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palantir
The Disappearance Machine
If this machine succeeds, it will not stop with immigrants. It will become the blueprint for domestic control and the silencing of millions.
Aug 30, 2025
"What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it from happening again."—Anne Frank
US President Donald Trump has federalized the DC police department and put more than 2,000 National Guard troops on city streets, even as crime remains at historic lows. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is seizing more than 1,000 people every day. Palantir is rolling out its AI-powered “ImmigrationOS,” designed to fuse the private details of millions into a single surveillance grid. These are not accidents or isolated headlines. They are pieces of a larger architecture: a disappearance machine that erases lives quietly while making absence look routine.
The system is not hypothetical. It is funded, operational, and expanding. What began with undocumented immigrants now extends to visa holders, asylum seekers, parolees, aid workers, and dissenters. By the government’s own numbers, more than 20 million people are potentially vulnerable. Many are not accused of crimes at all. They are flagged by association, by proximity, by the digital trails of daily life. And still there is no clear plan for where millions would be sent.
This is not only about immigration. It is about what happens when disappearance becomes policy, not error. It is about how authoritarian systems succeed, not through spectacle alone, but by presenting themselves as orderly, legal, and necessary. History offers its warning: Absence becomes normal, silence becomes institutional. If this machine succeeds, it will not stop with immigrants. It will become the blueprint for domestic control and the silencing of millions.
The Enforcement System
The machine does not announce itself with spectacle. Its danger lies in its efficiency, humming beneath the noise of everyday life. The quotas, contracts, and deployments pile up like the hum of an engine, so constant that many people stop hearing them.
ICE has already blown past its legal detention limits, booking more than 31,000 people in June alone. Overflow has been moved into tent camps on military bases and newly leased private facilities. But the real innovation lies beneath the numbers: the wiring of the system. Department of Motor Vehicle records, school rosters, medical files, protest photos—all are now drawn into ICE’s databases, where AI-driven analytics map not only who people are, but who they know.
That wiring has corporate architects. Palantir. Amazon Web Services. Anduril. Palantir’s AI engines feed the machine with millions of cross-linked records, turning raw fragments into actionable targets. Anduril watches from autonomous towers. Amazon stores the data that makes it possible. Each contract transforms misery into revenue, turning deportation into a line item on a balance sheet. Together they prove a brutal truth: Deportation is not just policy. It is profit.
What binds people to one another—love, kinship, faith, compassion—becomes evidence against them.
Congress has widened the channel further. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” earmarks $170 billion for detention, deportation logistics, and 10,000 new ICE agents. If enacted, ICE would surpass the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Marshals combined budgets and operational reach. Contracts like these rarely expire. Facilities like these rarely close. Permanence is the point, and permanence is the profit.
The military presence seals the fusion. Guard units have been mobilized in 19 states. Marines handle logistics. In Los Angeles, Washington, and other threatened cities, troops now patrol the streets. Each deployment erodes the line between military and civilian. Each step embeds martial presence deeper into ordinary life.
This is the machine. Arrests that exceed the law. Contracts that bind the future. Corporations cashing in. Soldiers on our sidewalks. A van arrives. A door closes. A name disappears. It does not need to announce itself loudly. It hums through budgets, contracts, and signatures. It looks procedural. It looks harmless. And that is the danger.
Silence allows it to run. And what it runs toward is not enforcement, but disappearance.
When Bureaucracy Becomes Disappearance
Once the machine is in motion, it does not deliver justice. It delivers absence. Disappearance is not a malfunction. It is the product the system is built to deliver.
When ICE takes someone, the trail goes dark by design. Families call and hear nothing. Lawyers search and find no records. Facilities deny they are holding anyone. Transfers happen within hours, often across state lines. A man leaves for work and never returns, his vehicle still running, lunch packed, a child’s car seat strapped in. Fields go unharvested, animals untended, trucks unloaded. This is not error. It is method. Not accident. Design.
Authoritarian regimes have long understood this power. Nazi Germany perfected registries, codes, and camps placed far from public view. The parallel is structural, not identical. Then it was files and cattle cars. Today it is biometric databases and chartered flights. What once took days can now be done in seconds with AI-driven servers and algorithms.
This is the innovation: speed. A protest photo flagged. A clinic visit cross-matched. An address linked to a file. Palantir’s AI system merges millions of fragments into real-time triggers. ICE no longer needs loud raids. It can knock softly, often. A van at the corner. A name missing the next day. Absence hardens into fact. Silence hardens into complicity.
The Logic That Criminalizes Connection
This system punishes not only identity but connection. In it, solidarity itself is criminalized. The machine does not only target individuals. It ensnares through association.
If you share an address with someone flagged, your file may be tagged. If your number appears on a church roster, a school list, or a protest sign-in sheet, it can be enough. If you drive a neighbor, open your home, or hand someone food, you may be prosecuted for “harboring.” AI-powered algorithms do not need guilt. They need only connection.
This logic makes solidarity itself dangerous. What binds people to one another—love, kinship, faith, compassion—becomes evidence against them.
We are already seeing it in practice. Arizona volunteers charged for leaving water in the desert. Texas laws making it a felony to drive undocumented neighbors to church. In Florida, vehicles parked near churches or immigrant-serving sites were scanned and flagged by law enforcement using surveillance data accessible to ICE. The ordinary acts of care that sustain community are reclassified as crimes. The message is unmistakable: Kindness itself can put you on the list.
These are not outliers. They are the system. Piece by piece, the fragments form a net.
A Net Cast Over Millions
Public debate still circles around the figure of “11 million undocumented.” But that number is a mirage. The government’s own statistics show a pool of vulnerability far larger.
In fiscal year 2023, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reported nearly 400,000 visa overstays. US Citizenship and Immigration Services lists 1.1 million people on Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and another 525,000 enrolled in Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). DHS reports show more than 530,000 parolees admitted from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Executive Office for Immigration Review and Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse data confirm over 2 million asylum cases pending and 3.7 million in active removal proceedings. To this must be added parolees from Afghanistan and Ukraine, more than 200,000 new foreign F-1 student visa recipients each year, and several hundred thousand seasonal or temporary workers.
The risk is not only to millions already vulnerable. It is to every one of us, to the very possibility of a society that remembers, that dissents, that refuses to be silent.
Taken together, these categories already exceed 22 million people potentially at risk. And that does not include the at least 4.4 million US-born children in mixed-status households, whose futures hinge on their parents’ deportability.
This is not just a pool of migrants. It is a blueprint: proof of how entire populations can be flagged, managed, and erased.
Most chilling of all, many of these groups—DACA recipients, TPS holders, parolees—were once granted provisional protection. Their status was designed to provide safety, but now those same categories function as easily revoked permissions. What was once stability has become a list. What was once recognition has become a trap.
Quiet Files, Loud Fear
The system works on two levels at once, and the tension is intentional.
It is quiet, bureaucratic, relentless. Arrest. Transfer. Conceal. Data-matched names pulled into custody. People erased without a headline.
It is also loud, theatrical, meant to frighten. Guard patrols in DC. Raids at food pantries and churches. And in the Florida Everglades, a detention complex nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz,” built in just over a week on an abandoned airstrip. With 200 cameras, miles of barbed wire, and capacity for thousands, the camp was raised almost overnight and showcased as proof of federal resolve. It was not only a camp. It was a message: that human beings can be caged faster than homes can be built. The spectacle was the point: Not only could the government erase, it could do so at speed, in full view.
These displays are not mistakes. They are signals, designed to spread fear.
The precedent is clear. Nazi Germany paired hidden registries with public raids. Bureaucracy made atrocity look like procedure. Spectacle made fear look like power.
The result is devastating. Efficiency makes absence seem administrative. Spectacle makes fear seem permanent. One normalizes disappearance. The other normalizes submission. Like two sides of a coin, the system flips back and forth, but the outcome is always the same.
We’ve Seen This Logic Before
Nazi Germany balanced quiet registries and files with public terror. The paperwork processed millions. The raids displayed the strength of the state.
The parallels here are structural, not identical. Then it was racial laws and household registries; now it is DMV databases and predictive analytics. Then it was cattle cars; now it is charter flights. Then it was propaganda films; now it is press conferences and televised ICE raids.
The point is not to equate outcomes, but to recognize how bureaucracy and spectacle normalize atrocity in slow motion. In Germany, disappearance was accepted because it looked like order—files, trains, uniforms, procedure. The danger now is the same logic in digital form. When arrests are by algorithm, when transfers vanish into databases, when detention is described as “routine,” absence can be made to feel like administration instead of atrocity.
Ordinary Germans tolerated disappearance because it looked like order. That is precisely the risk now: authoritarian disappearance creeping forward one administrative step at a time, while the public is told everything remains under control.
It Starts with Them. It Ends with Us.
What begins with immigrants does not end there. Once a disappearance machine exists, its reach expands outward.
The list is already long: undocumented residents, visa overstays, TPS and DACA recipients, parolees, asylum seekers. Around them ripple aid workers, clergy, family members, volunteers, neighbors. Association is enough.
And the warning is clear: If there is a list, there are many. No one’s record is spotless. To be added requires only an electronic click, a database match, a fragment of data. Protest and your photo may be flagged. Write and your words may be logged. Share a home or a meal, and your act may become evidence. The logic is merciless: No category is safe, no community beyond reach. It does not stop at the border. It does not stop at citizenship.
Nowhere to Send Them, Nowhere to Hide
Two hundred detention sites are already locked into contracts. Offshore deals with countries such as Rwanda and El Salvador, and negotiations with many others, are ongoing. Daily arrests now number over a thousand, with internal targets aiming for 3,000 or more. A deportation system scaled for millions now exists, but the government has offered no clear plan for where those millions would go.
History warns what happens when removal outpaces destination. Nazi Germany built camps faster than authorities could decide what to do with those inside. Bureaucracy outran policy, and atrocity followed. The United States is not there yet, but it is building a machinery of disappearance faster than it can credibly process.
When numbers overwhelm the system, detention becomes indefinite. The American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch have documented cases in which migrants were kept in prolonged detention without legal basis, sometimes without access to lawyers or family, effectively leaving them with no country of return or lawful destination. Congressional Research Service reports flag the capacity gap. In practice, that means expanded camps, more offshore transfers, and prolonged detention for those who cannot be removed.
The time to act is not when the machine is finished. It is now, while it is still assembling.
The danger is that a system built in the name of immigration control becomes one of social control. People are held not because they will be deported tomorrow, but because their absence today serves the machine. This is not immigration enforcement. It is the architecture of social control. Giorgio Agamben called this the creation of “bare life”: existence reduced to custody and stripped of political standing. As Hannah Arendt warned, the first loss is political: lose the “right to have rights,” and a “rule by Nobody” normalizes erasure from public life.
What cannot be done is to pretend this is merely immigration policy. What should not be done is to accept disappearance in any form as ordinary. What can still be done is to name the system for what it is, to resist normalization, and to defend the human ties that the machine seeks to criminalize.
The risk is not only to millions already vulnerable. It is to every one of us, to the very possibility of a society that remembers, that dissents, that refuses to be silent.
Before It’s Too Late to Speak
What once seemed unimaginable is quickly becoming routine. Daily arrests in the thousands. Troops on city streets. Contracts that turn human beings into commodities. Each day the machine expands. Each day Americans adjust, telling themselves it is not their concern.
But immigration is not the endgame. It is the cover story. Behind it, a larger project advances. The same AI-powered system that is designed to erase millions will erase dissent. The same silence that excuses raids will excuse repression.
This is how atrocity is normalized: not with sudden rupture, but with forms, files, and procedures that look ordinary until it is too late to resist them. History shows how absence can be made to feel like order, and how silence can become institutional.
The time to act is not when the machine is finished. It is now, while it is still assembling. Before the erasure of those targeted becomes irreversible. Before mass erasure becomes routine. History will not care about our excuses. It will remember our silence as complicity. It will ask not whether we knew, but whether we spoke.
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Fashion Death: The War Machine Now Has Merch
Celebrating weapons makers, even with a nod and a wink, serves to normalize the U.S. role as the world’s premier arms producer while ignoring the consequences of that status.
Jul 17, 2025
I wrote a book about Lockheed Martin — the world’s largest arms-making conglomerate. But even I was surprised to learn that for a number of years now, they have also been involved in the fashion industry.
The revelation came in a recent New York Times piece on Kodak, which has had a minor resurgence, not by selling its own products, but by selling its name for use on a range of consumer products, produced by other firms, from luggage to eyewear to hoodies and t-shirts.
Deeper into the article it was mentioned in passing that Lockheed Martin had been doing the same. It linked to another article that noted that Lockheed Martin-branded cargo pants and hoodies have been a hit in South Korea since they were introduced a few years back. Brisk sales are continuing, with the Lockheed brand adorning streetwear with slogans like “Ensuring those we serve always stay ahead of ready.” One blue t-shirt dons the outline of an F-35 on the back, emblazoned with the motto “The F-35 strengthens national security, enhances global partnerships and powers economic growth.” It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but at least it’s free advertising.
Lockheed Martin’s efforts at reputation laundering come at a moment when many arms industry leaders are vocally supporting — even applauding — armed violence.
Not to be outdone, emerging tech firms are selling limited edition fashion lines of their own. Palantir recently dropped a line of hats and tees that quickly sold out. Eliano Younes, Head of Strategic Engagement for Palantir, has noted that when they re-launched the Palantir shop that “the site almost crashed within four minutes.” And Anduril has partnered with Reyn Spooner to launch a limited drop of Hawaiian shirts — a favorite uniform of company founder Palmer Luckey.
Not everyone welcomes the entry of weapons makers into the fashion world. A critic of Lockheed’s apparel line who goes by the name of Opal noted, “They stopped killing people for just a minute to help them kill those looks . . . The people who made these decisions are either so out of touch or like unbelievably acutely aware of what’s going on, and I can’t really tell the difference.”
As Opal fears, the marriage of fashion and weapons makers may be a sign of the times, as shoppers welcome the entrance of arms makers into the consumer sector rather than seeing their foray into fashion as an exercise in poor taste. This is probably because military firms and the weapons they produce are so deeply embedded in our culture that many people view the companies as purveyors of neat technology while ignoring the devastating consequences that occur when those weapons are actually used.
Lockheed Martin’s efforts at reputation laundering come at a moment when many arms industry leaders are vocally supporting — even applauding — armed violence. Prominent Silicon Valley military tech executives like Luckey and Palantir CEO Alex Karp, have no compunction about glorifying war while their companies are paid handsome sums to build the tools needed to carry it out. Luckey, the 32-year old head of the military tech firm Anduril, asserts that “Societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited by enacting violence in pursuit of good aims.” He didn’t discuss who gets to decide what “good aims” are, or why being “excited” about killing fellow human beings could ever be a good thing.
And Karp held his company’s board meeting in Israel at the height of the Gaza war to cheer on Israel’s campaign of mass slaughter. At the time of the meeting, the company’s Executive VP Josh Harris announced that “Both parties have mutually agreed to harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of war-related missions. This strategic partnership aims to significantly aid the Israeli Ministry of Defense in addressing the current situation.”
These attitudes contrast with the efforts of old school arms company leaders like former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine, who was a master at burnishing the image of his company while downplaying its role as a primary producer of weapons at war.
Augustine led by personal example, working closely with the Boy Scouts and the Red Cross, championing science education, and speaking regularly of the need for corporate ethics, which he seemed to equate mostly with acts of charity by company employees, not with grappling with moral questions about how his company’s weapons were being used.
To a lesser degree, Augustine’s approach continues to this day. Company press releases describe Lockheed Martin as a firm that is “driving innovation and advancing scientific discovery.” The company’s image-building efforts include support for scholarships in STEM education, funding programs to build and upgrade facilities serving veterans, supporting food banks and disaster response programs, and more. There’s nothing wrong with helping fund a good cause, but it shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the company’s other activities.
The weapons produced by Lockheed Martin have fueled the war in Gaza, and they were integral to Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen, an effort that included bombing funerals, a school bus, hospitals, civilian markets and water treatment plants in Yemen, in a war that cost nearly 400,000 lives through the direct and indirect means, from indiscriminate bombing the the enforcement of a blockade the hindered imports of food and medical supplies.
On the rare occasions that arms industry executives are asked about the human impacts of their products, they usually say they are only doing what the government allows. They fail to mention that they spend large sums of money and effort trying to shape government policy, making it easier to rush weapons to foreign clients without adequate consideration of their possible uses in aggressive wars or systematic repression.
Given all of this, Lockheed Martin’s endorsement of a line of street clothing seems like a relatively harmless side show. But celebrating weapons makers, even with a nod and a wink, serves to normalize the U.S. role as the world’s premier arms producer while ignoring the consequences of that status.
America needs to be able to defend itself and its allies, but celebrating war and preparations for war is not the way to do it. We need more reflection and less celebration. And we need to call weapons makers what they are, not welcome the use of their names as marketing tools designed to sell consumer products.
The real question as we try to dig ourselves out of a period of devastating wars and increasing global tension is whether we need huge weapons firms like Lockheed Martin at all, or if there is a more efficient, humane way to provide for the common defense, less focused on profit and PR and more focused on developing the tools actually needed to carry out a more rational, restrained defense strategy.
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Big Brother Trump Is Watching You
The second Trump administration is deploying new surveillance methods it seeks to extend its authoritarian power. And one key aspect of that project is the consolidation of the personal information of millions of people in a single place.
Jun 28, 2025
Sometime in the late 1980s, I was talking with a friend on my landline (the only kind of telephone we had then). We were discussing logistics for an upcoming demonstration against the Reagan administration’s support for the Contras fighting the elected government of Nicaragua. We agreed that, when our call was done, I’d call another friend, “Mary,” to update her on the plans. I hung up.
But before I could make the call, my phone rang.
“Hi, this is Mary,” my friend said.
“Mary! I was just about to call you.”
“But you did call me,” she said.
“No, I didn’t. My phone just rang, and you were on the other end.”
It was pretty creepy, but that was how surveillance worked in the days of wired telephone systems. Whoever was listening in, most likely someone from the local San Francisco Police Department, had inadvertently caused both lines to ring, while preparing to catch my coming conversation with Mary. Assuming they’d followed the law, arranging such surveillance would have involved a number of legal and technical steps, including securing a wiretapping warrant. They’d have had to create a physical connection between their phones and ours, most likely by plugging into the phone company’s central office.
Government surveillance has come a long way since then, both technically and in terms of what’s legally possible in Donald Trump’s United States and under the John Roberts Supreme Court.
All the President’s Tech
Government agencies have many ways of keeping tabs on us today. The advent of cellular technology has made it so much easier to track where any of us have been, simply by triangulating the locations of the cell towers our phones have pinged along the way.
If you watch police procedurals on television (which I admit to doing more than is probably good for me), you’ll see a panoply of surveillance methods on display, in addition to cellular location data. It used to be only on British shows that the police could routinely rely on video recordings as aids in crime solving. For some decades, the Brits were ahead of us in creating a surveillance society. Nowadays, though, even the detectives on U.S. shows like Law and Order SVU (heading for its 27th season) can usually locate a private video camera with a sightline to the crime and get its owner to turn over the digital data.
Facial recognition is another technology you’ll see on police dramas these days. It’s usually illustrated by a five-second interval during which dozens of faces appear briefly on a computer monitor. The sequence ends with a final triumphant flourish—a single face remaining on screen, behind a single flashing word: “MATCH.”
We should probably live as if everything we do, even in supposedly “secure” places (real and virtual), is visible to the Trump regime.
I have no idea whether the TV version is what real facial recognition software actually looks like. What I do know is that it’s already being used by federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the FBI, under the auspices of a company called Clearview, which is presently led by Hal Lambert, a big Trump fundraiser. As Mother Jones magazine reports, Clearview has “compiled a massive biometric database” containing “billions of images the company scraped off the internet and social media without the knowledge of the platforms or their users.” The system is now used by law enforcement agencies around the country, despite its well-documented inability to accurately recognize the faces of people with dark skin.
The old-fashioned art of tailing suspects on foot is rapidly giving way to surveillance by drone, while a multitude of cameras at intersections capture vehicle license plates. Fingerprinting has been around for well over a century, although it doesn’t actually work on everyone. Old people tend to lose the ridges that identify our unique prints, which explains why I can’t reliably use mine to open my phone or wake my computer. Maybe now’s my moment to embark on a life of crime? Probably not, though, as my face is still pretty recognizable, and that’s what the Transportation Safety Administration uses to make sure I’m really the person in the photo on my Real ID.
The second Trump administration is deploying all of these surveillance methods and more, as it seeks to extend its authoritarian power. And one key aspect of that project is the consolidation of the personal information of millions of people in a single place.
One Database to Rule Them All
It’s been thoroughly demonstrated that, despite its name, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has been anything but efficient in reducing “waste, fraud, and abuse” in federal spending. DOGE, however, has made significantly more progress in achieving a less well publicized but equally important objective: assembling into a single federal database the personal details of hundreds of millions of individuals who have contact with the government. Such a database would combine information from multiple agencies, including the IRS and the Social Security Administration. The process formally began in March 2025 when, as The New York Times reported, President Trump signed an executive order “calling for the federal government to share data across agencies.” Such a move, as Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Aaron Krolik note, raises “questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.”
In keeping with the fiction that DOGE’s work is primarily focused on cost cutting, Trump labeled his order “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos.” That fiction provided the pretext for DOGE’s demands that agency after agency grant its minions free access to the most private data they had on citizens and noncitizens alike. As The Washington Post reported in early May:
The U.S. DOGE Service is racing to build a single centralized database with vast troves of personal information about millions of U.S. citizens and residents, a campaign that often violates or disregards core privacy and security protections meant to keep such information safe, government workers say.
Worse yet, it will probably be impossible to follow DOGE’s trail of technological mayhem. As the Post reporters explain:
The current administration and DOGE are bypassing many normal data-sharing processes, according to staffers across 10 federal agencies, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution. For instance, many agencies are no longer creating records of who accessed or changed information while granting some individuals broader authority over computer systems. DOGE staffers can add new accounts and disable automated tracking logs at several Cabinet departments, employees said. Officials who objected were fired, placed on leave or sidelined.
My own union, the American Federation of Teachers, joined a suit to prevent DOGE from seizing access to Social Security data and won in a series of lower courts. However, on May 31, in a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court (with the three liberal judges dissenting) temporarily lifted the block imposed by the lower courts until the case comes back to the justices for a decision on its merits. In the meantime, DOGE can have what it wants from the Social Security Administration. And even if the Supreme Court were ultimately to rule against DOGE, the damage will be done. As the president of El Salvador said in response to an entirely different court ruling, “Oopsie. Too late.”
Musk’s Pal Peter Thiel—and Palantir
Anyone who’s ever worked with a database, even one with only a few thousand records, knows how hard it is to keep it organized and clean. There’s the problem of duplicate records (multiple versions of the same person or other items). And that’s nothing compared to the problem of combining information from multiple sources. Even the names of the places where data goes (“fields”) will differ from one base to another. The very structures of the databases and how records are linked together (“relationships”) will differ, too. All of this makes combining and maintaining databases a messy and confusing business. Now imagine trying to combine dozens of idiosyncratically constructed ones with information stretching back decades into one single, clean, useful repository of information. It’s a daunting project.
And in the case of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Database, that’s where Peter Thiel’s company Palantir comes in. As The New York Times reported recently, at the urging of Elon Musk and DOGE, Trump turned to Palantir to carry out the vision expressed in his March executive order mentioned above. In fact, according to the Times, “at least three DOGE members formerly worked at Palantir, while two others had worked at companies funded by Peter Thiel, an investor and a founder of Palantir.”
Palantir, named for the “seeing stones” described in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, is already at work, providing its data platform Foundry to several parts of the government. According to the Times:
The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)
Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies—the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service—about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.
Who is Peter Thiel, Palantir’s co-founder? In addition to being a friend of Musk’s, Thiel was an early Trump supporter among the tech elites of Silicon Valley, donating $1.25 million to his 2016 campaign. He is also credited with shaping the political career of Vice President JD Vance, from his campaign to become a senator to his selection as Trump’s running mate. Thiel is part of a rarified brotherhood of tech and crypto-currency billionaires who share a commitment to a particular project of world domination by a technological elite. (And if that sounds like the raw material for a crazy conspiracy theory, bear with me again here.) Thiel was also an early funder of Clearview, the facial recognition software mentioned earlier.
In hiring Palantir and turning our data over to the company, Trump makes himself a useful tool, along with Vance, in the service of Thiel’s vision—just as he has been to the machinations of Project 2025’s principal author Russell Vought, who has different, but no less creepy dreams of domination.
The Dark Enlightenment
Thiel and his elite tech bros, including Musk, Internet pioneer and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, and Clearview founder Hoan Ton-That, share a particular philosophy. Other believers include figures like fervent Trump supporter Steve Bannon and Vice President Vance. This explicitly anti-democratic worldview goes by various names, including the “neo-reactionary movement” and the “Dark Enlightenment.”
Its founder is a software developer and political blogger named Curtis Yarvin, who has advocated replacing a “failed” democratic system with an absolute monarchy. Describing the Dark Enlightenment in The Nation magazine in October 2022, Chris Lehman observed that, in his run for Senate, JD Vance had adopted “a key plank of [Yarvin’s] plan for post-democratic overhaul—the strongman plan to ‘retire all government employees, which goes by the jaunty mnemonic ‘RAGE.’” (Any similarity to Musk’s DOGE is probably not coincidental.)
So, what is the Dark Enlightenment? It’s the negative image of an important intellectual movement of the 17th and18th centuries, the Enlightenment, whose principles formed, among other things, the basis for American democracy. These included such ideas as the fundamental equality of all human beings, the view that government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, and the existence of those “certain unalienable rights” mentioned in the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
Our response must be to oppose Trump’s onrushing version of American fascism as boldly and openly as we can.
The Dark Enlightenment explicitly opposes all of those and more. Lehman put it this way: “As Yarvin envisions it, RAGE is the great purge of the old operating system that clears the path for a more enlightened race of technocrats to seize power and launch the social order on its rational course toward information-driven self-realization.” That purge would necessarily produce “collateral casualties,” which would include “the nexus of pusillanimous yet all-powerful institutions Yarvin has dubbed ‘the Cathedral’—the universities, the elite media, and anything else that’s fallen prey to liberal perfidy.” Of course, we’ve already seen at least a partial realization of just such goals in Trump’s focused attacks on universities, journalists, and that collection of values described as diversity, equity, and inclusion.
On that last point, it should be noted that Yarvin and his followers also tended to be adherents of an “intellectual” current called “human biological diversity” championed by Steven Sailer, another Yarvin acolyte. That phrase has been appropriated by contemporary proponents of what used to be called eugenics, or scientific racism. It’s Charles Murray’s 1994 pseudo-scientific Bell Curve dressed up in high-flown pseudo-philosophy.
However, there’s more to the Dark Enlightenment than authoritarianism and racism. One stream, populated especially by Thiel and other tech bros, has an eschatology of sorts. This theology of the Earth’s end-times holds that elite humans will eventually (perhaps even surprisingly soon) achieve eternal life through physical communion with machines, greatly augmenting their capacities through artificial intelligence. That’s important to them because they’ve given up on the Earth. This planet is already too small and used up to sustain human life for long, they feel. Hence, our human destiny is instead to rule the stars. This is the theology underlying Elon Musk’s hunger for Mars. Anything that stands in the way of such a destiny must and shall be swept away on the tide of a tech bros future. (For an excellent explication of the full worldview shared by such would-be masters of the rest of us—and the rest of the universe as well—take a look at Adam Becker’s new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity.)
Surveillance Everywhere?
Back in my own corner of the world, the San Francisco Police Department has come a long way since those ancient days of clumsy phone tapping. Recently, a cryptocurrency billionaire, Chris Larsen, gave the SFPD $9.4 million to upgrade its surveillance tech. They’ll use the money to outfit a new Real Time Investigation Center (RTIC) with all the latest toys. “We’re going to be covering the entire city with drones,” claimed RTIC representative Captain Thomas MacGuire. Imagine my joyful anticipation!
How should defenders of democracy respond to the coming reality of near-constant, real-time government surveillance? We can try to shrink and hide, of course, but that only does their job for them, by driving us into a useless underground. Instead, we should probably live as if everything we do, even in supposedly “secure” places (real and virtual), is visible to the Trump regime. Our response must be to oppose Trump’s onrushing version of American fascism as boldly and openly as we can. Yes, some of us will be harassed, imprisoned, or worse, but ultimately, the only answer to mass surveillance by those who want to be our overlords is open, mass defiance.
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