US defence contractor Palantir recently published a 22-point list which was drawn from a book co-authored by CEO Alex Karp and Head of Corporate Affairs Nicholas Zamiska. Reactions have ranged from “technofascism, pure” (Cas Mudde, one of the world's leading scholars of the European far right) to “if evil could tweet, this is what it would tweet” (Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister). A columnist on RT, the Russian state broadcaster, simply labelled the points “Mein AI”.
The reactions are loud, but the document itself is curiously quiet. These 22 numbered items, each orbiting a sentiment without quite committing to a position, are written in a voice that aspires to gravitas and arrives at grievance. They share a mood, not policy.
What was Alex Karp really hoping to convey? Point 10, for example, reads, “The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray”.
The numbered list of theses is normally the form that forces intellectuals into clarity. Luther nailed 95 of them to a church door. The US Declaration of Independence is a four-minute read. Marx and Engels wrote a pamphlet you could finish on a tram ride. Each item in such a list is meant to be acceptable or rejectable on its own terms.
Karp is writing in the lineage of The HP Way and Google’s past motto ‘Don't Be Evil’ rather than in Luther's style, and corporate manifestos rarely manage that kind of clarity. But even by the forgiving standards of the form, his 22 points are unusually evasive. They function more like a sermon than a list. And once that is noticed, the question changes.
It is no longer: “What is Karp saying?”
It is: “Why is he saying it this way?”
The Philosopher in the Valley
The formative intellectual experience of Alex Karp was neither technical nor American. His undergraduate degree, from Haverford College in Pennsylvania, was in philosophy. His law degree is from Stanford University, where he met Peter Thiel, the contrarian billionaire investor, with whom Karp and others would later co-found Palantir. After that, Karp spent roughly a decade in Frankfurt, earning a doctorate in what he calls neoclassical social theory.
As Moira Weigel showed in her 2020 essay on Karp's intellectual formation, his 2002 dissertation, ‘Aggression in der Lebenswelt’, written in German, extends the Frankfurt School's critique of ‘jargon’ — a particular kind of public speech that formally affirms a society's official norms while smuggling through the forbidden wishes those norms exist to suppress, serving as a coded beacon for like-minded persons searching for a community.
Karp wrote his doctorate on the very rhetorical device he now deploys as CEO of a defence contractor worth over $330 billion.
Point 4 says, “Hard power in this century will be built on software”.
Karp is the philosopher at Palantir, not the technologist. From the very founding, his role has been to function as the company's cultural and commercial face, winning over governments, recruiting engineers who might otherwise choose not to build machines of destruction, and articulating how all of this is morally grounded work. The 22 points are not the bullet points of an American chief executive. They read as the prose of a German social theorist who has read Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity and decided to use the technique rather than expose it.
Karp is not failing to be clear. He is succeeding at something else. The reader is not supposed to parse the argument, but to feel its mood.
What the Fog Accomplishes
Not every point is evasive. Point 21's claim that “some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive” leaves little room for misreading, and the call to rearm Germany and Japan is unambiguous. The strategy works through the combination: blunt provocations draw the eye, while operationally consequential claims hide in the fog. Here is what that fog accomplishes.
Plausible Deniability. Point 5 says, “The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose”. A clear version of this point would have to say that Palantir believes the US and Israel are justified in striking Iran's nuclear programme, in targeting Iran's political and military leadership, and in striking civilian infrastructure. It would also have to say that Palantir's software is widely reported to have contributed materially to those operations. But stating this plainly would expose Palantir to legal, diplomatic, and reputational consequences in jurisdictions where wars of aggression are considered illegal.
Karp and Palantir can nod at the position without owning it. If asked later, he can say he was just speaking abstractly. The same mechanism operates at Point 7, on better software for soldiers; at Point 17, on Silicon Valley addressing violent crime; and at Point 15, on rearming Germany and Japan. Each is adjacent to a specific operational commitment that the document never openly embraces.
Coalition Building
Palantir's diverse audiences do not naturally agree with one another. Engineers wary of working on weapons need to hear that their company holds the moral high ground. National security conservatives need to hear that the West must recover its nerve. Religious traditionalists need to hear that elite secularism is corrosive. Disaffected liberals need to hear that they are still liberals, albeit serious ones. The Ayn Rand crowd needs to hear that ambition is being unfairly punished.
A more precise message to any one of these groups would cost Karp on the others. Vagueness lets each audience hear what it wants and supply the missing precision in its own preferred direction. This is the rhetorical structure of coalition building, and it depends on imprecision the way a wall depends on mortar.
Mood over Argument
Points 9, 10, 11, 18, and 19 are not arguments at all. They are atmospheric claims about contemporary public life: shallow, cruel, hostile to seriousness, and driving capable people away. Point 19, “the caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive; those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all”, does not commit to anything one could agree or disagree with. It just sets a mood.
Once the mood is accepted, the harder claims arrive in a context already prepared. The reader who would not have accepted the position that some cultures are simply regressive has by then been softened by a dozen smaller agreements about the texture of the present.
Dodging Falsification
Specific predictions can be wrong, and being wrong has costs. Point 12 — “One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin” — cannot be falsified because no specific prediction has been made. Vague claims age better than precise ones, and a man who expects to be quoted for decades has good reason to write claims that cannot be wrong because they are not specific enough to be either right or wrong.
Shifting the Burden of Interpretation onto Critics
The only way to charge a vague claim is to first make it more concrete, and Palantir's critics have accordingly been forced into attacking positions of their own construction, rather than to what Karp himself has committed. Unclarity also flatters the reader patient enough to decode it, making the reader a co-author of whatever meaning they supply.
Power without Accountability
This emerges as the unifying principle. It is the art of influencing important debates without being pinned to specific positions; a coalition of incompatible allies held together by what is not said; a worldview that survives almost any outcome; a document that cannot be refuted because it has not made itself precise enough to be charged with anything in particular.
This is precisely the rhetorical structure that Karp's dissertation described: speech that affirms public norms while smuggling forbidden wishes past them, and binds members of a community through what they recognise without having to say. The dissertation diagnosed it as a symptom. The manifesto deploys it as a method.
Two Hats
A philosopher writing in his study can be as elliptical as he likes. The cost of his obscurity falls mostly on himself in the form of being misunderstood or ignored by readers who lack the patience to decode him.
The words of a CEO, on the other hand — Alex Karp in this instance — attach to governments, concern military and intelligence operations, and connect to software involved in determining who lives and dies. They attach to shareholders. And they attach to a public whose taxes fund it all.
Karp wants to wear both hats at once: the philosopher's licence to posture without committing, and the CEO's power to act on what the words actually imply.
Watching Karp perform in interviews — because that is what he is doing; performing — is to witness an infant terribly uncomfortable with the consequences of adulthood, carefully avoiding any real rapport with his audience.
In a democracy, understanding how a government partner at this scale and of such political reach actually views the world is not idle curiosity; it is foundational.
Alex Karp runs a corporation whose software is being used — right now, in hot wars, and in anger — on actual human beings. His decisions help shape procurement worth tens of billions of dollars of public money. He is increasingly a political figure in his own right, not merely a commercial one. He has clearly embraced a worldview centred on American power. In that position, clarity is not a stylistic preference. It is part of the social contract between him and the public to which his company answers.
Karp could have been clear. He chose not to be.
