How to Survive the Broligarchy

06/02/2025

There’s one key rule to remember when considering all things Thiel: never underestimate him. He’s a master chess player who thinks strategically and long term. One of his most famous acts – destroying the media site, Gawker, was planned over years. JD Vance, the vice president, is a wholly owned Peter Thiel project that has been 15 years in the making. He first met Thiel when a student and he owes his entire career, first in finance and then politics, to him.

But Peter Thiel’s most consequential enterprise may be Palantir, the data analytics company and military contractor, which the Times reported is now being used to process and combine these datasets.

“Palantir’s selection as a chief vendor for the project was driven by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, according to the government officials. At least three DOGE members formerly worked at Palantir, while two others had worked at companies funded by Peter Thiel, an investor and a founder of Palantir.”

The New York Times drawing on reporting from Wired and CNN previously added up 314 categories of data that Musk’s DOGE was seeking to merge and consolidate.

Musk’s White House performances may be over, for now, most accurately viewed as a stunningly successful piece of political theatre but the “mission” is not. The foundations of a technoauthoritarian surveillance state have been laid and Palantir’s Foundry software – that also, unbelievably, is used at the heart of Britain’s NHS service – is the next stage in consolidation and control.

To understand how this database could be used, look no further than how it is already being used to monitor and track immigrants.

“Palantir also recently began helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s enforcement and removal operations team, according to two Palantir employees and two current and former D.H.S. officials. The work is part of a $30 million contract that ICE signed with Palantir in April to build a platform to track migrant movements in real time.”

You just have to look at China to understand how its treatment of a minority group was the thin end of the surveillance wedge. It began to surveille and control the ethnic Muslim Uighurs as a test project before rolling out the technology more widely.

But surveillance is only one aspect of how this database could be used. It hands state power to a private company whose proprietary AI – enhanced and enriched by this data – could be deployed to make opaque, unaccountable life-and-death decisions. This is the sort of technocracy that Elon Musk’s grandfather dreamed of.