By James Myers
Palantir is a tech company increasingly at the centre of controversial threats to personal privacy, particularly for its work with the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) that enables the technological targeting of migrants for mass deportations. ICE’s killings of Minneapolis protesters Renée Good and Alex Pretti in early 2026 put the spotlight on the agency and its enablers that include companies like Palantir.
Palantir is under contract with the U.S. government for development of a system called ImmigrationOS. The system’s three core functions are to streamline the “selection and apprehension operations of illegal aliens,” to track “self-deportations,” and to develop an “Immigration Lifecycle Process” to “streamline the identification” of aliens and their “removal” from the United States. The goal is to make “deportation logistics more efficient,” as reported by Wired.
Palantir’s website promotes decision-making by automation. Image: Palantir
Palantir’s motivations don’t appear to be strictly commercial. The company’s billionaire CEO Alex Karp made a $1 million contribution for the inauguration of the current U.S. president, and the company is helping to fund construction of the president’s White House ballroom.
In 2025, Karp co-authored, with Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. In a posting on X, Palantir summarized the book in 22 points “because we get asked a lot,” of which the following 4 points are of special historical note:
- “The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.”
- “The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.”
- “The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.”
- “Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.”
The historical perspective of Karp and his co-author is troubling in many respects.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp, in November 2023. Image: U.K. Government, on Wikipedia
Subsuming democracy’s moral appeal under “hard power” to enforce government of the people, by the people, for the people (as Abraham Lincoln defined democracy), is troubling. The inherent tension between “hard power” and power “of the people” is not acknowledged, and history provides many lessons for the contradiction.
The world is now witness to some democratically elected leaders who exercise “hard power” for personal gain and retribution against their adversaries, and recent history demonstrates the extent to which a leader’s hard power can cause continuing harm. The prime minister of India, the world’s most populous democracy, declared a state of emergency in 1976 under which 8 million men were forcibly sterilized. The consequences of the mass sterilization continue now, 50 years later, and will continue forever into future generations.
The idea that those who find “expression in people they may never meet” are bound for “disappointment” contradicts the ideal of government “of the people.” Can democracy, which is an expression of a nation’s people, function only when each person self-expresses without accounting for the ideas of others they don’t know? That possibility, among America’s nearly 350 million citizens, seems to be a fantasy – especially so now, when social media algorithms have given influencers the power to promote groupthink.
Palantir markets the hard power of its Gotham product line. Image: Palantir.
The authors’ sweeping conclusions about errors in the “defanging of Germany” and the “highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism” are, at a minimum, historically inept. Germany was the antagonist in both world wars (1914-1918 and 1939-1945) and Japan instigated the attack at Pearl Harbor in 1941 that led the U.S. into the second world war. Under what basis, after the loss of 60 million lives and the genocidal murder of 6 million Jews in the war that ended in 1945, should the aggressors have been allowed to continue as major military powers in the aftermath?
Genocide and war continue to plague human civilization and have become even more deadly with the precise targeting capabilities of advanced hardware and software. On what basis can Karp conclude that now-peaceful countries, like Germany, Japan, and others in various global regions, will not sometime in the future fall under the control of tyrants who would abuse their technological power? In a number of countries, the current warning signs are clear to see. For example, The Quantum Record’s October 2024 article How Journalists and Digital Watchdog Citizen Lab Protect the Public from Cyberthreats detailed the recent ability of authoritarian governments to secretly install software called Pegasus on the phones and computers of dissidents and journalists for tracking and retribution.
In this respect, it’s especially important to recall that the country that lost the greatest proportion of its Jewish population to Nazi Germany’s genocide in World War II is the Netherlands. Nearly three-quarters of Dutch Jews were murdered, in part because the country’s government maintained especially detailed records of its population – including the types of detail that Palantir’s ImmigrationOS now aims to gather in the U.S.
Lastly, on what basis can it be concluded that some cultures “have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful”? Who is the arbiter of cultural success and failure, and against what benchmark is success measured – that of the dominant powers of the day? Is Alex Karp, or anyone else, endowed with such clarity of vision to place global cultures in a hierarchy? On what historical basis can Karp conclude that some cultures, presumably those not aligned with Palantir’s major customer the U.S. government, are failures? For that matter, how can it be assumed that people of any “culture,” by whatever subjective measures are used to differentiate it from other “cultures,” act as a uniform bloc?
Praise for The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, extols the combination of technological power with the power of government at a time when the democratic goals of a polarized nation are heavily contested.
Not being an American, I am left wondering what culture I belong to. Is it one that’s based on the colour of my skin, the Western world in which I live, or my religious beliefs, age, sexual orientation, education, and any of the other factors that make me who I am? Whatever culture I might appear to belong to, I feel no compulsion to act in unison with others who might have a share in the same culture, and I might even vehemently disagree with many of them.
Tech leaders should tread very cautiously on the historical record, especially when their technological power to disrupt the lives of humans is as extensive as Palantir’s. At the very least, such leaders should humbly acknowledge the possibility that what they don’t know could exceed what they do know, and the harms that their products could inflict when they fall into the wrong hands.
