Manufacturing the Leviathan: Palantir’s ‘Technological republic’ and the nationalist faction of the tech oligarchy

Is palantir a ‘superweapon' or a marketing masterclass? This article examines the emergence of a ‘nationalist-militarist' faction within the contemporary tech oligarchy through a critical reading of The Technological Republic (2025) by Palantir CEO Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska. I argue that the book operates as an ideological manifesto designed to re-legitimize Silicon Valley's entanglement with the U.S. national security state, framing this alliance as a patriotic necessity in a Schmittian struggle against China. Rejecting both the company's self-mythologizing and popular portrayals of Palantir as an all-powerful, shadowy monolith, the article draws on STS scholarship and Göran Therborn's theory of ruling-class reproduction to analyze the ‘Palantir imaginary.' This imaginary of seamless, illiberal control is not an empirical reality but a carefully branded sociotechnical fantasy, cultivated to align with security agencies' desire for total situational awareness. I show how Palantir positions itself not merely as a software provider but as a strategic political actor engaged in an intra-oligarchic struggle against ‘globalist’ consumer-tech firms, advancing a technocratic, anti-democratic vision of sovereignty that replaces democratic oversight with proprietary algorithmic governance. The article concludes by demonstrating how the fusion of corporate accumulation and state power into a black-boxed sociotechnical system poses a fundamental challenge to democratic accountability.