oh, people are going to love you so much and you're going to be poor." By the way, "We love you so much, we're going to give you a little handout once a month." Yeah. Today I want to consider on a more meta level why exactly this regressive warlike mode of masculinity has suddenly reached such a position of political dominance in American society. What we're seeing on the right it's not a restoration of something from the past.
It's a bizarre new synthesis. A militarized entrepreneurial warrior ethos that fuses Silicon Valley's master class fantasies with evangelical eschatology. Working class yearnings to return to the old old industrial era of factory production mingling with futurist dreams of eternal life and the conquest of nature. And then and then add to that the anti- anticipation of Antichrist, apocalypse, and rapture. If you enjoyed this video and want more content like it, please like this video and subscribe to our channel. Also, you might consider sharing it with your friends. So, we need to explore how a huge part of what has driven this right-wing patriarchal regressive populist upsurge in the US is based on a rejection of a long-term feminization of culture and society that was incomplete, but has been going on for the last century, the last 100 years.
I think it's conceivable that this reactionary rampage is a temporary extinction burst. An extinction burst is like a massive explosion before an old pattern dies. This case would be a tantrum of the of the masculine ego as society is moving in a different direction away from domination and patriarchal modes of control. But the other possibility is also likely that this Christian patriarchal technofascism is going to lock in permanently and reformat human subjectivity with a ferocity far beyond what even George Orwell described in his book 1984. And I feel if we don't stop this onslaught, our children will very likely find themselves living in a Handmaid's Tale future indoctrinated from birth to surrender to authoritarian or totalitarian systems of control.
I mean, we know the Heritage Foundation plans to take away not just abortion, but also birth control and the right to vote from women. They really want to regress us back to the uh to the 19th century. So, a question that fascinates me is why in the US is our collective resistance to this malignant project so kind of muted and lackluster? I realize that we saw the Gaza encampments at universities last year in 2024. They were met with mass arrests, expulsions, visa revocations. The federal government is definitely trying to make us believe, convince us that it has the ability to crush and wipe out dissent. But then as we saw in Minneapolis when the people rise up, we can push back against these oppressive forces.
By now, we should be seeing huge demonstrations against both Palantir's plot to collect all of our data and the Iran war, but little seems to be happening, honestly. One powerful protest occurred recently when injured combat veterans and members of military families appeared at the Capitol. I think like 65 of them were zip tied and arrested. Right-wing MAGA women, kind of ironically, are now protesting against the rollback of restrictions on glyphosate and other forever chemicals that the Trump regime and their hero, quote and quote, RFK are putting back into our food chain. And these guys know full well that these chemicals will cause cancer epidemics and shorten life expectancy while boosting corporate profits.
Generally, the Epstein class of billionaires are treating the mass popu- population in the US like farm animals that can be killed off as soon as we stop producing profit from them. By not protesting and vehemently pushing back now, it feels like people are tacitly accepting that they're going to be made into sheeple. The Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri made the point that in a post-industrial industrial society like ours, the most important form of production is not anything material or physical, but actually the production of subjectivity itself. So, I want to step back from the news cycle and kind of ask a different question. How was this sort of passive form of subjectivity produced?
Something about the way identity or subjectivity has been produced and constructed in the contemporary US has made the populace as a whole extremely docile and passive. Of course, one factor is the destructive impact of smartphones and social media, which have created mass epidemics of ADHD, dissociation, and depression. And then there's the mental health crisis with rates of antidepressant skyrocketing among young adults, roughly doubling even over the past decade. The despair that so many people feel is in in fact a sane and rational response to a society that is strip-mining the planet for short-term gain to satiate the monstrous egos of a few hundred billionaires. The stunning corruption of the Trump family or Trump regime should have already unleashed massive constant expressions of public outrage.
The corruption is beyond anything we've seen in American history. Trump's affiliated crypto ventures World Liberty Liberty Financial and the Trump meme coin provided avenue for unregulated bribery. Anybody who wants to support can simply buy in. But instead, the collective response is just strangely muted. Among progressives in particular we need to inquire into how have we been produced or constructed as these passive, pacified, and alienated subjects. We need to understand why we have become so incapable as a society of responding to what the historian of fascism Tim Snyder has accurately called superpower suicide. This is a condition that threatens almost all of us with a diminishing horizon of possibility not in the distant but in the immediate future.
And look, I understand how difficult it is to fight against this overwhelming onslaught of destruction. Many of us still find ourselves on a tipping point where it hasn't really started to impact us yet on on level. But that's going to change, probably over the next year, if the situation is allowed to further degenerate. The US war against Iran and the closing closing of the Strait of Hormuz are likely to lead to ongoing and deepening shortages of fuel, fertilizer, and eventually the food that needed that fertilizer to grow. The US economy is also likely to crash at some point, which I personally suspect suspect Trump and his allies like Peter Thiel and the Qatari sovereign wealth fund actually want, as that would allow them to buy up distressed US assets, public lands, and infrastructure for pennies on the dollar, as happened in the USSR after the uh you know the the fall of communism.
So, I'm going to come back to these topics in later videos, but today I really want to focus on the construction and production of subjectivity. Now, we don't normally think of subjectivity as something mass-produced, like a widget in a factory. But if we stop and reflect on it, we can start to understand how this works. We're all shaped by the media we we we consume. We're conditioned and indoctrinated by the memes and narratives that are beamed toward us at all times. For several decades, the progressive project has focused on the reconstruction of subjectivity or identity around victimhood, relating kind of authentic selfhood to the experience of historical pain and you know legacy of ancestral suffering.
Eva Illouz's 2007 book called Intimacies traces this development back to the early 20th century with the arrival of clinical psychology into corporate management. And this accelerated in her account through the feminist movement of the 1970s. Three discourses, the therapeutic, the corporate, and the feminist, fused into what she calls a new communicative ethic. This ethic prioritized emotional expression and the control of emotions, which needed to be constantly observed, named, measured, shared, and negotiated. The healthy subject was defined as one who can express its emotional needs while understanding its history and the terms offered by psychological classifications that were eventually codified in in the DSM. So, we were trained to turn kind of the intimate sphere of our emotional lives into a site of management, extending the market logic and disposable commodity model of capitalism into our, you know, private family life.
For instance, through dating apps, which create a sense of infinite optionality in the romantic marketplace. Illouz defines emotional capitalism as a culture in which emotional and economic discourses and practices mutually shape each other. Under this regime, intimacy becomes a calculable domain. Feelings become commensurable objects, and the self, as she writes, becomes a packaged product competing with others on an open-ended market regulated by the law of supply and demand. So, this cultural construct requires the subject, the individual, to construct his or her identity through this narrative of victimization. The therapeutic mode, Illouz writes, paradoxically privileges suffering and trauma. She borrows a phrase from the art critic Robert Hughes describing the results as a democracy of pain, a culture of complaint in which the dominant therapeutic narrative, quote, "ironically creates much of the suffering it is supposed to alleviate." Unquote.
When suffering becomes the basis of authenticity authenticity, the subject then has a perverse incentive to perform, protect, and amplify its own wounds. Once victimhood is the ground of recognition, anyone who does not have an obvious trauma or uh you know, scar from the from past disasters or whatever, needs to either find one, manufacture one, or accept a reduced ontological status. And then an entire cultural apparatus was built around the ranking of injuries. This required constant monitoring of a language, policing of attention, and kind of the ritualized display of emotional processing. It made actual honest disagreement dangerous because disagreement always risks being reframed as as harm. And it is also inherently disempowering.
Someone who believes themselves to be a victim is not really going to be able to reclaim their own agency or develop the inner resilience to face unpleasant truths or even very harsh and horrible new situations. They're always going to be trapped in the in the grievances of the past. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han approaches similar territory from a different angle, adding an ontological layer to Illouz's critique. In his books, including The Burnout Society, The Agony of Eros, and Psychopolitics, Han proposes that the sort of contemporary neoliberal subject is not a subject of discipline in the Fou- Foucauldian sense. It is more of an achievement subject, he calls he he names it.
We have been conditioned to replace the external master, let's say the old factory foreman or the or you know, the corporate boss or whatever, with an internalized master. He writes, "Today, we do not deem ourselves subjugated subjects, but rather projects, always refashioning and reinventing ourselves." And also, "Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting laborer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one." What Han calls the achievement subject doesn't need to be repressed because it represses itself to survive in the entrepreneurial logic of the market. As a project deeming itself free of external and alien limitations, Han writes, "The I is now subjugating itself to internal limitations and self-constraints, which are taking the form of compulsive achievement and optimization." As this achievement subject fixates on psychological positivity and tech- techniques of self-optimization as modes of success, it loses the ability to be genuinely surprised, to surrender to authentic authentic eros, and also a lot of its political agency gets forfeited. So, love for this achievement subject gets positivized into a formula for enjoyment, requiring rational calculation.
And the end result, according to Han, is that we are drowning in sameness. We have abolished the threshold across which the other might appear to surprise us. As a sociologist, Illouz traces institutional and discursive histories, showing how the confluence of psychotherapy lingo, self-help and advice culture, corporate management techniques, and feminism combine to produce a certain form of subjectivity. This process required the rationalizing of intimacy to establish a regime of emotional capital. And this created new markets along the way, of course. Han could be described as a philosophical anthropologist. He defines a shift in the mode of subjectivity under neoliberalism But these two approaches, I think, mesh together and work together well.
Illouz kind of outlines the how, the technical mechanism by which modern subjects learn to observe, measure, verbalize, and manage their feelings as economic assets. Han supplies the why, the deeper drive toward self-optimization and auto-exploitation, of which the communicative ethic is one instrument. Both agree that the modern subject mistakes its bondage for freedom. For Han, the modern subject tends toward narcissism. This is because of the invisible ideology reinforced by social technologies under entrepreneurial capitalism. Trapped in a hall of mirrors, the subject becomes incapable of recognizing or accepting radical otherness. True love becomes impossible when the other is degraded to a reflection of the self. The modern subject ends up trapped in what Han calls the inferno of the same.
As a palliative, Illouz proposes a return to embodied intuition, the innate presence that precedes categorization and verbalization. Han advocates for ontological surrender, a willingness to experience the ego's undoing in the encounter with a real other. If the dominant cultural regime operates through a feminine mode of emotional management, demanding safe spaces, trigger warnings, the policing of language to prevent emotional harm, and the validation of victim narratives, the counter-reaction seeks to shatter this consensus. The reactionary impulse violently rejects the mandate to listen, to empathize, to care, to process trauma. It seeks to replace the the suffocating, hyper-verbalizing, sort of emotional subject with an assertion of raw, unapologetic power and traditional masculine aggression.
But, you know, the success of this counter-reaction is partly because the therapeutic model of endless emotional negotiation kind of went too far and left modern subjects feeling paralyzed and exhausted. I I also think another layer to this is is offered by Katherine Liu in her book Virtue Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional-Managerial Class. So, she makes a similar diagnosis, arguing that what Illouz calls the communicative ethic and what Han calls the achievement subject are not just sort of like free-floating, ambient moods. They are artifacts of a specific professional class, the sort of salaried mental workers who staff universities, nonprofits, law firms, the HR departments, and the upper reaches of media. All these precincts that uh, you know, Alex Karp and the techno billionaires want to now decimate with AI.
This class, Liu argues, have hoarded virtue the way older elites hoarded land or resources. They've got wellness regimens, language protocols, sensitivity rituals, that sort of rich ritual of allyship, and these were functioning as markers of caste and privilege, credentials by which members signal their distance from those people they consider beneath them. The professional-managerial class, or PMC according to Liu, have been shameless about hoarding all forms of secularized virtue. Whenever it addresses a political and epic crisis produced by capitalism itself, the PMC reworks political struggles for policy change and redistribution into individual passion plays, focusing its efforts on individual acts of, you know, giving back or reified forms of self-transformation. Yeah, a little bit like the psychedelic movement in a way.
It's politics, she adds, amount to little more than virtue signaling. And it loves nothing more than moral panics to incite its members to ever more pointless forms of pseudo politics and hyper vigilance. So, I think Lou makes some great points here, and now we can see that the reactionary right really organized a direct counterstrike against this culture of, you know, bureaucracy and the PMC, which had become very problematic as it got more and more institutionalized. But, unfortunately, the right-wing assault is taking almost everything else down with it, everything that's kind of good about our society. Supporting a diabolical program that is not even just authoritarian, but I would say even totalitarian ambitions.
You know, we can see they're trying to take take total control of the media, and if they can, they're going to try to take hold of the information systems to impose eventually regime of mind control. And honestly, it's not even that easy to figure out what can stop this right now. We think it can't happen here, but it easily can. And we're seeing India moving aggressively against political satire. You know, we're seeing what happened in North Korea and so on. Trump's ongoing attacks on late-night comedians and the press is just a sign of what's coming if we don't find a way to stop this juggernaut. This new project, which seeks to construct a warrior fanatic identity on the ruins of progressive neoliberalism advanced by the sort of Carpe Fiel Vente circle and the Heritage Foundation and all of their billionaire allies, it's really a counterstrike against this long-term feminization of culture, which was, as I said, an incomplete process, yet did bring focus on, you know, victimization, authenticity, and in some sense called for the rationalization of intimacy under a therapeutic culture.
And where the feminine communicative ethos required incessant verbalization of feelings and negotiation and procedural fairness, DEI protocols, HR mediated speech norms, and so on, the masculine holy warrior ethos that we see with somebody like King Seth prioritizes decisive action, you know, civilizational and ethic purification, contempt for the weak and those who don't go along with the program. Plus, it advocates for just homicidal violence without apology against those they see as weak or against them. Uh, you know, the Palantir manifesto shows contempt for the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. Um, yes, so one regime is getting produced by the failures and gaps and collapses of the of the other, the old regime. And the problem we now face is that this new project to transform and produce a new subjectivity, a new form of collective subordination, where people won't be like educated anymore or they're not even going to be like suited for entrepreneurial capitalism.
They're going to be kind of like de-skilled. They're going to be kind of imprisoned in a totalitarian program of techno-authoritarian control. This whole project isn't really being met by nothing but a loud, resilient, unrelenting, and forceful alternative. And I think, you know, as I've been expressing here these last 40 years of woke culture have progressively unfortunately conditioned younger generations to feel more like traumatized victims, uh, while the focus on achievement through self-optimization and entrepreneurship has left people without any sense of solidarity or commonality. Many people are just too stunned by the speed of events to even fully understand what's being done to them or what's being orchestrated under their feet.
So, we're at a point where we need people, particularly young people, to start thinking hard about how their subjectivity got produced by this system. And they're going to have to reclaim their agency for themselves outside of these really depressing and demoralizing constructs. What Illouz and Hand talk about is not a mistake to be corrected by its, you know, violent opposite. The answer to a victim-centered subjectivity is definitely not the brutal contempt of like a warrior psychopath ideology. Both are rejections of kind of presence and authenticity. Both refuse communion with the other. One reduces the other to a mirror of its own wounds. And the the right-wing version denies the other or seeks to deny the other the right to exist at all.
Hand defines Eros as this capacity for genuine encounter with the other. Illouz seeks a return to embodied intuition. The reclaiming of authentic agency is not something that can be delivered by an app or installed by any ideological program. We're going to need to reject both the victim identity of this kind of sappy progressivism and this horrible authoritarian project where people are going to be indoctrinated to give up their agency to narcissistic billionaires waving around samurai swords and you know, with their horribly inflated egos. But ultimately we're not trapped in this binary of victimhood versus violence. We have this other option, which is to move toward deeper embodiment, presence, and so on.
And this requires shifting from the achievement subject who views the self as an enterprise toward what might be called a participatory subject. Such a subject would acknowledge the depth of the present crisis not as an excuse for exhaustion or a license for nihilism, but as an opportunity, a catalyst for a purposeful and meaningful collective action. And so if we're going to confront this emergency, we're going to have to embrace new forms of solidarity. We're going to have to reject the culture of complaints while we avoid the sort of nihilistic tendency of the techno-fascist project. This is going to require localized, community-building, collective engagements that break the illusion of separation.
And we saw this recently in Minneapolis and how they were able to uh sort of come together against uh the the ICE menace. So, what we really need is kind of a ontological revolt on the part of the young principally. This would have meant abandoning the market-defined logic of the self and reclaiming our collective power before it is just too late and we find ourselves trapped permanently in an airtight control grid, which is definitely where this is going if we don't stop it.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.