The tragedy of Alex Karp
About a year ago while building a business case for an arts-based social networking alternative to Meta (it didn't happen – unfortunately "an arts-driven alternative to Meta" didn't inspire the arts foundations we approached for funding), my research took me down a rabbit hole that resulted in learning about accelerationism, which promptly resulted in an existential crisis. Mind you, I have existential crises all the time, but this one hit hard and ultimately, quite literally changed the course of my life. I should also tell you I was reading Schopenhauer, a philosopher known for such hot takes as, "what a man can do and suffer is unknown to himself till some occasion presents itself which draws out the hidden power", and, "life is suffering".
I was coping with the dread of rising fascism by playing with concepts of existentialism, shaking them like a toy. If I wanted to get really heady about this I'd pull in some D.W. Winnicott here too, whose philosophies in Playing and Reality informed most of my visual art practice back during my art-making days. In the context of this dark phase of my life, Schopenhauer was my "transitional object", a teddy bear that aided a "not me" perspective in identifying the role of "will" in all suffering (and joy), which resulted in the development of a "potential space" where I could wrap my mind around effective accelerationism. Ha.
But hoo boy did I get spooked after reading about effective accelerationism, a technology philosophy brought into being by Nick Land that believes, "unrestricted technological progress, especially driven by artificial intelligence, is a solution to universal human problems, such as poverty, war, and climate change."*
The Wikipedia article goes on,
"Although effective accelerationism has been described as a fringe movement and as cult-like, it has gained mainstream visibility in 2023. A number of high-profile Silicon Valley figures, including investors Marc Andreessen and Garry Tan, explicitly endorsed it by adding "e/acc" to their public social media profiles."*
"Following Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, several prominent tech industry figures expressed support for positions aligned with effective accelerationism, particularly regarding deregulation and technological advancement. The potential appointment of Elon Musk to government roles focused on auditing federal programs drew support from venture capitalists who anticipated reduced regulatory oversight of the technology sector."
From there, I dug further and found this article, which included the much-amplified quote of Peter Thiel's, "freedom and democracy aren’t compatible":
Daniel Soufi
All I wanted to do was design a social networking platform that amplified the arts and encouraged pro-social behaviour but I ended up discovering democracy was being speed-run into the sun.
And they're still doing it, by the way. The speed-run. It's what's driving everything right now, all gassed up thanks to Epstein and his ring of powerful freaks.
As I read more about the movement, I soon learned Peter Thiel had bankrolled J.D. Vance (which everyone knows), and I discovered the festering strategies of the New Right. Thiel was also Zuckerberg's first investor in 2004, and has had a hefty hand in starting up a variety of capital-driven projects since the early 2000s. He's a "conservative libertarian and democracy-skeptic authoritarian", and is cited widely throughout the Epstein files. He is not a good person.
That month, I went from brightly asking, "how do we increase online engagement in the arts?" to staring at the abyss whispering "fuck."
I wrote two blog posts that had exactly zero impact, one titled Thiel, Musk, Meta and Canada: a Rickety Outline of the Technocratic Takeover, and the other From Canadian Federal security & AI contractor to "Gleeful profiteers of Trumps Police State", this is Palantir. In my mind, Palantir was obviously an authoritarian surveillance tech firm, and what's worse, I discovered it had already established itself in Canada's government systems and policing agencies, plus throughout our public and private sectors. I even sent everything I found to a CBC contact, who received it politely, though I'm certain it degraded my standing with her as a reliable source. I'm sure she thought I was teetering on the precipice of conspiratorial brain melt, and honestly it kinda felt that way to me too, except everything was right there and it was true.
And Canada had a history of toying with Technocracy before the AI boom, too. Get this:
On October 7, 1940, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested members of Technocracy Incorporated, charging them with belonging to an illegal organization. One of the arrested was Joshua Norman Haldeman, a Regina chiropractor, former leader of the Regina branch of Technocracy Incorporated in Saskatchewan, and the maternal grandfather of Elon Musk. Another notable former Technocracy Inc. member is Jacque Fresco, who later went on to form Sociocyberneering Inc., and then The Venus Project, advocating for a resource based economy.*
Given Carney's extremely pro-AI, anti-regulation policies, I'm certain he must be onside with the movement in its current iteration, just in a less overtly fascist way than Thiel, Vance et al. Hooray for quiet malignant neoliberal conservatism.
Which brings us to Alex Karp, Palantir's co-founder and CEO. I spent the past year thinking of him as an evil person, on par with Thiel and all the other most rotten figures of the movement. I started sniffing about Thiel and Palantir, and it was Karp's face on all the media, so I dug a bit into Karp.
Karp barely did any press before 2024, and when I was first snooping around this is what I could find:
- "A secretive Silicon Valley tech giant set up shop in Canada. But what does it do?" - CBC News, 2017
- "Palantir’s big push into Canada" - Open Canada, 2019 (this article calls Palantir a "a deeply secretive company")
- "Controversial data-mining firm Palantir signs million-dollar deal with defence department" - The Logic, 2019
- December 2020, ethics Ethics Commissioner Mario Dion ruled that David MacNaughton, Canada’s former ambassador to the U.S., broke lobbying rules when he arranged multiple meetings between senior government officials, ministers and Palantir Technologies Canada. - CPAC
So, knowing about Thiel's involvement in the accelerationist movement and then seeing these stories, I hope you can appreciate that the alarm bells going off in my head felt very real and scary. Maybe accelerationism is the obvious solution according to all the nihilistic tech bros out there, but for a naive existential project manager like me who'd just spent years of my life growing flowers for profit, it was pretty hard to process.
I hate feeling afraid. My preferred remedies for anxiety are gardening and making insane jokes. Fear pisses me off though, it's a total waste of energy. My response to this fear ended up compiling with my fears of pending neofascism in Alberta, my fears of unaffordability in the city I lived, my fears of drought and water shortages, and my fears of increasingly toxic air quality, which resulted in a "flight" response, which resulted in me packing up my kids and pets, selling the house, and moving across the country to a quiet maritime island.
So that's where I am now, and I've had time to settle in, and Palantir is popping up all over the place. Mr. Karp has been busy, and it's hard to tell whether he's trying to put out fires or just energetically splashing water on them while knocking several kerosine lamps over in the process.
Since rifling through the internet for dirt on Palantir back in those early gutting days of 2024, Karp has become much more public about what Palantir does, and every time I hear him describe himself as a "progressive socialist", the more I need to know how a progressive socialist becomes both a capitalist and a militarist.
He also seems committed to doing his own comms. There's no strategic messaging, and he apparently takes nearly every interview he's offered. He speaks completely unscripted, energetically, and says whatever's on his mind. From a comms perspective, and for a company worth over $300billion, this is insane. So obviously I needed to know more.
So here's a sampling of stories from the past year or so. Also important to note the guy doesn't do cocaine or any drugs, despite the many "cocaine is a hell of a drug" comments on socials. Cool zinger, but apparently he's just very high-energy. Okay here's a bunch of stuff he said:
"In a rare in-depth interview, this billionaire man of mystery, the head of Palantir Technologies, talks about war, A.I. and America’s future" - Bankwatch, August 2024
- He says he supported Kamala Harris while staying critical of the Democratic party.
- “I just think I’ve always viewed myself as I don’t fit in, and I can’t really try to,” “My parents’ background just gave me a primordial subconscious bias that anything that involves ‘We fit in together’ does not include me."
- “Yes, I think the way I explain it politically is like, if fascism comes, I will be the first or second person on the wall.”
- "“If you were to do a sitcom on Palantir, it’s equal parts Larry David, a philosophy class, tech and James Bond,” he said."
- "Palantir does not do business with China, Russia or other countries that are opposed to the West."
- On Thiel's embracing of Trump: “I didn’t enjoy it,” he said. “There’s a lot of reasons I cut Biden a check. I do not enjoy being protested every day. It was completely ludicrous and ridiculous." "Because Peter had supported Mr. Trump, it was actually harder to get things done.”
- “I actually am a progressive,” “I want less war. You only stop war by having the best technology and by scaring the bejabers — I’m trying to be nice here — out of our adversaries. If they are not scared, they don’t wake up scared, they don’t go to bed scared, they don’t fear that the wrath of America will come down on them, they will attack us. They will attack us everywhere.”
- “The N.S.A., it hoovers up all the data in the world. As far as I can tell, there are incredible civil liberties violations where they’re spying on everybody outside the U.S., basically. Then they’re fortunately too incompetent to do much with the data.”
- "Unlike Mr. Musk and other tech lords, Mr. Karp is not into micro-dosing ketamine or any other drug. “My drug is athletics,” he said. “I love drinking, but now I’ve moved to drinking very little because what I’ve noticed is if you’re traveling all the time, the alcohol, it really affects your brain.” He’s on the road about 240 days a year."
"Palantir CEO: How the Company Helps Businesses" - Fox Business, December 2024
- The host praises Palantir's 93% gains and tells him it's, "almost like the world has woken up to something you already knew".
- "One of the biggest trends that we've had to fight against is the experts in this country are only experts in this country at being wrong. Their expertise is, "I'm wrong"."
- He defends Musk and DOGE operations...
- Karp notes he was a "pariah" for the 18 years of Palantir's 20-year existence.
- The interview includes visuals illustrating Palantir technologies. He's also wearing a wildly expensive watch (no surprise - an aquanaut probs? $200k-ish?), which I notice now because I dated a watch guy.
"Alex Karp Goes to War: Palantir’s CEO is good with ICE and says he defends human rights. But will Israel and Trump ever go too far for him?" - WIRED, November 2025
- “We’ve been at odds with Silicon Valley on and off since our inception 20 years ago.”
- Palantir has a Code of Conduct that supposedly binds the company to, among other things, “protect privacy and civil liberties,” “protect the vulnerable,” “respect human dignity,” and “preserve and promote democracy.”
- The author notes, "Beneath his fiery defense of Palantir, I sense that Karp yearns to be understood."
- About Palantir, Karp states, "The shorthand is if you’re doing anything that involves operational intelligence, whether it’s analytics or AI, you’re going to have to find something like our products", and, "Our competition is political. The woke left and the woke right wake up every day, figuring out how they can hurt Palantir."
"In the beginning, we were at odds with Silicon Valley because we were pro-American, pro-West, and pro-making the government functional. That was very controversial in Silicon Valley because it equated to not making any money and being a loser. We won that battle."
and
"if our product allowed for civil rights abuses, would I intervene? Yes, though our product is the hardest in the world to violate."
"Alex Karp unplugged: Palantir CEO" - The Axios Show, November 7, 2025
- Karp describes Palantir as "part of the AI economy where things are useful either on the battlefield or commercially. And we're the only AI company with a real spread function to the working-class Americans"
- He says "we went long on the reality that large language models were useful in their application in our software, and are not going to be as performative as people want them to be outside of it."
"Palantir CEO weighs in on government overreach, anti-ICE protests" - Seeking Alpha, February 2026
- "It is confounding to many that the same software system that is capable of preventing a terror attack may be equally capable of preventing an unconstitutional intrusion into the private lives of citizens by the state," Karp wrote in a shareholder letter. "But that is the software system that we have, quite intentionally, built."
- "Karp said Palantir (PLTR) developed its technology with granular permissioning capabilities to "ensure that the state and its agents can see only what ought to be seen" and functional audit logs to ensnare external and internal threats."
"Meet Alex Karp: The ‘batshit-crazy’ philosopher behind surveillance firm Palantir", a review of Michael Steinberger’s The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State - Indian Express, February 2026
- Karp refers to himself as "the batshit crazy CEO"
- "a person whose dedication is near fanatical, whether it is to a cause or a company. Karp tells Steinberg that his biggest fear is fascism, and his commitment to Palantir stems to a large degree from this."
- "Although initially ignored by many venture capitalists, Karp’s persistence ultimately yielded rich dividends for Palantir. “He pitched Palantir as if his life depended on it. In his mind, it did” Steinberg writes."
- "“Only the paranoid survive,” Karp tells Steinberger that his sense of foreboding actually “propels a lot of decisions for this company.” It fosters a culture that is very driven and yet loaded with stress"
- "is in “long-term, concurrent relationships with two women, an arrangement that worked in part because he was “geographically monogamous.” Both women are incidentally “age-appropriate.”"
Like holy god this man needs a comms team.
As of writing this, Karp reportedly responded to internal pressure from employees to explain Palantir's position on ICE. He apparently tried to calm concerns in an hourlong video and offered NDAs to workers who wanted to understand the nature of the company's work with ICE. More of that in WIRED. I think I speak for all of us when I say that I personally think he should not be working with ICE at all. But that's just me/all of us!
His Wikipedia page shares he was born in New York City and raised in Philadelphia, he's the eldest son of a Jewish pediatrician and an African-American artist, both civil rights activists. He's dyslexic, which he's open about throughout his PR engagements. He was influenced by his parents' activism "and went to many protests". He said what he inherited from his maternal side was "a strong affinity to fighting discrimination". His paternal side originates from Germany, and he has said "before he went to Germany, he had underestimated how German his upbringing had been." He's also a massive Lord of The Rings fan, referring to his employees as "hobbits" and The West as "The Shire". Also, Palantir, obviously.
He speaks often about his care for "the people" and apparently believes in supporting the rights of the working class.
He has Ph.D. in neoclassical social theory, which he talks about in this 2009 interview with Charlie Rose. He's neurodivergent and has a clear talent for asynchronous processing.
Over the past five years he also subscribed to the Israeli narrative of Hamas/Palestine, and Palantir technology has been called the driving force behind the automation of IDF target lists. Karp stated in a Fox Business interview, "I don’t give to Israel. I allow them to purchase our product."
And last year he purchased this monastery in Colorado for $120 million, presumably for the good cross-country skiing. He owns cross-country "ski huts" across multiple continents, aka across all the countries. The monastery is on over 3000 acres and looks like a cross between the Shire and Rohan, which I'm extremely not jealous about.
Something that stood out to me while reading and watching those interviews was Karp identifies strongly both as an underdog and a vindicated outsider. Throughout the interviews there is a strong sense of grudge-bearing – he seems bruised from the experience of being rejected by the VC/PE community for the first 18 years of Palantir's existence.
I was also reading and watching the interviews just after the late-January Epstein file dump, and I was struck by the thought, did he not know about the Epstein stuff?
Like, I actually think maybe he didn't? I'm not trying to paint him too sympathetically – maybe he did, and maybe maintaining that sense of cognitive dissonance is what drives his isolationist tendencies. For someone so principled, I can't help but wonder how the recent release of files and all their horrific details might influence his next steps. Especially given their ties to Israel and easily half of his business circles.
Like up until reading about his cold dismissal of Palestinian suffering, I was honestly trying to like the guy.
And now I think I feel a sense of... pity?
This intelligent and passionate boy who learned civil activism from his parents, who cares about protecting "The Shire" more than anything, whose "greatest fear" is(was?) fascism, this boy who is neurodivergent, dyslexic, who never fit in, part of a class he's experienced years of patronization from...
And when his moment finally arrives, just after riding the peak of its crest, he's faced with the horrific fact that he's not only working for fascists and has been defending their ideologies, but his long-time founding partner is a depraved piece of shit. His whole legacy sits on the brink of ruin because he trusted a terrible wealthy man. From progressive socialist to... what? Where does someone like him go from there?
When I first learned about Karp I perceived him as a soulless capitalist, and maybe that's truly the inevitable course for men of wealth and power. And as I watched him try to express himself again and again, explaining his perspectives passionately and candidly, I really hoped to see a redemptive path for him. I really wanted to like him. His big weird energy was refreshing; in one article the author describes him breaking into tai chi moves and accidentally bonking into a passing employee, then apologizing profusely. I love that shit, it's familiar to me; the neurodivergent energy of non-stop movement paired with social awkwardness- but then again maybe he's just a powerful nerd who can afford to ignore social norms. And maybe plenty of powerful nerds who view themselves as men of Númenór are actually just plain old men of Gondor; easily corruptible and deeply susceptible to pride. Maybe he's the perfect example of how power poisons and detaches people from the good parts of humanity. A living parable. Our own Boromir.
I do believe he started out thinking he was building a technology that would prevent war and protect The West, and I believe he truly did view The West as a superior entity, which is somewhat baffling given its long history of exploitative capitalist mechanisms. Why not use his power to advance actual tenets of socialism? When has he ever spoken to "the people" or opened the floor to us? Are we all just the dirty, teeming hoards from his vantage point? Who counts as society to him now? I mean who cares, but also what the hell, man?
In an early 2023 "Top 100" article in Time, he doubled down on Palantir's controversial partnerships, arguing "with AI-driven military technologies set to determine the global balance of power, Chinese companies don’t have the same qualms. “I think we should immediately have a law that all technologies produced in the U.S. will be available to the U.S. government.”"
(Another flag indicating how existentially scared of China the Western ruling class currently seems to be, which is also what I base my framing of Carney's collaborating with Trump on.)
And now he's openly aiding what might possibly be the most malignant swell of fascism since the 1930s. How does someone like him find themselves so blindsided? From someone so sure they'd be "the first or second person on the wall" to the person condemning citizens to that very wall? So incredibly on the wrong side? Has he mistaken vindication for redemption? Does he even care?
I do think his case is tragic, and I actually kinda hope he doesn't discard his old ideals as youthful naïvety, but I might as well be hoping three ghosts visit him on Christmas eve. Power corrupts, and I can't think of any case where that corruption is reversible.
And given how chaotic his PR has been and how easy it is for literally anyone to spin it into evil narratives, it's only a matter of time before the people turn on him en masse. What a terrible end for someone who spent their life working towards their version of a progressive future.
If I were him I'd cash out my stocks and denounce Thiel, then use my $18billion+ net worth to empower the anti-fascist resistance, and then I'd fund a massive network of community gardens, and a foundation that supports botanical artists, and a cognitive rehab centre surrounded by stunning flower gardens that helps people re-develop their cognitive capacity (give me some billions please!).
Dude could've been a hero of the people. This guy should have been the antidote to capitalism – the secret weapon of socialism, one of ours finally breaking through. But he's just our Boromir on his way to Rauros-falls.
Anyway that's enough of trying to understand the mind of a billionaire. Back to my normal little life in my cute old house, on an island as close to an actual Shire as I could find, doing my damnedest to build and share an ethos of gardening. I'm very excited for spring, billionaires be damned.
Update: alright so I think I'm closer to sorting out the whole "techbros defending the West" thing. I keep asking myself why every leader of the ruling class is so convinced the West is under existential threat. What would push someone like Karp (and Carney) to choose fascism over human rights? The easy answer is "capitalists gonna capitalize", but I think I've landed somewhere more substantial.
I don't even know if I should write it out. Like, it's very icky?
Basically I remembered we've been in an information/comms war with Russia/China since the mid-2010s at least – it's funny how the noise can distract you from truths you knew a few years ago – and it occurred to me that maybe they're winning. Maybe this is why my comms instincts have been in overdrive these past couple years. Maybe it's a comms war.
This post by xlr8harder on Bluesky (who I thiiinnk is Nick Land?) kinda tipped me over another little edge. If NVIDIA does indeed move to "operationalize and distribute DeepSeek through its enterprise ecosystem", the West is, well. A bit fucked.
I've wondered aloud more than once whether LLMs could be a bioweapon/trojan horse, given how they:
- deteriorate cognitive autonomy and agency
- collect massive amounts of behavioural data
- collect massive amounts of personal data (everyone keeps telling the damn things all their secrets!)
- apply "agentic" architecture that behaves like malware – if agents are integrated into every Western system, that makes us very vulnerable
But then I'm just back to, where the hell are our digital defences? Why is the West wasting resources on ICE and policing its own citizens? Is the ruling class truly so convinced that the teeming hoards have descended into chaos? Do they think us plebs have been turned against them by nefarious foreign algorithms? And who's feeding them those narratives? Because a lot of us are just down here trying to pay our bills and stay alive. We have no money. Affordability is near impossible. They're essentially revoking universal health care in Canada. Our ruling class could've made plenty of better choices to strengthen and protect us and they didn't. China didn't do this, greedy old men did.
Has Russia taken the U.S. via Epstein/Trump and now China is moving in for Canada? Plus climate change is many measures worse than everyone thought it was three years ago (I mean obvs), and is also speed running us into the sun. And in the meantime, capitalists gonna capitalize.
It all sounds like a comic book plot. Goddammit I am this close to nihilism. I wish I could just have a clean conversation about it. Then just put me in a greenhouse and let me grow flowers and berries till it sorts itself out. I do want to witness and resist of course but gawwwd.
What's become more and more evident over the past few years is there are truly no clean narratives. Binary thinking is a massive barrier to making sense of what's happening. Some truths hold, ie: capitalists will always choose capital over people, but every person is still just making choices based on the best intel they have, delivered by sources they've chosen to trust. And of course, some people are extremely vulnerable to the poisonous effects of status and power.
At this point trust itself is one of the hardest choices to navigate. I won't deny the appeal of isolationism for those reasons, it's always been my default, even knowing how valuable real-world community is right now – I write about it to remind myself not to withdraw! But I feel like I'm at a stage where I need the space to communicate on an intimately strategic level, both in long and short form. I can't do that when I'm surrounded by people whose literacy and motives I have to constantly navigate.
Anyway this has become a ramble. Good thing it's just a blog and nothing matters! JK plants and flowers still matter. Bees too. And my kids are extremely cool, and I'm setting them up with fun options outside of the neoliberal paradigm. Anyway.
Update 2: Okay so I think what the ruling class is actually freaking out about is the past few years of mass dementia caused by social media. Or it's a big piece of the issue anyway.
✉
Prasanna Mohan mohanprasannarediffmail.com ✉Corresponding author.
It also explains why I've been losing my fucking mind over how dumb everything seems to be lately. Like every social space is full of either neutralized or polarized zombies now. Maybe social media did unleash a "mind virus" and it didn't discern between political beliefs, every online brain took a hit. Then covid pushed cognitive damage further, and now people are truly melting down. I think that's actually the "rupture" Carney was referencing. That makes better sense.
AI is their solution to mass dementia. They're throwing gasoline on something that could be reversed. Fucking idiots.
Well big thanks to my intuition for getting us out to a quiet charming island, and for leading me down this path. Def sticking to flowers and tightening up my cognitive care regimen, gawd. This will take some time to process.
