Peter Thiel bought a $12 million house in a very exclusive area of Buenos Aires, Argentina. He also held meetings with government officials and the president, who described the meeting as “a good conversation between anarcho-capitalists.” But it doesn’t end there.
The content of those conversations was not made public; However, local media sources report that Thiel has held meetings with presidential adviser Santiago Caputo and the head of the Department of Deregulation and Destabilization, Federico Sturzenegger. According to those reports, the meetings discussed, among other topics, the country’s technological and energy capabilities.
When Thiel meets with government officials, we have to assume that it is not just a feeling of friendship. He is the founder of Palantir, a technology company specializing in the sale of surveillance software used in civil and military situations. We should probably assume, as the local media did, that those negotiations were on the table, since Milei has expressed her interest before and in 2024 established the Artificial Intelligence Unit Applied to Security.
However, if we understand that Thiel is not just a single person who does business, but is part of an organized group of people who control some of the largest technology companies and investment funds, and that this group has a specific agenda, the context that Thiel is in Argentina and meets with the president and officials changes.
Furthermore, if we also understand that this group of organized people has reached the highest level of the US systemic power structure and that it is becoming an important part of the government, it adds another layer of complexity.
Over the past few years, Argentina has been a testing ground for many of the policies the US has implemented in other Latin American countries. Milei was among the first to rule in a wave that changed the colors of governments in the region—some through electoral processes, others by force.
Milei inherited a country with deep structural economic problems; problems that were created, in large part (although not underestimating other factors), by loans and mandates from the IMF and the World Bank. Milei, who is an economist by training and is known as a TV commentator, has used some of the strictest measures of austerity in any country, dividing the social sector of the country of Argentina. He describes himself as an anarcho-capitalist in philosophy and a minarchist in practice, and shares many ideological traits with Peter Thiel.
Both men say they despise the state; however, the two men sat together discussing how to transition from being run by people to being, effectively, driven by algorithmic computation. Because, in fact, that’s what Palantir does. It provides data integration and correlation to allow useful visualization and improve, according to them, the decision-making process.
However, when decisions are made based on a system that cannot be understood by a human being—because the human brain simply cannot process the same amount of data at the same speed—the decision process has been effectively outsourced to a technological machine. This is what happens in war, as seen in Gaza or Iran, but also in national surveillance, as shown by ICE, intelligence agencies, and other growing aspects such as the health system.
But these programs are not selective. They are developed by a group of people with a clear agenda and in cooperation with the political and financial class. These programs are designed to maintain the status quo by strengthening government control and oversight. This continues despite any other rhetorical conflict, however inconsistent, by the likes of Thiel and Miley.
“The purpose of a system is what it does.” This very useful benefit, put together by cybernetic and systems theorist Stafford Beer and recently put together by James Corbett on the Corbett Report podcast, applies here perfectly.
Despite the libertarian propaganda of both peoples, the system that one of them designed and the other wants to implement produces the opposite of the freedom of many people and maintains the status quo of power and finance. If that’s what the program does, that’s the program’s purpose.
It should come as no surprise that the CIA was among the first investors in Palantir and that the company was able to grow through defense contracts. It shows a practical acceptance by some elites that, despite the propaganda of its founders, their technical system will not significantly change the status quo; it will take it to its next step in the hierarchy of governance and control.
When Thiel meets Milei in Argentina, he follows the tradition of the “Black Ships,” a naval force sent to Japan by the US in the mid-1800s to force Japan to open up to the benefits of capitalist free trade. This “gun talk” ended a society—whatever judgment we might have had—that had existed for centuries. It introduced Japan to the Western financial system, making it dependent.
In fact, Thiel did the same, the difference is that he got willing ears. You are selling a program that once implemented will make the host country dependent on it. At that time, decisions will not be made by humans, however imperfect, but by algorithmic computation-algorithms that have a clear bias because they are built that way.
That is a new form of governance that the US is developing and using because those who developed it are now part of the government. Now, more than 18 countries around the world have contracts with Palantir. Outside the US Palantir is firmly embedded in the government, or process, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, and Israel. It also reported use in Australia, Denmark, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Qatar, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UAE.
Peter Thiel and his friends probably think they have succeeded in their vision. This is what Thiel said in 2010:
“The basic idea was that we would never win an election because we were a small minority, but maybe you could change the world without constantly convincing people and persuading people and persuading people, who won’t agree with you, through technical means; and that’s where I think technology is an amazing way of politics.”
Although I would argue that they are really changing the world, or they are just doing the same.
