PALANTIR: MUCH MORE THAN A MANIFESTO - Silvestro Marascio - ETHICA SOCIETAS-Rivista di scienze umane e sociali

From technological neutrality to the militarization of AI: the role of digital platforms in the geopolitical redefinition of the West

Abstract: The Technological Republic is the title of a post that, in fact, represents a genuine political manifesto drafted by the leadership of the U.S. company Palantir. The underlying aim of the document is to reaffirm an almost self-evident idea: cybersecurity and the technological power that companies operating in this sector are able to express increasingly constitute a strategic asset for the community and, as such, must be regarded by the state that hosts them. Although the post originally appeared on social media, the debate subsequently spread across the broader media landscape in the final days of April, focusing precisely on the 22 programmatic points written by Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, and its Head of Corporate Affairs, Nicholas Zamiska.

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versione italiana

The Meaning of the Manifesto: Technology, Power, and Western Responsibility

The document published by Palantir Technologies on April 18, through its corporate account on the platform X, rapidly established itself as a programmatic text whose significance extends beyond the boundaries of corporate communication. Its public reception, including within the Italian debate, has shown that it is perceived not merely as a corporate statement of principles, but as a political-technological manifesto situated at the center of a broader reflection on the role of Big Tech in international security, the defense of the West, and the transformation of the relationships among technology, war, and democracy.

The most significant element of the document is not the mere assertion of the importance of artificial intelligence, which has by now become a consolidated feature of public debate, but rather the explicit overcoming of the idea of technological neutrality. Palantir appears to argue that high-tech companies can no longer confine themselves to producing tools, infrastructures, and platforms to be made indifferently available to the global market, because technology, in the new geopolitical scenario, is already part of conflict. It is not external to competition among powers; rather, it constitutes one of its principal arenas.

From this perspective, a strong thesis emerges: Silicon Valley would have a moral debt toward the United States and, more broadly, toward the Western political order that made its economic, cultural, and technological rise possible. According to this view, the digital industry is not a neutral actor, but the historical product of an institutional ecosystem grounded in economic freedom, legal protection, public research, military investment, capital markets, and American strategic supremacy. If this is the case, then Big Tech could not withdraw from the defense of that order without falling into a form of political irresponsibility.

Read in this light, Palantir’s manifesto therefore does not merely call for greater cooperation between technology companies and state apparatuses, but proposes a genuine redefinition of the role of the digital industry within the architecture of Western power. Technology is no longer represented as an autonomous, cosmopolitan, and post-political space, but as an infrastructure of sovereignty, deterrence, and strategic survival.

The End of Technological Neutrality

One of the most significant cores of the manifesto lies in its challenge to technological neutrality. For a long time, a substantial part of Western digital culture cultivated the idea that innovation could develop above geopolitical affiliations, as a global force capable of connecting individuals, markets, and knowledge beyond the borders of states. This vision, however, appears increasingly difficult to sustain in a context marked by hybrid warfare, cyber-conflicts, industrial competition, data control, critical infrastructures, and the military use of artificial intelligence.

Palantir adopts a radically different position: if technology is already a terrain of conflict, then not choosing is itself a choice. Neutrality, from this perspective, would not be ethical prudence, but a removal of responsibility. A technology company that declares itself neutral with respect to global conflicts would ultimately ignore the fact that its tools may be used by authoritarian powers, hostile apparatuses, or actors capable of threatening liberal democracies.

This position stands in tension with other views that have emerged in the debate on AI, in which some actors in the sector have claimed ethical limits on the use of their systems in military contexts or in Pentagon-related projects. The divide is significant: on one side, a view that regards ethical prudence as a condition of responsibility; on the other, a view that regards the refusal to employ technology strategically as a form of unilateral disarmament of the West.

The issue is far from secondary. It concerns how democratic societies intend to govern artificial intelligence when it is no longer merely a tool of productivity, automation, or knowledge, but becomes an element of military superiority, surveillance, threat prediction, and strategic decision-making. In this framework, the question is no longer whether AI will enter conflicts, but which political order will orient its use.

From Soft Power to Technological Hard Power

Palantir’s manifesto appears to mark a transition from a diplomatic and cultural conception of power to a technological-military conception of deterrence. Soft power, understood as the capacity to attract, persuade, and legitimate through values, culture, and institutions, is deemed insufficient in the face of the harshness of the new global scenario. In its place, or at least alongside it, the manifesto exalts a form of technological hard power, in which artificial intelligence becomes an instrument of protection, anticipation, and informational dominance.

The implicit thesis is that democracies can no longer defend themselves solely through the moral superiority of their principles, but must equip themselves with technical superiority capable of translating those principles into operational capacity. In this view, the protection of the West would no longer depend only on alliances, treaties, conventional armies, and nuclear deterrence, but on the ability to develop, control, and deploy AI systems more advanced than those of strategic competitors.

It is at this point that the manifesto assumes a clearly geopolitical significance. The atomic age, according to the logic attributed to Alex Karp, would have been replaced by the age of artificial intelligence. Deterrence would no longer be based solely on the threat of physical destruction, but on the capacity to predict, classify, strike, coordinate, and neutralize threats through advanced computational systems. Power no longer resides only in the arsenal, but in the algorithm that determines how, when, and where to employ it.

This transformation entails a profound shift in the grammar of security. The soldier, the political decision-maker, and the military apparatus are integrated into a technical ecosystem in which the speed of information becomes part of force itself. War is no longer fought only on the ground, but within data architectures, predictive models, targeting systems, cloud infrastructures, satellite networks, and command platforms.

Artificial Intelligence, Battle, and the Anticipation of Threats

The concept that emerges most forcefully from the manifesto is the inevitability of the use of artificial intelligence in warfare. According to this perspective, the problem would not be to determine whether AI will be used in conflicts, because that is either already occurring or is destined to occur; rather, the problem is deciding who will control it, for what purposes, and with what strategic advantage.

For Palantir, the West must arrive first. This statement implies a logic of acceleration: if technological competition is also military competition, slowing down for ethical reasons may appear, in the eyes of those who support this approach, as a form of vulnerability. Innovation is no longer assessed solely in terms of its social impact, but in terms of its ability to produce strategic advantage before adversaries do so.

From this follows the idea that, if a soldier requires a given technology in order to operate with greater safety and effectiveness, the high-tech industry must respond. Silicon Valley’s moral debt toward the Western system would thus be translated into a duty to support defense, not episodically or conditionally, but structurally. Technology becomes part of the chain of collective protection.

However, this very approach opens decisive questions. If artificial intelligence is presented as a tool for anticipating threats, it becomes necessary to ask who defines the threat, according to what criteria, through which data, and with what possibilities of democratic oversight. Anticipation, in fact, may be an instrument of prevention, but it may also become a device of surveillance, profiling, and preventive intervention against conduct not yet carried out. The boundary between security and control becomes, in this scenario, particularly fragile.

Urban Security, Privacy, and Predictive Surveillance

The manifesto appears to extend the logic of technological deterrence also to the field of urban security. AI would not be destined only for theaters of war, but also for the protection of cities, the prevention of risks, the management of emergencies, and the anticipation of criminal or destabilizing phenomena. In this passage, military and civilian technologies tend to overlap, producing a hybrid zone in which instruments originally developed for defense may be adapted to the governance of urban spaces.

This perspective is particularly delicate. On the one hand, the use of AI in urban security may improve the analytical, coordination, and response capacities of institutions. On the other hand, it may produce a significant expansion of surveillance powers, especially when technological efficiency is invoked as an argument for compressing privacy, procedural guarantees, and limits on the processing of personal data.

The question is not whether urban security should make use of advanced technological tools, but what balance should be constructed between prevention, individual liberty, and public control. A democratic society cannot renounce the protection of its citizens, but neither can it accept that protection should become the noble name for permanent surveillance. It is here that Palantir’s manifesto raises a fundamental political question: to what extent can the promise of security legitimate the expansion of the state’s algorithmic infrastructure?

The answer cannot be left solely to the companies that design the systems, nor solely to the apparatuses that use them. It requires public rules, transparency, independent assessment, institutional responsibility, and effective democratic oversight. Without these elements, technological deterrence risks becoming a form of opaque governance of conduct.

Geopolitics of the Technosociety

Palantir’s manifesto does not merely discuss the military use of artificial intelligence; it proposes a broader reading of the global order. Its perspective is clearly situated within a systemic competition in which China represents the main antagonistic reference, whether explicit or implicit. The order born after the Second World War appears, in this view, increasingly inadequate to govern the new distribution of technological, industrial, and military power.

Contemporary technosociety is no longer a neutral environment in which technology accompanies social development, but the space in which sovereignty, dependence, freedom, and decision-making capacity are being redefined. The borders to be defended are no longer only territorial, but also digital, cognitive, infrastructural, and informational. Those who control data, models, platforms, and computational capacity do not merely control economic tools, but growing portions of social reality itself.

In this perspective, the manifesto pushes toward a politics of technological power. The West should not limit itself to defending its values at the declarative level, but should build the technical superiority necessary to make them effective. The implicit criticism is directed at a pacifism perceived as naïve, incapable of understanding that democracies can be defended only if equipped with tools adequate to the harshness of contemporary conflict.

Yet it is precisely here that the deepest contradiction opens. If the defense of democracy requires increasingly invasive, opaque, and militarized instruments, one must ask what democracy is in fact being defended. The risk is that, in the attempt to protect the liberal order, its own presuppositions may be altered from within: limits on power, protection of the person, judicial oversight, administrative transparency, and political accountability.

The Olivettian Paradox: The Social Function of Technology and the Global Market

Observed from an Italian perspective, Palantir’s manifesto also allows for a further reflection. Paradoxically, it seems to recall an idea that was central to Adriano Olivetti’s vision: industry and technology cannot be separated from their social function. The enterprise is not only a site of production and profit, but a subject embedded in a community, called upon to produce cultural, civic, and institutional effects.

The distance, however, is evident. In Olivetti’s thought, the social function of technology was oriented toward the construction of community, the dignity of labor, and the balance among production, culture, and territory. In Palantir’s manifesto, by contrast, the social function of technology appears to be articulated in terms of power, defense, security, and geopolitical competition. In both cases, technology is not neutral; but the end toward which it is oriented changes radically.

This comparison helps clarify the critical point: the end of technological neutrality does not automatically lead to a technology that is more democratic or more human. It may lead to an industry responsible toward the community, but it may also lead to an industry increasingly integrated into apparatuses of power. The question is not only to recognize that technology has a social function, but to determine which society it should serve.

In this sense, Palantir’s manifesto also calls into question the European and Italian model, often unable to retain scientific expertise, valorize advanced research, and build a mature relationship between the public and private sectors. Brain drain, weak strategic investment, and the distance between universities, industry, and public administration make Europe increasingly dependent on technological platforms produced elsewhere, precisely while global power is shifting toward those who control digital infrastructure.

Technofeudalism or Digital Sovereignty?

One of the most critical readings of the manifesto is that it sees in it the origin of a new technofeudalism. The expression is strong, but it captures a real problem: the concentration of technological power in a few large private companies capable of providing states with essential tools for security, defense, intelligence, data management, and the control of critical infrastructures. In this scenario, public sovereignty risks depending on architectures designed, owned, and updated by private actors.

The issue does not concern the market alone, but the very structure of power. If states do not possess internally the skills, platforms, and computational capacities they require, they ultimately purchase sovereignty in the form of a service. The risk is that political decision-making remains formally public, but materially constrained by technical systems that are opaque, proprietary, and difficult to control.

Technofeudalism would not therefore be a return to a medieval past, but a new form of dependence: no longer founded on land, but on data; no longer on personal loyalty, but on access to infrastructures; no longer on agrarian rent, but on computational rent. From this perspective, Palantir’s manifesto can be read both as a declaration of Western responsibility and as an assertion of the political role of private platforms in global governance.

The democratic response cannot consist in the rejection of technology, because that would mean surrendering the field to other actors. It must instead consist in the construction of digital sovereignty, public capacity for evaluation, transparent rules, limits on use, independent audits, and legal accountability. Technology can serve democracy only if it remains subordinated to a democratic order; when the reverse occurs, democracy risks becoming dependent on the very technology it claims to govern.

Conclusion: The Moral Debt of Big Tech and the Democratic Limit

Palantir’s manifesto has the merit of clearly posing a question that public debate often prefers to evade: digital technologies are no longer neutral instruments situated at the margins of politics, but central infrastructures of security, war, the economy, and social life. Artificial intelligence, in particular, cannot be understood solely as productive innovation or as a cognitive assistant, because it increasingly enters decision-making processes, threat prediction, military organization, and the management of public spaces.

Palantir’s thesis, according to which Big Tech would have a moral debt toward the West, is powerful but ambivalent. On the one hand, it calls the technology industry back to historical and political responsibility; on the other, it risks transforming that responsibility into unconditional adherence to the logic of power. Defending democracies does not mean merely equipping them with stronger instruments, but also preserving the limits that make them democratic.

The real issue, therefore, is not choosing between technology and security, nor between ethics and defense. The issue is to construct a form of technological power that is effective without becoming unlimited, capable of protecting without turning into total surveillance, and integrated into defense without escaping democratic oversight.

Palantir’s manifesto announces a new phase of technosociety: one in which digital platforms no longer ask merely for space in the market, but claim a role in the geopolitical order. This transformation cannot be dismissed with either enthusiasm or fear. It must be understood, regulated, and publicly discussed, because the future of the West will depend not only on who controls artificial intelligence, but also on what limits it will be able to impose upon its own power.