In the heady neoliberal 1990s, techno-optimism touched its most cringe-worthy extremes. Infused with the fatuous imaginary of what Richard Barbrook has termed the “Californian ideology,” tech workers, entrepreneurs, and techno-visionary ideologues identified digital technology as a weapon for liberation and personal autonomy. This tool, they proclaimed, would allow individuals to defeat the hated Goliath of the state, then widely portrayed in terms of the failing behemoths of the imploding Soviet bloc.
For anyone with a superficial knowledge of the origins of digital technology and Silicon Valley, this should have been, from the very start, a laughable belief. Computers were a product of the war efforts of the early 1940s, developed as means to decode encrypted military messages, with Alan Turing famously involved at Bletchley Park.
ENIAC, or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, considered the first general-purpose computer used in the United States, was developed for artillery calculations and to aid the development of the hydrogen bomb. As G. W. F. Hegel infamously argued, war is the state in its most brutal form: the activity in which the strength of the state is tested against that of other states. Information technologies have become ever more central to this quintessentially state business.
Some people may still believe the myth of Silicon Valley springing organically out of hackers soldering circuits in their garages. But the reality is that it would have never come to life without the infrastructural support of the US defense apparatus and its public procurement ensuring the commercial viability of many products and services that we now take for granted. This includes the internet itself, with DARPA — the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency — responsible for developing the packet-switching technology that underpins the communication architecture of the web to this day.
True: from this incubation in the military sector, Silicon Valley has gradually evolved to focus mostly on civilian purposes from social media and e-commerce to gaming, crypto, and pornography. But it has never severed the link with the security apparatus. The Prism leaks by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed a deep and almost unconditional cooperation between Silicon Valley firms and security apparatuses of the state such as the National Security Agency (NSA). People realized that basically any message exchanged via Big Tech firms including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, etc. could be easily spied upon with direct backdoor access: a form of mass surveillance with few precedents in its reach and pervasiveness, especially in nominally democratic states. The leaks prompted outrage, but eventually most people preferred to look away from the unsettling truth that had been laid bare.
Now, however, the umbilical cord between the security state and Silicon Valley is visible as never before. The second coming of Donald Trump has not only favored an alliance between the far right and Big Tech that until recently few considered possible, but also provided the opportunity for the rise of a new type of state that aims at solidifying this new power bloc. We could describe it as the Big Tech Deep State.
What is called the “deep state” — the surveillance and repressive apparatus that exists at the core of every modern state, below the more endearing, surface-level ideological apparatus made up of parliaments, the media, or churches — is now deeply intertwined with these communication technologies. Previously sold as tools of liberation and autonomy, they are revealed to be means of manipulation, surveillance, and top-down control.
A Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, famously cautioned against the risk of the military-industrial apparatus, warning of the creation of an autonomous center of power and the interference it could have on the democratic process. Now we should be concerned by the overwhelming power of the military-information complex — to use a term already floated in 1996 by political scientists John Browning and Economist editor Oliver Morton. It expresses an ever-closer relationship between Silicon Valley and the deep state, which risks gutting what is left of our democracies.
PQR: In June, a group of tech executives were sworn in as army lieutenant colonels.
The Military-Information Complex
On June 13, 2025, a strange military ritual took place in Conmy Hall at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Virginia. A group of tech executives from some of the most important Silicon Valley firms including Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer (CTO) of Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, CTO of Meta; Kevin Weil, chief product officer of OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, adviser at Thinking Machines Lab and former chief research officer for OpenAI, appeared in military fatigues in front of a large group of soldiers. They were sworn in as army lieutenant colonels as part of the newly constituted Detachment 201: the Army’s Executive Innovation Corps (EIC).
The initiative was presented in typical neoliberal jargon as part of the effort to “leverage private expertise” to the benefit of the “public sector.” But the reality is much more disconcerting. This commissioning signals that there is no clear barrier between the private and public sectors: the prodigal son that is digital technology may long have been estranged from its military roots, but now it is coming back home. Why? Because it is, by and large, the military that is paying its bills.
The most extreme case is the surveillance and intelligence firm Palantir. Almost half of its revenue comes from government contracts — including the Department of Defense and intelligence agencies, in addition to the military of various NATO allies. Despite the firm’s attempt to diversify its revenue sources to more commercial uses, it is likely to remain very tied to public procurement, especially as global tensions and authoritarianism continue to rise. In the first three months of 2025, its government contracts shot up by 45 percent, while its Wall Street valuation has grown by over 200 percent since Trump’s election.
Palantir has been in many ways the path-breaker for the Big Tech Deep State. When it was founded in 2003 by Elon Musk’s close friend Peter Thiel (also hailing from South Africa), alongside Stephen Cohen, Alexander Karp, and Joe Lonsdale, the firm secured early funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, effectively aligning the company with the state’s security apparatus from its inception.
Its service is fundamentally to provide a more sophisticated version of the mass surveillance that the Snowden leaks revealed over a decade ago. In particular, it endeavors to support the military and police as they aim to identify and track various targets — sometimes literal human targets. This is why it is called Palantir: in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the Palantiri are magical crystal orbs used to see across distances.
This “seeing stone” metaphor embodies the company’s intention to offer services that can uncover the patterns hidden in large data troves — and deliver “actionable insights” to various agencies. This is exemplified by the most famous service offered by Palantir, called Gotham. Used by the CIA, FBI, NSA, and militaries in other US-allied states, it offers pattern analysis and predictive modeling capabilities, which connects people, their phone accounts, vehicles, financial records, and locations. But “algorithmic seeing” can also be used proficiently on the battlefield. Palantir’s AI services have already been used as a means to identify bombing targets in Ukraine.
While the company vehemently denies its direct involvement in supporting the genocide in Gaza, it has been reported that some of the firm’s most advanced tools have been supplied to Israel since October 2023. Given the company’s secrecy, the extent of this involvement remains difficult to independently verify. But it would not come as a huge surprise: indeed, collaboration between Palantir and the Israeli government is so strong that the two signed a strategic partnership at the beginning of 2024. UN rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese, has included Palantir as one of the firms profiting from genocide.
Besides overseas wars, Palantir is also greatly active on the domestic front, as seen in its long-standing collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has only intensified since Trump came to power. Its software has been used for real-time surveillance and tracking of individuals, aiding worksite and residential raids such as the ones that have become increasingly frequent under Trump’s presidency.
In short: Palantir is a company whose very business is to support the security state in its most brutal manifestations: in military operations that lead to massive loss of life, including of civilians, and in brutal immigration enforcement, which is terrifying large swathes of the resident population around the United States.
Unfortunately, Palantir is but one part of a much broader military-information complex, which is becoming the axis of the new Big Tech Deep State. Several similar companies have come to the fore in recent years. Perhaps the most dystopian is Anduril technology, specializing in “autonomous systems,” namely AI as applied to weaponry. It was founded by Palmer Luckey, an entrepreneur who previously invented the virtual reality headset Oculus Rift.
He self-identifies as a “radical Zionist”; he was a precocious MAGA supporter who already in 2016 hosted various Trump fundraisers. Anduril (which again has a Tolkienian name) focuses on a variety of AI-powered services for the defense sector, such as automated monitoring of borders and infrastructure, the loitering munition drone Altius, and augmented reality systems for soldiers. It is now valued at over $30 billion.
These companies represent the worst both of capitalism and of state intervention. They operate in shadowy industries, where there is almost zero competition, and live off military procurement — a sector with basically no transparency and which is notoriously prey to corruption and heavy forms of political interference. This is ironic given that their moguls such as Thiel style themselves as libertarians against the state. In fact, they are so intertwined with the state that they are better understood as financialized outgrowths of the security state apparatus than truly autonomous private firms.
Against the Tech Empire
Not only have firms like Palantir and Anduril become new tools of the security state, contributing to war abroad and to heavy-handed policing at home, but they now make little mystery about all this, even trying to present their operations as informed by soaring ideals.
In his recent book Technological Republic, Palantir CEO-philosopher Karp waxed lyrical about Silicon Valley finally coming back to the barracks from which it originated. A former liberal, Karp holds a PhD from the Institute for Social Research at Goethe University Frankfurt, the home of the Frankfurt School — the institution originating from the group led by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and more recently associated with lofty liberal post-Marxists such as Jürgen Habermas — who briefly even acted as Karp’s academic mentor before he was given a different supervisor.
While the founders of the Frankfurt School envisioned social science as a terrain of critical inquiry to support human emancipation, Karp has used this knowledge to do something rather different: concoct an ideological justification for why Silicon Valley should embrace the security state.
In his book, Karp criticizes Silicon Valley for having become too focused on providing consumer services and overlooking its duties toward the state and connected geopolitical objectives, particularly in the context of the escalating confrontation with China. He wants the internet to move away from the “cuteness” of emojis and selfies on Instagram and embrace a martial ethos of sacrifice and patriotism, in a landscape populated with AI-controlled weapons systems, autonomous drones, combat robots, and other dystopian sci-fi-esque technologies.
This is justified based on “patriotism,” albeit of a type that just happens to fit hand in glove with the economic interests of Karp and his ilk. Karp sees the “union of the state and the software industry” as a necessary matter of survival for both. Various external enemies are conjured up in order to heighten the sense of danger, including Russia and China, equally accused of threatening Western democracies. It seems that fearmongering about autocracies is the only liberal theme that Karp has retained from his former Habermasian self.
In the case of Palantir, this “patriotic” collaboration with the government is just a disingenuous masquerade: a reflection of the material necessity of a company heavily depending on state procurement. For the rest of us whose lives do not depend on defense contracts, on the ups and downs of Palantir’s stocks, or on the development of murderous military technology, it should be time to realize that the military-information complex poses a major threat to what is left of our democracies.
This kind of alliance of interests typically poses a major threat to democracy and to peace, as even Eisenhower denounced some decades ago. Restoring democracy in Western societies under the threat of rising authoritarianism, and securing peace in a war-torn world, requires stamping out the sprawling power of these securitarian giants. It means consigning the pervasive new “deep state” that they have enabled to the dustbin of history.