For almost two years, the British government has been holding an inquiry- -whitewash into the nation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the recent witnesses to that inquiry was Louis Mosley, the executive vice-president of Palantir Technologies UK (and, incidentally, the grandson of the 1930s British fascist Oswald Mosley), who during his testimony saw a rare opportunity to plug his company’s products. It was one he seized upon with relish.
The UK government, he said, should invest in a “common operating system” for its data, encompassing the full gamut of departments and local authorities — a system that Palantir would presumably be more than happy to develop:
“[The government should] deploy this common operating system capability immediately and not wait until the next pandemic or civil challenge on the scale of COVID-19 is already underway. An investment of this kind is already long overdue.”
This comment is very similar to a remark made by Palantir’s Chief Technology Operator Shyam Sankar in 2021 — with regard to the US government:
Turning to government, we continue to advance our mission of becoming the US government’s central operating system as we extend our footprint across defence, healthcare and civilian agencies.
As outlandish as the idea may seem that one company could aspire to exclusively provide and manage a central operating system for the governments of both the US and the UK, there can be no doubting Palantir’s ambitions to expand its influence throughout government on both sides of the Atlantic. This is a company, after all, whose founder, Peter Thiel, has long marketed himself as a libertarian while lauding the benefits of monopoly capitalism and helping build the infrastructure of the modern surveillance state.
As Iain Davis writes in his excellent two-part series on the “Dark MAGA Gov-Corp Technate”, the “proponents of Technocracy and the proponents of the Dark Enlightenment, such as Elon Musk and Thiel, are not interested in restricting state power, though they may say otherwise”:
Instead they wish to move the state from the public to the private sector and expand its power once sufficiently privatized. True, they oppose “representative democracy” and characterise it as both a “democracy” (which it isn’t) and a bureaucratic system riddled with problems (which it is), but the solutions they offer, to all intents and purposes, magnify the power of the very state they supposedly condemn.
What the believers in Technocracy and the believers in the Dark Enlightenment both propose are compartmentalised, hierarchical sociopolitical power structures that couldn’t be more state-like or more authoritarian. They seek to expand and maximise the power of the state, though in slightly different ways. Calling their new model of the state either a Technate (as technocrats do) or a gov-corp (as accelerationist neoreactionaries do) doesn’t change the nature of the tyrannical statism they desire to foist on the rest of us.