The Colonization of Judgment

Technological revolutions always lead to a rewriting of the criteria upon which the credibility of knowledge depends. Consequently, terms such as truth, reality, universality, and objectivity tend to lose their traditional value. We saw such a principle take hold during the cultural climate we dubbed "postmodern"—what Gianni Vattimo considered the koinē of hermeneutics for our time. Upon reflection, the postmodern era challenged the very legitimacy of knowledge as it had been handed down. The technological revolution inherent to it was the digital revolution—one that, intellectually speaking, far predated the moment we began to engage with it in practice. Von Neumann’s theory of automata and Wiener’s cybernetics, dating back to the 1940s, already provide clear evidence of this.

Postmodernism tells us that the question of the legitimacy of knowledge is, ultimately, political. Gradually, the political establishment is beginning to realize this. Obama’s election campaigns and the Cambridge Analytica affair bear witness to this fact. Yet perhaps the political significance of the digital realm became most strikingly evident immediately after Donald Trump’s first election as President of the United States in 2016. Indeed, right after the election, Trump convened—at the suggestion of Peter Thiel—a summit with key leaders from the tech industry. All the big names from Silicon Valley were there: Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Sheryl Sandberg, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, and Satya Nadella. A meeting conceived in this way highlighted the profound transformation of American industry. The automotive giants—such as General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford—were no longer there; in their place stood the giants of the digital world.

The change in question corresponded to a shift in reality. However, what had changed most of all was the cultural and political attitude of entrepreneurs. They were no longer content—as they had been in the past—merely to propose economic directions for the country's policies; instead, they sought to steer them directly. This is clearly evident, among other things, in the writings of the most intellectual figures among IT industry leaders—such as Peter Thiel and Alexander Karp—who take the humanist tradition surprisingly seriously in their quest to establish the hegemony of digital power. For some time now, the digital humanities have been a field cultivated by a form of technological fundamentalism that gives cause for both reflection and concern. Early signs of this trend were already apparent with the release of The Technological Republic by Karp and Zamiska. Karp is an American billionaire entrepreneur with a strong background in classical studies and CEO of Palantir Technologies (a company providing software support for US defense), while Zamiska is an executive at the same firm. Karp co-founded the company alongside the more famous Peter Thiel. What is most remarkable, however, is the work's content. It serves as a sort of political manifesto by two Silicon Valley figures who envision the future in terms of technological governance—as the book's title itself suggests. Yet—and here lies the surprise—this is not a case of the usual "social engineering" from the top down. Rather, technology is meant to incorporate a form of humanism, where the "hard power" of machines blends with cultural convictions to shape nothing less than the future of the West (as reflected in the subtitle: "Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West"). This same technological utopia is now being revived by one of the key figures of digital turbo-capitalism: Peter Thiel, the creator of PayPal and founder of Palantir itself. Yet there is a fundamental and astonishing difference: while Karp and Zamiska propose a technology-inspired political vision, Thiel aims higher. In a recent article published in First Things, he ventures into what might be termed "scientific theology." It is worth noting that both Karp and Thiel were "Stanford boys" who, during their time at the university, fell under the spell of the great mystic René Girard. Furthermore, Karp studied extensively in Germany, earning his doctorate with a critical theory research group originally coordinated by Jürgen Habermas.

In essence, whatever else one might say about Thiel and Karp, one cannot deny that they operate not only in the shadow of vast capital but also upon a foundation of solid intellectual and cultural grounding. This enables them to challenge the legitimacy of knowledge—and, ultimately, the very meaning of knowledge. As postmodern thinkers have suggested, the legitimacy of knowledge is political in nature. Consequently, it serves as a compelling basis for establishing hegemony.

But there is more. If what is at stake is the structure of knowledge and its legitimacy—and thus the capacity of individuals to form autonomous judgments about the world—then Thiel and Karp’s project is not merely an attempt to secure positions of economic or political power. Rather, it seeks to redefine the conditions under which thought itself becomes possible or impossible. Hannah Arendt taught us that the collapse of the faculty of judgment does not necessarily require coercion; it can also come about through the silent replacement of deliberation with the sheer processing of data. This is what we have elsewhere termed "algorithmic banality"—not the wickedness of a system, but its structural indifference to the act of thinking, its tendency to churn out answers where the ability to formulate questions is what is actually needed. From this perspective, the true stakes of the techno-humanist project lie not so much in hegemony over markets or governments as in the colonization of the inner self: that capacity for self-questioning—for inhabiting uncertainty without prematurely dissolving it—which constitutes the irreducible core of any democratic experience worthy of the name.

The original version of this article was published by Corriere Della Serra on June 13, 2026.