Palantir and the New Order: Neoliberalism is dead. Say hello to Techlordism

For half a century, neoliberalism was the undisputed creed of the global elite. Born from the ashes of Bretton Woods, it sanctified the emancipation of financial capital from the regulatory shackles of the New Deal. Its genius was not originality but attitude.

Unlike Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill—who fretted over precisely when markets might fail—neoliberals declared the market infallible. Even when Wall Street cratered our economies, they insisted that mortal intervention would only make things worse. That suited the financiers perfectly. But that era is over.

A new form of capital is ascending: cloud capital—networked algorithmic machines that grant their owners remarkable powers to modify our behaviour. And just as financiers needed neoliberalism, today’s tech lords need a new ideology to legitimise their rule. I call it techlordism.

Neoliberalism’s job was to provide an ideological and pseudo-scientific cover for the incessant recycling of dollars through US deficits. Techlordism’s job is far more radical: to provide the ideological cover for colonising everything—human endeavour, state institutions, and Wall Street itself.

Consider the three fronts. First, techlordism must legitimise replacing fallible, recalcitrant humans with cloud capital in every realm, from medicine to poetry translation to raising children. Why? Because the deeper the penetration, the greater the cloud rents for the technofeudal class.

Second, it must legitimise colonising the state—privatising public data, hooking systems into the tax office and the Pentagon, as Elon Musk’s DOGE and Peter Thiel’s Palantir have already done.

Third, it must legitimise colonising Wall Street, merging cloud capital with financial services to create unfettered cloud finance outside traditional markets.

The new ideology is already here. Techlordism mutates transhumanism, just as neoliberalism mutated classical liberalism. It replaces the neoliberal Homo Economicus with an amorphous HumAIn—a human-AI continuum—and substitutes the divine market with a new divinity: the divine algorithm, rendering decentralised markets obsolete in favour of Amazon-style centralised matching.

The repercussions are breathtaking: ubiquitous surveillance, automated targeting on the battlefields, macroeconomic instability (as cloud rents destroy aggregate demand), the end of democracy as even an ideal (cheered by Peter Thiel), and the death of universities replaced by personalised AI augmentations.

And yet, the full ugliness of techlordism is best seen not in abstract theory but in the unspoken manifestos of its vanguard.

A recent tweet by Palantir proudly sets out its techlordist program. Reading between the lines, it becomes painfully clear that Silicon Valley recognises its immeasurable debt to the ruling class that bailed out criminal bankers while wrecking the livelihood of most Americans. Indeed, it shouts it from the rooftops that it will defend that ruling class to the death—literally—in the name, supposedly, of a majority that they treat with contempt.

At the same time, Palantir has its eyes on various bundles of rents. For instance, it is eyeing the Apple Store, salivating over replacing your iPhone with a device that dissolves what remains of your privacy. Palantir gives nothing away for free; instead, it grows by sowing fear and selling a fake sense of security. It glorifies brute force. Ethics are for suckers, it proclaims. What the West needs more of is Palantir’s murderous software.

AI-powered killer robots are coming, and Palantir’s task is to profit magnificently by building them first, asking questions later. International treaties limiting such weapons must be avoided at all costs. Every poor sod lacking connections to avoid the trenches will be drafted—so forget paying US soldiers a salary. All income streams must converge in Palantir, where shareholders profit while non-shareholders do the dying.

Palantir works overtime to equip US Marines with killer bots that strip away whatever remnants of ethical judgment they have left. Back at the home front, American society must be rendered perfectly incapable of any debate that restricts Palantir’s capacity to eliminate any remaining opportunity to reject its software’s choice of targets. Public servants must be fired en masse—except a few folks approved by Palantir and paid enormous salaries by taxpayers.

Turning to the political sphere, Palantir is adamant that Donald Trump must be beatified for throwing himself into public service. Not forgiving folks like Trump everything risks our soul—not to mention raising the prospect of officials who might restrict Palantir’s malevolent powers. Politics needs to be AI-like, devoid of human empathy. Those who seek to save their soul in politics must be sent to the gulag forthwith.

There are some people too eager to hasten Palantir’s demise, the company notes. They should rethink, or else. Meanwhile, the company must be congratulated for developing non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction, ready to add to the prospect of nuclear Armageddon various brand new AI-driven threats to humanity’s existence.

As a patriotic company, Palantir is immensely proud that no country in history has, in the name of progress and freedom, committed as many war crimes as the United States. This may have something to do with the undisputed fact that America offers infinite freedom to companies like Palantir to profit handsomely from inflicting so much damage upon humanity. In the same vein, German and Japanese fascism must be made great again. Denazification was an ‘overcorrection’ for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. Japanese pacifism must also be terminated immediately.

Addressing squeamish US citizens, Palantir’s managers invoke them to applaud those who monopolise everything through generous government contracts. What is good for their bottom line must be excellent for America. As for billionaires, they must not be satisfied merely with their billions. They must strive to become even more obscenely rich by promoting grand narratives that convince the poor to use their freedom to grant billionaires more power. And, by the bye, they add, “Palantir loves Elon”, especially his grand apartheid-inspired narrative.

Taking down even more ethical barriers, Silicon Valley must be free to do in America’s cities what it did in Gaza. Some politicians seem reluctant to grant Palantir the right to annihilate all remaining civil liberties and human rights. They, too, must be silenced. Epstein’s syndicate should be forgotten, lest lovely people like Trump and the Clintons be deterred from entering government. The public arena must be scrutiny-free, unless subversives like Sanders or Mamdani enter it.

Banal public figures are great as long as they give Palantir juicy contracts. Colourful public figures who do the same are welcomed too. The masses need a lot more opium —for they seem insufficiently inebriated for Palantir to pursue their complete subjugation unimpeded. Questioning organised superstition is, in this context, intolerable and must end. Time to bring back Hitler’s hierarchy of races, with Palantir’s founders and Elon at its Aryan pinnacle.

The idea that it is wrong to judge someone by the colour of their skin, ethnicity, or religion must be jettisoned. Blacks, Muslims, most Asians, and of course, women, are inferior untermensch. Western men have for half a century resisted putting these subhumans in their place in the name of inclusivity. It was a mistake. Subhumans must never be allowed in, except as servants or sex service providers—at least until Palantir and Tesla can perfect our androids, in which case they will become surplus to requirements.

This is techlordism. It is not hyperbole. It is the ideology already being written into code, contracts, and tomahawk missiles. Neoliberalism is dead. What comes next will make the 2008 Great Financial Crisis look like a picnic. The only question is whether enough of us will recognise it before the divine algorithm renders impossible recognising anything—or anyone—beside the cloud.

Yanis Varoufakis is an economist, political leader and the author of numerous bestselling books, including Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. He is co-founder of the grassroots movement DiEM25 and a Professor of Economics at the University of Athens.