Techno-authoritarianism

El Heraldo de México

March 16, 2026

BY RODRIGO GUERRA LÓPEZ, SECRETARY OF THE PONTIFICAL COMMISSION FOR LATIN AMERICA

E-mail: rodrigoguerra@mac.com

https://heraldodemexico.com.mx/opinion/2026/3/16/tecnoautoritarismo-780478.html

Peter Thiel is not merely a Silicon Valley billionaire. He is one of the most influential thinkers in contemporary technopolitical power. Founder of PayPal, he is also the founder of Palantir. The latter is not a simple software company, but rather a peculiar theory of the State transformed into a corporation for the strategic implementation of decisions based on big data.

Palantir condenses within a single institution surveillance, warfare, capital, and ideology. For instance, one of its most successful products is “Gotham.” For years, it has served the principal security and intelligence agencies around the world. For this reason, the problem posed by Palantir is not merely technical, but political and anthropological. When a platform becomes indispensable to policing, military strategy, and intelligence services, what emerges is “vendor lock-in”: the State no longer purchases merely a service, but the very intelligibility of its decisions. Technological dependence thus becomes a cession of sovereignty.

We are not dealing with a neutral instrument, but with the ideal infrastructure of a techno-authoritarian power capable of classifying populations, prioritizing targets, and concealing political decisions under the appearance of pure technical efficiency. A concrete example is “Maven”—AI-integrated software used in the Iran war—which transforms the decision-making chain to the point of reducing the human being to an almost symbolic guarantee. The question “who is a legitimate target?” thus risks shifting from human prudential judgment to an algorithmic optimization system. Something similar occurs in the field of migration: “Falcon” and “ImmigrationOS” enable the locating of individuals, the reconstruction of family ties, the tracking of mobility patterns, and the coordination of violent expulsions. The migrant ceases to appear as a face and a biography and instead becomes a “target” to be achieved.

Palantir is better understood when one examines the political theology inhabiting the mind of its founder. Thiel draws from John Henry Newman the duty to watch for the signs of the Antichrist; from René Girard, the intuition that mimetic violence structures history; and from Carl Schmitt, the friend–enemy distinction. The problem is that, where Girard saw in Christ the rupture of the sacrificial mechanism, Thiel retains the diagnosis of violence but shifts the response toward the accumulation of power. For Thiel, there must exist a force that restrains the Antichrist, and that force is always ambiguous, always one step away from becoming the Antichrist itself. The United States, in his reading, occupies precisely this liminal position.

Pope Francis warned at the G7 that no innovation is neutral and that AI may impose uniform models and reinforce a “technocratic paradigm.” The Vatican document Antiqua et nova insists that peace cannot be sustained by instruments that justify injustice, violence, or oppression; Leo XIV has reiterated that AI must be evaluated in light of the integral development of the human person and must never be confused with intelligence, much less with wisdom. Palantir thus becomes an important “sign of the times”: when technology promises to save us through total surveillance, algorithmic selection of enemies, and the logistical management of the vulnerable, power ceases to serve the human person and begins instead to demand obedience.