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24 April 2026 (Athens, Greece) - Our team is assembling in Athens, on our way to see our boss, Gregory Bufithis, on his remote island in the Dodecanese. The subject of this 4-day weekend retreat? Techno-fascism, which is "politely" defined as :
An emerging ideology describing the merger of authoritarian state power with corporate technological power, using AI, surveillance, and data control to bypass democratic processes and enforce top-down, right-wing governance. It blends technocratic superiority with nationalism, where private firms (e.g., in AI, and social media) set social policy.
On my flight to Athens to hook up with the team, I read “Google’s New Deep Research and Deep Research Max Agents Can Search the Web and Your Private Data".
This essay is somewhat long with lots of graphics, and it blends all the disparate "improvements" in Google’s AI capabilities that Google has been hawking over the last few months.
What caused me to stand up and rage was the rhetoric and tone. Google’s agent can search the Web (or what’s left of it after paywalls, AI slop, and information weaponization).
But the big news is that Google can and will process your files, cloud resources, data sets. With these data tucked into your profile on Mother Google, the kindergarten-color outfit will output a report with charts and analysis.
With a mindless repetition, this baroque content marketing write-up presents the innovation as "progress". Consultants, med tech professionals, or any knowledge worker from any industry has the Google and its AI "standing at your side". The good news for Google is that all the content resides on Mother Google’s servers.
This is a feature for you. Trust Mother Google.
Google is normalizing its access to billions of users’ information, just as OpenAI has done, just as Palantir has done.
And Google will do a much better job of presenting “your” information than you, a mere Google user and Google advertising consumer, could ever achieve. The essay blasts forth a "Gloria" structure for Googzilla.
Note to readers: If you are not into choral masses, the "Gloria" is a hymn of praise and thanksgiving to God. An 18th century Gloria would have been joyful; this Gloria is smarmy.
Deep integration, broad personal information, and a hoped-for dependence on Mother Google. Google is just doing what is logical.
What’s the problem?
Answer: Nobody should trust BAIT (big AI tech) outfits. These firms do what they want, dismiss annoying regulators, pay lobbyists - and follow Mother Google’s vision of what is right, true, and fair.
But there is a ton of stuff out there on this techno-facism. A post on Twitter noted the article "Palantir: Why Its Political Manifesto Is Causing a Stir”. A quote from the German publication DW.com:
Economist and former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis shared the original post with the comment: “If Evil could tweet, this is what it would say!”
What’s interesting is that these Palantirians have some of their "fellow travelers" in influential positions. The U.S. Deputy Secretary of War is a Palantirian, along with 25 additional hires the Pentagon made. Almost all U.S. health services are using it, as well as 6 countries in Europe for military and medical services. That's capture.
How is that working out? From my point of view, it is working out pretty well for some Palantirians. For example, Palantir, an intelware vendor, is now also protecting America’s foods. Hey, isn’t there supposed to be a government agency riding herd on beverages that feature lots of caffeine? No worries. Palantir has it covered.
Here’s another statement from the DW.com article:
Dutch populism researcher Cas Mudde described Palantir’s thread as a call for a world dominated by an authoritarian United States and controlled by tech surveillance companies, labelling it “Technofascism pure!” On LinkedIn, Mudde said its worldview disqualifies Palantir as a business partner. Europe should not only halt any new cooperation but “should divest from this technofascist company ASAP!”
When I consider the smarmy Google write up with the techno-militant attitude of Palantir, the issue becomes more serious than just indexing emails.
As Greg wrote to all of us in organizing this retreat:
Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg - they have clearly left the world of consequences behind. They float in a sensory-deprivation tank the size of the planet, in which their actions are only ever judged by themselves.
Because being truly rich doesn’t mean amassing enough money to afford superyachts, private jets, or a million acres of land. It means that everything becomes effectively free. Any asset can be acquired but nothing can ever be lost, because for soon-to-be trillionaires, no level of loss could significantly change their global standing or personal power. For them, the word failure has ceased to mean anything.
And so they can do anything, knowing they can never be held to account. If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all.
As Noah Hawley said in a recent article in the Atlantic Magazine, what we are talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes. Asked recently if there is any check on his power, Trump - himself now a billionaire, given his unending corruption, and by far the richest president in American history - said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me” Not domestic or international law, not the will of the voters, not God or the centuries-old morality of civic and religious life.
The tectonic political and social shift has been made.
Greg had sent us this clip of Peter Thiel from 2010, a guy Greg calls the Antichrist:
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