Alex Karp uses the Frankfurt School， deliberately misunderstanding it in order to use it.

Karp wrote his PhD under Habermas arguing that invoking "ontology" is a form of ideological violence. Then he built a company whose core product is called the Ontology and sold it to every intelligence agency and military targeting chain he could find （And I mean that in a value-neutral way. Criticism of Palantir as a concept would be a different discussion.）

His manifesto warns against the "tyranny of the apps，" invokes moral duty （Point 1）， and reads like Frankfurt School cultural criticism. But every single point follows the same logic： there's a threat， only technology solves it， we are the technology. Adorno and Horkheimer warned that reason turns mythological when it becomes pure means-ends calculation （Dialectic of Enlightenment）. The manifesto however does exactly this. it wraps the language of civic virtue around a business that draws over half its revenue from government contracts. Point 1 says Silicon Valley owes the nation a moral debt； the debt has an invoice number.