Technofascism & The Philosophy of Palantir | An online conversation with Moira Weigel & Anthony Burton on Tuesday 12th May
Last month, the powerful tech company Palantir published what was widely described as its manifesto. According to the company’s post on X it was meant as a brief version of the book The Technological Republic, co-authored by Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir and Nicholas W. Zamiska, head of corporate affairs and legal counsel at Palantir. The manifesto claims among other things that AI will replace nuclear weapons as the new deterrent, calls for the return of a universal national service and argues that Silicon Valley has a moral obligation to participate in the defence of the United States.
The bullet points of the manifesto don’t seem on the surface to be advancing a coherent philosophy, having been described as “the ramblings of a supervillain” by a British MP. But Alex Karp has an usual background for a tech CEO, having completed a PhD in philosophy in 2002 at the J.W. Goether University in Frankfurt Germany, with a thesis entitled Aggression in the Life-World.
So, does Karp’s training in the philosophy of the Frankfurt School find expression in Palantir’s manifesto? Is this a version of technofascism? And what can we do when powerful tech companies start thinking they have deep insights into geopolitics, public policy and the state of “Western civilization”?
About the Speakers:
• Moira Weigel is Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University and Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Her research focuses on history, theory, and social life of media and communication technologies, from the early nineteenth century to the present. More recently, she has focused on data-driven technologies, particularly social media and marketplace platforms, as well as on new developments in artificial intelligence and machine translation. Her book Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do and How They Do It (2020) consists of a series of long-form anonymous interviews with workers at every level of the Bay Area tech industry, from startup founders to cafeteria workers and in-house massage therapists to Google engineers. It received positive reviews from The New York Times, Wired, The Nation, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other outlets, and was named one of Wired‘s “8 Best Books About Artificial Intelligence to Read Now.”
• Anthony Burton is a postdoctoral researcher in the Media Studies department at the University of Amsterdam. He works on the relationship between social theory, intelligence, desire, and mimesis in contemporary late fascist politics. He is co-author of Algorithmic Authenticity, which brings together different disciplinary understandings of “authenticity” in order to find alternative ways to approach mis- and disinformation that go beyond contemporary fact-checking and its search for the “authentic” truth. Patterned under the algorithmic flows of digital capitalism, authenticity itself is subject to variation, iteration, and outside influence. Linking cross-disciplinary research on the history and practices of algorithmic authenticity points to new research questions to understand the impact of algorithmic authenticity on social life and its role in contemporary information disorder.
The Moderator:
Alexis Papazoglou is Managing Editor of the LSE British Politics and Policy blog. He was previously senior editor for the Institute of Arts and Ideas, and a philosophy lecturer at Cambridge and Royal Holloway. His research interests lie broadly in the post-Kantian tradition, including Hegel, Nietzsche, as well as Husserl and Heidegger. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The New Republic, WIRED, The Independent, The Conversation, The New European, as well as Greek publications, including Kathimerini.
This is an online conversation and audience Q&A presented by the UK-based journal The Philosopher. The event is free, open to the public, and held on Zoom.
You can register for this Tuesday 12th May event (11am PT/2pm ET/7pm UK) via The Philosopher here (link).
#PoliticalPhilosophy #AI #Philosophy #Technology #SocialPhilosophy #Ethics #Politics #CriticalTheory
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About The Philosopher (https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/):
The Philosopher is the longest-running public philosophy journal in the UK (founded in 1923). It is published by the The Philosophical Society of England (http://www.philsoceng.uk/), a registered charity founded ten years earlier than the journal in 1913, and still running regular groups, workshops, and conferences around the UK. As of 2018, The Philosopher is edited by Newcastle-based philosopher Anthony Morgan and is published quarterly, both in print and digitally.
The journal aims to represent contemporary philosophy in all its many and constantly evolving forms, both within academia and beyond. Contributors over the years have ranged from John Dewey and G.K. Chesterton to contemporary thinkers like Christine Korsgaard, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Elizabeth Anderson, Martin Hägglund, Cary Wolfe, Avital Ronell, and Adam Kotsko.
