The Stone That Looks Back

I. A Name from Middle-earth

In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings there are seven seeing-stones, the palantíri. Whoever looks into one sees what is happening far away. The stones are not evil. But one of them has fallen into Sauron’s hands, and since then whoever looks into another is seen himself. Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, believes he has the situation in view. He sees only what Sauron lets him see, and it destroys him.

In 2003 Peter Thiel, Alex Karp and a few others founded a company that analyses data for intelligence services, the military and the police. They called it Palantir. One may assume they knew the story.

II. The Thinker: Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1967 and grew up in the United States. At Stanford he studied under René Girard, the theorist of the scapegoat and of mimetic desire, and by his own account Girard shaped him like no one else. PayPal made Thiel rich, an early stake in Facebook made him very rich. He is chairman of Palantir’s board.

Thiel is a thinker with a chequebook, and his sentences are plainer than those of most politicians. In 2009 he wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” In 2014 he headed an essay in the Wall Street Journal “Competition Is for Losers” and praised monopoly as the goal of every entrepreneur.

In 2007 the online magazine Gawker had made public, under the headline “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people”, that Thiel is homosexual. Nine years later the wrestler Hulk Hogan sued Gawker over the publication of a sex tape and was awarded 140 million dollars. Only then did it become known that Thiel had secretly financed the lawsuit, with around ten million dollars, as he himself confirmed. He called it philanthropic. Gawker went bankrupt in June 2016.

In 2022 Thiel provided around fifteen million dollars to get his former employee J.D. Vance into the Senate. Vance is now Vice President of the United States.

Ilyin, the dead man from Zollikon, supplied a language that others could appropriate. Thiel supplies the language, the money and the people all at once.

III. The Antichrist as an Argument

Since autumn 2025 Thiel has been lecturing on the Antichrist, first in San Francisco and in March 2026 in Rome as well. His thesis: the Antichrist will not come as a monster but as a false saviour who promises peace and security and in return sets up a world government that stifles progress. As his harbingers Thiel names the regulation of technology, international institutions, those who warn of the risks of artificial intelligence, and Greta Thunberg.

The Italian bishops’ newspaper Avvenire wrote that Thiel’s vision amounts to replacing democracy and the rule of law with an elite super-plutocracy.

In the essay “The Spirit-Seer and the Final Authority” we described how a vision becomes a usurpation of power: when it declares itself the final authority and escapes every test. Thiel goes one step further. He declares the test itself the work of the devil. Whoever regulates, whoever warns, whoever demands democratic control over technology serves the Antichrist. Against this argument there is no objection left, because every objection confirms it.

IV. The Supplier: Alex Karp

Alex Karp is Thiel’s counterpart, and precisely for that reason the two have been friends since their studies at Stanford. Karp calls himself a man of the left, comes from a Jewish and African-American family in Philadelphia and earned his doctorate in Frankfurt am Main in 2002, in the milieu of Critical Theory. He speaks fluent German. He has run Palantir from the beginning.

Karp does not write theology but programmes for the state. In his 2025 book The Technological Republic he demands that Silicon Valley put itself back in the service of national defence instead of building apps for consumers. He calls for AI weapons, hard power through software and universal conscription. In March 2026 he said in a television interview that his technology weakens the economic power of humanities-educated voters who vote largely Democratic, and strengthens that of vocationally trained workers. He did not say it as a warning.

V. Palantir in Germany

Palantir is not an American affair. In Hesse the police have been working with the software since 2017, under the name “Hessendata”, according to the taz with around fifteen thousand queries a year. Bavaria has used it since 2024 under the name “VeRA”, North Rhine-Westphalia daily, and Baden-Württemberg bought it in 2025.

In February 2023 the Federal Constitutional Court declared the legal basis of this automated data analysis in Hesse and Hamburg partly unconstitutional. The states have amended their laws. At federal level the picture is mixed: the Minister of Justice rejects Palantir for federal agencies, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution has chosen a French alternative, and the Minister of the Interior keeps the question open.

VI. The Red Carpet

On 24 September 2026 the Axel Springer publishing house presented Peter Thiel with the Axel Springer Award in Berlin. Before him it had gone to Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Tim Berners-Lee. Mathias Döpfner gave the laudation and praised Thiel’s long-term thinking and his courage to argue against the consensus. The publisher expressly honoured the founding of Palantir as important for “democratic resilience”.

Thiel responded by calling parts of the media a “left-wing hate factory” and praising Döpfner for his courage. More than two hundred people protested outside the building, and the German Journalists’ Association had criticised the award beforehand.

A publisher may honour whomever it likes. Something else is remarkable. A media company honours a man who drove a media company into bankruptcy with a secretly financed lawsuit. And it honours a piece of software for its contribution to democracy whose use the Federal Constitutional Court has declared partly unconstitutional. Whoever honours in this way does not merely provide a platform. He gives the stone a certificate before anyone has checked who sits at the other end.

VII. What Speaks for the Two

A fair text must make the other side strong, and it has arguments.

Thiel’s diagnosis of stagnation must be taken seriously. The sentence from the manifesto of his venture fund, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters”, describes something true: for decades the West has spent more on administration, safeguards and entertainment than on real innovation. As an inventor I have seen how institutions stifle the new, and on this finding I agree with Thiel. The diagnosis can be right even if the therapy is dangerous.

Karp stands clearly against Putin and against China, and Palantir has supported Ukraine. Whoever says that democracies must be able to defend themselves technologically says nothing anti-democratic.

And the police point to cases solved with the software. Palantir stresses that the software collects no data itself. It only analyses what the state already holds.

VIII. Where the Danger Lies

The danger does not lie in individual sentences or in evil intentions. It lies in two things coming together.

The first is an ideology that regards democratic control as an obstacle, in Thiel’s case even as diabolical. The second is a technology that becomes indispensable to states. The ideology alone would be talk, and the technology alone would be a tool. Together they amount to a power that never has to stand for election.

Franz Oppenheimer described the state as the organisation of the political means, the appropriation of other people’s labour without anything in return. Here a new form of it is emerging. It is no longer the conqueror who takes tribute but the supplier of the infrastructure. Whoever runs the software with which a police force thinks has a seat at the table, even if he was never elected. And the longer the agencies work with it, the harder it is to get out. Baden-Württemberg bought the software in 2025 and is already planning to leave it again by 2030.

That is the palantír problem: the state believes it sees further with the stone. It forgets that at the other end sits someone who has plans of his own and states them openly.

IX. How This Essay Could Be Refuted

The first objection: Thiel is a provocateur, and provocateurs say many things they do not carry out. The Antichrist lectures are a billionaire’s private theology, not a political programme. That may be. But a provocateur who has financed a vice president and chairs the board of a state supplier is more than a provocateur.

The second objection: every state buys software, including from foreign companies, and nobody asks Microsoft about its founder’s world view. That is true, and dependence on Microsoft is a problem of its own. The difference is that Palantir does not write letters or calculate spreadsheets but helps police and intelligence services decide whom to look at.

The essay would be refuted if it could be shown that the agencies using Palantir can switch at any time and without great effort, and that Thiel’s political money has no influence on the decisions of those he has backed.

X. The Question

Are Peter Thiel and Alex Karp dangerous? Individually perhaps less than their critics say. Together more than their admirers believe.

The question is not whether they are evil, but who sits at the other end of the stone when a state looks into it.