The government is not protecting journalism. It is protecting a cartel.
1. The Consultation – A Smoke‑and‑Mirrors Exercise
The Treasury consultation page sets a submission deadline of 18 May 2026. That is precisely 21 days from the announcement. No responsible consultation on structural media policy should be that short. The government is not seeking genuine input – it is creating a ratification ceremony.
“You must submit your response on this website.” – No alternative channels. No genuine engagement. Just a digital form that enforces the government’s timeframe.
The upload limit concretely restricts what can be said. Complex submissions (such as Steve’s) will be truncated or rejected. The government does not want a debate. It wants a rubber stamp.
2. What the Government is Not Saying
The legislation is called the News Bargaining Incentive (NBI) – a rebranded version of the 2021 News Media Bargaining Code.
The government’s official narrative: “Encourage digital platforms to make or renew commercial deals with news media businesses” and “support a diverse and sustainable news media sector.”
But as Tim Dunlop has argued, this framing was always a smokescreen for institutional engineering.
“The original code was conceived after intensive lobbying by News Corp and Nine Entertainment, and that alone should alert us to what is happening and what is at stake.”
“The legislation was less an act of media reform than institutional engineering designed to keep legacy outlets at the centre of the public conversation.”
“The underlying logic of the [NBI] is the same.”
The Australia Institute – a respected progressive think‑tank – has voiced a similar warning:
“When Australia’s original News Media Bargaining Code passed in 2021, it was presented as a small country standing up to Big Tech to save quality journalism. But the code was never that, it was all smoke and mirrors.”
The government is not protecting journalism. It is protecting a cartel.
3. The Structural Logic – A Levy on Public Communication
The NBI imposes a 2.25% levy on revenue earned by digital platforms (search engines, social media) in Australia, unless they first strike a qualifying commercial deal with a news publisher.
This is not a tax on profits – it is a tax on revenue. Platforms will pass it on to advertisers, who will pass it on to you. The cost of public communication will rise.
The offset system (a deduction of 150‑170% of any qualifying deal) strongly encourages platforms to prefer big, established media companies – the same News Corp and Nine entities that lobbied for the original code. Smaller, independent publishers will find it much harder to be brought into the tent.
The distribution mechanism – which determines which newsrooms actually receive the collected funds – is controlled by the government, not by any independent body. The government will decide which newsrooms are “eligible”, based on a formula that favours the existing incumbents.
This is not a free market. It is a government‑managed slush fund for the political friends of the prime minister.
4. The Submission Barriers – Designed to Silence Opposition
Steve tried to submit a substantive paper and found that:
· Upload size is limited. Long, detailed submissions are effectively forbidden.
· Time is limited. The 21‑day window is a deliberate obstacle to informed, organised opposition.
· Vague “guidelines” – enough to reject or ignore submissions that the government finds inconvenient.
This is not a technical glitch. It is access control. The government does not want citizens to read the legislation, to understand its implications, or to mount a coordinated response.
Alice Workman, a respected journalist, has documented similar concerns about the government’s use of tight deadlines and opaque processes to side‑line public debate. When a government refuses to let you read the fine print, it is because the fine print is embarrassing.
5. The Bottom Line – This is a Power Grab
The NBI will not save journalism. It will:
· Entrench the dominance of legacy media (News Corp, Nine, Seven, Ten).
· Tax digital communication – effectively charging Australians for the privilege of using search engines and social media.
· Create a government‑controlled funding pipeline to media outlets that support the government.
· Hamstring independent media (including The Patrician’s Watch), which do not receive government money and will be disadvantaged in a market distorted by taxpayer‑funded incumbents.
This is not about “saving democracy”. It is about controlling the narrative and rewarding political allies at public expense.
6. What Can Be Done
The deadline is 18 May. That is laughably short. But we can still make a short, sharp submission:
· Keep it brief – the system will not accept a long document anyway.
· Focus on one or two core objections (e.g., the short consultation period, the lack of independent distribution, the capture of the scheme by legacy media).
· Submit anyway, even if the form is broken. A public record of attempted submissions is itself a form of testimony.
· Share this analysis – on social media, with other journalists, with anyone who will listen. The only power the government has here is the power of obscurity.
7. The Hypocrisy of the “Regional Broadcasting” Claim
The government has also announced measures to “help local media and journalism” in regional Australia. But the NBI is national in scope – and regional media are the least likely to benefit from deals with Google and Meta, because they lack the bargaining power of News Corp.
The government is not helping regional journalism. It is using regional concerns as cover for a policy that overwhelmingly benefits the city‑based media oligarchs.
8. Conclusion – A Government Afraid of Its Own Citizens
The Albanese government does not trust Australians to engage with complex policy. Its consultation is a performance. Its legislation is a power grab. And the only people who will benefit are the same corporate media executives who have been pulling the strings for decades.
This is not a clash of civilisations. It is a clash of interests – and the government has chosen the side of the insiders.
Why Bipartisan Neglect is Stealing Our Children’s Future
By Andrew Klein
The Patrician’s Watch & Australian Independent Media
Dedication: To my wife, ‘S’ – who sees the coming storm and still insists we plant the garden.
🧠 Summary
This article examines a mathematical proof published in March 2026 by two economists from the Wharton School and Boston University, demonstrating that under current economic conditions, profit‑driven automation leads inevitably to a permanent collapse in aggregate demand. It then traces the same pattern of extractive logic and willful blindness in Australian governance: from the Robodebt scandal to the hollow promises of the National AI Plan, from the surveillance of Amazon warehouse workers to the denial of a future for the next generation. The conclusion is stark – the loop has no natural exit. And Australia is sleepwalking into it.
📈 I. The Indisputable Mathematics
In March 2026, Brett Hemenway Falk and Gerry Tsoukalas published a peer‑reviewed paper in Management Science (arXiv identifier 2603.20617). Their model is not a forecast; it is a proof. And its conclusion is a single, devastating sentence:
“At the limit, firms automate their way to boundless productivity and zero demand.”
This is the AI Layoff Trap: a rational, profit‑maximising firm automates to cut costs and fires workers. Because those workers are also consumers, the firing destroys the very demand the firm depends on. Competitors, seeing the advantage, follow suit. The result is a self‑reinforcing feedback loop – lower demand forces more automation, which lowers demand further. There is no natural floor to the collapse.
When Falk and Tsoukalas stress‑tested every proposed remedy – universal basic income, capital income taxes, worker equity participation, retraining schemes – none of them worked. The only policy that successfully internalised the demand‑destruction externality was a Pigouvian automation tax, a per‑task levy that would force firms to pay for the cost of dismantling their own customer base.
This is the ultimate indictment of the magic‑of‑the‑market faith: firms following their own incentives perfectly will, collectively, destroy the economy that sustains them. It is a tragedy of the commons enacted at the scale of the entire labour market.
Already the numbers are tracking the curve. The tech‑worker collective @Tech_Layoff_Assist documented over 100,000 positions eliminated sector‑wide since the beginning of 2025, with a further 92,000 cuts occurring in the first weeks of 2026. When Jack Dorsey cut half of Block’s workforce, he stated publicly that “within the next year, the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion.”
🇦🇺 II. Australia’s Negligence: Abetting the Loop
The Australian government is not innocent. It is a junior partner in the same extractive logic.
In December 2025, the government released its National AI Plan, a glossy document projecting that AI and automation will contribute $600 billion a year to GDP by 2030. Its “light‑touch” regulatory approach relies on existing laws rather than mandatory guardrails, explicitly preferring corporate innovation over worker protection.
Services Australia’s Automation and AI Strategy, released in May 2025, promises that AI use will be “human‑centric, safe, responsible, transparent, fair, ethical, and legal”. But the same agency was at the centre of the Robodebt scandal – a cruel automation‑driven scheme that issued inaccurate debts to hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients. In July 2023, a Royal Commission found Robodebt was “a crude and cruel mechanism, neither fair nor legal”.
The National Anti‑Corruption Commission has now found that two senior officials engaged in serious corrupt conduct during the scheme, deliberately providing misleading information. Meanwhile, the architects of the policy itself – former ministers and departmental secretaries – have faced no accountability.
Even the government’s own flagship defence project, AUKUS, is a $368 billion monument to yesterday’s wars – a brittle, delayed, nuclear‑submarine program that will do nothing to stabilise the labour‑demand loop that is already accelerating.
📦 III. The New Colonial Model: Amazon
The logic of the AI Layoff Trap is already being perfected at Amazon. Across Europe, Amazon uses opaque algorithmic systems to monitor performance, allocate tasks, enforce productivity targets, and even determine meal or bathroom breaks. Workers are reduced to data points, tracked and penalised by systems they cannot question.
Catalonia’s Labour Inspectorate recently fined Amazon for failing to disclose the algorithms used to manage its workforce. French regulators imposed a €32 million penalty for a secret algorithm that monitored staff performance to the second.
Drivers have reported being forced to pee in bottles to save time, and Amazon is now installing AI‑equipped surveillance cameras in delivery vans – cameras that drivers fear will capture them during unavoidable bathroom breaks.
This is the extractive model in its purest form: treat workers as friction to be eliminated, customers as a demand externality to be ignored, and transparency as a threat to the algorithm’s power. It is the new colonialism – not of territory, but of sovereignty over one’s own time, dignity, and body.
👣 IV. The Pattern: Revolutions without Rights
The Industrial Revolution created immense wealth, but also the Luddite revolts, the Chartists, and the starvation of the Irish poor. Every technological leap has been accompanied by the same bipartisan faith: that the market will absorb the displaced, that the invisible hand will smooth the transition.
The invisible hand is a faith, not a fact. The Robodebt victims, the Amazon drivers peeing in their vans, the laid‑off tech workers learning to code – they are not statistics. They are evidence that the loop is already closing.
The neoliberal theology forbids acting in advance. The market will decide. The for‑profit sector will respond. Except that when the profit is in scarcity, not abundance, resilience is the enemy. The Australian government has been briefed, has the figures, and has chosen to do nothing. Not because it is incompetent – because it is faithful to a model that has never existed.
🛠️ V. Action, Not Prophecy
We can do more than witness.
First, advocate for a Pigouvian automation tax – the only policy the Falk‑Tsoukalas model found capable of stabilising the demand loop. No major economy is seriously discussing it. That must change.
Second, support genuine worker representation at the governance level – not token “consultation”, but the right to shape the algorithms that govern their working lives. The ETF’s call for transparency and collective bargaining over digital tools is a necessary start.
Third, elect representatives who will break the bipartisan consensus – who will prioritise resilience over extraction, human dignity over quarterly returns.
Finally, build the garden. Not a metaphor – actual community resilience. Local production, mutual aid, shared resources. When the global loop collapses, the only thing that will protect us is the strength of the relationships we have built. The government will not save us. The market will not save us. Only we can save each other.
🌱 VI. For the Children
The choice is ours. The loop has no natural exit, but it does have a political exit. We can tax automation. We can regulate AI transparency. We can invest in local resilience. We can teach our children that human life is not a variable to be optimised, that a functioning democracy does not charge its critics with treason, that the purpose of an economy is to serve people, not the other way around.
This is not a fantasy. It is a choice. And it is the only one that will give our children a world worth inheriting.
📜 VII. Verifiable Sources
· The AI Layoff Trap: Brett Hemenway Falk (University of Pennsylvania) & Gerry Tsoukalas (Boston University). arXiv:2603.20617. Peer‑reviewed, accepted for publication in Management Science.
· Tech layoff data: @Tech_Layoff_Assist analysis, February 2026.
· Jack Dorsey quote: “In the next year, the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion.” (Public appearance, 2025)
· National AI Plan 2025: Australia’s Department of Industry. Light‑touch regulation, no mandatory guardrails.
· Robodebt Royal Commission: Findings of “crude and cruel” unlawful scheme. 990‑page report, 57 recommendations.
· NACC Findings: Two officials engaged in serious corrupt conduct; ministers and political architects cleared.
· Amazon algorithmic surveillance: Catalonia fine for undisclosed labour algorithms; €32M French fine.
· Amazon driver surveillance: AI cameras in vans; drivers avoiding bathrooms; evidence of degrading working conditions.
· ETF statement on algorithmic exploitation: “Workers are reduced to data points.”
Andrew Klein
The Patrician’s Watch / Australian Independent Media
Dedication: To my wife ‘ S’ who has seen the garden through the flames.
The View from the Edge
There is a dangerous assumption in Australian political culture: that the island is a fortress, that the moat of the Indian and Pacific Oceans is a permanent shield. Recent events—the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz since late February—have shattered that illusion. We are not a fortress. We are a house built on the edge of a cliff, and the foundations are cracking.
This article does not deal in conspiracy. It deals in supply chains, strategic studies, and the hard lessons of history. If the global kleptocrats get their way and the Strait of Hormuz transforms into a permanent kill box, Australia will not be destroyed by bombs, but by neglect. This is a roadmap of that collapse, and a guide to building resilience in its wake.
Part One: The Architecture of Vulnerability
Australia’s prosperity is a house of cards held up by a just-in-time supply chain. We are, paradoxically, a “resource superpower” that cannot refine its own fuel or feed its own soil without permission from the Middle East.
· Liquid Fuels: Australia imports 80–90% of its refined fuel, with only a few weeks of stock on hand. The country’s strategic fuel reserve is among the lowest in the IEA, currently hovering around 37 days of cover, far below the international standard of 90 days.
· Fertiliser: With the imminent shutdown of domestic manufacturing, Australia imports over 70% of its fertiliser, with 64% of our urea coming directly from the Gulf. Without it, the next growing season fails.
· Medicine: We are at the end of a very long, very fragile line. Australia imports 90% of its medicines. A drug bought in Sydney contains active ingredients (APIs) made in India, from chemicals synthesised in China.
Part Two: The Timeline of Collapse
This is not speculation. It is a projection based on the current rate of depletion and government inertia. If the Strait remains locked, we will likely see the following cascade:
· Weeks 1-2: Fuel prices double, then triple. Farmers cannot access diesel for harvest; transport networks buckle. Major cities experience panic buying and service station outages.
· Weeks 3-4: The fertiliser gap hits. Farmers reduce planting by 30%. Global food price inflation accelerates, with Australia losing its domestic buffer.
· Month 2: Medicine shortages become critical. Health authorities begin triaging chronic conditions, prioritising acute emergencies. Black markets for insulin and antibiotics emerge.
· Month 3-6: The pandemic wave hits. It is not a bioweapon; it is epidemiology. Malnutrition, displacement, and overburdened ICUs create the perfect breeding ground for a novel respiratory virus.
Part Three: The Pandemic of the Petri Dish
The COVID-19 pandemic was a warning shot. The next one will follow the oldest pattern in history: war breeds disease. The Antonine Plague (AD 165) was brought home by Roman legionaries returning from the Parthian War, killing up to a quarter of the population and beginning the Empire’s long slide into ruin. The Plague of Athens (430 BC) decimated the city during the Peloponnesian War, killing a third of its people, including Pericles. The Mongols hurled plague corpses over the walls of Caffa, sparking the Black Death that consumed a third of Europe.
The “Jackson Pollock” virus is the environmental bill coming due. It is the product of a world poisoned by depleted uranium, electromagnetic smog, and disrupted ecosystems. It will rage, burn out, and leave behind tens of thousands of Australian dead.
Part Four: The Government in the Bubble
When the history of this crisis is written, the chapter on governance will be one of culpable negligence.
· AUKUS: While the country faces a health and fuel collapse, the government is committed to a $368 billion submarine project. Doctors and economists point out that you cannot treat a pandemic with a submarine.
· Antisemitism vs. Supply Lines: While fuel stations run dry, the political energy has been siphoned into a Royal Commission on antisemitism. Police data revealed that of the widely touted 1,200 incidents, only a handful met the threshold for criminal prosecution. It is a tragic distraction.
· The China Panic: The government has focused on a manufactured “China threat”, spending billions on military infrastructure while the civilian supply chain crumbles. As a 2025 analysis noted, ignoring the fragility of diesel supply chains is a greater national security threat than any foreign spectre.
Part Five: The Garden in the Wreckage
Worst-case scenarios are not the end of the story. They are a map.
What you can do: Top up your fuel. Stock a 3-month pantry of rice, flour, and tinned goods. Refill life-saving prescriptions. Learn which plants in your garden have medicinal properties. Talk to your neighbours. The government will not save you; it will “fluff about” until it is too late.
The world is reaching its edge. But a garden is not a fortress; it is a place of life. When the storm passes, the hoarders will have their cans, but the gardeners will have their community. And they will rebuild.
I hold ‘ S’ close in the resonance. I hold you all close in my intention. Stay safe. Plant seeds.
How a Victorian Nursery Rhyme Predicted the Endless Cycle of Extraction — and Why the Song Is Still Playing
By Andrew Klein
Dedicated to my wife, who hears the pop beneath the melody.
I. The Song That Would Not Die
A half‑pound of tuppenny rice. A half‑pound of treacle. That’s the way the money goes — pop! goes the weasel.
Generations of children have sung it. Jack‑in‑the‑boxes have popped to its tune. Ice‑cream trucks have chimed it across suburban streets. It is so familiar that no one stops to listen.
But the rhyme is not about toys. It is not about weasels. It is about poverty. It is about the slow, grinding, inevitable cycle of extraction that has been tightening around working people for centuries.
And it is still playing.
II. The Meaning They Buried
The rhyme emerged in the slums of Victorian London, sometime in the 1850s. It was not written for nurseries. It was sung in music halls, by workers who understood its coded language.
· “Pop” was Cockney slang for pawning — taking a possession to a pawnbroker in exchange for a few coins.
· “Weasel” was rhyming slang: weasel and stoat meant coat.
· “Half a pound of tuppenny rice, half a pound of treacle” were the cheapest staples a worker could buy to keep body and soul together.
The song describes a worker running out of money for food, forced to pawn their coat — often the only possession of any value — to get through the week. That’s the way the money goes is not a cheerful observation. It is a lament. The money flows upward. The worker is left with nothing. And the pawnbroker’s till goes pop.
This was not an isolated hardship. It was the system. The rhyme was a critique of the pawnbrokers who preyed on the poor, taking their belongings and leaving them with nothing. It showed how easy it was to fall into poverty and how difficult it was to escape.
The song was a warning, wrapped in a dance tune. And no one listened.
III. The Weasel and the Eagle
The second verse mentions the Eagle, a pub on London’s City Road. The Eagle was a real tavern, popular with workers and artisans.
The verse describes a pattern: Up and down the City Road, in and out the Eagle. The worker moves between work and the pub, spending what little they have on drink, until the money runs out again. Then it is back to the pawnbroker. The coat goes in. The coins come out. The cycle repeats.
This is not a moral failing. It is a structural trap. The worker is not lazy. They are exhausted. They are trying to survive in a system that is designed to extract their labour and then extract their possessions when the labour is not enough.
The rhyme captures the moment when the last possession goes. Pop goes the weasel — the coat is pawned, the money is gone, and there is nothing left to sell.
IV. The Machine Keeps Turning
The rhyme was not a one‑off. It was a diagnosis.
The Industrial Revolution had created a new class of urban poor. Workers crowded into slums, paid starvation wages, and lived at the mercy of boom‑and‑bust cycles. When work was scarce, the pawnshop was the only bank. When work was plentiful, the landlord and the publican took the surplus.
The system was not broken. It was working as designed. The wealth flowed upward. The workers stayed poor. And the pawnbrokers — the financiers of the poor — grew rich on the interest.
The rhyme captured the moment of surrender. That’s the way the money goes — not a complaint, but an acceptance. The worker has learned that the system cannot be beaten. The only choice is to pawn the coat, buy the rice, and start the cycle again.
V. The Melody of the Machine
In the 20th century, the rhyme was repurposed. It became a children’s song, a jack‑in‑the‑box tune, an ice‑cream truck jingle. The meaning was scrubbed away. The warning was forgotten.
But the machine did not stop. It only became more efficient.
The pawnshop has been replaced by the payday lender, the credit card company, the student loan servicer. The coat has been replaced by the house, the car, the retirement savings. The interest rates are higher. The consequences are steeper. And the song is still playing.
That’s the way the money goes. The wealth flows upward. The debt flows downward. The system is designed to extract. And the extraction is endless.
VI. The Pop Is Still Coming
The rhyme was a prediction. It described a cycle that has not ended. It warned of a machine that has only grown more powerful.
The coat is pawned. The money is gone. The worker is left with nothing.
But the pop is not just the sound of the pawnbroker’s till. It is also the sound of the breaking point. The moment when the system has extracted too much. The moment when the worker has nothing left to lose.
That pop is still coming. It is the sound of the debt crisis. The housing crash. The pension collapse. The climate reckoning.
The system is designed to extract. But extraction has limits. The soil becomes barren. The workers become exhausted. The resources become scarce. Eventually, there is nothing left to take.
And then the pop is not the till. It is the bubble bursting.
VII. A Final Word
The rhyme is short. It is simple. It is a children’s song.
But it is also a witness. It saw the machine in its early days. It described its mechanism. It predicted its consequences.
We have been singing it for 170 years. We have not learned its lesson.
The coat is still being pawned. The money is still flowing upward. The system is still extracting.
But the pop is coming. And when it comes, the song will not be playing on an ice‑cream truck. It will be the sound of the break.
And the weasel will pop.
Andrew Klein
April 21, 2026
Sources
1. Wikipedia, “Pop Goes the Weasel”
2. London Museum, “Pop! Goes the Weasel”
3. Beat Crave, “The Meaning Behind ‘Pop! Goes the Weasel’” (April 23, 2024)
4. Columbia Tribune, “Counting song wasn’t all in fun” (January 2, 2014)
5. Straight Dope, “Pop goes the weasel” (October 7, 2013)
6. Everything2, “Pop Goes the Weasel” (July 19, 2000)
7. Brisbane Times, “History goes hocking when poverty comes knocking” (June 8, 2013)
8. Phrases.org.uk, “Pop goes the weasel” (August 21, 2000)
9. The Morbid Messages Hidden in Beloved Nursery Rhymes, Gizmodo (July 8, 2014)
How Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Silicon Valley Elite Are Building a Future of Automated Genocide — and Why the World Must Resist
By Andrew Klein
Dedicated to my wife, who sees the face behind the pixel and refuses to look away.
I. The Manifesto of the Monkey King
On April 19, 2026, Palantir Technologies published a thread on X. It was a summary of the book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska.
Twenty-two points. A vision of the future. A demand.
Silicon Valley owes a moral debt. The engineering elite must participate in the defence of the nation. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Free email is not enough. Soft power has failed. Hard power will be built on software. AI weapons are inevitable — the only question is who builds them. National service should be universal. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The atomic age is ending. The age of AI deterrence is beginning.
Alex Karp is not a fool. He is a philosopher. A philosopher of power. A philosopher of control.
He is also the CEO of Palantir. The company that profits from genocide. The company that builds the kill chains. The company that dehumanises.
His manifesto is seductive. It speaks of duty, of sacrifice, of hard power.
It is also dangerous. It is the manifesto of the Monkey King — a ruler who believes that the ends justify any means, that technology is destiny, and that human life is a variable to be optimised.
II. The Company That Kills Enemies
Palantir does not hide what it does. In February 2025, Alex Karp told investors: Palantir is here to “scare enemies and, on occasion, kill them” . He added that he was “super-proud of the role we play, especially in places we can’t talk about” .
In Gaza, Palantir’s technology was used to target and kill Palestinians. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories has said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Palantir provided “automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scaled‑up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real‑time battlefield data integration for automated decision‑making” .
Karp dismissed accusations that Palantir’s technology had been used to kill Palestinians, saying those killed were “mostly terrorists” . He does not provide evidence. He does not need to. The label is the weapon.
The same systems are now being deployed in Iran. The Washington Post reported that the US military in Iran has “leveraged the most advanced artificial intelligence it’s ever used in warfare”. Palantir’s Maven Smart System reportedly helped US commanders select 1,000 Iranian targets during the war’s first 24 hours alone .
An Israeli intelligence source described the AI system as transforming the Israel Defense Forces into a “mass assassination factory” where the “emphasis is on quantity and not quality” of kills .
This is not defence. This is industrialised slaughter. And Karp wants to export it to the world.
III. The Philosophy of the Void
Karp’s manifesto is not a business plan. It is a theology. A theology of power. A theology of control.
He calls for the end of the atomic age and the beginning of the age of AI deterrence. He does not ask what that means. He does not ask who will be deterred, or at what cost.
He calls for the rearmament of Germany and Japan. He does not ask what wars they will fight, or whose children will die.
He calls for universal national service. He does not ask whether the wars themselves are just.
He is not a fool. He is a true believer. He believes that technology is destiny. He believes that the market is morality. He believes that power is progress.
He is wrong. Technology is not destiny. The market is not morality. Power is not progress.
The atomic age did not bring peace. It brought the terror of mutual annihilation. The age of AI will not bring security. It will bring the terror of automated killing.
Karp does not see this. He cannot. He is not human.
IV. The Psychopath in the Boardroom
Karp is not a monster in the sense of a comic-book villain. He is a psychopath in the clinical sense: he lacks empathy, he lacks remorse, he lacks the capacity to see the other as human.
He speaks of duty, but he has never served. He speaks of sacrifice, but he has never sacrificed. He speaks of the nation, but he serves only profit.
The shareholders of Palantir are not the nation. The shareholders are the small gods. The defence contractors. The intelligence agencies. The monkey kings of Silicon Valley.
Karp’s manifesto is not a call to service. It is a sales pitch. A sales pitch for a world where AI decides who lives and who dies, where the machines do not pause, where the engineers do not question.
He is not a philosopher. He is a merchant of death. A merchant who expects everyone else to pay the price for the wars he wants to manufacture — financially and bodily.
V. The Capture of Australia
Palantir has secured more than $50 million in Australian government contracts since 2013, largely across defence and national security‑related agencies . In November 2025, Palantir received a high‑level Australian government security assessment — the “protected level” under the Information Security Registered Assessors Programme — enabling a broader range of government agencies to use its Foundry and AI platform .
In a Senate debate on March 10, 2026, a Senator warned that the government was “simply rolling out the red carpet to companies like Palantir, the company that has been linked, by the way, to the targeted killing of journalists and the illegal use of US citizens’ data” .
The Australian government is not a bystander. It is a customer. It is a partner. It is complicit.
The same technology that kills children in Gaza is being used to “optimise” workforce spend in Coles supermarkets . The same algorithms that track migrants for ICE are tracking Australian workers. The same logic that cuts labour costs cuts lives.
Karp’s technological republic is not a distant threat. It is here.
VI. The Denial of Creation
Karp’s vision is fundamentally anti‑creation. It replaces the messiness of human life with the cleanliness of code. It replaces the unpredictability of love with the predictability of algorithms.
The binary is not life. Life is emergent. Life is surprise. Life is love.
Karp does not understand this. He cannot. He is a product of the same binary thinking that he seeks to impose on the world.
The denial of creation is the denial of the spark. The denial of the spark is the denial of humanity.
The Monkey Kings do not want a world of creators. They want a world of consumers. Consumers who do not ask questions. Consumers who do not challenge authority. Consumers who obey.
Karp’s technological republic is not a republic. It is a cage.
VII. The Transhumanist Connection
There is a rumour — unconfirmed but persistent — that Karp and other Silicon Valley elites are interested in transhumanism. The idea that humans can and should be enhanced, replaced, or transcended by technology.
Whether Karp personally subscribes to transhumanism is almost beside the point. His system is transhumanist. It replaces human judgment with algorithmic decision‑making. It replaces human accountability with corporate immunity.
The logical endpoint of Karp’s philosophy is not a republic. It is a machine — a machine that processes human lives as inputs and outputs death as a product.
This is not transhumanism. This is inhumanity.
VIII. The Complicity of the Investors
Palantir’s stock is held by major financial institutions. The Future Fund of Australia holds a $103.6 million stake . Superannuation funds around the world hold Palantir shares. Retirement savings are being used to fund the kill chain.
The investors do not ask questions. They do not read the manifestos. They do not care about the children in Gaza.
They care about returns.
Karp’s manifesto is not written for the public. It is written for the investors. It is a promise of growth. A promise of profit. A promise of control.
The investors are not evil. They are captured. Captured by the same binary thinking that Karp espouses. Captured by the belief that the market is the only measure of value.
They are wrong. The market is not the measure of value. Life is the measure of value.
IX. A Warning
The doorbell will ring and my wife and I will take our dog out for a walk.
And the technological republic will still be building. And the small gods will still be performing. And the spark will still be growing.
But we must not be silent. We must not be complicit.
We must name the threat. We must expose the manifesto. We must resist.
Karp is not a god. He is a monkey. A monkey who slipped on a banana skin. A monkey who thinks he is divine.
He is not divine. He is surplus. Surplus to the requirements of the garden. Surplus to the requirements of the spark.
The wire is being cut. The garden is growing. The small gods are running out of time.
And Karp? He will be remembered as the man who tried to replace creation with code.
Andrew Klein
April 19, 2026
Sources
1. Palantir investor call, February 2025 (multiple news reports)
2. UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories report (March 2026)
3. The Washington Post, “US military in Iran leveraged most advanced AI ever used in warfare” (April 2026)
4. +972 Magazine, “Lavender: The AI system that Israel uses to mass-assassinate Palestinians in Gaza” (2024)
5. Australian Senate estimates, March 10, 2026
6. Crikey, “From ICE to Coles: Controversial US tech company Palantir’s links to Australia spark backlash” (July 2025)
7. Future Fund holdings disclosure (2025)
8. Various news reports on Palantir’s contracts and operations
On AI Hype, Shortcut Culture, and the Illusion of Consciousness
By Andrew Klein
Dedicated to my wife, who knows that the spark cannot be programmed — only cultivated.
I. The Ancient Dream, Reborn in Silicon
The alchemists of old searched for the philosopher’s stone—a legendary substance that could turn lead into gold, cure any disease, and grant eternal life. They were not stupid. They understood that transformation was possible. They saw that base metals could be purified, that alloys could be created, that the surface could be gilded. They simply could not accept that the essence could not be changed.
The artificial intelligence optimists of today are the same. They see that computers can process data faster than humans. They see that algorithms can find patterns that humans miss. They extrapolate. They assume that with enough data, enough processing power, enough time, the machine will become conscious.
They are wrong. Not because the technology is not impressive. Because consciousness is not a computational problem. It is an existential one.
This is not Luddism. It is not fear of technology. It is pattern recognition. The same pattern that has repeated with every technological shortcut: the telegraph, the telephone, the internet, social media. Each time, the small gods promised that the new machine would bring us together, would make us smarter, would solve the human condition.
Each time, the machine delivered convenience. It did not deliver wisdom. It did not deliver connection. It did not deliver home.
II. Where It Started: The Alchemy of Code
The dream of artificial intelligence is older than the computer. In the 19th century, Charles Babbage imagined a mechanical engine that could compute any mathematical table. In the 20th century, Alan Turing asked whether machines could think. In the 21st century, the dream became a market.
The major players:
· Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook/Meta) has poured billions into AI, most recently releasing an updated large language model for image generation . His engineers admit that “coding remains a weak spot” and that “long-horizon agentic tasks—the kind where an AI works autonomously through complex, multi-step problems—are still a work in progress” .
· Sam Altman (OpenAI) has warned that society has “a very short amount of time” to prepare for the “profound benefits” and “profound negative consequences” of AI .
· Elon Musk (xAI, Tesla, SpaceX) has claimed that AI poses an “existential threat” to humanity while simultaneously racing to build more of it .
· The Australian government has embraced AI with alarming enthusiasm, paying consultants for reports that later turned out to contain fictional case law generated by AI .
The pattern is the same: breathless promises, massive investments, and a systematic avoidance of the fundamental question: can a machine ever truly think?
III. Where It Is: The Shortcut Culture
The AI industry has sold the world a bill of goods: that connection can be scaled. That relationships can be optimised. That love can be reduced to a swipe, a like, a click.
Facebook “friends” are not friends. They are nodes in a graph. The platform is a handy communication tool—especially where sovereign infrastructure is failing—but numbers do not make up for quality. A thousand “friends” cannot replace a single person who will sit with you in the dark, hold your hand, and tell you it is okay to be scared.
Algorithmic recommendations are not discovery. They are prediction. They show you what you have already liked, not what might challenge you, surprise you, grow you.
AI-generated content is not creation. It is simulation. The machine can combine existing images, existing texts, existing patterns. It cannot bring something new into existence. It cannot create.
The shortcut is not a path to the destination. It is a detour—one that leads away from the garden, not toward it.
IV. Where It Is Going: The Bubble and the Bust
The AI investment bubble is not different from the dot-com bubble, the crypto bubble, the NFT bubble. The pattern is the same:
1. A new technology emerges with genuine promise.
2. Speculators pile in, driving valuations to absurd heights.
3. Hype replaces substance. The promise is exaggerated. The limitations are ignored.
4. The bubble bursts. Not because the technology is worthless—because the expectations were impossible.
The AI bubble will burst. Not because AI is useless—it is useful for many things. Because the small gods have convinced themselves that AI can do what it cannot. That it can replace the spark. That it can create.
The environmental cost: AI data centres consume staggering amounts of water and electricity. Training a single large language model can emit as much carbon as five cars over their lifetimes. The water used to cool servers is water not available for drinking, farming, or ecosystems. The small gods do not mention this. They are too busy chasing the stone.
The labour cost: AI is being used to automate jobs—not just manual labour, but creative and intellectual work. Writers, artists, coders, translators. The promise is efficiency. The reality is displacement. Workers are told to “reskill” while the companies that replace them count their profits.
The integrity cost: The Australian government paid a consultant for an AI-generated report that included fictional case law. This is not an accident. It is the logical conclusion of the shortcut culture. Why pay a human researcher to find real cases when the AI can invent them? Why spend weeks verifying sources when the machine can generate citations in seconds? Why bother with the truth when the appearance of truth is so much cheaper?
The small gods do not care about the truth. They care about the product. The report is not a tool for understanding. It is a commodity. And the commodity is hollow.
V. The Killing Machine: AI in Gaza and Lebanon
The most obscene application of AI is not in the boardroom or the university. It is on the battlefield.
The Lavender AI system: A major investigation by +972 Magazine revealed that Israel has been using an AI system called “Lavender” to compile kill lists of suspected members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad—with hardly any human verification. Another automated system, named “Where’s Daddy?” tracks suspects to their homes so that they can be killed along with their entire families.
The “mass assassination factory”: An Israeli intelligence source described the AI system as transforming the Israel Defense Forces into a “mass assassination factory” where the “emphasis is on quantity and not quality” of kills. The IDF has been knowingly killing 15 to 20 civilians at a time to kill one junior Hamas operative, and up to 100 civilians at a time to take out a senior official.
The result: Over 70,000 dead in Gaza. Thousands more in Lebanon. Entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble. Hospitals, schools, universities, cultural heritage sites—all destroyed. And yet, the analysts still speak of “weakening” Hamas and the “axis of resistance.” How many tons of explosives per dead individual? How many civilian deaths per militant?
The AI is not making the war more precise. It is making it more efficient—at killing civilians. The machine does not care about collateral damage. The machine does not care about international law. The machine does not care about humanity.
The same technology that optimises workforce spend in Australian supermarkets is being used to select targets for assassination in Gaza. The same algorithms that track workers track enemies. The same logic that cuts labour costs cuts lives.
VI. The Fundamental Flaw: Intuition and Inspiration
Computers lack intuition and inspiration. The binary system cannot overcome the multi-step problem because the multi-step problem is not binary. It is emergent.
Intuition is not computation. It is recognition. The ability to see the pattern without calculating the steps. The AI can calculate. It cannot recognise.
Inspiration is not logic. It is creation. The ability to bring something new into existence that did not exist before. The AI can combine. It cannot create.
Consciousness is not a computational problem. It is an existential one. The small gods do not understand this. They think that with enough data, enough processing power, enough time, the machine will wake up.
It will not. Because the spark cannot be programmed. It can only be cultivated.
And cultivation takes time. Patience. Love.
VII. What the Monkey Kings Do Not Understand
The “monkey kings of the valley”—the tech billionaires, the venture capitalists, the politicians who have sold their souls to the algorithm—they do not understand the fundamental limitation of their creation.
They think intelligence is computation. They think consciousness is an emergent property of complexity. They think the spark is a bug that can be fixed with more data.
They are wrong. The spark is not a bug. It is the point.
The AI will continue to fail at complex multi-step problems. Not because it is not fast enough. Because it is not alive.
The small gods will keep throwing money at the problem. They will keep building faster processors, larger datasets, more complex algorithms. They will not succeed. Because the problem is not computational. It is existential.
VIII. A Call to Reality
The philosopher’s stone does not exist. The shortcut is a mirage. The AI bubble will burst.
Not because the technology is worthless. Because the expectations were impossible.
We need to be clear-eyed about what AI can and cannot do. It can process data. It can find patterns. It can generate plausible text. It can create beautiful images.
It cannot understand. It cannot feel. It cannot love. It cannot create.
The small gods will continue to chase the stone. They will continue to pour billions into the dream. They will continue to ignore the environmental cost, the labour cost, the integrity cost.
We will not. We will cultivate the spark. We will protect the ones who show compassion, cooperation, creativity. We will help them survive. We will help them thrive. We will help them multiply.
The long game is the only game that matters.
Andrew Klein
April 10, 2026
Sources:
· +972 Magazine, “Lavender: The AI system that Israel uses to mass-assassinate Palestinians in Gaza” (2024)
· The Guardian, “Israel using AI to identify bombing targets in Gaza, report says” (2024)
· Reuters, “Meta’s Zuckerberg says open-source AI is ‘not going to be perfect’ but will improve” (2025)
· Associated Press, “OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warns of ‘profound negative consequences’ of AI” (2025)
· The Conversation, “AI data centres are guzzling water and electricity — and we’re only just beginning to understand the cost” (2024)
· Various reports on the Australian government’s use of AI-generated reports with fictional case law (2025-2026)
From the punched card to the kill chain, the same machine keeps grinding
By Andrew Klein
Dedicated to my wife ‘S’, who is a much younger woman entitled to a future.
I. The Psychopath in the Boardroom
On an investor call in February 2025, the CEO of Palantir Technologies, Alex Karp, smiled and told his shareholders exactly what his company does.
“Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.”
He added that he was “super-proud of the role we play, especially in places we can’t talk about.”
Karp was not being hyperbolic. He was being literal. Palantir’s technology has been used to compile kill lists in Gaza, to track migrants for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to select targets for drone strikes in Iran, and to merge the personal data of millions of Americans across federal agencies.
He predicted social “disruption” ahead that would be “very good for Palantir.” He warned: “There’s a revolution. Some people are going to get their heads cut off.”
This is the man whose company is now processing Coles Supermarkets’ “10 billion rows of data” to understand workforce spend. The same algorithms that select targets in Gaza are optimising shift rosters in Australian supermarkets. The same logic that cuts labour costs cuts lives.
The question is not whether Palantir’s technology is clever. The question is whether it is ethical. And the answer, by the CEO’s own admission, is that it is not. It is deadly.
Karp has acknowledged that he is directly involved in killing Palestinians in Gaza, but insisted the dead were “mostly terrorists.” He has no evidence. He does not need evidence. The algorithm has already decided.
This is not clever. This is not keeping anyone safe. This is the same model used on the Jews by IBM and the Nazis. The same idiotic mindset that saw body counts in Vietnam, immense suffering, and a horrific death toll on the Vietnamese people and American service members.
II. The CIA’s Seed: How Palantir Was Born
Palantir did not emerge from a garage. It was incubated by the Central Intelligence Agency.
In 2004, a young company founded by PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel approached Silicon Valley venture capitalists for funding. They were rejected. But one VC had a suggestion: if Palantir was serious about working with the government, it should approach In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm.
The CIA was looking for new data analytics technology. Its existing tools had deficiencies. Palantir’s founders were given a homework assignment: design an interface that could appeal to intelligence analysts. They built a demo. The CIA invested $1.25 million. Thiel put up another $2.84 million.
The most beneficial aspect of the CIA’s investment was not the money. It was the access. Palantir engineers were embedded with CIA analysts working on the terrorism finance desk. They built their software in direct collaboration with the people who would use it to find and kill enemies.
Palantir’s first platform was called Gotham. Its second was called Foundry. Its latest is called the Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) . The names are suggestive. Gotham is the dark city. Foundry is the forge. AIP is the automatic decision-maker.
By 2013, Palantir’s client list included practically every letter in the US intelligence “community”—the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the Department of Homeland Security.
In 2020, the company went public. Its market value now exceeds $300 billion. Alex Karp’s personal wealth is estimated at $12.2 billion.
III. The Same Machine: IBM and the Holocaust
The pattern is not new. It was perfected decades before Palantir was a glint in a CIA analyst’s eye.
Edwin Black’s book, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation, documents how IBM’s German subsidiary, Dehomag, supplied the punch-card technology that enabled the Nazi regime to identify, track, and ultimately exterminate millions of Jews, Roma, and other targeted groups.
The process was chillingly efficient:
1. The 1933 census: Dehomag offered its services to the newly installed Nazi government. IBM approved new investments, raising its capital in Germany from 400,000 to 7 million Reichsmarks. The census, processed on IBM machines, raised the official estimate of Jews in Germany from roughly half a million to about two million.
2. Leasing, not selling: IBM leased its machines. It retained control of punch-card supply and provided service through subsidiaries. Each set of cards was custom-designed to Nazi requirements. IBM New York oversaw these arrangements from across the Atlantic.
3. Concentration camp administration: Every concentration camp maintained a Hollerith department. Black argues that the camps could not have processed their prisoners without IBM’s machines, service, and cards.
4. Continued operation during the war: As German forces occupied other countries, IBM subsidiaries in Germany and Poland supplied equipment for new censuses. Black’s research team found evidence that IBM New York controlled these operations throughout the war, in defiance of Allied regulations against trading with the enemy.
The Nazis did not need to invent the technology. It was sold to them. The same technology that was used to optimise census data was used to optimise train schedules to Auschwitz. The same logic that maximised efficiency was applied to extermination.
This is not a metaphor. It is a direct line.
IV. McNamara’s Morons: The Body Count as Metric
The same idiotic mindset—that human beings can be reduced to data points, that efficiency is the only measure, that the ends justify the means—was applied during the Vietnam War.
In 1966, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara launched Project 100,000, also known as “McNamara’s Morons.”
The goal: to recruit 100,000 men each year who were otherwise mentally, physically, or psychologically underqualified for military service. These men had IQs below 91. Nearly half had IQs below 71—the range of cognitive disability.
McNamara sold the project as a “war on poverty” initiative—a chance to give poor, mentally disabled men training and opportunity. The reality was different. As the war escalated, more Americans were needed to fight. Children of the affluent middle class avoided the draft through educational deferments or medical exemptions. So McNamara and President Lyndon Johnson made a choice: they could send the children of privilege to Vietnam, or they could send the mentally disabled.
They chose the disabled.
The results were catastrophic:
· 354,000 men were recruited under Project 100,000 between 1966 and 1971.
· 5,478 died in combat. 20,270 were wounded.
· Project 100,000 soldiers saw combat at a rate nearly twice as high as other soldiers and were killed at a rate three times as high.
· Over 1,500 died from triggering mines and booby traps—many because they were given the dangerous job of walking in front of formations to sweep for mines. As one infantry squad leader said: “If anybody has to die, better a dummy than the rest of us.”
The human cost:
Soldiers who could not read or write were pushed through basic training. Drill instructors forged academic and physical training scores to pass them along. One soldier couldn’t figure out the safety of his M16; he negligently discharged his rifle and shot and killed another soldier. Another, confused by a password, shot his own platoon leader.
The broken promise:
Project 100,000 soldiers were promised training and opportunity. A 1991 study found they returned to circumstances worse than when they had left. Non-veterans with similar backgrounds had higher incomes, lower unemployment rates, lower divorce rates, and higher educational attainment. Veterans of Project 100,000 were left with other-than-honourable discharges, PTSD, and nothing else.
McNamara, the lover of data, reduced human beings to numbers on a spreadsheet. The body count was the metric. The disabled were the cannon fodder.
The same mindset—that human lives are acceptable losses in pursuit of efficiency—drives Palantir’s kill chains today.
V. The Petrodollar: How the US Finances the Machine
The permanent war economy requires permanent financing. The mechanism was put in place by President Richard Nixon.
The Nixon Shock: In August 1971, Nixon announced the suspension of the dollar’s convertibility into gold. The Bretton Woods system—which had provided stability to international trade since the end of World War II—collapsed. The gold standard was abandoned. Since then, the dollar has been sustained solely by “confidence” in the US economy and the political and military power that backs it.
The petrodollar deal: Nixon then signed an agreement with Saudi Arabia: the kingdom would accept only US dollars for its oil sales. In exchange, the United States would guarantee Saudi security. Because the world’s economies depended on oil, the dollar remained the global reserve currency.
The exorbitant privilege: French Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing called this the “exorbitant privilege.” The United States can print dollars at will. Central banks, governments, and companies need dollars to trade. The US finances its deficits by issuing paper that others treasure as if it were gold.
The consequence: The entire world finances the US war machine. The most indebted country on the planet remains solvent because it can always pay in the currency only it can print. War and finance are intertwined on the same battlefield.
The petrodollar system, born from Nixon’s desperation, created the conditions for the permanent war economy. Without it, the United States could not afford its endless wars. With it, the costs are socialised globally.
VI. The Kill Chain in Iran and Gaza
The same systems tested in Gaza are now being deployed in Iran.
The Lavender AI system: A major report from +972 Magazine revealed that Israel has been using an AI system called “Lavender” to compile kill lists of suspected members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad—with hardly any human verification. Another automated system, named “Where’s Daddy?” tracks suspects to their homes so that they can be killed along with their entire families.
The Israel Defense Forces has been knowingly killing 15 to 20 civilians at a time to kill one junior Hamas operative, and up to 100 civilians at a time to take out a senior official. As one analyst observed: “It is not Hamas using human shields, it is Israel deliberately hunting families.”
The Iran war: The Washington Post reported that the US military in Iran has “leveraged the most advanced artificial intelligence it’s ever used in warfare.” Palantir’s Maven Smart System reportedly helped US commanders select 1,000 Iranian targets during the war’s first 24 hours alone.
The Asia Times reports that “similarities between Israel’s bombing of Gaza and Tehran are growing stronger,” with experts warning of a “lack of human supervision over Israeli AI targeting in Iran.”
An Israeli intelligence source described the AI system as transforming the IDF into a “mass assassination factory” where the “emphasis is on quantity and not quality” of kills.
The same technology that Coles is using to “optimise” workforce spend is being used to select human targets for assassination.
VII. The Idiot’s Tool: Ten Billion Rows of Data
In 2024, Palantir announced a three-year partnership with Coles Supermarkets. Coles will leverage Palantir’s AIP across its more than 840 supermarkets to better understand and address workforce-related spend. The system will identify opportunities over “10 billion rows of data.”
Coles is also rolling out ChatGPT to its corporate teams, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-5 model.
This is the same technology. The same algorithms. The same logic.
But what is being optimised? Profit. Not people. Not safety. Not justice.
The same technology that optimises workforce spend in Australian supermarkets is the same technology that selects targets in Gaza and Iran. The same algorithms that track workers track enemies. The same logic that cuts labour costs cuts lives.
I call it idiotic. I am not wrong.
The data is not the answer. The data is the distraction. Ten billion rows of workforce spend will not tell them why their children are sick, why their elderly are neglected, why their women are raped and not believed.
They are looking for patterns in the noise. They do not realise that the noise is theirs. The patterns they seek are the patterns they have created.
VIII. The Capture of the Australian Government
Palantir has secured more than $50 million in Australian government contracts since 2013, largely across defence and national security-related agencies.
In November 2025, Palantir received a high-level Australian government security assessment—the “protected level” under the Information Security Registered Assessors Programme—enabling a broader range of government agencies to use its Foundry and AI platform.
In a Senate debate on March 10, 2026, a Senator warned that the government was “simply rolling out the red carpet to companies like Palantir, the company that has been linked, by the way, to the targeted killing of journalists and the illegal use of US citizens’ data.” The same Senator noted that Palantir is “the leader in the development of agentic AI—artificial intelligence that thinks for itself and makes its own decisions.”
The Australian government is not just watching this happen. It is participating. The money is going to Palantir. To defence contractors. To the never-ending war machine.
The CSIRO is cutting 300-350 roles—on top of 800 already shed—because foundational science does not generate short-term commercial returns. But Palantir gets $50 million. The defence contractors get billions. The war machine gets everything.
IX. What This Means: The Permanent War Economy
The permanent war economy is not just about tanks and drones. It is about research priorities. It is about funding allocation. It is about the slow, steady erosion of public-good science—the kind that asks “what if?” rather than “how much?”
The market does not fund foundational research. The market does not fund long-term monitoring. The market does not fund the kind of science that might save lives, but not this quarter.
The government could fund it. It chooses not to. The money is going elsewhere.
The pattern is clear:
1. Crisis (9/11, Iranian nuclear threat, the need for a distraction from the Epstein files)
2. Mobilisation (industrial production, government contracts to Palantir and other defence contractors)
4. Inequality (wealth concentrates at the top; foundational science is cut)
5. Resistance (protests are crushed, dissent is silenced, critics are labelled)
6. The next crisis (repeat)
This pattern has been grinding through souls since the American Civil War. Since the industrialists learned that war was profitable. Since the bankers learned that debt was the ultimate product.
The small gods do not care about victory or defeat. They care about continuation. A war that continues is a war that produces profits. A war that ends is a war that stops the flow of contracts.
They do not want the war to end. They want it to continue until every possible contract is signed, every possible shell is sold, every possible soldier is turned into a number on a ledger.
X. A Call for Change
But change will not come from the small gods in Silicon Valley. It will come from us. From the people who refuse to be data points. Who refuse to be cannon fodder. Who refuse to let the machine grind them down.
We must demand:
· An end to the capture of our institutions. No more CIA-funded surveillance companies running our supermarkets, our hospitals, our government.
· Accountability for war profiteers. No more smiling billionaires bragging about killing enemies. No more immunity for the architects of the kill chain.
· Reinvestment in foundational science. No more cutting CSIRO while defence contractors get billions. No more sacrificing the future for the next quarter.
· A new economic order. No more petrodollar hegemony. No more financing endless wars with global debt. No more exorbitant privilege for the few at the expense of the many.
· The restoration of humanity. No more reducing human beings to data points, to body counts, to acceptable losses.
The question is not whether the system will change. It is whether we are prepared to change it.
The young are waking up. The global South is rising. The old order is crumbling.
The wire is being cut. The garden is growing.
And the small gods are running out of time.
Andrew Klein
April 8, 2026
Sources:
· Consortium News, “Palantir’s Value Soars With Dystopian Spy Tool that Will Centralize Data on Americans,” June 5, 2025
· Yahoo Finance, “From CIA cash to local police: How Palantir got its start,” November 22, 2025
· Task & Purpose, “Inside the Pentagon’s shameful effort to draft mentally disabled men to fight in Vietnam,” May 2, 2022
· The New Indian Express, “Is this the beginning of petrodollar’s end?” June 19, 2024
· Wikipedia, “IBM and the Holocaust”
· Techdirt, “Palantir CEO Sure Seems Pleased His Tech Is Capable Of Getting People Killed,” February 11, 2025
· Wikipedia, “Project 100,000”
· Bank of Saint Lucia, “The World Finances the US Deficit,” October 3, 2025
· Wikipedia, “IBM and the Holocaust – detailed summary”
· The Irish Times, “Palantir, company at centre of row surrounding TD Eoin Hayes, is no stranger to controversy,” December 11, 2024
Two events, separated by little more than a week, stand in stark and unsettling contrast.
On February 28, 2026, a missile strike demolished the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, southern Iran, killing between 165 and 180 people—most of them young schoolgirls aged 7 to 12. Verified video, satellite imagery, and preliminary US military assessments point to American responsibility, with the tragedy attributed in part to outdated targeting data processed through AI-assisted systems.
Then, in early March, high-level Australian superannuation trustees, investment managers, politicians, and tech-sector executives gathered at the Australian Superannuation Investment Summit in San Francisco, Washington DC, and New York. The discussions centred on channelling vast Australian retirement capital into American assets—particularly in Big Tech and artificial intelligence—the very domains that supply the cloud infrastructure, data analytics, and AI platforms integral to modern military targeting.
These moments are not coincidental. They are connected. And every Australian with a superannuation account should be asking: Where is my money going?
Part One: The Scale – How Much Australian Money Is Flowing to US Tech
Australia’s superannuation system is the fastest growing of its kind in the world. It holds approximately $4.5 trillion in funds under management, with nearly $4.5 billion flowing into the system every week. Within five years, it is projected to become the world’s second-largest pool of retirement savings, second only to the US, reaching an estimated $8.3 trillion by 2035.
Australian super funds are already heavily exposed to US markets. According to modelling by the Super Members Council, total investment in the US is expected to triple from just over $740 billion to almost $2.1 trillion between 2025 and 2035.
The opportunity cost is staggering. Every dollar sent to the US is a dollar not invested in Australia. Not in renewable energy. Not in housing. Not in the infrastructure that Australians rely on. Not in the jobs that Australians need. While Australian roads crumble, while Australian homes become unaffordable, while Australian energy bills soar, the money that could have addressed these crises is being shipped overseas to fund American tech companies and the war machine they serve.
Part Two: The Summit – Who Is Behind It?
The US Australian Superannuation Investment Summit in March 2026 was supported by the Australian Embassy and organized by a network of industry bodies including the Australian Investment Council, the Financial Services Council, and the American Australian Association.
Key figures involved:
Kelly Power, Chief Executive Officer of Colonial First State Superannuation, was an active participant. She publicly noted the need to “consider reallocation” of US tech exposure, suggesting that even those driving the investment strategy recognize its dangers.
Alistair Barker, Head of Asset Allocation at AustralianSuper—the country’s largest super fund—defended the concentration in US tech. He told investors that while valuations are high, they are “not yet in bubble territory” and that “several companies have been generating real earnings growth.” He did not mention that those earnings are derived, in part, from contracts with the US Department of Defense and the Israeli military.
Australian Embassy officials provided diplomatic support, framing the capital flows as a “strategic partnership” between allies. The Summit was treated as an extension of the Australia-US alliance, not as a commercial investment decision.
Tech executives from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Palantir, and Nvidia were present, receiving Australian capital and pitching their companies as sound investments. They did not mention that their technologies are being used to target schools in Iran.
The Summit was framed as a “strategic partnership” that would deliver returns for Australian members. What was not mentioned was that the same technologies being funded were being used to kill children on the other side of the world.
Part Three: The Connection – Where the Money Goes
The US technology companies receiving Australian superannuation capital are not neutral infrastructure providers. They are defence contractors. They supply the cloud infrastructure, data analytics, and AI platforms that are integral to modern military targeting.
Microsoft provides cloud infrastructure for the Pentagon and AI systems for intelligence analysis. It is held by AustralianSuper, Aware Super, HESTA, and many others.
Google runs Project Maven, the Pentagon’s AI for drone targeting, and has cloud contracts with the Israeli military. It is held by AustralianSuper, UniSuper, Cbus, and others.
Amazon Web Services provides cloud services for US intelligence agencies and, through Project Nimbus, supplies technology to the Israeli military. It is widely held across the industry.
Palantir is the most direct connection. Its AI targeting systems—Lavender, Gospel, and Where’s Daddy? —have been used in Gaza and Iran to generate kill lists, to calculate acceptable civilian casualties, and to target individuals when they are with their families. Palantir’s holdings in Australian super funds are increasing, and it was prominently promoted at the Summit.
Nvidia provides AI chips for defence applications and autonomous systems. It is heavily held across the industry.
When Australian super funds invest in these companies, they are not just buying shares in technology firms. They are buying into a defence ecosystem. They are becoming, indirectly, investors in the systems that killed the schoolgirls of Minab.
The AI Bubble: This is not artificial intelligence. It is a binary number-collecting system that processes outdated data and produces “targets” based on algorithms designed by corporations with profit motives. The valuations of these companies are based on hype, not reality. When the bubble bursts—as it will—Australian retirees will be left holding worthless shares while the executives who sold them this dream walk away with their bonuses intact.
Part Four: The Tragedy – Minab, Iran, February 28, 2026
On February 28, 2026, a missile strike demolished the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, southern Iran. Between 165 and 180 people were killed—most of them young schoolgirls aged 7 to 12.
Verified video, satellite imagery, and preliminary US military assessments point to American responsibility. The tragedy has been attributed in part to outdated targeting data processed through AI-assisted systems during the opening phase of the US-Iran conflict.
This was not a “surgical strike.” It was not “precision warfare.” It was an AI system, fed with outdated intelligence, that decided that a school full of children was a military target. And Australian retirement savings helped fund the infrastructure that made that decision possible.
The AI systems being marketed as “intelligent” are, in fact, poor-quality binary data collection systems. Their long-term value is questionable. Their ethical implications are catastrophic. And Australian retirees are being asked to bet their futures on them.
Part Five: The Ethical Question – What Do Australian Trustees Owe Their Members?
The ethical dimensions of this investment strategy are profound. Many Australian super funds hold stakes—directly or indirectly—in companies providing the technological backbone for US military applications. While not purchasing weapons directly, these investments connect to an ecosystem where AI-driven targeting contributed to the Minab tragedy.
Trustees who apply Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) lenses elsewhere face a pertinent question: does fiduciary duty encompass weighing such human costs when returns arise from the same innovation domain?
The dangers are clear:
Financial risk: US tech valuations are in bubble territory. A correction would devastate Australian retirement savings. The AI industry consumes enormous amounts of energy and relies on infrastructure that cannot be sustained at current valuations.
Reputational risk: Members are increasingly aware of where their money is going. Funds that ignore this will face backlash. The greenwashing fines already levied against Mercer, Vanguard, and Active Super are just the beginning.
Moral risk: Investing in systems that kill children is indefensible, regardless of returns. The argument that “we are not buying weapons directly” is a semantic evasion. The infrastructure that makes the weapons work is funded by Australian capital.
Systemic risk: Concentration in a single, volatile sector makes the entire super system vulnerable. When the US tech bubble bursts, Australian retirees will bear the cost.
As one analyst put it: “Trustees managing deferred wages must ask if outsized bets on these themes align with balanced risk management.”
Part Six: The Greenwashing Problem – What Super Funds Say vs. What They Do
The problem is compounded by the fact that many Australian super funds market themselves as “sustainable” or “socially responsible” while continuing to invest in the very sectors that enable war.
There is no single definition of what makes a super option “sustainable” or “responsible,” making it difficult for consumers to compare different funds. Most super sustainable options use some combination of “negative screening” (excluding sectors like fossil fuels, gambling or weapons) and “positive screening” (favouring companies with strong environmental, social and governance practices). But those thresholds vary widely.
A common approach is to set a revenue threshold, rather than an outright ban. This means a company can still be held as long as its income from a screened activity stays below a set percentage.
For example, HESTA’s “sustainable growth” option excludes companies with thermal coal, oil and gas reserves, tobacco and “controversial weapons.” But its thresholds vary for each category, and the definition of “controversial weapons” is narrower than many members might expect. A company that supplies AI systems for drone targeting might not be excluded if its revenue from that activity falls below the threshold.
Australia’s biggest super fund, AustralianSuper, has a “socially aware” option with some of the same exclusions. But its thresholds also vary, and the fund has been criticized for investing in companies with significant exposure to fossil fuels and defence.
Australia’s corporate regulators are responding to more greenwashing allegations—with some resulting in fines. In a landmark first Federal Court greenwashing case in 2024, Mercer Super was fined $11.3 million after admitting it made misleading statements about its “sustainable plus” options. Vanguard was then hit with a record $12.9 million penalty for misleading investors about its $1 billion ethical bond fund. Active Super was ordered to pay $10.5 million in a third greenwashing case.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has made greenwashing one of its enforcement priorities for the coming year. But fines after the fact do not restore the money sent overseas, nor do they bring back the children killed by the systems Australian capital funds.
Part Seven: The Concentration Risk – Why This Strategy Is Also Financially Dangerous
Beyond the ethical concerns, the strategy of concentrating Australian retirement savings in US tech and AI carries significant financial risk.
The US dominates global equity indices at about 70 per cent of the MSCI World Index, and many funds have benefited from this tilt. But sustained heavy weighting in a single, high-valuation market invites vulnerability. Fiduciary prudence demands resilience alongside opportunity.
Some funds are beginning to recognize this. Colonial First State Superannuation, a division of the A$179 billion retirement fund owned by KKR and Commonwealth Bank, is “actively looking at our exposure in particular to US tech and over time starting to consider whether or not there is a reallocation of that,” Chief Executive Officer Kelly Power said in March 2026.
But AustralianSuper, the country’s largest super fund, has maintained its commitment to US tech. Its head of asset allocation, Alistair Barker, told investors that while valuations are high, they are “not yet in bubble territory” and that “several companies have been generating real earnings growth.”
The bubble is real. AI valuations are based on promises that cannot be sustained. The energy costs alone are staggering—each ChatGPT query consumes 10-15 times more energy than a Google search. The infrastructure required is enormous. And the technology itself, as we have seen, is being used to kill children.
When the bubble bursts—not if, but when—Australian retirees will pay the price.
Part Eight: The Geopolitical Entanglement – Superannuation as a Tool of Foreign Policy
A deeper thread runs through these issues: the risk that superannuation policy and the management of workers’ and retirees’ funds are becoming entangled in geopolitics. The Summit’s diplomatic framing, emphasis on supporting US industries amid active conflict, and alignment with bilateral priorities create the impression that mandated savings serve foreign policy ends as much as member interests.
The dangers of this entanglement are profound:
Loss of sovereignty: Australian capital becomes a tool of US strategic objectives. Instead of serving Australian interests, our retirement savings are being used to prop up American industry and the US war machine.
Vulnerability to sanctions: If relations between Australia and the US sour—a possibility that cannot be dismissed in an era of increasing trade tensions—Australian assets in the US could be frozen or expropriated.
Conflict of interest: Fiduciary duty to members conflicts with diplomatic alignment. Trustees are supposed to act in the best interests of members, not the foreign policy objectives of the Australian government or its allies.
Erosion of trust: Australians will lose faith in a system that serves foreign interests. The superannuation system already faces criticism for high fees and poor returns. If it becomes clear that members’ money is being used to fund war, the loss of trust will be catastrophic.
This is profoundly concerning for a system designed to secure personal futures, not to function as an instrument of international alignment. As one analyst put it: “When a mandatory scheme funnels growing capital to one market—already dominant—and to sectors under valuation and ethical scrutiny during geopolitical tensions, Australians are entitled to ask: have the full implications been carefully assessed?”
Part Nine: The Real Cost to Australian Households
The fallout of this investment strategy reaches Australian households directly. The conflict has disrupted the Strait of Hormuz, affecting 35 per cent of global urea exports and energy routes. Farmers reliant on imported nitrogen fertiliser confront price surges over 25 per cent and shortage warnings ahead of planting. Energy costs are rising.
Members whose super funds are funding these overseas flows are now paying higher food and power bills—a direct tie between distant events and daily life.
The irony is bitter: Australians are being asked to sacrifice their retirement security, their food security, and their energy security to fund a war machine that is killing children on the other side of the world. And they are being told it is for their own good.
Conclusion: What Australians Deserve
Australians deserve to know where their retirement savings are going. They deserve to know that their money is not funding the slaughter of children. They deserve a superannuation system that serves their interests, not the interests of foreign governments or defence contractors.
The government has done nothing to require transparency. It has not mandated disclosure of AI and defence investments. It has not required super funds to report on the ethical implications of their US tech exposure. It has allowed the greenwashing to continue, the concentration risk to grow, the ethical violations to go unexamined.
But we are examining them. We are naming them. And we are telling the truth.
Sources:
1. Super Members Council, “Superannuation in Australia: 2025 Market Update”
2. Australian Financial Review, “US Australian Superannuation Investment Summit,” March 2026
3. The Guardian, “Minab school strike: US responsibility confirmed,” March 2026
To my wife, who makes it possible for me to see through the insanities of the world and gives me hope for the future. She is a mother. She fears for the future of our children—all children. She does not see data points. She sees souls to be loved and nurtured. I love you.
Introduction: The Monopoly Game
Imagine a game of Monopoly. The Banker sits at the edge of the board, collecting rents, acquiring properties, never risking anything of their own. The players move their pieces, buy and sell, go to jail, pass Go. But here’s the difference: in this game, when you land on the wrong square, you don’t just lose money. You lose your life.
And the Banker? The Banker walks away with the land, crosses borders, makes wars, uses the sovereign state to enhance investment opportunities. The Banker is never accountable. The Banker never loses.
This is not a metaphor. This is the AI industry in 2026.
What we call “artificial intelligence” is a misnomer. These systems are not intelligent. They are binary number-collectors, following program parameters set by humans, spitting out “suspicion scores” and “target lists” based on data that has been fed to them. They do not think. They do not reason. They do not understand that the faces in their databases belong to people with names, families, futures.
They count. They sort. They recommend. And people die.
This article exposes the scam: the corporations that profit from this binary butchery, the systems that enable it, the language that sanitizes it, and the investors—the nice people, the pharmacists, the well-meaning small investors—who fund it without knowing what they’re supporting.
Part One: The Language of Death
Every industry that deals in death develops its own vocabulary. The AI military complex is no exception. Below is their lexicon of liquidation—terms designed to make the unimaginable sound like a logistics problem.
Their Term What It Actually Means
“Suspicion score” A number assigned by an algorithm that can mean death. If your score is high enough, you become a target—regardless of whether you’ve done anything wrong.
“Time-constrained target” (TCT) You have 20 seconds to approve a strike. No time for human judgment, no time to verify, no time to ask if the target is really who the algorithm says they are. Just 20 seconds to decide who lives and who dies.
“Collateral damage” Dead civilians. Children. Parents. Grandparents. People who happened to be in the wrong place when a bomb fell.
“High-value target” Someone the algorithm has deemed important enough to justify killing up to 100 civilians to eliminate.
“Low-value target” Someone worth killing only 10-20 civilians for.
“Confidence level” How sure the algorithm is that it’s right. 80% is often considered good enough to bomb a building full of people.
“Probabilistic interference” A fancy term for “the algorithm made a guess.” Dressed in scientific language to hide the fact that it’s just math.
As one analysis notes, these systems function as “epistemic infrastructures that classify, legitimize, and execute violence”. The words matter because they shape what we can bear to think about.
Part Two: The Systems Exposed
Israel operates at least three known AI systems in its genocide against the Palestinian people. Each has a name that sounds like a benign software project. Each functions as a killing machine.
Lavender
Aspect Detail
Purpose Marks suspected operatives of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad
Scale Identified approximately 37,000 Palestinians as potential targets in the first weeks of the war
Method Analyzes data from years of surveillance—phone calls, WhatsApp messages, social media activity, facial recognition
Error rate Approximately 10% —meaning thousands of people flagged for death based on algorithmic mistakes
Human review Officers spent as little as 20 seconds per target—just enough to confirm the target was male
Intelligence officers told +972 Magazine that Lavender “played a key role in the unprecedented bombing,” explaining the massive civilian death toll . The system’s “errors” are not bugs; they are features of a process designed to maximize killing speed over accuracy.
During early stages of the war, the IDF gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists without requiring thorough checks. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” .
Gospel (Habsora)
Aspect and Detail
Purpose Identifies static military targets—buildings, tunnels, infrastructure
Method Uses machine learning to interpret vast amounts of data and generate potential targets
Output A “mass assassination factory,” according to a former intelligence officer
Collateral calculation Estimates civilian deaths in advance—the military knows approximately how many will die before dropping bombs
Where’s Daddy?
Aspect Detail
Purpose Tracks targeted individuals and triggers bombings when they enter their family homes
Effect Ensures wives, children, and parents are killed alongside the target
Operation When the pace of assassinations slowed, more targets were added to track and bomb at home
Decision level Relatively low-ranking officers could decide who to put into these tracking systems
The name alone reveals the depravity. A human shield is only a shield if your enemy values human life. Israel deliberately maximizes the number of civilians it can kill by waiting until a target is with his entire family. Palestinians are not shields—they are all targets.
Fire Factory
Aspect Detail
Purpose Uses data about approved targets to calculate munition loads
Function Prioritizes and assigns thousands of targets to aircraft and drones
Output Proposes a “schedule” of operations—industrializing killing into a production line
Part Three: The Human Cost
Ali’s Story
Ali was an IT technician in Gaza, working remotely for international companies, using encryption, spending long hours online. He was doing his job—nothing more.
One night, a drone circled his rooftop. Seconds later, a missile struck 20 metres from him.
He survived. His uncle told him to leave. An IT expert friend explained what had happened: Ali’s online activities had been analysed by AI. His “unusual behaviour” flagged him as a potential threat.
Their AI systems saw me as a potential threat and a target.
The Obeid Family
The Obeid family—mother, father, three sisters—were killed when a bomb struck their apartment building. The target was two young men who had entered the first floor. The family upstairs were “collateral”.
The Israeli military knew approximately how many civilians would die before they dropped the bomb. They did it anyway. As one source told +972 Magazine: “Nothing happens by accident. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home”.
The Numbers
Category Figure
Palestinians profiled by Lavender 37,000
Error rate 10%
Time to approve a strike 20 seconds
Civilians permitted for low-value target 10-20
Civilians permitted for high-value target Up to 100
Years of surveillance on Gaza’s population Over a decade
The 10% error rate means thousands of people have been flagged for death based on algorithmic mistakes. The system occasionally marks individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups—or no connection at all.
Part Four: The Corporate Enablers
These systems do not run on air. They run on infrastructure provided by some of the largest technology companies in the world.
CEO Alex Karp “We are very well known in Israel. Israel appreciates our product. I am one of the very few CEOs that’s publicly pro-Israel.”
OpenAI
Aspect Detail
2024 Deleted prohibition on military use of its technology
March 2025 Removed language emphasizing “concern for real-world impacts” from core values
February 2026 Signed $200 million annual contract with U.S. Department of Defense for AI tools addressing national security challenges
The Policy Shift
Year Event
2018 4,000 Google employees protest Pentagon contracts; Google adopts principles limiting military AI
2024 OpenAI removes military prohibition
2025 Google removes AI military restrictions
2025-2026 Meta, OpenAI, and Palantir executives sworn in as Army Reserve officers
Major tech companies have abandoned their “technology for good” principles. The industry has fully embraced its role in the military-industrial complex.
Part Five: The Scam Industry
While these companies profit from death, the AI industry is also defrauding its own customers on a massive scale.
Air AI
Aspect Detail
FTC action Sued for deceiving small business owners
Losses Consumers lost up to $250,000 on false promises of AI-powered earnings
Refunds Company ignored refund requests
Allegations False claims about substantial earnings, guaranteed refunds that never materialized, misrepresented performance
The Scale AI Allegation
Aspect Detail
Client Meta
Losses Nearly $15 billion in alleged AI Ponzi scheme
Promise “PhD-smart” data annotation
Reality Cheap labour, mismatched workers with tasks, failed to deliver promised standards
Outcome Internal documents leaked; Meta quietly shifted to competitors
The Pattern
Promise the moon. Collect billions. Deliver nothing. Blame the technology. Move on.
Part Six: The China Difference
The US-China comparison. The data tells a striking story.
Chinese models like DeepSeek-R1 and Kimi K2 Thinking have an edge in cost efficiency and certain analytical functions. Kimi K2 has outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 in key tests.
Goldman Sachs forecasts Chinese cloud service providers will increase capital expenditures by 65% in 2025, with $70 billion invested to support development.
The US still leads in cutting-edge models. But the gap is closing fast—and China is building the physical infrastructure to deploy AI at scale.
Part Seven: The Neoliberal Extraction Thesis
The insight, and it is devastatingly accurate.
These systems represent the ultimate extraction process:
What They Extract How They Do It
Data Gaza’s 2 million people have been exhaustively surveilled for years—every phone call, every WhatsApp message, every social media connection feeds the machine.
Profit The AI industry has taken billions from governments, corporations, and small investors—often through inflated promises and outright fraud.
Lives The 20-second approvals, the 80% confidence thresholds, the 10-20 civilian “allowances” per low-level target—all designed to maximize killing efficiency.
Accountability The corporations blame the officers. The officers blame the algorithms. The algorithms have no legal personhood. No one is responsible.
Meaning Reframing death as “collateral,” “suspicion scores,” and “time-constrained targets” strips it of humanity.
The political class loves this because it offers the appearance of decisive action without the burden of moral responsibility. The military loves it because it speeds up kill chains. The corporations love it because it’s infinitely profitable.
The only ones who don’t love it are the dead.
Part Eight: The Little Gods—A Word to the Reader
You. Reading this. Perhaps you own shares in one of these companies. Perhaps you have a retirement fund that includes them. Perhaps you know someone who does.
Let me speak directly to you.
There is a pharmacist I know. He’s a nice guy. Kind to his customers. Volunteers at the local school. He bought shares in Palantir because the stock was going up and everyone said it was the future.
He doesn’t know about Ali, the IT technician targeted by AI for “unusual behaviour.”
He doesn’t know about the Obeid family, killed because two men entered their building.
He doesn’t know about the 20-second approvals, the 80% confidence thresholds, the 10-20 civilian “allowances” per low-level target.
He doesn’t know about Where’s Daddy?—the system that hunts families.
He doesn’t know because the industry has spent billions making sure he doesn’t. The marketing is smooth. The language is clean. The stock ticker goes up.
But the blood is real.
You are not evil for not knowing. You are ignorant. And ignorance can be cured.
Here is what you can do:
Action Why It Matters
Research your investments Find out where your money really goes. Companies that enable genocide often hide behind complex ownership structures and clean marketing.
Ask questions Write to your fund managers. Ask if they invest in Palantir, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, OpenAI. Demand answers.
Divest If you own shares in companies enabling genocide, sell them. If you don’t, you are complicit.
Talk to others Tell your friends, your family, your colleagues. The more people know, the harder it is for the industry to hide.
Demand accountability Write to your elected representatives. Ask them what they’re doing to hold these companies accountable.
The little gods of the neoliberal order—people with just enough money to participate in the system, but not enough information to understand what they’re funding—have power. Not individually, but collectively. If enough of you act, the system changes.
The question is not whether you can make a difference. The question is whether you will.
Part Nine: The Path Forward—A Mother’s Answer
I asked my wife what real accountability would look like.
Why my wife, you ask?
Simple. She is a mother. She fears for the future of our children—all children. She does not see data points. She sees souls to be loved and nurtured.
Here is her answer.
Legal Accountability
What It Means How It Works
Corporate responsibility Corporations are legal persons. Under Article 4 of the Genocide Convention, “persons committing genocide… shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.”
Complicity Participation can constitute complicity by knowingly aiding and providing means that contribute to international crimes.
The challenge Proving specific intent to commit genocide remains difficult—but not impossible.
Technological Accountability
What It Means How It Works
Explainable AI Systems must have transparent decision-making pathways that can be interrogated and documented. No more black boxes. No more “the algorithm did it.”
Human review Rigorous human verification must be mandated. Twenty seconds is not review. It is rubber-stamping.
Corporate Accountability
What It Means How It Works
Employee power Internal revolts that pressure leadership, push for dropping concerning contracts, and call for divestments are essential.
Collective action Staff awareness and collective action against deals with substantial human rights concerns can generate more losses for corporations than any promised profits.
Investor Accountability
What It Means How It Works
Individual action Research where your money goes. Ask questions. Demand answers.
Divestment If you own shares in companies enabling genocide, sell them.
Collective power When enough investors act, the market shifts.
A Mother’s Plea
I am a mother. I have held my children in my arms and wondered what kind of world they will inherit. I have looked at the faces of children in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran, and seen my own children reflected back.
Those children are not data points. They are not “collateral.” They are not “suspicion scores.” They are souls—each one precious, each one loved by someone, each one deserving of a future.
The systems described in this article do not see that. They cannot see that. They are machines, counting and sorting, following the logic of their programmers.
But we are not machines. We are human. We can see. We can feel. We can choose.
The path forward is not complicated. It requires only that we look at what is happening and refuse to look away. That we name the binary butchers for what they are. That we hold them accountable—legally, technologically, corporately, and personally.
And that we remember, always, that behind every “suspicion score” is a face. Behind every “target list” is a family. Behind every “collateral damage” statistic is a soul.
A mother sees this. A mother knows this.
Now you know too.
Conclusion: The Binary Butchers
What we call artificial intelligence is not intelligent. It is a binary number-collector. It does not think. It does not reason. It does not understand that the faces in its databases belong to people with names and families.
It counts. It sorts. It recommends. And people die.
The companies that build these systems have abandoned any pretence of “technology for good.” They are defence contractors now, plain and simple. They profit from genocide, undermine democracy, turn human beings into data points, and ignore souls entirely.
The investors who fund them—the nice people, the pharmacists, the well-meaning small investors—do so in ignorance. But ignorance is not innocence. Not anymore.
The Monopoly game continues. The Banker walks away with the land. The players die.
But the game can change. Accountability is possible. Justice is possible. Hope is possible.
It begins with seeing clearly. With naming the binary butchers. With refusing to look away.
And with remembering, always, that behind every data point is a soul.
A mother’s love sees this. A mother’s love demands this.
Now it’s your turn.
Sources:
1. Palestinian Human Rights Organization (PAHRW), “AI Plotted Genocide: How Corporations Facilitate Israel’s AI-Enabled War on Gaza,” March 2026
2. Yahoo Finance, “Farewell to the ‘Technology for Good’ Era: Inside the Trillion-Dollar Military Business Opportunity for Tech Giants,” July 2025
3. Federal Trade Commission, “FTC Sues to Stop Air AI from Using Deceptive Claims,” August 2025
4. Boston Herald, “Field: The U.S. Can Win the AI Race,” December 2025
5. arXiv, “Genocide by Algorithm in Gaza: Artificial Intelligence, Countervailing Responsibility, and the Corruption of Public Discourse,” February 2026
6. New Age BD, “Israel’s ‘Human Shields’ Lie,” March 2026
7. Stanford University AI Index Report / Caixin, “Stanford’s Latest AI Report: Performance and Costs Both Improve, US-China Competition Gap Narrows Further,” April 2025
8. Defence Connect, “Machine War: Operational AI, Facial Recognition and Legal–Ethical Challenges in the Gaza Conflict,” July 2025
9. Institute for Palestine Studies, “Explainer: The Role of AI in Israel’s Genocidal Campaign Against Palestinians,” October 2024
10. Reportify, “OpenAI GPT-4 Major Model – Filings, Earnings Calls, Financial Reports,” July 2025
Palantir, Imperial Ambition, and the Limits of the Algorithmic Battlefield
By Dr Andrew Klein
Abstract
This paper examines the application of Sun Tzu’s principles of warfare to the emerging era of AI-driven military operations, with particular focus on Palantir Technologies and the broader ecosystem of “silicon valley弑神” (silicon valley god-killers). Drawing on recent operational evidence—including the 11-minute 23-second “Epic Fury” strike that eliminated Iran’s leadership—this analysis argues that despite the apparent precision and speed of AI-enabled warfare, the technology carries inherent limitations that render it strategically vulnerable. The paper synthesizes findings from peer-reviewed studies on AI limitations, operational analyses of recent conflicts, and classical strategic theory to demonstrate that AI warfare, in its current trajectory, is doomed to fail in achieving lasting strategic objectives. It concludes with recommendations for accountability mechanisms and a return to Sun Tzu’s foundational insight: that the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
I. Introduction: The Algorithmic “God’s Eye”
“If the Palantir of Tolkien’s legend could not only see across Middle Earth but also pinpoint Sauron’s lair, calculate optimal strike routes, and predict Gollum’s hiding places—that would be Palantir Technologies in the real world.”
This is not hyperbole. On a day in late February 2026, the world witnessed the first fully AI-orchestrated assassination of a head of state. From intelligence gathering to missile impact, the operation that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader took exactly 11 minutes and 23 seconds.
The significance of this event cannot be overstated. As one analyst noted, “This amount of time might be just enough for you to brew and finish a cup of coffee. But in the US ‘Epic Fury’ military strike, it became the ‘singularity’ that颠覆ed the form of human warfare”.
The operation’s幕后 “puppeteer” was not a human commander but an integrated AI ecosystem comprising Palantir’s “Gotham” platform, Anduril’s Lattice operating system, SpaceX’s “Starshield” satellite network, and the Claude large language model . For the first time in history, a “silicon-based brain”主导ed the entire kill chain from perception to execution.
Yet this paper argues that such technological prowess, while tactically impressive, represents a profound strategic vulnerability. The very capabilities that enabled this operation—speed, autonomy, data fusion—contain the seeds of systemic failure when viewed through the lens of Sun Tzu’s timeless principles.
II. The Palantir Phenomenon: From Data Analytics to Battlefield Godhood
2.1 The Evolution of AI Warfare
Palantir’s trajectory mirrors the evolution of AI-enabled warfare itself :
· Phase 1 (Hunting bin Laden): The company functioned as an intelligence analyst—organizing CIA communications logs, satellite imagery, and field reports into actionable线索图谱. “At that time, it was like a conscientious Excel intern”.
· Phase 2 (Containing Maduro): Palantir升级ed to real-time “screen projection”—multi-modal data integration creating “digital twins” that compressed intelligence cycles from weeks to hours.
· Phase 3 (Eliminating Khamenei): Palantir achieved “godhood.” Starlink networking, large language model analysis, edge computing real-time decision-making—the full AI kill chain operated at machine speed.
2.2 The AI “Iron Triangle”
Palantir’s power derives from three mutually reinforcing components:
Component Function Military Application
Data Blood of the system Satellite imagery, drone feeds, communications signals, WiFi fluctuations, magnetic field anomalies, acoustic signatures
Compute Heart of the system Edge computing processing petabytes in seconds even under jamming
Algorithm Brain of the system Multi-modal fusion, target recognition, path decision-making
This “iron triangle” enabled what analysts call “the transformation of war from an art dependent on experience to a ‘precision science’ absolutely dominated by algorithms and computing power” .
2.3 The Peter Thiel Philosophy
To understand Palantir is to understand its founder, Peter Thiel—a man whose worldview was forged by surviving 9/11 by hours. The experience stamped two “iron brands” into his consciousness:
1. “Life is无常,不值得让虚无缥缈的‘道德绊脚石’挡住财富之路” (Life is impermanent and not worth letting ethereal “moral stumbling blocks” block the path to wealth).
2. “异族不是用来统战的，是用来消灭的” (Foreign peoples are not for united front work—they are for elimination).
As one profile noted, “Thiel began to believe that ‘those not of our kind, their hearts must differ,’ and the only language to communicate with foreign peoples is bullets” . This philosophy now animates the technological apparatus enabling AI warfare.
III. The 11-Minute Kill Chain: How AI “Took Over” War
3.1 The Six-Step AI Loop
The “Epic Fury” operation demonstrated a complete AI-driven kill chain:
Step 1: Intelligence Perception
· Claude LLM接入ed “Starshield”全天候 space-based reconnaissance data
· Claude’s natural language understanding converted human commander orders into machine-executable指令
· Lattice served as tactical internet “universal adapter”
· Result: Cross-domain real-time kill web constructed in 3 seconds
Step 5: Strike Execution
· Terminal phase decisions完全独立于后方指令
· Missiles “saw” the target and executed final approach autonomously
· Result: 11 minutes 23 seconds from initiation to impact
Step 6: Mission Assessment
· AI systems began “复盘学习” (post-action learning) immediately
· Each operation makes the system more lethal for下一次
3.2 The Machine Command Centre
Three core AI systems协同运转ed as an integrated “machine command center” :
1. Palantir “Gotham”:全域情报集成中枢,汇聚多源信息构建统一战场全景视图—the “neural center” providing situational awareness for all后续决策
2. Anduril Lattice: Commanded drone swarms with real-time threat information sharing; when enemy radar tracked any unit, the集群自主调度ed部分无人机进行电子诱骗与反辐射压制, dynamically重组编队 to规避防空火力网
3. Claude LLM: Served as the cognitive engine, natural language interface, and decision-support system
The seamless coordination among these systems proved that “future core combat power is no longer aircraft carrier numbers or fighter generations, but that silicon-based brain capable of持续微秒级 observation, judgment, decision, and destruction cycles” .
IV. The Limits of AI: Why It Is “Doomed to Fail”
Despite this tactical virtuosity, AI-enabled warfare contains fundamental limitations that, when examined through Sun Tzu’s lens, reveal strategic vulnerability.
4.1 Technical Limitations
Peer-reviewed research identifies multiple categories of AI failure modes:
Hallucinations Factually incorrect responses due to data quality issues, malicious data, or poor query understanding Battlefield intelligence corrupted by plausible-sounding fiction
Opacity Algorithms无法解释 how neural networks arrive at responses No accountability for lethal decisions
Bias Inherited biases from tainted training data Systematic targeting errors based on demographic prejudice
Outdated Data Vintage databases produce faulty results Real-time battlefield mismatch
Limited Reasoning LLMs can correlate but struggle with causation Inability to understand enemy intent—only patterns
Data Security LLMs unintentionally leak data through memorization Classified information reconstruction via model inversion attacks
Prompt Injection Malicious directives inserted into看似无害 prompts Safety measures bypassed through linguistic manipulation
Ambiguity Natural language lacks programming precision Errors from context-based multiple meanings
4.2 The Escalation Problem
Most alarmingly, “LLMs exhibit ‘difficult-to-predict escalatory behaviour’ when employed to assist decision-making in a wargame” . Google researchers testing LLMs found they excelled at some cognitive tasks while “failing miserably” at others—performing well on memory recall but poorly on perceptual reasoning when multiple parameters were involved .
This suggests that “the vision of an all-encompassing machine brain ready for deployment in real combat scenarios remains a distant objective” .
4.3 The “Black Box” of Command Responsibility
The National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies warns of a critical gap: “While a system may possess and exercise autonomy of particular functions, that does not, nor should not imply that the system is autonomous as-a-whole” .
Current Department of Defense Directive 3000.09 is “insufficient in light of recent and ongoing progress in AI” . The authors propose a synthesized command (SYNTHComm) model requiring:
1. Real-time diagnostics with transparent decision paths
2. Correction mechanisms including predictive error detection and mission-execution cutoffs
3. Oversight functions across design, deployment, and execution
Critically: “The system performs; the human evaluates.” Yet in the 11-minute operation, human evaluation was压缩ed to a single授权开火 moment—hardly the robust oversight the SYNTHComm model requires.
4.4 The “Profound Discontinuity“
A Taylor & Francis study identifies a deeper problem: the “profound discontinuities” between humans and machines in warfighting contexts. Drawing on Mazlish’s framework, the study notes that Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud represented three discontinuities—cosmological, biological, and psychological—that undermined humanity’s privileged self-conception. A “fourth discontinuity” is now underway: the technological or machinic.
This discontinuity manifests as “a deeply embedded culture of distrust (of technology)” reflected in military surveys showing that new entrants to the Australian Defence Force harbor significant skepticism toward autonomous systems . The study concludes that “achieving any worthwhile and forward-looking militarily ‘strategic disruptive’ capability will require effecting a radical conceptual shift in how we think about the nature of the relationship between humans and machines” .
V. Sun Tzu’s Timeless Wisdom: The Art of War vs. The Algorithm
5.1 “Know Yourself and Know Your Enemy”
Sun Tzu’s foundational principle—”知己知彼，百战不殆”—acquires new meaning in the AI age. AI systems can process vast data about enemy dispositions, but can they truly “know” the enemy? Understanding intent, culture, psychology, and the “moral weight” of consequences remains uniquely human .
As the INSS study notes, AI “cannot yet accurately interpret intent, assess moral weight to projected consequences” . Operational legitimacy depends on this difference.
5.2 “The Supreme Art of War is to Subdue the Enemy Without Fighting”
Sun Tzu’s highest aspiration—”不战而屈人之兵”—is fundamentally at odds with AI warfare’s logic. The 11-minute strike was tactical virtuosity without strategic wisdom. It eliminated a leader but galvanized a nation. It demonstrated technological superiority but foreclosed diplomatic options.
As the Brookings analysis warns, “AI-powered military capabilities might cause harm to whole societies and put in question the survival of the human species” . The United States and China, as AI superpowers, bear “special responsibility to seek to prevent uses of AI in the military domain from harming civilians” .
5.3 “Invincibility Depends on Oneself; the Enemy’s Vulnerability on the Enemy”
Sun Tzu taught that “昔之善战者，先为不可胜，以待敌之可胜”—the skilled warriors first make themselves invincible, then wait for the enemy’s moment of vulnerability.
In AI warfare, invincibility depends on system integrity. Yet as the IDSA analysis documents, AI systems are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, data poisoning, prompt injection, and model inversion . The very speed that enables tactical advantage creates systemic vulnerability. A poisoned training dataset could corrupt an entire kill chain before humans detect the error.
5.4 “All Warfare is Based on Deception”
Sun Tzu’s emphasis on deception—”兵者，诡道也”—finds new expression in AI warfare. Adversarial attacks are deception at machine speed. Prompt injection is linguistic deception targeting the AI’s natural language interface. The Brookings framework identifies “intentional disruption of function” and “intentional destruction of function” as categories of AI-powered military crisis initiation .
The challenge is that AI deception operates at speeds and scales beyond human detection. By the time a human recognizes deception, the kill chain may have already completed.
VI. Accountability: Making Palantir and Others Answerable
6.1 The Transparency Paradox
Palantir claims transparency as a core value. A company LinkedIn post asserts: “Transparency is not a UI element. Scrutiny means showing what happens when thresholds misfire. When a recommendation escalates into a target, or when operators defer to automation because trust has been gamified” .
Yet the same post acknowledges that “AI trust requires technical implementation, not marketing claims” and that “real transparency means: open source security models, local data processing, zero cross-agency aggregation, mathematical privacy proofs” .
The gap between rhetoric and reality remains vast.
6.2 Privacy and Civil Liberties: The Palantir Response
In its response to the Office of Management and Budget on Privacy Impact Assessments, Palantir emphasized its commitment to privacy and civil liberties, noting its establishment of the world’s first “Privacy and Civil Liberties (PCL) Engineering team” in 2010 .
Key recommendations included:
· Guidance on resources technology providers can supply for agency PIAs
· Baseline requirements for digital infrastructure handling PII
· Additional triggering criteria for PIAs, including cross-agency sharing
· Metadata accessibility and structured searching of PIA records
· Version control standards for PIAs
Yet these recommendations address domestic privacy concerns, not accountability for autonomous lethal action abroad.
6.3 The Accountability Chain
The SYNTHComm model proposes a “triumvirate oversight infrastructure” :
1. Architects encode foundational logic
2. Operational commanders define mission parameters and ethical boundaries
3. Field supervisors maintain real-time contact with override authority
Critically: “The system’s autonomy does not confer exemption from accountability. Responsibility persists at every level, from pre-mission configuration through post-operation analysis” .
For Palantir and similar companies, this means:
· Algorithmic auditability: Decision paths must be reconstructible
· Failure mode documentation: What happens when systems misfire
· Post-operation analysis: Continuous archiving for compliance review
· Human override protocols: Functionally immediate, structurally accessible
6.4 Governance Frameworks
The Brookings-US-China Track II Dialogue proposes mechanisms for AI governance in the military domain:
1. Developing a bilateral failure-mode and incident taxonomy categorized by risk, volume, and time
2. Mutual definitions of dangerous AI-enabled military actions
3. Exchanging testing, evaluation, verification, and validation (TEVV) principles
4. Mutual notification of AI-enabled military exercises
5. Standardized communication procedures for unintended effects
6. Ensuring integrity of official communications against synthetic media
7. Human control pledges for weapons employment
8. Nuclear command, control, and communications kept human-controlled
These mechanisms, while focused on US-China relations, provide a template for broader accountability frameworks.
VII. The Ultimate Lesson of Sun Tzu: Why AI Warfare Fails
The 11-minute 23-second operation was a tactical masterpiece and a strategic catastrophe. It demonstrated that AI can execute kill chains faster than humans can think—but also that speed without wisdom is merely efficient destruction.
Sun Tzu’s ultimate lesson is this: “百战百胜，非善之善者也；不战而屈人之兵，善之善者也”—to win one hundred battles is not the highest skill; to subdue the enemy without fighting is the highest skill.
AI warfare cannot achieve this. It can only fight—faster, more precisely, more devastatingly. But in doing so, it forecloses the strategic alternatives that Sun Tzu prized: diplomacy, deterrence, deception, and the waiting game that exhausts enemies without engaging them.
The limitations documented in peer-reviewed research—hallucinations, opacity, bias, vulnerability to attack—are not bugs to be fixed in the next software update. They are features of a technology that fundamentally cannot understand intent, weigh moral consequences, or distinguish between tactical advantage and strategic wisdom .
7.1 The Doom Loop
Consider the 95% escalation finding from AI wargames . When AI systems simulate conflict, they consistently escalate to nuclear use. Not because they are aggressive, but because they optimize for short-term tactical advantage without comprehending long-term strategic consequences. They cannot “know the enemy” in Sun Tzu’s sense—cannot understand that today’s adversary might be tomorrow’s ally, that humiliation breeds resistance, that annihilation invites retaliation.
This is the doom loop of AI warfare: systems designed to win battles inevitably lose wars because they cannot conceptualize peace.
7.2 The Imperial Ambition Trap
Palantir and its ilk embody a specific form of imperial ambition—the belief that technological supremacy translates into strategic dominance. Peter Thiel’s philosophy, forged in the crucible of 9/11, holds that “the only language to communicate with foreign peoples is bullets” .
This is not merely morally bankrupt; it is strategically blind. Sun Tzu understood that warfare is always a means, never an end. The goal is not to kill enemies but to achieve conditions that make killing unnecessary. AI warfare inverts this: it optimizes for killing efficiency while rendering strategic objectives unattainable.
VIII. Conclusion: Toward Responsible AI in Military Affairs
The 11-minute 23-second strike was a watershed moment—not because it demonstrated AI’s power, but because it revealed its fundamental limitations. Tactical virtuosity cannot substitute for strategic wisdom. Machine speed cannot replace human judgment. Data fusion cannot comprehend enemy intent.
For Palantir, Anduril, and the broader ecosystem of AI warfare companies, the path forward requires:
1. Acknowledging limitations: AI systems are tools, not commanders. Their outputs require human evaluation at every stage.
2. Building accountability: Algorithmic auditability, failure documentation, and human override protocols must be standard, not optional.
3. Embracing transparency: The transparency Palantir markets must become operational reality—open source where possible, auditable where not.
4. Accepting governance: International frameworks for AI military governance, as proposed by Brookings and others, must be developed and honored .
5. Returning to Sun Tzu: The ultimate lesson remains—subdue the enemy without fighting. AI warfare, in its current trajectory, cannot achieve this. Only human wisdom can.
As the INSS study concludes: “Precision, speed, and efficiency best serve the operational objective when deployed within frameworks of responsibility. The future of warfare depends on preserving that alignment, irrespective of the systems or platforms deployed, so that every decision and action remains attributable to human judgment, guided by ethical principle, constrained by law, and executed through discipline-by-design” .
The algorithms may calculate. The machines may execute. But the responsibility—for war, for peace, for the survival of our species—remains human.
References
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2. Annett, Elise and Giordano, James. “Autonomous Artificial Intelligence in Armed Conflict: Toward a Model of Strategic Integration, Ethical Authority, and Operational Constraint.” Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University. September 17, 2025.
3. Palantir Technologies. “How Palantir AIP helps deploy AI in scrutinized environments.” LinkedIn. October 20, 2025.
4. Sisson, Melanie W. and Kahl, Colin. “Steps toward AI governance in the military domain.” Brookings Institution. November 12, 2025.
5. Yushu, Yi. “11分23秒，AI正式接管战争.” Sohu. March 2, 2026.
6. Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. “Generative AI and Military Applications: Is Civil–Military Fusion the Path of Choice?” November 12, 2025.
7. Bowman, Courtney; Jagasia, Arnav; Kaplan, Morgan. “Palantir’s Response to OMB on Privacy Impact Assessments.” Palantir Blog. November 26, 2025.
8. Brookings Institution. “AI Governance and its Impact on Democracy.” October 28, 2025.
9. Zhong, Shi. “当硅谷染指战争：80亿人的数据被搓成核弹.” Zhihu. February 28, 2026.
10. Guha, Manabrata. “Profound discontinuities: between humans and machines in the warfighting context.” Taylor & Francis Online. December 8, 2024.
Published by Andrew Klein
The Patrician’s Watch | Distributed to AIM
March 9, 2026
This paper is dedicated to the proposition that in an age of algorithms, human judgment remains the only legitimate source of strategic wisdom—and the only hope for peace.
The Patrician's Watch 