BOOK REVIEW-THE PHILOSOPHER IN THE VALLEY

Written by: Alex M and Duncan B on 31 March 2026

 

Duncan B.

The Philosopher in the Valley. Alex Karp, Palantir and the Rise of the Surveillance State is written by Michael Steinberger, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. The book tells the story of the rise of the software company Palantir and its co-founder and CEO, Alex Karp. 

Palantir Technologies started as a company that specialized in data analytics. Its software could sift through enormous quantities of data to identify connections and trends which human analysts would need days or months to find.

Palantir was started in 2003 by co-founder Peter Thiel in the wake of the Al-Qaeda attacks on the US on September 1, 2001. Thiel believed that Palantir’s purpose was to help the American government combat terrorism. Palantir was partly financed by the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel to the tune of $1.25 million. Later, Palantir went on to develop a software programme which met the CIA’s requirements, which they subsequently purchased.

In 2004 Thiel invited Karp to join Palantir, and Karp soon became CEO. He said that Palantir’s mission was to defend the West and liberal democracy.

Prospective employees had to believe in the company’s mission. Anyone who was fussy about helping to kill terrorists or work with the US government had no chance of being hired.

Karp was concerned with the privacy and civil liberties aspects of the surveillance technology that Palantir was building. The problem was that the end users of Palantir’s programmes did not share this commitment. For example, there were cases of Palantir’s programmes being used by police departments to amass vast amounts of information about millions of people, with the risk of racial profiling of coloured people. 

In 2016, Palantir sued the US army for excluding Palantir from submitting a bid to build a new data analysis system for the army. Palantir won the case and gained several contracts from the US military. 

There were allegations that Palantir got these contracts thanks to Peter Thiel’s support for Trump in the 2016 election. Thiel became a strong supporter of Trump and donated $1.25 million to Trump’s election campaign. At that time, Karp was still a Democrat supporter, although later he swung around to support Trump. The US Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) was one of the government departments awarded contracts to Palantir for use of its technology in ICE’s crack-down on alleged illegal immigrants.

Previously, Palantir had not been involved in the development of AI systems, remaining a data analytics company. In 2017 the Pentagon started a programme called Project Maven, which aimed to bring AI and machine learning to the battlefield. Originally, Google was awarded the $10 million contract to build this system. Due to objections by thousands of Google employees, the company pulled out of the contract. Palantir took over the contract and made Project Maven a reality. Maven helped the US provide the Ukraine forces with vital information which allowed them to destroy Russian forces invading Ukraine.

At the start of the Covid pandemic Palantir developed software which the US and other governments used to fight the disease. It enabled governments to bring together all the data necessary to track the spread of the disease, collect data on testing and hospitalization and coordinate the distribution of vaccines and other critical supplies.

This use of Palantir’s systems in the fight against Covid shows that computer technology and AI can benefit humanity. It is the use of Palantir’s programmes by the US government agencies, the US military and by the Israeli government in its war on the people of Palestine that show that in the wrong hands this technology is used to spy on the people and suppress their struggles.

Control must be in the hands of the people, not the likes of Musk, Altman, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Karp, Thiel and the other tech billionaires. 
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Alex M:

What is really striking when you read biographies such as this one is the hubris that Tech billionaires like Karp almost invariably possess. Along with figures such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg and others, Karp is not lacking in self-regard. Having come from a family which considered themselves ‘progressive’ (his father is Jewish and his mother is African American and they saw themselves as politically liberal in the U.S. sense), Karp continues to identify as ‘progressive’ even though he supported Trump in the last presidential election. In addition, as Duncan B has pointed out above Karp’s supposed progressivism has not stopped him or Palantir actively seeking and gaining contracts with the CIA and the Pentagon among others. Aside from some hand-wringing about privacy, Karp has not been bothered too much about Palantir’s involvement with the U.S. and Israeli militaries and intelligence agencies. He rationalizes this by claiming that Palantir is part of the fight to maintain the values of liberal democracy and the dominance of the West.

As a child, Karp was diagnosed with dyslexia which, with help, he was able to overcome and he became a diligent student. So much so that he completed his undergraduate tertiary studies at Haverford College, majoring in philosophy (hence the title of the book) and then opted to go to Stanford University to complete a graduate Law degree. It was at Stanford in the late 1980s, early 1990s that he met Peter Thiel and established a friendship that would see them re-connect years later. After completing his Law studies at Stanford, Karp decided to do a PhD in Germany having little to no German language skills. Taking an intensive German language course Karp was able to quickly become fluent in German which was necessary because Karp’s PhD thesis not only required him to read German texts, but he also wrote it in German; no mean feat for a non-native speaker of German and one who had had dyslexia early in life. Karp completed his PhD in 2002. His PhD thesis examined the bitterness of many Germans over being held accountable for the Holocaust and being reminded constantly about it. Steinberger states that: “In essence, the dissertation was a study of in-groups, out-groups, and the rhetoric of fascism.” (Steinberger, p.53)

By now Karp was in his mid-thirties and not inclined to pursue a career in academia. He re-connected with Thiel and eventually Thiel offered Karp the position of CEO of his Silicon Valley start-up company Palantir in 2004. What makes this appointment stand out is the fact that Karp has no background in computer science (nor for that matter does Thiel). Karp quickly showed that he was adept at promoting and selling Palantir’s products as well as being renowned for his eccentric manner.

Karp is also abrasive when it comes to excoriating rival big tech companies. As Duncan B pointed out above thousands of Google employees objected to Google’s involvement in Project Maven, causing the company to withdraw from the project in 2018. Palantir stepped in and took up the contract. Karp wrote an op-ed published in the Washington Post in September 2019 taking Google and the rest of Silicon Valley to task for betraying the U.S. military” and by extension, American democracy”. (Steinberger, p.168) 

Palantir’s involvement with Project Maven marks the start of Palantir’s direct engagement with AI. Karp made it clear in a conversation with Steinberger in 2019 that he considered that Project Maven was the Manhattan Project of the 21st century because as with the atomic bomb, “the country that gained a military edge with AI would ‘determine the world order tomorrow’”. (Steinberger, p.169) Karp contrasted the West with China which for Karp and Thiel stands as the very antithesis of so-called Western values and liberal democracy and therefore AI must be used in the military forces of the U.S. and selected allies such as the Israelis, to stave off the challenge coming from China.

Palantir, and by extension Alex Karp and Peter Thiel, represent the moral, political and social bankruptcy that lies at the heart of contemporary U.S imperialism.

Control of software that may be of some benefit to humanity must be wrested from the hands of Tech billionaires, and governments such as those in the United States; the consequences of not doing so will be dire for the world’s working people.

 

 

 

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