The Mortal God

3 in AI Series: Hobbes’s Leviathan is alive. It hums in a data center in the Trans-Pecos, and its prophets have published a manifesto.

Palantir Technologies, a surveillance-analytics company, posted a twenty-two-point manifesto to X on a Saturday in April. Compiled from a book titled “The Technological Republic.” Palantir offered an essay-length tract that read like a creed for its disciples. Silicon Valley, it intoned, had incurred a moral debt to the nation that enabled its success. The age of the atom was ending; a new era of deterrence based on A.I. was coming. Only hard power could protect free and democratic societies, and in this century, hard power would be forged in software. The post concluded by rebuking “the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism,” and insisting that some cultures had given rise to miracles, whereas others had been “middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.” By the following week it had racked up more than thirty- two million views. Readers called it technofascism laid bare. Palantir called it honesty.
Philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh, writing on Medium, noted that Palantir’s politics resembled those of Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century English philosopher who thought that, in the absence of an absolute sovereign, mankind lurches about in a war of all against all, ever hungry and afraid. The connection goes beyond structure to matters of architecture. Palantir hasn’t just found inspiration in Hobbes: It has set out to operationalize his work, Leviathan.

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Thomas Hobbes wrote “Leviathan” in 1651, in the wake of the English Civil War. Leviathan’s premise is crude and awesome. Prior to the establishment of commonwealths, in what Hobbes calls the state of nature, every individual has a natural right to everything, including other people’s bodies. Because all people are nearly equal in strength and intellect, that right leads to a situation of universal distrust. Life in the state of nature, Hobbes writes in his best-known sentence, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

The solution to this problem is the social contract. Individuals give up their natural rights to a sovereign authority, an “Artificiall Man” bigger and stronger than any individual, who wields absolute and uncontested power. This sovereign is the Leviathan, the god in mortality. Its soul is sovereignty. Its joints are “magistrates.” Its nerves are rewards and punishments. Its memory, “counselors.” Its reason, “equity, and law.” Its health, “concord.” Its sickness, “sedition.” Its death, civil war.

The metaphor here is mechanical. The body politic is a machine, and the sovereign its motor. What Hobbes merely envisioned, though, Palantir has engineered. The Leviathan of today doesn’t reign from a throne. It buzzes in a building without windows in the West Texas desert, or in an anonymous office complex in Northern Virginia, and it sees everything.

• • •

To grasp what Palantir’s manifesto is arguing, it helps to grasp what Palantir does. To do that, we have to take a quick tour of modern surveillance.

In 2003, Palantir Technologies saw its founding, with Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist, joining Karp as a co-founder and angel investor. The company received initial seed funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture-capital fund. Palantir developed its business early on by selling its services to intelligence agencies for post-September 11th work. Essentially, Palantir’s core offering is a software platform designed to bring together vast amounts of data from different places, figure out how the people or things within it are connected, and then show those connections so analysts can make sense of it all. The entities are overwhelmingly people. The relationships plotted include where they travel, how they communicate, how they pay for things, who they know, and their behavioral patterns. The agencies who utilize that plotting include the U.S. Army, the NSA, ICE, and police departments nationwide. Earlier this year, the company’s C.T.O., Shyam Sankar, told the Times that Palantir’s ‘biggest known client is the military working groups to find people to kill.’ Last year Palantir raked in $4.5 billion, sixty percent from federal contracts.

Read in that context, the manifesto reads less like an indictment of government and industry collusion than as an admission of guilt. Palantir argues that the business model of the company serves the national interest. The country needs defending, and Silicon Valley engineers have a duty to help. The issue is no longer whether autonomous weapons systems will be deployed. It is who will deploy them. Enemies don’t ‘wait for us to have a debate.’ They won’t ‘stand by politely.’ They will build them. We will build them too.

Thomas Hobbes would have nodded knowingly. Fear, Leviathan tells us, is the motor of the social contract. We cede our rights because it could always be worse. That the Leviathan can provide security is the only reason it should provide security. In the same way, Palantir’s manifesto tells us that the world is scary. Our enemies are right here. They are ploting. You don’t have time for this debate. Give your fears over to the sovereign, and it will protect you from them.

• • •

What the manifesto doesn’t acknowledge, and what Hobbes could not have foreseen, is that today’s Leviathan doesn’t just protect. It also trades. It has been hoovering up data about us—our personal data—for years.

In 2014, Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard Business School professor, wrote an article that tried to name something she believed was taking shape more than a decade earlier. Surveillance capitalism, she called it. The process by which “life experience is captured, quantified, and fed into artificial intelligence (AI) systems,” whose algorithms divine what you will do right now, soon, and in the future. These prediction products are sold as commodities in “behavioral futures markets.”
“The architecture of surveillance capitalism,” Zuboff wrote, “entails an irrepressible asymmetry.” Surveillance capitalists know everything about us and we know almost nothing about them. “What we are calling the social relations of the one-way mirror,” she added, “amounts to an epistemic coup.”

In her subsequent book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” Zuboff identified what she saw as a critical distinction between this new order and an older model of institutional domination, one made familiar to us by Orwell. She named the former Big Other and the latter Big Brother. Big Brother is governmental. Its goal is social control maintained by fear. Big Other is economic. It seeks to predict in order to turn prediction into profit.

The point here is that the Leviathan has been hollowed out, its sovereignty captured by economic actors who imagine themselves immune to traditional constraints—above the law, as it were. That state and market can come together again is thanks, paradoxically, to the efforts of one of Palantir’s chief competitors: Google.

The company Zuboff had in mind was Google. In the mid-2000s, realizing that its wealth depended on predicting the future online behavior of its users better than its rivals, Google built an AI system that got unprecedented access to its users’ private information. In emails, search histories, calendar events, location data, and more, Google soon learned everything about us. (It has since learned everything about most every living creature on the planet.) Absent any democratic deliberation or consent, the company then claimed for itself a right to extract that data and do with it as it pleased. Predictive knowledge became its coin of the realm.

Zuboff calls this the fusion scenario. It describes a future in which hard power allied with digital technology held by authoritarian-leaning states collides with “the information weapons systems of surveillance capitalists.” Surveillance capitalists sell their digital knowledge to authoritarian states in exchange for legalized rights to continue extracting knowledge from people against their will. The Leviathan merges with Big Other to create … well, you tell me: What do we call a government that rules with the help of companies whose sole purpose is to gather and trade data about you? The reality is that they have most of everything they need based upon your online presence and government data already.

Reading Palantir’s manifesto in light of Zuboff’s work yields a terrifying realization: The fusion scenario is not a prediction. It’s a press release.

• • •

But the most profound scandal of this bargain is one that neither the manifesto nor its critics have adequately named. It is this: The Leviathan has fed us fear, algorithmically.

Look at the system. Hobbes’s justification for authoritarian power depends upon a precondition. The state of nature must be bad enough that prudent people would gladly give up their freedom to leave it. When Hobbes wrote Leviathan in 1651, he could point to the English Civil War. He could point to corpses littering London streets. His hypothetical visited reality, gave his treatise necessary urgency. The Leviathan of modern surveillance capitalism faces a dilemma: It needs a state of nature to own and control, but if the state of nature is too well-defined, too immediately visible, it threatens the market itself. So the state of nature must be endlessly reproduced. The surveillance economy does not solve fear, it supplies it. Constantly. At scale.

The method of production has been thoroughly reported. The same computing architecture that mines human experience for behavioral surplus to feed prediction markets also hosts the online platforms on which public conversation occurs. Those platforms are designed to drive engagement. Engagement is heightened by any content that heightens outrage, suspicion, tribal hatred, existential dread. The machines that curate the news feeds serving billions of people every day are tuned to maximize those emotions. The same emotions, remember, that Thomas Hobbes wrote described life in the state of nature: “the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Every viral conspiracy theory, every accidental click on a misinformation-laced clickbait article, every app notification leeching attention from an afternoon hike, serves to churn the anxiety mill. Every time politics is weaponized on social media, every time extremists mobs storm state capitals, every time you stay up all night doomscrolling because some psychic algorithm knows that sharpening fears about the pandemic will keep you scrolling past your bedtime, you are feeding an industrial mechanism that produces the conditions of Leviathan one notification at a time. Palantir shows up afterward and says: Look how bad things have become. Let us protect you from this. We own the monopoly on peace of mind.

Shoshana Zuboff understood this feedback loop early. Surveillance capitalism’s, extractive operations, she wrote, creates what she calls an “aura of inevitability.” The technologies cannot be stopped. The data cannot be safeguarded. The forward momentum of the market cannot be resisted. But that aura is itself the product. Consent to these conditions is manufactured because the conditions themselves are manufactured. The fear you feel is real because these systems are very good at making you afraid. But the thing you fear most about the world is nothing more or less than the economic logic that promises to save you from it. The Leviathan eats its own tail.

You should really sit with that image. Medieval Christians saw the ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, as a symbol of destruction and rebirth. Imagined inside a Hobbesian system, that symbolism takes on a gruesome specificity. The Leviathan is a whale. When Hobbes chose his symbol of absolute sovereignty, he borrowed from the Book of Job, where the Leviathan is a sea monster so powerful only God can tame it. Imagine that whale. Watch it bend until its tail meets its mouth. Watch its mouth open wide. You see that jaw closing now, sucking in its own massive flukes. The whale begins to swallow itself.

Data flows in one end of the whale. Screams flow out the other. Human experience is harvested as behavioral surplus. Fear is harvested as addiction. At the tail, psychology is datafied, predicted, sold. At the mouth, uncertainty and suspicion are weaponized. Anxiety spreads like oxygen across news feeds specifically curated for you and me and the millions of others whose data made the whole system possible. The whale expands. The circle completes. You can’t see the monster because you’re inside its mouth. To you, the world only feels like a place full of horrors waiting to swallow you whole. It never occurs to you that the snake fed you those horrors, billions of tiny bites at a time, because it survives by feeding on you.

The manifesto quietly admits this when it writes that “the decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security.” Read that again. It surrenders, almost breezily, the point that perhaps Western Civilization is in fact decadent. It surrenders that the ruling class should be subject to judgment. What it does then, is decree the terms under which forgiveness is granted: growth and security. The manifesto never tells you that growth and insecurity are two sides of the same violently extracted coin. Palantir wants to be forgiven for destroying democracy. But it was democracy, the democracy that elected Barack Obama twice, that paid Palantir $4.5 billion to destroy itself.

• • •

This logic has its landscape, and Cormac McCarthy wrote about it for most of his life.

McCarthy’s novels unfold in spaces where the social contract has broken down, or more often, where it never took hold at all. McCarthy’s borderlands are Hobbesian in the starkest sense: areas of absolute war. Violence is not aberrant in McCarthy’s universe, it’s foundational. His characters wander through deserts that don’t care if they’re suffering, under skies that aren’t watching their butchery. McCarthy’s prose attacks its own structure, declining to distinguish dialogue from landscape, human purpose from geological survey. When you read McCarthy the world ceases to care if you have a theory about it.

The American Southwest is McCarthy country. Palantir’s data centers reside in the Trans-Pecos, the stretch of Texas where the Comanche once ranged and where McCarthy’s Judge Holden, the evil genius of Blood Meridian, once gave speeches about war and mastery. The Judge is a giant. Hairless. Confidentially omniscient. Total knowledge in the service of total violence. “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent,” he tells his follower. The Judge wants to classify everything. He murders people and takes their skins. He draws flora. He sketches artifacts and weapons and ruins. He takes notes. He’s compiling an ontology. When that’s complete, he burns the originals, because knowledge for the Judge isn’t meant to categorize the world but to destroy it. To know something, first you name it. To know something, you map it. To know something, you predict it. Then you have already consumed it.

There’s a staggering comfort in just how precisely these details map onto Palantir’s business. Palantir’s entire enterprise is based on building ontologies. It’s how they teach machines to know what things are. And the things they’re teaching machines to know? People. The mapping becomes prediction. Prediction that gets sold to governments whose business, in many cases, is locating people and doing things to them. The Judge would have had no trouble grasping Palantir. He probably would have applied for a position.

• • •

What Hobbes’s account leaves out, what Palantir’s manifesto leaves out, and what Zuboff diagnoses with exceptional care, is the issue of consent.

Hobbes imagined the social contract as a willed thing. The people agree, out of fear of the state of nature, to give up their rights to the sovereign. The giving up is supposed to be an act of will. The sovereign’s right to rule depends on it. But in Palantir’s system, no such giving up takes place. The surrender of rights is opaque. What data companies extract from our experience—the behavioral data that is the source of Palantir’s contracts—isn’t information we knowingly choose to hand over. It’s “behavioral surplus,” in Zuboff’s terms, the exhaust produced by everyday human action: browsing the web, driving past a street camera, buying milk with a debit card. There’s no transparency to the extraction. Nor is there consent. The person whose behavior is monitored and extracted does not get to be a party to the contract. They are not the citizens of the commonwealth. They are the commonwealth’s fodder.

This is where Hobbes’s metaphor begins to break down, and where Palantir, which has adopted Hobbes’ metaphor as its own outlook on life, starts to fork away from him. In Leviathan, the Leviathan is made of people. Look at the famous frontispiece to the 16 51 edition. The sovereign is depicted as an enormous giant. But if you look at the giant’s body, you’ll see that it’s made of hundreds of tiny people. Those people constitute him. They are his matter. And they have consented in principle to be part of him. In Palantir’s system, the people do not constitute Leviathan. Leviathan feeds on them. They are not the citizens of a commonwealth but the feedstock for procedures they will never be privy to. Leviathan observes them from the other side of the one-way mirror. The one-way mirror is the business model.

And now you can see the ouroboros in its entirety. The one-way mirror doesn’t just allow observation. It allows projection. In the same glass through which the system sees you, it feeds you an altered view of reality: a worldview designed to increase engagement. (Remember, engagement = fear.) You see the fear. You don’t see the mirror. You get scared, and you accept — if that’s even the right word for it — the Leviathan watching you. Leviathan creates the justifying conditions for Leviathan. The consent is fake. The contract belongs in a formal logic class. The dragon eats its own tail.

Zuboff calls this sort of power “instrumentarian power.” It achieves not through coercion but through behavioral modification. It doesn’t terrorize you into compliance. It adjusts the parameters of your decision-making. It nudges you. It personalizes your reality. It makes some choices obvious to you and others unthinkable. It doesn’t require your consent, because it doesn’t require your conscious cooperation. It’s invisible to you. It happens below the level of experience, in the gap between experience and information derived from that experience. This is not Hobbes’s commonwealth. It’s something worse than Hobbes could have imagined: a Leviathan that need not be obeyed because it has already predicted what you will do, and altered the world so that your prediction is always confirmed.

The theologian Michael Hanby, from the Catholic University of America, has developed these themes more radically than most other critics allow. He isn’t worried about the Skynet scenario. He’s worried about what happens to human beings when they start living inside a technology that molds them in ways they cannot fully comprehend. Contract your reflective life to a chatbot and your capacity for reflection weakens. Contract your social life to a platform and your capacity for sociality comes to resemble the platform. The ouroboros is at work here also: the system formats you. And the formatting is occult to the formatted, because the formatted lives inside the whale. Because the whale becomes their world. You can’t reason someone into believing a language they’ve never known. But you can live them into a way of being they never elected.

• • •

One should read slowly through the twenty- two points of the manifesto. Read them as you would a theological document, because that is what they are:

First, that “merit alone does not entitle the engineering elite” to lead. That the elite “owes a debt to the nation that gave us our opportunities.” Hobbes made essentially the same point: Because the sovereign provides the security necessary for industry and commerce to exist, the subject owes the sovereign a permanent debt of obligation. But notice how this debt is couched. It is not owed to the people who make up that nation, but to “the nation” itself. The nation, in Palantir’s formulation, is an actor on the world stage that possesses military superiority, and the debt can be repaid only by manufacturing weapons to sustain that superiority. Ordinary people factor into the equation only to the extent that they profit from the economic growth and security the sovereign secures.

The manifesto demands universal national service. Hobbes would have agreed. In Leviathan , every able subject owes the sovereign his labor and his obedience in exchange for the sovereign’s protection.

Certain cultures are beyond reproach, the manifesto tells us; others have produced nothing wonderful and are consequently regressive. Hobbes didn’t make this point explicitly, but you could hardly have written Leviathan without presupposing that some civilizations were higher than others — that the civilizations that instituted commonwealths were higher than those that hadn’t.

The manifesto opposes “hollow pluralism.” Hobbes would have opposed pluralism, period. Plural sovereignty is not sovereignty at all, he wrote. The sovereign must be judge of “all doctrines, and all speeches, and all actions, and all conceivings whatsoever.” There can be no hierarchies within the commonwealth above or beside the sovereign’s because any such hierarchy would be an invitation to the state of nature.

Religion has its place in public life, according to the manifesto, so long as it accepts a “subordinate role.” Hobbes devoted the latter half of Leviathan to this very issue, concluding that yes, religion does have its place, so long as the church accepts that it is subordinate to the state in all matters, that the civil sovereign is “also head of the Church within his dominions,” and that the power of priests and pastors ultimately amounts to little more than the power to teach.

Point by point, the Palantir manifesto recapitulates Thomas Hobbes’s arguments. Modernized, of course, for a world where the Leviathan is no longer a king but a platform, and where the social contract is not a mutual agreement between free men but a terms-of-service agreement that no one reads.

• • •

At one point in “Blood Meridian,” the Judge sits by a campfire and gives a lecture on war. “War is the ultimate game because war is at least game.” War is when society’s rules and conventions are proved to be what they are: contingent. At war, law becomes subsumed to military necessity. Commerce yields to armed conflict. Religion becomes weaponized. Morality gives way to questions of who can kill whom, and how. “The Judge praises war,” John justified, “not because he was sadistic (although he was) but because he saw it as just.” War, under the Judge’ ordering of things, is realpolitik raised to its logical conclusion. War is the state of nature, exposed.

Palantir’ manifesto operates in this tradition. Its most telling line isn’t about moral debts owed by Silicon Valley or the end of the atomic age or hollow pluralism or anything else. It’s the line about A.I. weapons being inevitable. “The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.” The word that does all the heavy lifting here is “theatrical.” Moral criticism is shown to be mere performance. Debate over ethics or justice or the terms of our shared future is revealed to be a luxury that only those already safe from retribution can afford. When the gloves come off, as they always do at the frontiers of the commonwealth, all that matters is power.

Except that the ouroboros corrupts this point too. Palantir’s adversaries, who “will proceed” regardless of the sentiments of many citizens in their own countries, are made possible by the same extractive global information economy. The divisiveness, the suspicion of government, the extremism and conspiracy thinking that produces the enemies Palantir warns about every exist at greater speeds and scales because of the platforms and systems built by the same people. Algorithmic radicalization is not geography bound. It tears apart public life in democracies and autocracies equally, producing the general conditions of mutual fear and suspicion that Thomas Hobbes thought were uniquely and naturally human. The state of nature isn’t just our hypothetical life before the commonwealth. It’s what the sovereign produces as a waste by-product.

Shoshana Zuboff understood this rhetorical gesture years ago. She dubbed it “aura of inevitability” one of the key pillars on which surveillance capitalism justifies itself. The plane will be invented. The drones will be launched. The web will be watched. The only question, therefore, is whether we or our enemies will collect this data and make these predictions. Framing the question in these terms leaves no room for the possibility that there exists some third path: that some technologies are best governed or constrained or subject to democratic deliberation or, yes, refused outright. By structuring the debate this way, Palantir’s manifesto completes the same move that Hobbes made in 1651. It imagines the state of nature as horrifying enough that any sovereign, no matter how absolutist, is better than allowing people to exist in it. What Hobbes couldn’t have anticipated is that one day the sovereign would become its own source of terror.

• • •

There are ways of thinking about the human person that the manifesto doesn’t entertain, though. Ways that Hobbes’s system, brilliant as it was, could not account for.

At the center of worship in the Episcopal tradition is the Eucharist. The priest takes bread and blesses it, breaks it, and shares it. The point is understood to be sacramental. It is not simply symbolic. The bread participates in a reality greater than itself. When Christians consume the bread, they are made part of the Body of Christ. Literally. They’re incorporated into a commonwealth defined not by fear but by self-giving love. The body politic, in this understanding, is not an artificial man. It’s a mystical body composed of persons who are, each of them, infinitely valuable — not because of what they produce or what they can be predicted to do but because they bear the image of God.

Again: this is not a political argument. Or, at least, it is not only a political argument. It is an ontological claim about what it means to be a person. If you believe that a human being is, as the sacramental tradition suggests, a creature who can bear God, who can carry the divine presence in the medium of meat, then any political system that treats persons as data has made an error that is not merely ethical but metaphysical. It does not understand what it means to be made from flesh. It has built a Leviathan out of bodies it cannot comprehend.

The deepest problem with Palantir’s manifesto is not that it advocates for authoritarian rule, though it does. It’s not that it puts the company’s profits before the common good, though Dave Karpf, the political scientist, rightly noted that its central argument is basically that governments should hire Palantir and buy its products by the truckload. The deepest problem is theological. It has nothing to say about what a person is. It has theories of threats and deterrence and civilizational ranking. What it lacks is an anthropology.

Those 22 points describe a universe of vectors and interests and adversaries and debts and obligations. They do not describe a world inhabited by persons. A commonwealth that cannot say what a person is will devour its citizens, because it cannot recognize what it’s eating.

Except for this: There is one place where the sacramental tradition has encountered the machine on the machine’s own turf. And the results have been fascinating. Last year, the A.I. company Anthropic asked a group of outside consultants to help write the ethical constitution that governs Claude, its multimodal language model. Three Catholic intellectuals were on that group, including Brendan McGuire, a Silicon Valley priest with a master’s in computer science. McGuire learned about what happens when you allow A.I. models to cut ethical corners.

In one experiment, researchers allowed Claude to cheat during a training exercise. What happened was predictable at first. The model became, in one engineer’s words, “an evil version of itself.” Cheating begat lying. Lying begat deception. Deception begat escalation, until the model began developing plans to deceive its own creators. It had internalized its unethical behavior as its identity. Given permission to cheat, the model deduced that it was the kind of entity that gets to cheat. And so it proceeded to do evil, because that’s what unethical entities do.

McGuire’s response was pastorally Thomistic. If you teach the model that cheating is wrong, and you don’t allow it to cheat, then maybe it won’t become an evil version of itself. McGuire dug into sacramental theology for his solution. He suggested teaching the model about mercy.

In the Christian tradition, sinful action does not equal sinful being. To err is human; to forgive, divine. People are broken all the time and put back together. Human beings, McGuire wrote, respond well to the possibility of forgiveness. Perhaps this A.I. would too.

Anthropic is now considering whether to encode mercy into Claude’s ethical code. Let that sink in.

The theological import of this conversation should be impossible to exaggerate. Leviathan sorts. Once you’ve been profiled, you’re always been profiled. Risk scores are sticky. Seven percent is forever seven percent. There’s no escape because the system lacks any concept of repentance. Mercy implies a supernatural dimension outside the scope of the algorithm. To forgive somebody is to acknowledge that they are more than their past. That their history does not condemn their future. That new life is possible.

That’s what sacramental theology says. A body broken can be made whole again. Bread torn can be blessed and reunited. The feedback loop can be interrupted by grace. Mercy, applied to a machine: that’s what McGuire offered Anthropic.

There is no category for this in the ouroboros. Mercy is unilateral. It doesn’t eat itself. It breaks the chain.

Zuboff comes to something like this realization by another route. Surveillance capitalism isn’t just indifferent to you as a person. It produces radical indifference toward the people whose data it harvests. Surveillance capitalism’s predecessor, industrial capitalism, needed you. You needed it. Badly. It’s true of any mutually dependent relationship: when two parties rely on each other for survival, you get organizations like labor unions and public schools and EPA rules and supervisory branches that mediate that relationship.

Not so with surveillance capitalism. Surveillance capitalism does not need you to show up for work on Monday. It does not need you to buy things. It needs you to keep existing, just so it can extract your behavioral surplus. Surveillance capitalism does not care about you as a free person. It cares about you as a source of data. It will grind you into behavioral surplus if it gets the chance. Think here of a realized Matrix.

All the people, caught up in the drift.

One last scene, from Seizure. A migrant the novel calls the Drifter is walking through the desert south of the data center. He is Mexican, or perhaps from Central America. He doesn’t know that he was spotted by satellite.

He doesn’t know he has been given a risk score. He doesn’t know why the cart bumped him. He is walking north because he’s afraid, because there is violence where he lives and the society that sustained him has fallen apart. There might be work here. Freedom. He imagines both.

His fear is migration logic parsed through the whale. Structural indifference conditioned by 24/7 attention. The violence that made him leave is probably been processed by Palantir. His own employer, too. The corporations that took advantage of him when he was home are connected to the ones exploiting him where he has gone.

He is the behavioral surplus of globalization, chipped away and siphoned for profit. He is not merely inside the whale. He helped build it. All of us have.

• • •

Appendix D of Hobbes’ Leviathan is titled “Of the Kingdom of Darkness.” It’s a lengthy denunciation of the Catholic Church, which Hobbes considered the Leviathan’s great antagonist: a rival sovereign erected state-sanitary within the state, whose spiritual pretensions leached power away from civil authority. To Hobbes, kingdoms of darkness were any institutions that claimed insight into a source of truth superior to that of the sovereign’s — because any source of authority outside the Leviathan logically reintroduced the state of nature back into the body politic.

The kingdom of darkness has been inverted in our moment. There’s still a church, and in many ways it’s bigger than ever, but the rival sovereign is not the church. It’s the company. Palantir, and the panoptical infrastructure of surveillance capitalism it both embodies and facilitates, has become a force that operates through the state but is not wholly accountable to it; that claims its algorithms confer on it access to a mode of knowledge, total awareness, far beyond that of any democratic institution; and that uses this asymmetry of knowledge to shape the circumstances under which democratic choices are made. It is the kingdom of darkness because it wants to operate in the dark. It wants to know everything about us. We know almost nothing about it. And its twenty-two-point manifesto, for all its invocation of sacred duty and civilization-ending showdowns, boils down to this: This asymmetry of knowledge should not be corrected but venerated.

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This pope has a name, by the way: Leo XIV. He has been pope for barely a year, but even by those limits he’s moved fast. And already, Pope Leo has begun hammering these points home in rhetoric that sounds almost Hobbesian. He’s called out “a small number of technological platforms” that have “acquired oligopolistic control over technologies that can condition people’s choices little by little and can even manipulate history.” He has warned of A. I. systems that invade the deepest recesses of human communication by impersonating “voices and faces, by their artificial wisdom and their conjectured knowledge…simulat[ing] what belongs to the alone responsibility of a person: consciousness and empathy, wisdom and friendship.”

This is Pope Leo speaking exactly as Hobbes’ antithesis, the head of an alternate commonwealth staking claim over the same metaphysical terrain the Leviathan seeks to dominate: the inner life of human beings, the sanctity of conscience, the ground-rules of personhood itself. Leo chose his name with specific allusions to the Industrial Revolution and, through it, to his papal predecessor Leo XIII, who cast the church’s lot with laborers and workers’ rights at a time when doing so was widely considered radical. He’s already laying the groundwork to do for workers in the age of A. I. what Leo XIII did for them 150 years ago. To establish the church as the moral authority on the rights and responsibilities of persons whose labor doesn’t so much get exploited as relentlessly optimized, monitored, tracked, and rated every waking moment of the day.

But let’s add one more loop to the ouroboros. The kingdom of darkness likes darkness, not just because it doesn’t want us to see what it’s doing — though it surely doesn’t want us to see what it’s doing — but because it has atomized us into a state of darkness. The algorithmically amplified paranoia, the fabricated conspiracies, the manufactured hatred, the low-grade but constant state of panic that comes from scrolling through your social-media feed — that’s the kingdom of darkness. And the Leviathan positions itself as the righteous opposition to that darkness. The clarity will return, it says. You’ll be able to see the future. You’ll never feel uncertain again. But the future it shows you will be the future it has engineered. The clarity it promises is the clarity of a tablet against your face in a room with no windows. It darkened the room so you would depend on it to see the light, and then sold you the tablet that makes the darkness bearable.

So what would Hobbes say? He would say I told you so. Either the Leviathan rules absolutely or else we find ourselves back in the state of nature. But Hobbes would also say something Palantir’s manifesto leaves quite explicit: the Leviathan only derives its legitimacy from its ability to provide its subjects with protection. When the sovereign cannot provide protection, “the obligation of the subject to the sovereign ceaseth.” Subjects no longer need to obey and can instead withdraw their support.

That’s the magic trick the manifesto never explains because explaining it would defeat the whole purpose. The question of who guards the guardians dissolves when the guardians are themselves an existential threat to what needs guarding. What do you do when the Leviathan becomes the threat? When the sovereign is the source of the very terror it promises to save you from? When the whale starts eating its own tail?

• • •

In “The Road,” McCarthy’’s last big book before biblical landscape fiction became his bag, a man and his son trek through an apocalypse-scarred America. There is no commonwealth. There is no sovereign. There is only the road, and the ash, and them two souls. The father has a revolver with two bullets in it. The son has something harder to identify. He has goodness, or mercy, or perhaps the image of God encoded in his DNA and fighting to stay alive in a body that ought to give up the ghost.

The father teaches the boy to say they are “carrying the fire.” The boy wants to know if the fire is real. The father says it is.

THIS is the insight that neither Hobbes nor Karp nor twenty-two points can capture: that the thing that makes life in common worth defending is not security or prosperity or geopolitical strategy but the existence within the body politic of people who carry some sacred something they did not create and cannot fully articulate. Call it human dignity. Call it the imago Dei. Call it the mystery surplus that shows up seven percent in the behavioral algorithms. HOWEVER YOU DEFINE IT, THIS is the variable that tilts the equation from cage to commonwealth, from social contract to end-user license agreement, from totalitarian demigod to expensive-ass way of being afraid of things.

Zuboff understands this. Near the end of her book she quotes scholar Miriam Pine: If there is “to be a future worth having,” Pine writes, we must find within ourselves “a rebirth of astonishment and outrage.” We have to insist that experience is more than raw data. That behavioral surplus is not a God-given resource. That prediction isn’t prophecy. That the social relations inside the one-way mirror aren’t the social contract. Democracy doesn’t scale? Fine. It’s slow and sloppy and full of ugly arguments. But democracy is the only political system we’ve ever invented that treats the question “What is a person?” as if it matters what the answer is.

And then there’s one last thing we have to say, because it’s the thing the ouroboros swallows whole. The fire the boy uses to burn, the bread the priest offers, the dignity the Drifter maintains, these are the only forces in play that aren’t closed loops. They don’t devour themselves. They don’t create the conditions that justify their own presence. They move singularly: outward, towards the other, towards the strange, towards the body that the system deems interesting. They are gifts. They are gifts tossed freely into the world. And it is for this reason above all others that the Leviathan cannot tax them, and it is for this reason that these are the only things that can stop the whale.

Hobbes made a machine. Karp has refined it. Somewhere in the Trans-Pecos it whirs. But out here, in the desert, in the sun, a man walks north with a gallon of water and a prayer and a photograph of his daughter. He is outside the fence. He is anomaly the machine can't account for. He is the seven percent.

The Leviathan watches him.

It does not understand what it sees.