In case you missed it, Palantir just dropped a hot new manifesto on world domination. Sorry, I mean The Technological Republic.

For those of you who aren't Lord of the Rings nerds like me, a palantír is a magical seeing stone that the bad guys use to spy on humanity. The company named itself after this. On purpose. Thank God they're on our side, right?

On April 18th, Palantir posted a 22-point summary of CEO Alex Karp's book on X. Thirty-two million people saw it. The manifesto argues that Silicon Valley owes America a "moral debt," that AI weapons are inevitable and the only question is who builds them, that pluralism is "vacant and hollow," and that some cultures have produced "wonders" while others are "dysfunctional and regressive." It calls for the remilitarization of Germany and Japan. It floats universal national service. And it's coming from a company with multibillion-dollar contracts with the Department of Defense, ICE, and the Israeli military, a company that built ImmigrationOS to track deportation targets and whose software was confirmed used in the Lebanon pager attack that killed 42 people. More than half their revenue comes from governments. This isn't philosophy; it's a product roadmap dressed in civilizational language.

What got under my skin wasn't the military hawkishness. Defense contractors have always argued for more defense spending. What got me was the entitlement underneath it all. "Silicon Valley owes a moral debt." The wealthiest industry in human history, framing itself as the humble debtor, as if two decades spent building addiction engines and surveillance platforms was a well-meaning detour they're now graciously correcting by building weapons instead.

The manifesto argues that politicians and public servants shouldn't be treated as "priests," which sounds reasonable enough until you notice it also argues that those in "public life" should be forgiven for their mistakes. They aren't talking about politicians. They're talking about themselves. The scale of what they're building exempts them from the scrutiny they insist everyone else submit to. They claim to defend Western civilization, but the version they describe has been hollowed out: the pluralism is hollow, the democratic deliberation is a liability, the postwar restraints that kept militarism in check for eighty years are an overcorrection. What's left is a civilization defined solely by its capacity for dominance.

Here's what this has to do with your job.

Every AI tool flooding into your workplace right now is a seeing stone. It shows you real things: productivity metrics, performance dashboards, candidate rankings, market signals. And all of it is framed by the people who built the tool. When your company adopts an AI platform that scores employee output, that platform didn't just give you data; it decided what counts as output. When a recruiting tool ranks candidates by "culture fit," someone upstream defined the culture it's fitting to. You're seeing true things inside someone else's frame, and the frame is invisible until you go looking for it.

The Palantir manifesto matters to anyone with a job because the ideology it describes isn't just operating at the level of defense contracts and geopolitics. It's operating in your performance review. The logic is the same at every scale: make the system indispensable, make the humans dependent, and frame that dependence as progress. Palantir does this to governments. Your company's new AI stack does it to you.

Ernst Jünger fought for Germany in both World Wars and was one of the most decorated soldiers of the first. When the Nazis came to power, he refused to join the party, and he didn't leave. He stayed in Germany, watched his country lose its mind, and kept something intact inside himself that the regime couldn't touch. In 1951 he wrote Der Waldgang (the forest passage), about what it means to maintain your sovereignty inside a system you can't overthrow and can't escape. The forest rebel uses the roads the regime built, walks through the institutions the regime controls, and maintains at real personal cost an interior sovereignty that the system cannot reach.

I keep coming back to Jünger because we are watching our country arm a genocide in Gaza and bomb Iran's nuclear facilities while tech companies write civilizational manifestos to justify the infrastructure that enables it. Jünger would recognize the shape of what's forming here immediately; he lived inside the original version.

And I'm not outside any of it. I have a Claude subscription and a Cursor subscription and every prompt I send feeds the ecosystem that produces documents like this manifesto. I can't pretend that throwing my laptop in a river would slow Palantir down, and I can't treat the people building these systems as a different species from me, because that kind of othering is just a convenient way to stop thinking about your own participation.

What I can do is something closer to what Jünger described: use the roads and refuse to let the system do my thinking for me. Run models on my own hardware when I can. Own my tools rather than rent access to someone else's. Build things that serve my autonomy instead of feeding someone else's platform.

The forest passage was never about winning. Dependence is a choice that gets made slowly, one tool at a time, one outsourced decision at a time, one surrendered judgment at a time. And it can be refused the same way. Not by rejecting the tools, but by refusing to let them replace the parts of you that make the tools worth using in the first place.

Tolkien knew something about forests that Jünger also knew: forests are where things grow that empires can't control. The Ents didn't look into the palantír. They were slow and patient, and when they finally moved, Saruman didn't see it coming.

Build something of your own in the forest.