Intel Inside? Well it's got outside now, it's out of control and it's terrifying
There was a time when intelligence agencies operated in the shadows, covertly, bureaucratically, and answerable, at least nominally, to elected government. But now? Now they wear Patagonia gilets, pitch 'freedom' between Soylent sips, and burn venture capital (VC) money to build private surveillance states in WeWork meeting pods. The Tech-Bros are no longer just out of control,they’ve escaped the lab, and they’re weaponising state-level intelligence tools in the service of profit, ego, and some truly unhinged libertarian delusions.Let’s not mince words: this is what happens when the CIA and NSA’s alumni swap their black ops badges for black Amex cards.
Palantir is run by Peter Thiel, a man who thinks democracy and capitalism are incompatible, and, spoiler alert, he's not rooting for democracy. This is a bloke who literally helped fund a vampire-blood biotech startup while also building predictive policing software used to deport migrants and profile protestors. He’s not a Bond villain, he’s worse: he’s a TED Talk sociopath in a button-down shirt, mainlining innovation dollars. And Thiel is just the poster boy. Behind him stands a legion of tech-fascist goons who believe 'code is law' and democracy is a bug.
OpenAI, founded with breathless promises of safety and transparency, now behaves like the bastard child of HAL 9000 and Enron, spiralling into secrecy, profit-chasing, and what appears to be a total inability to stop making more powerful and untested models. Sam Altman, who somehow gives off the persona of 'start-up founder' and 'Bond villain intern' simultaneously, has even said he wants to build a 'techno-utopia' with surveillance, crypto-economics, and AI overlords as 'governors.' That’s not utopia, mate, that’s fucking Black Mirror with stock options.
And then there's Anduril, founded by Oculus bro Palmer Luckey, the man who was booted from Facebook for donating to a white supremacist meme factory and then decided to start a weapons company. His drones and border surveillance towers are now in use by the U.S. military and border patrol. A man too toxic for Facebook now helps enforce national borders with Skynet.
This isn’t satire. This is the real world, and it’s being run by emotionally retarded IT Basement nerds who read Dune and decided they’d rather be the Harkonnens. And of course Britain isn’t immune. Palantir’s tentacles are already sliming their way through the NHS, having won control of vast swathes of health data with promises of 'efficiency.' Efficiency? From the same mob that brought you 'predictive policing' and ICE raids based on dodgy algorithms? Spare me. If Thiel and co think NHS patient data is just another battlefield, we’ll soon see our medical histories used to flog insurance premiums or predict who’s 'non-compliant' with Big Pharma.
Enter the Dark Enlightenment: The Philosophical Hellpit Behind It All
To understand just how deep this rot goes, you need to look at the ideological sewage pipe feeding it: the Dark Enlightenment. Coined by arch-creep Curtis Yarvin [previous blogs about this POS], a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug. This is the far-right techno-feudalist philosophy that Peter Thiel and his fanboys sip like communion wine. The central thesis? Democracy is dead weight, and we should run society like a Silicon Valley startup, with a CEO instead of a President, efficiency instead of justice, and a friendly fascist user experience. This is monarchism with machine learning. It’s Steve Jobs meets Joseph de Maistre.
These people don’t just dislike democracy, they think you having a vote is the problem. Yarvin’s followers believe power should be consolidated, streamlined, and removed from public accountability. They call it 'neocameralism.' I call it what it is: oligarchy on Adderall. And this isn’t some dusty internet corner anymore, it’s metastasised into the real world. Thiel has literally quoted Moldbug. Balaji Srinivasan, ex-CTO of Coinbase, calls for 'exit over voice', meaning rich libertarians should just build parallel societies, unbothered by the poor, the sick, or anyone who can’t afford to buy their way out of civil society. It’s techno-secessionism disguised as innovation. It’s Randianism with drones.
The Dark Enlightenment didn’t stay online. It put on a venture capital funded hoodie, broke into state institutions through 'innovation partnerships,' and now runs your hospital data, polices your borders, and wants to run your government. These are not tech bros. They’re authoritarian ideologues with venture capital and a Wi-Fi connection. This is what happens when intelligence, state, military and algorithmic gets into the hands of Silicon Valley fascists who want to be kings. Not to help you. Not to protect you. But to rule you.
The Governments Are In On It: Washington Sells the Keys, and Reform UK Is Licking the Windows
The last fig leaf of decency is dropped: this isn’t a hostile takeover of power by tech oligarchs, it’s a merger. A marriage of state and capital, with the government playing the willing sub. In the US, decades of bipartisan deregulation, defence contracting, and blind worship of 'innovation' have handed over military-grade surveillance tools to private companies with zero public accountability.
How many times has the Government done something that doesn't make sense? Well it all comes into focus when you realise this is why.
In the US do you think DARPA stopped when the ink dried on the Patriot Act? Do you think in the UK Wes Streeting pushied forward the NHS Procurement Act out of love for the NHS? Think again. It evolved. It incubated Palantir. It whispered sweet nothings to Amazon Web Services, which now runs CIA cloud infrastructure and Big Pharama incursions into social infrastructure. The line between state and private sector intelligence doesn’t exist anymore, it’s just a revolving door with a security clearance.
Biden’s administration talked a good game about 'AI regulation,' but let’s be honest: the DoD is already ploughing billions into autonomous weapons and machine-learning threat detection. And this ramped up a gear under Trump. They don’t want oversight, they want first dibs.
And here, on the other side of the pond? You’d expect a post-Brexit Britain to maybe resist this kind of Silicon Valley colonisation. But no, we’re selling out even faster, because we don’t even pretend to have guardrails anymore. Enter stage right Reform UK Ltd, a limited company LARPing as a political party, captained by that Poundland fascist tribute act Nigel Farage and his pack of neoliberal nation-wankers. These goons talk about 'freedom' and 'sovereignty' while courting exactly the same techno-authoritarian ideology as Thiel, Yarvin, and their creepy libertarian cult. They dream of deregulated data markets, privatised everything, and a Britain run like a bloody subsidiary corporation with a Union Jack.
Reform doesn’t and never wanted to take back control, they want to hand it to the highest bidder. In their fantasy, the NHS isn’t saved, it’s strip-mined. Surveillance is fine, as long as it’s 'entrepreneurial.' And if you think Farage wouldn’t sell every inch of NHS data to Palantir in exchange for a seat at some cigar-smoke libertarian think tank in Miami? Then you haven’t been paying attention. These grifters don’t just admire US tech fascists, they aspire to be them. Farage literally appeared at CPAC alongside the likes of Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel’s ideological bedfellows. This is a transatlantic pipeline of hard-right digital feudalism, and Reform is the UK distribution arm for the American dream of digital control and corporate autocracy.
Digital Feudalism Wearing a Hoodie
What we’re seeing is the endgame of 40 years of neoliberal decay: private intelligence. Private governance. Private tyranny. The tools of state surveillance have been handed to billionaire man-children whose political philosophy reads like a Reddit thread moderated by Mussolini. The US Government enabled it. Reform UK idolises it. And if we don’t get wise fast, we’ll all be living in some bastardised tech-feudalist hellscape, managed by biometric scans and AI moderators, while Peter Thiel gives keynote speeches on why democracy was always a 'scam.' They call it the Dark Enlightenment. But it’s just the old aristocracy, reborn in hoodies, armed with spyware, and funded by your tax money.
References
- Peter Thiel: Why I Don’t Believe in Democracy Anymore, The Atlantic, 2009. ↩
- Peter Thiel’s Blood-Transfusion Startup Is Still a Thing, MIT Technology Review, 2019. ↩
- OpenAI Board Ousted Altman Over Profit Concerns, Now Backtracks, New York Times, 2023. ↩
- Sam Altman’s Worldcoin and the Future of Surveillance Capitalism, Wired, 2024. ↩
- Palmer Luckey’s Far-Right Ties and Anduril’s War Tech Boom, Vice News, 2021. ↩
- Palantir Wins NHS Data Contract, Critics Slam Secrecy, The Guardian, 2023. ↩
- The Dark Enlightenment, Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin), 2008. ↩
- Peter Thiel’s Influences Include Anti-Democracy Blogger Mencius Moldbug, Vox, 2017. ↩
- Balaji Srinivasan: Exit vs Voice and the Future of Crypto-Governance, UnHerd, 2021. ↩
- CIA Signs $600M Deal with Amazon for Cloud Services, The Atlantic, 2013. ↩
- Pentagon’s AI Initiatives Raise Ethics Concerns, New York Times, 2023. ↩
- Farage at CPAC: Brexit Blowhard Joins Trump’s Extremist Fest, The Guardian, 2023. ↩
