PALANTIR'S TECHNOLOGICAL REPUBLIC AND THE MYTH OF THE BATCAVE

Abstract

This article critically analyzes the Palantir technology company's manifesto, identifying it as an expression of technofascism: a proposal to merge total digital surveillance with the power of a US techno-financial elite to the detriment of democratic processes and national sovereignties. The aim of the work is to point out the authoritarian foundations of the manifesto, demonstrating its ideological and aesthetic continuity with fascist tendencies present in a more or less veiled way throughout eight decades of the US cultural industry. Methodologically, it is a theoretical, qualitative, exploratory, bibliographic, and documentary research that articulates a critique of the political economy of information with cultural criticism, in dialogue with philosophy, in order to enrich the debate on the relationship between technology, information, politics, economics, and war. The results indicate that the manifesto defends an exclusionary technical knowledge – based on the universal extraction of often sensitive data and the production of strategic metadata – concentrated in the US corporate elite; it naturalizes war as a permanent state; and it suggests the suspension of democracy in the name of security. In conclusion, the arguments presented are summarized, and the need for a theoretical and ethical-political confrontation of the manifesto's claims is advocated, beginning with the unveiling and denunciation of the threats it poses to liberal democracy and the possibility of promoting more substantial forms of democracy.