The Debt That Was Never Owed
Palantir posted a bootlicking new manifesto to X on Saturday
Palantir posted a bootlicking new manifesto to X on Saturday, calling it a brief summary of The Technological Republic, a 2025 book by Palantir co-founder and CEO Alexander C. Karp and head of corporate and legal affairs Nicholas W. Zamiska. You can read the full manifesto here.
There is a word missing from Palantir’s 22-point manifesto, and its absence is the most revealing thing about the document. The word is citizen. Not customer, not taxpayer, not the “public” whose security the company claims to protect—citizen, the person with rights that precede the state’s demands on them. In 318 words posted to X on a Saturday, Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska laid out a vision of the relationship between Silicon Valley and the American government that has no room for that word, because the vision does not require it. What it requires is something older and more coercive: debt.
“Silicon Valley owes a moral debt,” the manifesto announces, “to the country that made its rise possible.” The engineering elite has “an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.” Read slowly, this is an extraordinary claim—not that companies should contribute to national defense as a matter of civic choice, but that they owe this contribution as repayment for being permitted to exist and thrive. The logic underneath is not liberal. It is feudal. You were allowed to build here; now you must serve.
This distinction matters because it forecloses the question the manifesto most wants to avoid: serve what, and decided by whom?
The Machine That Needs No Ethics
Palantir is not a neutral observer of the relationship between technology and national power. It is one of the primary architects of that relationship. Its tools help run predictive policing programs in American cities—programs with documented records of racially disparate impact. Its analytics support military operations in Gaza, where the scale of civilian death has generated calls for investigation at the International Court of Justice. The company’s stated business is to make governments and militaries more effective at finding and targeting people.
This background is not incidental to reading the manifesto. It is the lens through which every high-minded claim about “hard power” and “the long peace” must be understood. When point five declares that “the question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose”—Palantir is answering its own question. It will build them. The purpose will be defined later, by clients.
The manifesto’s treatment of AI weaponry is instructive precisely because of what it refuses to say. “Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications.” The word theatrical is doing enormous work here. It transforms any moral inquiry—any attempt to ask what these systems will do to human bodies, to civilian populations, to the international frameworks that have governed warfare since 1949—into performance. The person who asks “should we build this?” is not thoughtful. They are theatrical. They are wasting time while China proceeds.
This is an old move. It has been used to justify every weapons program that ever required the silencing of conscience. The urgency of the adversary becomes the alibi for the abandonment of ethics. What is new is the audacity of building that alibi directly into a manifesto and posting it with apparent pride.
The Hierarchy They Won’t Name
The manifesto’s most revealing quality is its double standard, operating so consistently across so many of its twenty-two points that it must be understood as a design feature rather than an oversight.
Ordinary people who look to politics “to nourish their soul and sense of self” are warned they “will be left disappointed.” They should not rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in politicians they’ll never meet. Stay in your lane. But Elon Musk should not be “snickered at” for his grand narratives. The rich man’s vision is legitimate ambition; the ordinary person’s political investment is pathetic dependency.
Public figures deserve “far more grace.” The “ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service.” The culture of accountability—the press, the investigators, the citizens who demand that power justify itself—is characterized as a pathology driving good people from public life. But the document offers no equivalent concern for the people whose private lives are exposed by Palantir’s surveillance tools. The predictive policing database. The behavioral analytics. The location tracking. The inference engines that make private lives legible to the state. That exposure is the product. The grace is reserved for those doing the exposing.
Point 21 declares that some cultures “have produced wonders” while others “have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.” This is not accompanied by any methodology, any acknowledgment of the material conditions that produce what Karp and Zamiska are willing to call cultural failure, any reckoning with the history of a Western civilization that has spent five centuries extracting labor and resources from the cultures it now grades. It is simply asserted, with the confidence of people who have never had to justify to anyone why their own culture gets to be the rubric.
This is the hierarchy the manifesto will not name: the people who build the tools and those upon whom the tools are used. The engineers whose creative lives deserve protection from decadence and the citizens whose movements, associations, and behaviors feed the databases that fund the manifesto’s authors. The public figures who deserve grace and the communities who deserve, apparently, nothing but efficiency.
The Draft and the Document
Point six is the most honest sentence in the manifesto: “We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.”
I want to sit with this for a moment, because buried inside its apparent fairness is something important. Karp and Zamiska are calling for conscription. Universal national service. They are saying that the all-volunteer military—the force assembled from people who, for economic or ideological reasons, chose to enlist—is insufficient. Everyone must go.
And yet.
The same document argues that engineers have a “moral debt” to the national defense that must be repaid through the production of AI weapons. The same document argues that tech companies must be conscripted to serve national interests. The same document warns that “theatrical debates” about the ethics of these weapons should not be permitted to slow their development.
What the manifesto envisions, in full, is a society in which everyone serves—but in which the purposes they serve, the weapons they build, and the targets those weapons find are determined by the people writing 22-point manifestos and posting them to X. Universal obligation. Elite prerogative. The risk is shared; the decisions are not.
This is the structure of every regime that has ever called for national sacrifice while exempting its own planning class from accountability. The workers die in the wars that the strategists design.
What Decadence Actually Is
The manifesto’s most irritating rhetorical move is its deployment of decadence as an indictment of ordinary life. “The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.” “Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization?” “Free email is not enough.”
This is the pose of someone who has everything and is bored by it—who mistakes their boredom for moral clarity and their ambition for national purpose. Karp and Zamiska are billionaires. They run a company whose stock has made many of its employees extraordinarily wealthy. The product they are now positioning as the antidote to decadence—AI-powered weapons systems—is the revenue engine that sustains their own very comfortable lives. The argument is: you are distracted by your phones while we build the future, which we will sell to governments at market rates.
What decadence actually looks like is a surveillance capitalism that profits from exposure while calling for privacy protections for its principals. It looks like a company that takes federal contracts to build targeting systems and then writes a book about the spiritual failure of the engineering class that won’t do the same. It looks like the audacity to write about public service while running a company whose compensation structure would, as the manifesto itself notes, cause any normal business to “struggle to survive”—and offering no solution to that problem beyond the vague instruction that the situation must change.
The Peace That Is Not Peace
Point fourteen asserts that “American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace.” The framing is precise, calibrated, and wrong in the ways that matter most.
The hundred years of “some version of peace” that the manifesto celebrates looks different depending on where you are standing. It looks like the Korean War if you are Korean. It looks like Vietnam if you are Vietnamese, or Laotian, or Cambodian. It looks like a series of coups and counter-insurgency operations if you are Guatemalan, Chilean, Iranian. It looks like the Iraq War and its 200,000 civilian dead if you are Iraqi. It looks like the drone program if you are Yemeni, Pakistani, or Somali.
The “long peace” is a peace among great powers, purchased in part by the exportation of violence to places whose people the manifesto is not designed to address. When Karp and Zamiska write that “nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict,” they are using “the world” to mean something smaller than the world.
This is not a minor error. It is the error that makes possible everything else in the document—the easy celebration of hard power, the dismissal of ethical debate, the confidence that the instruments of American military capacity are, on balance, a gift to humanity. If you exclude from your accounting the people on whom American military power has been used, the accounting works out very well. If you include them, it does not.
What I Find Myself Unable to Dismiss
And yet.
There are things in this document that cannot simply be mocked away. The concern about Germany and Japan—point fifteen’s argument that Europe is “paying a heavy price” for the overcorrection of German demilitarization—has been vindicated with terrible specificity by events since 2022. The observation that public service compensation structures drive talented people toward private alternatives is empirically accurate. The critique of a political culture that has become so punitive that it discourages participation is something that people across the political spectrum have made, often for opposite reasons.
The scaffolding of the manifesto is not entirely wrong. The conclusion it draws from that scaffolding—that Silicon Valley companies have an obligation to build weapons and a right to do so without ethical interference—is where the document reveals what it actually is.
The scaffolding says: the world is dangerous, democracies must compete, technical capacity is the foundation of power, the people who can build technical capacity have responsibilities that go beyond personal enrichment.
The conclusion says: therefore, Palantir.
These do not follow from each other. The premises could support a very different conclusion—one in which technical capacity is developed under democratic accountability, in which the ethical debates the manifesto calls theatrical are understood as the very mechanism by which a free society maintains control over its instruments of power, in which the “debt” to the country is repaid through transparency and restraint rather than through the manufacture of ever more effective targeting systems.
The manifesto’s authors know this. They wrote around it. The question is whether we will let them.
The Last Line
“The republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.”
This is Karp and Zamiska on the quality of American public servants. It is contemptuous in a way that, in a less polished document, would read as rage.
I find I agree with the sentence. I disagree with its intended targets.
The ineffectual empty vessels with insufficient belief structures are not the public servants who refused to build weapons. They are not the engineers who asked whether they should before they asked whether they could. They are not the citizens who looked to politics to nourish something in themselves and were told to stay in their lane.
The problem with genuine belief is that it imposes obligations. It means being accountable to something larger than the manifesto you published on a Saturday. It means the ethics are not theatrical. It means the debt runs in more directions than down.
Karp and Zamiska believe in hard power. They believe in American strength. They believe in the obligation of technical elites to serve national purpose. They have built a company that embodies these beliefs and made themselves very wealthy in the process.
What they do not believe in—what the bootlicking manifesto’s 318 words systematically exclude—is accountability to the people the tools touch. The communities surveilled. The bodies targeted. The cultures graded and found regressive. The ordinary citizens whose political investments are characterized as pathetic while their physical conscription is proposed as necessary.
That is not a belief structure. That is a business model wearing a belief structure as a costume.
The republic deserves better than costumes. So do its people.
Nik Bear Brown is Associate Teaching Professor of Computer Science and AI at Northeastern University and founder of Humanitarians AI (501(c)(3)). His research on algorithmic systems, AI ethics, and platform accountability is published at bear.musinique.com, skepticism.ai, and theorist.ai.
Tags: Palantir Technological Republic critique, AI weapons ethics Silicon Valley, conscription tech manifesto, surveillance capitalism accountability, Alexander Karp national service obligation