Earlier this month, multibillion-dollar US tech company Palantir posted on X a summary of its chief executive Alex Karp’s recent book, the portentously titled The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.

The book and the post offer a kind of manifesto, making sweeping claims about a hierarchy of civilisations, the rejection of pluralism, Silicon Valley’s moral obligation to US military power, the necessity of AI-powered weapons, and the case for compulsory military service.

The manifesto has met widespread criticism. Some commentators have compared the rhetoric to the monologue of a comic-book villain: grand, moralising, tinged with a sense of historical destiny.

But the manifesto is more than just corporate posturing: it’s helping to construct a new geopolitical reality and normalise a worldview that concentrates power beyond democratic accountability.

From tools to worldviews

For the past two decades, large technology firms have mostly presented themselves as benevolent service providers. They build tools; governments and users decide what to do with them.

That distinction has always been convenient, but it is looking less and less tenable. For some, Karp’s manifesto offered a grim sense of confirmation of the change. As Austrian philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh put it, “reading it is like opening a food item that you suspected has gone off, but you didn’t know it was that much off”.

Palantir is not just any tech company. Its software, offering “AI-powered automation for every decision”, is embedded in military, intelligence and policing systems – not just in the United States, but in many other countries across Europe, the Middle East and Australia.

When a company in that position denounces “regressive” cultures and “hollow” pluralism, it is asserting a worldview rather than just selling technology.

As the manifesto puts it: “the ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power.” Here, “hard power” means not just military force but the technological systems that shape how force is used.

Palantir’s systems shape how threats are identified, interpreted and acted upon. So when the company advances claims about civilisational decline and the necessity of strength, it is also helping define the terms on which power is exercised.

A stakeholder letter or something older?

In one view, the manifesto is a corporate position paper or a statement of values aimed at investors, partners, the public and policymakers. But there is something older in its form.

It is reminiscent of Cicero, the Roman statesman and master of rhetoric, in its talk of decline, virtue, duty and the survival of the republic. It frames technological development not as a market activity but as a moral obligation tied to the fate of civilisation.

Like classical republican oratory, it asserts that survival depends on strength. And today, that strength is technological.

Cicero wasn’t simply expressing his own opinions when he spoke. He was asserting a right to speak on behalf of the republic. In the same way, Palantir is positioning itself as a legitimate interpreter of civilisational stakes.

The shift from argument to atmosphere

The manifesto does not argue via carefully reasoned policy claims. Instead it offers declarative statements: that some cultures are “harmful”, that pluralism has become “vacant”, that technological strength is the ultimate guarantor of civilisation. These establish a mood: urgency, decline, necessity.

The effect is to manufacture a sense of inevitability. It works via tone and framing rather than evidence, setting the background conditions under which certain policies feel necessary rather than debatable.

Once that atmosphere is in place, the range of acceptable responses shrinks. Palantir is helping to construct geopolitical realities, rather than respond to them.

Supervillain or Cicero? It’s both

Palantir’s rhetoric does bear comparison to the ranting of fictional supervillains. Both feature sweeping claims about decline and the need for decisive action.

Palantir also exempts itself from the accountability that might accompany its claims. Comic-book villains believe they see more clearly than others, but they also place themselves above constraints that apply to everyone else.

The structure of the argument feels familiar. The world is in crisis, the options are narrowing, and power must be expanded beyond normal limits.

Seen this way, the villain tone and the Cicero-like register are two expressions of the same underlying move. It is an effort to define reality at a civilisational scale, from a position that answers to no one.

An infrastructure project

This worldview did not emerge overnight. It has been developed over years through op-eds in prestige newspapers and published by major mainstream houses before being compressed into a social media thread that reached millions in hours.

When companies that build and operate core security technologies put considerable resources into developing and promoting stories about civilisation and its future, their language is not just expression. It is a kind of infrastructure for their actions in the real world.

By the time most people notice the rhetoric, the infrastructure it justifies is already in place.

But the future trajectory of this worldview is not set. The history of democratic politics is, in part, a history of people recognising when power has overreached and building the collective capacity to say so.

That work is not heroic in the comic-book sense. It doesn’t focus on a single figure or decisive moment. It starts with understanding precisely how the manufacture of inevitability works, so what is presented as necessary can be seen as a choice – before it is made for us.

Daniel Baldino does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Warning: this article contains details of injuries sustained during a terrorist attack.

The 2025 Bondi Beach terrorist attack was different to other terrorism incidents. What stands out was the response.

Lifeguards, off-duty doctors and nurses, and members of the public worked alongside ambulance paramedics and community first-responders to triage and treat the injured. In all, 16 people died, including one of the gunmen.

I’m a paramedic, medical doctor, researcher and the clinical lead of Community Health Support – a volunteer medical first-responder charity set up by the Jewish community in Sydney. I had been training our teams for a disaster like this for four years, and helped co-ordinate the organisation’s emergency response at Bondi that day.

In a paper published in the Medical Journal of Australia, my colleagues and I describe how our organisation prepared for and responded to the Bondi attack, how we helped our community recover, and the lessons we learned.

How the day unfolded

At 6.42pm on December 14 2025 two gunmen began shooting at the crowd of about 600 Jewish community members celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach in Sydney.

Within minutes, 000 emergency lines were overwhelmed with callers.

At the same time, people sheltering from the bullets began applying first aid to their injured friends and family.

Local lifeguards and volunteer lifesavers rushed to the aid of the 42 injured survivors who ended up going to hospital, and the many more who were treated at the scene. Doctors, nurses and good samaritans, who just happened to be nearby, also responded. These so-called spontaneous or “zero responders” arrived before “first responders” such as ambulance crews, Community Health Support medics, and police.

Two minutes after police declared the scene safe to enter, the forward commander for Community Health Support entered the scene with the first few paramedics from NSW Ambulance. He radioed it was safe for our team of 19 responders, about 500 metres away, to follow him in.

Here’s what we learned as we helped triage and treat survivors at the scene.

Terror attack injuries are different

Sadly, the events at Bondi confirmed what experts had recently begun to suggest. The pattern of injuries we see in terror attacks are different to those typically seen in war zones, despite the same weapons being used.

Soldiers wear ballistic vests and helmets, so when they are shot, it is usually in the arms and legs.

When civilian victims are shot in a terror attack, it is more likely in the torso and head, making these injuries more deadly. This pattern of injuries also makes it much harder to stop life-threatening bleeding.

For heavily bleeding limbs, a specific type of tourniquet can be lifesaving. This arterial tourniquet is a bandage-like device with a windlass (winding rod) in the middle to tighten it and compress the artery.

These devices became widely used during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and became synonymous with military medicine.

All Community Health Support responders and ambulance paramedics carried these tourniquets in their medical kits at Bondi. Unfortunately, tourniquets can’t be improvised using belts or clothing – these just don’t work. Very few arterial tourniquets were needed because of the injury pattern of civilian terrorism.

For patients with penetrating trauma to the torso, the only definitive treatment is to get them into an operating theatre without delay.

We had to prioritise

Community Health Support volunteers and NSW Ambulance paramedics are trained in triage during mass casualty incidents, such as a terror attack. This system prioritises who to treat first to save the most lives in the short time before patients can bleed to death.

To an outsider, this may sound harsh, but we typically don’t do CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) during mass casualty incidents where people have been shot or stabbed.

That’s because CPR works when someone’s heart is the first organ that has stopped, or someone’s stopped breathing from lack of oxygen. Unfortunately, when there’s no blood to circulate due to bleeding out from a gunshot or stabbing, CPR is mostly futile.

We found it was emotionally difficult to keep treating the highest priority patients when others were asking for help to resuscitate victims, despite the unsurvivable nature of their injuries.

Ambulance services use a traditional triage tag system for mass casualty incidents. Patients are tagged with a red tag if critical, yellow for urgent, green for walking wounded, and black for deceased.

However, we felt it was psychologically harmful to ask our volunteers to potentially tag their own friends and family members as “deceased”. Instead, in preparation for mass casualty incidents like this, we implemented the “ten second” triage system from the United Kingdom. This is where patients are triaged faster (in about ten seconds), and tagged as “not breathing” rather than “deceased”.

These people are placed on their side until there are enough trained medical responders to go back and consider CPR (after prioritising living patients with major bleeding).

We faced unknown risks

Within an hour of the shootings starting, police found several undetonated improvised explosive devices (homemade bombs) and began moving patients and rescuers away.

This turns on its head the traditional idea adopted during the Cold War to classify zones as hot, warm or cold. Back then, these labels categorised the level of risk to rescuers entering an area where a nuclear or chemical weapon had detonated. This thinking, of categorising areas based on an unchanging perception of risk, has continued to this day.

But it suffers from one small drawback: terrorists don’t play by the rules, and situations change rapidly.

We suspect these homemade bombs could have been used to inflict more injuries to responders rushing in to help the wounded. In the past, such second waves of terror attacks have specifically targeted first responders.

So in the future, we need to think of risk as something that changes and comes in “phases”, rather than simply in terms of zones. It means emergency responders need to be on constant alert, and keep teams in reserve in case there are other nearby attacks.

Reflections for the future

It is essential communities prepare themselves for disasters. Thanks to preparation, our responders, the ambulance teams, and local hospitals rose to the occasion on an extremely difficult day.

As we reflect on lessons learned, we continue to share these with our colleagues in disaster medicine globally.

We hope our lessons go some way to helping the next community prepare for tragedy when it inevitably strikes.

Dr Aidan Baron was the medical incident controller for the Jewish community on the day of the Bondi Beach attack, and is the clinical lead with Community Health Support.