A week ago, a tweet by Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, an American cybersecurity company, went viral, in which he spread ideas against democracy and supported technology for the future government of countries. Now, what is being talked about is the manifesto that this company has published called ‘The Technological Republic’, which has an “almost prophetic” tone, as if the engineers of Silicon Valley had written their own gospel,” explained Jorge Freire in At last.
Palantir was born in Silicon Valley just after 9/11. Its founder is Peter Thiel, one of the “great technological magnates of the Trumpist orbit”, in the words of Freire, and what this company does is cross-check millions of data in real time. However, with the publication of this manifesto many questions have arisen due to the doctrinal tone of the text.
What ‘The Technological Republic’ is saying is that the future is in the hands of these technological elites, that “deliberative democracies are too slow and that technology must direct the world with criteria of efficiency, less discussion and more algorithms,” Freire explained. But this immediately leads to “disturbing” questions, because “it is one thing to use machines and another to obey them.”
The danger of leaving power in the hands of algorithms
“Are we facing a technology or something else?” asked the host of the program, Jaime Cantizano, while reading paragraphs of that manifesto about “social discipline, authority, patriotism, with a messianic tone.” According to Freire, the manifesto “exudes manifest resentment” against democratic deliberation, which he defines as “a waste of time.”
This is a contradiction in itself, because this company has been fed for years by “multimillion-dollar contracts from the State itself.” “Silicon Valley has been selling itself for decades as a libertarian, rebellious, untamed territory, adverse to bureaucracies. But it turns out that many of these technological giants have prospered precisely thanks to public power,” said Freire.
In addition, he has warned of the danger of leaving power in the hands of technology companies and algorithms. Democracy is based on a very simple premise, which is that citizens can understand and evaluate how decisions are made. However, if power begins to rely on “technical systems whose operation escapes public understanding…”, Freire has dropped.
Democracy allows citizens to deliberate, but “how are they going to deliberate about something that no one understands? It’s like when a technical expert tells you that you don’t understand something, but trust us.”
The idea of the philosopher king
The truth is that these companies are already participating in police or social surveillance tasks, such as ICE, which is based on the algorithm, which crosses stories, police records, bank transactions, geolocation, personal relationships, license plates, calls… and generates risk profiles. “It’s not just what someone has done that’s pursued, but what they statistically could do.”
Palantir’s manifesto is, ultimately, a response to the idea of the philosophical king. Like Plato, he imagined a city governed by philosophers, who were superior to the Athenian citizenry whom he saw as manipulative and emotional. Planto distrusted Athenian democracy and did not trust letting the crowd make decisions. “When someone is convinced of having a superior vision of reality, democratic deliberation bothers them,” this is what Palantir is saying, according to Freire.
In this sense, “we are not facing a return of classic fascism, but something else, an unprecedented concentration of technical, economic and cognitive power in the hands of very few companies capable of simultaneously influencing markets, governments and social behavior,” stated Freire.
