On Palantirism? A guide for the perplexed

A guide to 'Palantirism': how Palantir's founders' philosophy underwrites its embedding in state and corporate infrastructure.

In April 2026 Palantir Technologies posted a twenty-two-point manifesto distilling the worldview of its co-founders, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp. This paper takes that document, and the firm behind it, as a way into understanding a company that has become a major supplier to the state, embedded across defence, intelligence, immigration, policing and healthcare through contracts that include the US immigration case-management system, the NHS Federated Data Platform and the Pentagon's Project Maven. What sets Palantir apart from conventional contractors is that its founders hold an articulated philosophical position they have written about, lectured on and funded over several decades. The paper reconstructs that formation. Beyond the neoreactionary current associated with Curtis Yarvin, it traces five older sources — René Girard, Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, and the financial futurism of Davidson and Rees-Mogg — and shows how their commitments find expression in Palantir's Gotham and Foundry platforms. Reading the manifesto across four functions — diagnosing crisis, protecting the powerful, building a coalition and a distinctive gender politics — it argues that the document is best understood not as public relations but as a coherent worldview given a light legitimating gloss. Its central claim is that the philosophy cannot be separated from the infrastructure the firm supplies.

Please contact Dr Zahid Mumtaz (zahid.mumtaz@anu.edu.au) if you have any questions.

Event Speakers

Professor Roger Burrows — Roger Burrows is Professor in Global Inequalities at the University of Bristol and an Honorary Professor at ANU. He is a critical interdisciplinary researcher who has worked for over four decades across housing and urban studies, the sociology of digital technologies, health and the body, social class and inequality, research methods, and the metricisation of higher education.