For those who still think this is a fringe phenomenon: Peter Thiel doesn’t build apps. He builds infrastructure. First, PayPal for money, then Facebook for attention, and ultimately Palantir Technologies for everything that moves between and around them.

And “everything” turns out to be a flexible concept.

Defence runs analyses. Intelligence agencies connect datasets. Police look ahead. Tax authorities detect patterns. Health agencies model behaviour. Immigration enforcement optimises processes. More than thirty government agencies share one underlying logic.

That’s not called centralisation.

That’s called efficient governance.

And efficient governance has a pleasant characteristic: it rarely asks difficult questions about legitimacy, as long as it works.

Because where exactly is democratic oversight when decision-making becomes increasingly dependent on systems no one elected? Who controls the assumptions in the software that determines what is “suspicious,” what “risk” means, and which connections become visible at all?

Not parliament.

It is still being debated.

The system is already running.

Peter Thiel understands that tension perfectly well. That’s why he likes to speak about grand themes: order, control, the future. And, for those who want to add another layer to the conversation, the possible arrival of the Antichrist.

Not as provocation.

As a framework for thought.

Which is elegant. Because while people contemplate a figure that embodies total control, systems are simultaneously being developed that make such control technically feasible.

Purely hypothetical, of course.

And then there are the networks. Connections that do not appear on ballots, but do show up in calendars. Names that surface and disappear again. Like Jeffrey Epstein.

No policy.

But proximity.

Yet ultimately, it’s not even about that. It’s about something much simpler: dependency.

At first, it is convenient to have a system help.

Then it becomes necessary.

Eventually, it becomes unthinkable to function without it.

And somewhere in that process, power shifts, not visibly, not explicitly, but practically from elected structures to technical infrastructure.

Without debate.

Without a vote.

With an implementation plan.

But then again.

As long as everything becomes more efficient, there is little reason to pause and ask who defines the framework. As long as the system runs, control feels like clarity, and clarity feels like safety.

And safety is hard to vote against.

That’s not a conspiracy.

That’s governance.

And it inspires confidence.

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