Peter Thiel has bought a $12 million house in the most exclusive area of Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has also held meetings with government officials and the president, who described the encounter as a “wonderful conversation among anarcho-capitalists.” But that’s not quite all.
The content of those conversations has not been made public; however, local media reports that Thiel held meetings with presidential advisor Santiago Caputo and the head of the Ministry of Deregulation and State Transformation, Federico Sturzenegger. According to those reports, these meetings addressed, among other topics, the country’s technological and energy potential.
When Thiel meets with government officials, we must assume that it is not simply out of a feeling of friendship. He is the co-founder of Palantir, a technology company specialized in selling surveillance software applied to civil and military scenarios so states. We should probably assume, as local media does, that those discussions were on the table, since Milei had expressed an interest beforehand and in 2024 founded the Artificial Intelligence Unit Applied to Security.
However, if we understand that Thiel is not just one man doing business, but is part of an organized group of individuals who control some of the largest technology companies and investment funds, and that this group has a specific agenda, the context of Thiel being in Argentina and meeting with the president and officials changes.
Further, if we also understand that this group of organized individuals has arrived at the upper echelons of the system’s power structure in the U.S. and that they are becoming an indispensable part of the government, it adds another layer of complexity.
For the past few years, Argentina has been the experimental ground for many of the policies that the U.S. has then implemented in other Latin American countries. Milei was among the first to come to power in a wave that has changed the colors of governments in the region—some through electoral processes, others through force.
Milei inherited a country with profound structural economic problems; problems that were created, in large part (though not underestimating other factors), by the loans and dictates of the IMF and the World Bank. Milei, who is an economist by training and became knwon as a TV commentator, has implemented some of the most drastic austerity measures of any country, tearing apart the social welfare aspect of the argentinian state. He defines himself as an anarcho-capitalist in philosophy and a minarchist in practice, and he shares many ideological traits with Peter Thiel.
Both men claim to despise the state; however, both men are sitting together discussing how to transform the state from being run by humans to being, effectively, run by algorithmic computation. Because, in essence, that is what Palantir does. It offers data integration and correlation to allow for helpful visualization and to optimize, according to them, the decision-making process.
However, when decisions are made based on a system that a human cannot understand—because the human brain simply cannot process the same amount of data at the same speed—the decision process has been effectively externalized to a technological device. This is what is happening in war, as seen in Gaza or Iran, but also in national surveillance, as exemplified by ICE, intelligence agencies, and increasingly other aspects such as the healthcare system.
But these systems are not impartial. They have been developed by a group of people with a clear agenda and in partnership with the political and financial class. These systems are designed to maintain the status quo by strengthening the control and surveillance capabilities of the state. This persists despite any other rhetorical argument, however incoherent, by the likes of Thiel and Milei.
“The purpose of a system is what it does.” This extremely useful heuristic, coined by cybernetic and system theorist Stafford Beer and recently covered by James Corbett in a Corbett Report podcast, applies here perfectly.
Despite the libertarian rhetoric of both individuals, the system one of them has designed and the other wants to implement produces the opposite of freedom for most people and maintains the status quo of power and finance. If that is what the system does, then that is the purpose of the system.
We should then not be surprised that the CIA was among the first investors in Palantir and that the company was able to grow through defense contracts. It shows the pragmatic acceptance by elites that, despite the rhetoric of its founders, their technological system would not radically alter the status quo; it would only take it to its next consequential logical step of monopoly and control.
When Thiel meets with Milei in Argentina, he is following the tradition of the “Black Ships,” a naval squadron that was sent to Japan by the U.S. in the mid-1800s in order to force Japan to open itself to the benefits of capitalist free trade. This “gunboat diplomacy” ended a society—whatever judgment we might hold of it—that had lasted for centuries. It introduced Japan into the Western financial system, making it dependent.
Thiel is essentially doing the same, with the difference that he has found willing ears. He is selling a system that, when implemented, makes the host country dependent on it. At that point, 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 the new form of dominance that the U.S. is developing and implementing because those who have developed it have become part of the government. Now, more than 18 countries worldwide have contracts with Palantir. Other than in the U.S. Palantir is firmely embedded in the government, or in the process of, in United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, and Israel. It also has reported usage in Australia, Denmark, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Qatar, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UAE
Peter Thiel and his ilk probably think that they have succeeded in their vision. This is what Thiel said in 2010:
“The basic idea was that we could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority, but maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people, who are never going to agree with you, through technological means; and this is where I think technology is this incredible alternative to politics.”
Though I would argue whether they are really changing the world, or just doing more of the same.
