War is Silicon Valley's new business

Today I am providing my English translation of an article by Glauco Benigni, originally in Italian and published first on ItaliaNelFuturo.com on Wednesday 3rd December 2025 and then on ComeDonChisciotte.org on Sunday 7th December 2025.
(All formatting and footnotes original).

Over the last 30 years, a fifth Caste has been added to the four dominant Castes that have been handed down through history, namely Brahmins, Merchants, Warriors and Scribes: the Caste of Digital Tycoons. Many of them are former executives involved in the various processes that took place at the end of the 1990s in the “forge” of PayPal. They are “affectionately” known as the PayPal Mafia. Now fifty-year-old billionaires, these former Silicon Valley youngsters grew up in the cyber world, combining the skills of the previous castes and conquering important parts of Nasdaq, every social network, artificial intelligence and e-commerce. What’s more, they have a monopoly in the West on the collection and processing of big data.

Today, each of them is a mix of Brahmin, Merchant and Scribe. For some time now, they have also been revealing themselves as Warriors, both because they build and manage the weapons of Cognitive Warfare and because they have put their knowledge and best practices at the service of the Armed Men (Pentagon, Intelligence, Private Security), in many cases eliminating the distance between the client (the Warrior State) and the contract manager and, as we shall see, officially taking on prestigious positions in the institutions to which they provided services and consultancy.

The leading representatives of this new Caste are: Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, founders in 2003 of Palantir (a technology company specialising in big data analysis and artificial intelligence). The two are known as “the architects” of the new system; Elon Musk, now known as “the voice of the techno-populist right”; Davide Sacchi, known as “the techno-currency czar”, and Marc Andreessen, the ideologue of acceleration. To these must be added J.D. Vance, US Vice-President (according to gossip columns: Peter Thiel’s boyfriend) and Donald Trump Jr., son of the current occupant of the White House. Of course, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are also closely linked to the Circus of Wonders we have described. This is undoubtedly a “fine little team”, whose financial strength (turnover and stock market capitalisation) amounts to several trillion US dollars. In other words, more than the 2024 national GDPs of countries such as the UK, Germany or France.

Trump has surrounded himself with them in the hope – not even a secret one – that they can anaesthetise many of the fractures and pains still caused by the Deep State. How? Mainly by exercising remote control over antagonists and cognitive warfare: sophisticated activities that you can engage in if you have computing power and networks, megaservers, microchip production and the cloud at your disposal. In essence, Trump’s choices are consolidating the new powers of the third millennium, namely the Webcracy that I describe at length in my book of the same name.

The new Caste has made its way into the White House, NASA, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, and is taking the helm of change in the US, first thanks to the cuts made by Elon Musk’s DOGE programme and now thanks to funding diverted to the digital bosses and taken away from the old Fordist world figures who have ended up in the shadows.

At the end of July 2025, in the labyrinthine corridors of the Pentagon, the US Army calmly signed away a piece of its sovereignty. A ten-billion-dollar contract with Palantir Technologies – one of the largest contracts in the history of the Department of Defence – was presented to the public and promoted in the business world as a step towards “efficiency”. The contract consolidated seventy-five previous procurement agreements into a single mutual commitment. This new relationship is considered a fundamental strategic step, thanks to which military functions are conferred on a private company. So far, there would be little to be surprised about if its founder, Peter Thiel, did not go on television to declare the Truth as seen from his privileged observatory: “freedom and democracy are no longer compatible”.

Translated: “You are all being monitored 24/7 without your knowledge, and we use your Big Data to guide your choices and make you like robots”. Honestly, Westerners living in NATO territories should not sleep peacefully after hearing these words: in addition to the spectre of war looming over us, we are now being told to forget the dream of freedom and to go along with the new aggressive and belligerent technological tyranny.

A nice little s****y programme, which goes hand in hand with the implied statement to the peoples already involved in the delirium of conflict: “Stop shooting each other or we won’t sell you any more weapons”.

We are therefore witnessing an increasingly authoritarian technology that tends towards dictatorship. In this scenario, US Vice President J.D. Vance, supported in his election campaign with $15 million from Peter Thiel, has become the face of techno-right governance. Behind him, his financier and boyfriend has firmly established himself in the techno-military heart of the state.

Waving the flag of “patriotic technology”, this new bloc is building the infrastructure of control: clouds, artificial intelligence, financial positioning, drones, satellites, an integrated system that Americans call the authoritarian Stack¹. A faster, more ideological and almost completely privatised form of governance: a regime in which the boards of digital corporations, rather than public law, set the rules.

Some US media outlets describe Webcracy as a large lobby that operates with powers similar to those of the state: it writes or omits rules as its interests change, wins contracts and exports its model to Europe, where it poses a direct challenge to what remains of the Old Continent’s democratic governance. A governance so fragile and sick that it is unable to react. So let’s clarify one thing: Silicon Valley is no longer building search engines, social networks and apps, it is building a new empire. Or at least it is trying with all its might. Which is no small thing.

The prophecies about society made by some contemporary thinkers are coming true. Authors such as Jeremy Rifkin, in discussions on the access economy, or theorists who analyse surveillance capitalism, such as Shoshana Zuboff, examine how control over data, the tools that generate and manage it, and the networks that collect and convey it, has created new power dynamics, often surpassing the tradition of mere monetary exchange.

According to some analysts, Webcracy has taken states hostage by satisfying one of their primary needs, if not the most important one: the efficient control and organisation of the consensus of their citizens. To demonstrate this, let us summarise the roles occupied by some members of the New Caste.

Michael Kratsios ==> Former chief of staff to Thiel, he now heads the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Michele Obadal ==> An executive at Anduril, he was appointed undersecretary of Defence despite retaining $1 million in company shares.

Gregorio Barbaccia ==> After a decade at Palantir, he is now the Federal Chief Information Officer at the White House.

Clark Minore ==> comes from Palantir and has become Chief Information Officer at Health and Human Services (HHS).

Then there are the “placements” in the military ranks. In June 2025 alone, four former executives from technology companies such as Palantir, Meta and Open AI were sworn in as lieutenant colonels in the US Army. They are: Shyam Sankar, Andrea Bosworth, Kevin Bene and Bob Mc Grew.

It is likely that our [Italian] Minister of Defence, Guido Crosetto, has been seduced by such examples and, more modestly, after denouncing that we are in the midst of a hybrid war in which “banks or hospitals can go haywire”, he wants to address the situation by creating a National Cyber Army, hiring several thousand units, among which – it is expected – a large percentage of hackers.

Guys... the die is cast! War tout court, war.com, has become the engine of development for NATO countries and is leading us towards privatised military sovereignty. Unlike the old authoritarianism built on fear and force, this new system governs through algorithms, the anarchic proliferation of financial capital and the ownership of networks that carry digital signals (web, telephones, TV, etc.).

Today in the US, Trumpism favours war.com, fuelling and justifying risky investments ==> investments take the State hostage ==> the State secures many contracts and in turn the contracts produce infrastructure ==> infrastructure such as megaservers, clouds, low-altitude satellites, cable networks, etc., become indispensable to the population and generate large profits ==> profits finance more risky investments...and so on, to the detriment of State Sovereignty and in favour of the Digital Oligarchy.

Let’s see which venture capital firms are currently active in the scenario described above:

Founders Fund, Thiel’s $17 billion flagship company, took Anduril from a valuation of $1 billion to $30.5 billion. It was the first institutional investor in Palantir and SpaceX, which are Thiel and Musk’s respective “crown jewels”. Palantir’s quarterly revenue now exceeds $1 billion, up 53% thanks to government contracts.

1789 Capital was founded by Thiel’s confidants and recently acquired by Donald Trump Jr. It has grown from $150 million to over $1 billion. It directs tens of millions towards certain areas of Musk’s empire: SpaceX (satellites and orbital dominance) and xAI (Artificial Intelligence for military purposes).

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), through its “American Dynamism” fund, supports defence technology and what it calls the “builders of the American State”. Andreessen rallied Silicon Valley’s billionaire class to support Trump’s 2024 campaign.

Smaller giants such as 8VC and General Catalyst reinforce the model. 8VC poured $300 million into Anduril; General Catalyst led several hundred million and some billion dollar fundraisers.

The five domains of privatised sovereignty

Critical State infrastructure is being privatised in five sectors – data, defence, space, energy and money – the foundations of contemporary power. These domains constitute the architecture of privatised sovereignty: a technological regime in which power manifests itself through algorithms, laws, infrastructure, platforms and automated procedures.

1st Domain: Crypto Sovereignty achievable through a privatised monetary system with “quasi-central” banking powers that separate the issuance and governance of money from democratic control.

2nd Domain: Nuclear-AI Sovereignty. Data Centres/Megaservers for Artificial Intelligence powered by nuclear energy running on private networks.

3rd Domain: Sovereignty over Space Orbits. SpaceX (launch vehicles), Starlink (civilian), Starshield (military), Starship (global logistics), Golden Dome (an ambitious layered missile defence system designed to defend the United States from ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missile attacks entrusted to Elon Musk), Palantir and Anduril (cutting-edge technologies, including autonomous military drones, artificial intelligence systems applied to military operations and rocket engines).

4th Domain: Military Sovereignty. Automated warfare with AI commanding the battlefield. A $22 billion contract managed by Anduril, in which the German company Rheinmetall also participates.

5th Domain: Big Data Sovereignty. Organisation of State decision-making. A $10 billion contract managed by Palantir.

The European trap

By mid-2025, the first effects of privatised sovereignty were already being felt across Europe. In Rome, Italian defence officials moved to integrate Elon Musk’s Starlink into military communications.

In Berlin, Rheinmetall and Anduril expanded their joint venture to deploy swarms of autonomous drones for NATO. The German variants of the drones still run on Californian code. Musk broadcasts live with Alice Weidel of the AfD, endorsing the German far right while simultaneously providing signal transport capabilities to NATO.

In London, the NHS (National Health Service) has signed a £330 million contract with Palantir to organise 50 million patient records. Meanwhile, a £1.5 billion defence partnership ties Britain to Palantir’s artificial intelligence systems.

In France, the Palantir Platform has been adopted by the Ministry of the Interior to carry out anti-terrorism and predictive policing analyses. Anduril Systems (EU Frontex Programmes) are being evaluated as an integration of border surveillance and drones.

None of these decisions were made following any real public debate. Little information has appeared in the mainstream media. The overall picture confirms the systematic “outsourcing” of European sovereignty to American digital oligarchs whose ideology openly undermines democracy. Control is being ceded with every contract signed.

Once Palantir becomes indispensable, once Anduril drones are standard NATO weapons, once nuclear plants power the AI that manages everything else… the transformation is irreversible. Europe faces an existential choice: build true technological sovereignty now, or accept governance exercised through platforms whose architects see democracy as a slow and obsolete operating system.

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1. A stack is a data structure used in computer science that operates on the Last-In-First-Out (LIFO) principle. This means that the last item you put into the stack is the first one to come out. It’s like a pile of chips. You can’t remove a chip from the middle without changing the entire stack.