In Political Theology, Carl Schmitt explores sovereignty as the power to decide when the rules are insufficient. The sovereign decides when the normal legal rules need to be suspended and when a decisive judgment is necessary to preserve the state. Political orders do not require sovereign decision in every ordinary moment. Their everyday life can proceed through rules, offices, procedures, and habits. But those ordinary mechanisms depend on the prior possibility of a concrete decision in cases where the rules fail. That being said, such abstract rules, procedures, and moral principles cannot allow for such decisions. For a decision to truly be sovereign, it is not subject to these norms. The law does not stand on its own ground.
Michael Steinberger (whose libtardation masquerading as objective neutrality is nearly unreadable) quotes Alex Karp, in the biography of the piscine-cleped Palantir founder, as stating that Palantir's work is the wall that stands between modern Europe and a Europe where everyone is goose-stepping down the streets. This is because, Karp claims, numerous terrorist attacks have been prevented by Palantir that, if they had occurred, would have awoken the second era of forced Islamic exfiltration from Europe. I was struck by this line because it implies a profound incompetence on the part of liberal government in dealing with threats and adversity.
Post-Enlightenment liberal and democratic governments are incapable of serving the interests of the populace. Trump has made a Herculean effort in the United States to restore some effectiveness, but the problem is structural, not political. No bill passed through Congress, no Supreme Court decision, no amendment to the US Constitution (or any European equivalents) can solve the structural issue. Part of the problem is that decisiveness is suppressed and rendered impossible by the bureaucratic network. Make no mistake: Supreme Court decisions are entirely procedural matters, and in the last 2 years, have repeatedly challenged decisive actions by Trump.
This tension is not accidental. A liberal-constitutional order cannot write a general exception to all norms into the norms themselves without undermining the norms. It must suppress, proceduralize, bureaucratize, or hide the sovereign decision. This does not eliminate situations where the need for the state of exception arises.
A well-governed government upholds the well-being of the citizenry. To do so, there must occasionally be exceptional decisive action, especially in times of crisis. If the state fails in its duty in these instances, it may retain its legitimacy as a formal sovereign but prove it lacks capacity. If the state cannot make that decision, the decision migrates elsewhere. Whatever actor supplies the missing capacity assumes a sovereign function. It may not become sovereign in the formal juridical sense, but it becomes sovereign at the point where sovereignty matters most: the exception.
As the state fails and technology advances, technological capabilities and organizations step in to fill the shoes of sovereignty. Yet they only do this in a qualified sense. The formal sovereignty still belongs to the state because it is implicitly capable of disrupting its own norms. Functional sovereignty, however, rests with whoever actually makes decisions in times of crisis. The decisions in question are those that ordinarily belong to the state. Again, this is not a formal process or formal transition of sovereignty. Big tech does not abolish state sovereignty. Instead, it reveals that sovereignty has become fragmented, outsourced, and operationalized through technological systems. As private enterprises, they could not exist without some consumer or investment demand for their functional sovereignty. Existence of such demand indicates a failure of state sovereignty.
There are many examples that fit into this at different levels. As far back as Oracle’s first customer being the CIA, because the CIA needed to lean on an outside entity to put together the first relational databases, and also including the leaning on of private companies to control and manage information flows and push propaganda. Benjamin Franklin normatively declared that the postal system should belong to the government, and yet effective deliveries have been usurped by Amazon and effective communication has been usurped by the telegram the email the text message.
Palantir is one of the most striking examples. The rise of sensors in technology meant that more intelligence could be captured and observed, whether by police, the military, or other law enforcement agencies. More sensors mean more data, which must be understood in relation to all other data and meaningful context. Each new data inflow increases the complexity of reliably extracting intelligence. State intelligence apparatuses, militaries, and law enforcement agencies proved incapable of managing this complexity and drawing actual insights on their own.
These governmental organizations primarily operate to solve issues that should be solved upstream. Terror attacks could be prevented by not inviting foreigners by the millions and giving them free money. Crime and disorder are downstream from systemic problems such as “criminal justice reform” or electing judges who put insane people back on the streets (because they are insane). Empowering these hard-power entities, such as intelligence and armed forces, is treating the symptoms of the disease rather than the causes. The causes cannot be addressed because of liberal-democratic entropy. The symptoms cannot be treated by these entities alone because of the data's complexity. Hence, the need for a private enterprise like Palantir, which provides data ontology as a service.
The liberal state survives because technological intelligence systems perform the decisive work that the liberal state is too procedurally paralyzed to perform. In other cases, it survives because technological intelligence cleans up the mess caused by indecision.
The American Dynamism fund backs companies to serve a similar role. While the liberal state retains formal sovereignty, operational sovereignty lies with private-sector startups that can move quickly and operate like monarchies. Private tech companies, not the state, provide the operative capacity to build, decide, detect, deploy, manufacture, secure, and respond at crisis speed. The message American Dynamism sends is that the state is too slow, bureaucratic, and procedurally bound to meet exceptional threats. Therefore, startups must rebuild the practical machinery of national power.
Schmitt asks who decides. While private tech companies often do not make decisions directly, they increasingly provide the conditions under which the state makes them. Private entities like Palantir, Anduril, or SpaceX do not need to formally declare war, a state of exception, foreign policy, etc., to exercise operational sovereignty. But their status shifts from mere government contractors to something more when the state's core functions become impossible without them. In this era, the state of exception ceases to be a legal moment and becomes an operational environment in which private tech companies constitute the nervous system of sovereignty.
This is not libertarian privatization, in which the state's power decreases. The transfer of operational sovereignty empowers the state, even as it makes every effort to destroy itself. Critical functions need to be separated from the decay of democracy. The state retains symbols of legitimacy (courts, offices, chain of command. However, the ability to act on the exception increasingly depends upon companies that can supply the technological organs of decision.
Whatever steps into decide the exception does not necessarily become sovereign in the full juridical sense. But it does assume a sovereign function. If sovereignty is defined not by ceremonial legitimacy but by the concrete capacity to decide when normal rules are insufficient, then the technological actor that enables or makes such decisions becomes sovereign at the point of exception. The modern liberal state retains the title of sovereign while outsourcing the substance of sovereignty to technological systems it cannot fully understand, publicly justify, or democratically control.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.