Everything Is Computer - by Teodor Mitew - Turbulence

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Everything Is Computer<br>On Palantir's Manifesto and the Recompiling of the State

Teodor Mitew<br>May 20, 2026

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Everything is Computer (Flux by H1dalgo)<br>Every system that keeps itself together runs the same. Every system that breaks apart breaks in its own particular way. More, functional systems converge in a balancing act between adaptability and efficiency, a battle that ultimately ends in collapse or ecdysis. Failed systems, however, fail idiosyncratically because their blindness is local, path-dependent, and sacred to them.<br>If you imagine a system’s sensorium as a Kuhnian paradigm it uses to interface with reality, a system enters the Red Queen Trap and dies when its paradigm stops seeing its surroundings. The system still speaks and moves, but it cannot see. In its blindness, it chooses the path of least resistance, which is the repetition of what it did before. Inertia.<br>To paraphrase Tolstoy again, functioning systems invariably converge in their modes of perception, while failing ones diverge into their own private blindness. In this blindness, they accumulate anomalies, internal complexity, and rising incoherence. When anomalies accumulate beyond a system’s internal tolerance for incoherence, the system collapses.<br>A system trying to escape inertia, path dependency, and the Red Queen Trap appears to move orthogonally to the dominant paradigm surrounding it. Much like Satie’s Gnossiennes, its grammar does not sound like progress at all, because progress is linear movement within an existing perception paradigm.<br>Instead, it sounds like a strange return, or an incomprehensible detour, sparse and archaic, but played on modern or even futuristic machinery. Thinking orthogonally is not easy at all, as it requires abandoning the assumptions of the dominant paradigm one moves away from.<br>When I first read Palantir’s manifesto, I thought of Satie’s Gnossiennes. Absurd and preposterous association, yeah, I know. Whatever. Satie abandoned the then-dominant romanticism to its own exhaustion and took a sideways step into a much older grammar, making his version of modernity sound fresh and alien again.<br>He just checked himself out of the established paradigm and started building his own musical grammar stack. You can just do things. The manifesto does the same thing politically, by stepping orthogonally into the archaic grammar of duty, service, hierarchy, faith, power, and national form, only to then wire them to AI and futurism.<br>In times of crisis, people flock to the certainty of hierarchical power and authority. Similarly, and contrary to cyberpunk dystopias, when facing near-future labor and battlefield obsolescence, people will flock to power stacks ready to provide them with protection and meaning. This is part of the logic of the Gated Age. Peter Thiel and Alex Karp are clearly operating in that concept space already.<br>The Manifesto Is Not For You Or Me<br>I wouldn’t bother reading the manifesto as persuasion. Why would Palantir want or care to persuade the doomscrolling, left-swiping masses, anon? Why do people still engage in the great delusion that the State, and the oligarchic factions behind it, deeply care what they think? A belated spoiler alert, if you still need it: they don’t, and never have.<br>Instead, I read the manifesto as alignment signaling between oligarchic factions already negotiating the framework for the new Gated Age state. It most certainly is not a pitch deck (to whom?), a provocation for journalists (lmao), or a vibes document for anxious peptide-maxxing founders who suddenly discovered Rome after their third ketamine-adjacent podcast.<br>It is a sovereignty document.<br>More precisely, it is a fragment of a dinner conversation allowed to leak. The intended audience is the class already negotiating the replacement of the exhausted universal progressive state with something harder, thinner, faster, more computational, more lethal, and less embarrassed by its raw power.<br>They know that we know we are not the audience. That is part of their message, anon. Cherish their honesty.<br>I also do not assume, even for a moment, that we have the full picture to analyze Palantir’s true position here. As I wrote in The Red Queen Trap, the fact that you do not understand someone’s planning does not mean they do not have a plan. It usually means you do not have enough data.<br>So I read Palantir’s manifesto as a condensation event seen through a glass, darkly. The old universal superstructure, the therapeutic state, the app economy, the postwar security order, soft power, cultural pluralism, bureaucratic government, moralized politics, and nuclear deterrence are all being declared insufficient at once.<br>The manifesto speaks in fragments, the priestly language of the coming stack-state. Cherish their honesty.<br>Palantir is announcing the software reconstruction of sovereignty. In hindsight, the name was always the tell, if you had...