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Welcome to your weekly Dark Markets news roundup. I’ve just uploaded a brand-new recording of my talk at Codex Books two weeks ago. It was an absolute delight - we had good turnout, including at least one loyal reader of this newsletter, and absolutely noone I knew personally.
Most incredible of all, one member of the audience was an established author who I’m a big fan of - more on that soon, hopefully. Big picture, I’ve really come around on the idea that selling my book is going to be a long-term project. There will be more events like this to come, so keep an eye out!
The recording captures me reading one of my favorite passages of Stealing the Future, and part of the really good discussion I had with Adam Lowenstein. Unfortunately, the battery on my little Zoom camera ran out before the talk was over, but this is the punk rock reality we live in.
News dropped yesterday that Palantir is trying to soothe the discomfort of its employees in the wake of ICE agents killing at least 3 U.S. citizens in cold blood like dogs in the street. This is the kind of thing you leak to a reporter if you voluntarily work at Palantir and suddenly start feeling a wee bit bad about your massive and blood-soaked paycheck. I’m sure it was therapeutic.
Palantir, its maniacally bloodthirsty CEO Alex Karp, and its actual key man Peter Thiel embody a more honest inversion of the usual Silicon Valley ethos - they’re doing well by doing bad. Palantir manages ICE’s target lists, including helping identify targets for deportation, which just to be entirely clear they have been incredibly bad at, leading to no-knock raids on the homes of U.S. citizens.
This embodies another key feature of Silicon Valley in 2025 - even after embracing evil, these firms can’t actually do what they promise.
Far-right power gained through shameless stock-pump fraud by gleeful authoritarians like Karp, Elon Musk, and Chamath Palihapitiya is just the most obvious aspect of tech’s responsibility for the Trump administration’s campaign of terror against Americans. More deeply, tech has also been the vehicle for dehumanizing logics, including explicit ideological campaigns against the very concept of empathy, which certainly have made things easier for the people currently trying to defend ICE and Palantir.
The broader corrolary to that, of course, is that the tech sector, most importantly Peter Thiel and his acolyte Sam Altman, have dedicated themselves to destroying education and art, and especially to destroying the kind of humanist education that teaches people to understand and care about one another, and about society. In this they align with and continue a campaign beloved of the most degraded avatars of proud ignorance, people like Amway heir Betsy DeVoss (Trump’s first “Secretary of Education”) and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who vindictively gutted New College, his state’s primary public liberal arts college.
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Inability to actually run a police state effectively is one reason Palantir is a fragile meme stock rather than a real defense stock. Michael Burry has taken a public short position, and Andrew Left at Citron has said Palantir is “detached from fundamentals and analysis.” Bearish fundamentals haven’t mattered for stocks in aggregate for quite a few years now, but can start mattering a lot for any individual stock very fast.
One good way to let the air out of a stock fraud is being publicly tied to a murderous agency that was denounced as the “gestapo” by none other than Joe Rogan even before they haplessly tried to paint an ICU nurse as a violent terrorist.
It doesn’t help if that happens after your CEO has spent the past two years shoveling his own stock holdings out the door as fast as possible: Karp sold nearly $2 billion worth of stock in 2024, and a reported 21% of his total stake in the six months leading up to March 2025. He has continued selling huge clips over the past year.
Karp is also one of those guys who rants about short-sellers, which is always a sign of terrifying fundamentals under the hood, but is even funnier when you’re actively selling yourself. Big guy, what do you think a short seller actually does? I mean it’s right there in the name.
·
July 1, 2025
And so it’s good news that Palantir stock was off quite badly yesterday, down 1.3% against a Down Jones that’s up .6% - a pretty huge gap for one day of action. That’s definitely blood in the water, and suggests actual consequences for the firm, if not for Karp, who has feathered his own nest quite nicely by monetizing the desire of lumpen investors to kill Venezuelans.
While I have little optimism these days in the disciplining forces of the market, one can always hope.
Palantir is just a particularly literal version of the impact technology, and speculative technology stock shilling specifically, has had over the past twenty years - and especially over the past ten.
The number of truly awful people empowered by pump-and-dumps over the past decade is astonishing. Most obviously, Trump would almost certainly not have been elected if not for Elon Musk, who donated $288 million to the campaign, and has only become more strident and open in his white supremacist stance. With Tesla and X simultaneously collapsing, the fundamental fraud (and government subsidies) that propelled him to hyperwealth and toxic influence have become crystal clear.
·
December 30, 2025
(To play fair here, Sam Bankman-Fried probably funneled north of $100 million to the Biden campaign through various channels. And Joe Biden probably killed more innocent people than Donald Trump could even dream of.)
The same goes at the even farther fringes. Remember that Balaji Srinivasan gained his seat at the decamillionaire table by selling a quiz site to Coinbase for $120 million. That friendly deal in retrospect clearly points to the common feeling between the “network state” techno-fascist and right-wing Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who in 2020 imposed a company-wiide gag order against discussing Black Lives Matter.
Those ill-gotten funds have been crucial, but the ideology emerging out of Silicon Valley is just as much to blame. I think a lot of people my age still think “California progressive” when they think of a typical technology CEO, and it’s staggering in retrospect how well Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Gary Tan, and even Mark Zuckerberg himself actively concealed their real beliefs.
The friendly liberal face of tech helped sell the dream of a wealthy future for all, a dream which these figures turned into money most of all for themselves. That money went, not to helping create more community or connection or even Thiel’s vaunted flying cars, but a political regime that gratifies its supporters’ erotic lust to punish anyone less isolated and miserable than they are.
Disregard for human life comes naturally for the techies, thanks not only to their god-like egos, but the engineering and predictive biases of the values instilled in the entire community by its roots in militarism.
·
August 25, 2024
But Silicon Valley has also contributed to the broader decline of democratic care with its indirect impacts on everyday Americans. I know a few Trumpists too well, and they are most of all bitter about the disappointments of their own lives. Nothing is likely to engender that useful cynicism more than the constant parading of people like Sam Altman as world-changing geniuses, when what Americans are actually experiencing on the ground is wild swings in electricity prices, ugly data centers, and global labor exploitation.
Silicon Valley’s main export these days is the clear message that America is controlled by a cabal of corrupt elites who don’t have to actually produce or create anything useful to become billionaires - and in turn, to be treated as leaders on any subject they care to opine about.
Silicon Valley has opened the door for fascism in a dozen ways, and quite intentionally. But perhaps their most insidious contribution is the bait-and-switch of promising a better future, then delivering practically nothing at all.
Dark Markets is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Subscribe
Welcome to your weekly Dark Markets news roundup. I’ve just uploaded a brand-new recording of my talk at Codex Books two weeks ago. It was an absolute delight - we had good turnout, including at least one loyal reader of this newsletter, and absolutely noone I knew personally.
Most incredible of all, one member of the audience was an established author who I’m a big fan of - more on that soon, hopefully. Big picture, I’ve really come around on the idea that selling my book is going to be a long-term project. There will be more events like this to come, so keep an eye out!
The recording captures me reading one of my favorite passages of Stealing the Future, and part of the really good discussion I had with Adam Lowenstein. Unfortunately, the battery on my little Zoom camera ran out before the talk was over, but this is the punk rock reality we live in.
News dropped yesterday that Palantir is trying to soothe the discomfort of its employees in the wake of ICE agents killing at least 3 U.S. citizens in cold blood like dogs in the street. This is the kind of thing you leak to a reporter if you voluntarily work at Palantir and suddenly start feeling a wee bit bad about your massive and blood-soaked paycheck. I’m sure it was therapeutic.
Palantir, its maniacally bloodthirsty CEO Alex Karp, and its actual key man Peter Thiel embody a more honest inversion of the usual Silicon Valley ethos - they’re doing well by doing bad. Palantir manages ICE’s target lists, including helping identify targets for deportation, which just to be entirely clear they have been incredibly bad at, leading to no-knock raids on the homes of U.S. citizens.
This embodies another key feature of Silicon Valley in 2025 - even after embracing evil, these firms can’t actually do what they promise.
Far-right power gained through shameless stock-pump fraud by gleeful authoritarians like Karp, Elon Musk, and Chamath Palihapitiya is just the most obvious aspect of tech’s responsibility for the Trump administration’s campaign of terror against Americans. More deeply, tech has also been the vehicle for dehumanizing logics, including explicit ideological campaigns against the very concept of empathy, which certainly have made things easier for the people currently trying to defend ICE and Palantir.
The broader corrolary to that, of course, is that the tech sector, most importantly Peter Thiel and his acolyte Sam Altman, have dedicated themselves to destroying education and art, and especially to destroying the kind of humanist education that teaches people to understand and care about one another, and about society. In this they align with and continue a campaign beloved of the most degraded avatars of proud ignorance, people like Amway heir Betsy DeVoss (Trump’s first “Secretary of Education”) and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who vindictively gutted New College, his state’s primary public liberal arts college.
Subscribe
Inability to actually run a police state effectively is one reason Palantir is a fragile meme stock rather than a real defense stock. Michael Burry has taken a public short position, and Andrew Left at Citron has said Palantir is “detached from fundamentals and analysis.” Bearish fundamentals haven’t mattered for stocks in aggregate for quite a few years now, but can start mattering a lot for any individual stock very fast.
One good way to let the air out of a stock fraud is being publicly tied to a murderous agency that was denounced as the “gestapo” by none other than Joe Rogan even before they haplessly tried to paint an ICU nurse as a violent terrorist.
It doesn’t help if that happens after your CEO has spent the past two years shoveling his own stock holdings out the door as fast as possible: Karp sold nearly $2 billion worth of stock in 2024, and a reported 21% of his total stake in the six months leading up to March 2025. He has continued selling huge clips over the past year.
Karp is also one of those guys who rants about short-sellers, which is always a sign of terrifying fundamentals under the hood, but is even funnier when you’re actively selling yourself. Big guy, what do you think a short seller actually does? I mean it’s right there in the name.
·
July 1, 2025
And so it’s good news that Palantir stock was off quite badly yesterday, down 1.3% against a Down Jones that’s up .6% - a pretty huge gap for one day of action. That’s definitely blood in the water, and suggests actual consequences for the firm, if not for Karp, who has feathered his own nest quite nicely by monetizing the desire of lumpen investors to kill Venezuelans.
While I have little optimism these days in the disciplining forces of the market, one can always hope.
Palantir is just a particularly literal version of the impact technology, and speculative technology stock shilling specifically, has had over the past twenty years - and especially over the past ten.
The number of truly awful people empowered by pump-and-dumps over the past decade is astonishing. Most obviously, Trump would almost certainly not have been elected if not for Elon Musk, who donated $288 million to the campaign, and has only become more strident and open in his white supremacist stance. With Tesla and X simultaneously collapsing, the fundamental fraud (and government subsidies) that propelled him to hyperwealth and toxic influence have become crystal clear.
·
December 30, 2025
(To play fair here, Sam Bankman-Fried probably funneled north of $100 million to the Biden campaign through various channels. And Joe Biden probably killed more innocent people than Donald Trump could even dream of.)
The same goes at the even farther fringes. Remember that Balaji Srinivasan gained his seat at the decamillionaire table by selling a quiz site to Coinbase for $120 million. That friendly deal in retrospect clearly points to the common feeling between the “network state” techno-fascist and right-wing Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who in 2020 imposed a company-wiide gag order against discussing Black Lives Matter.
Those ill-gotten funds have been crucial, but the ideology emerging out of Silicon Valley is just as much to blame. I think a lot of people my age still think “California progressive” when they think of a typical technology CEO, and it’s staggering in retrospect how well Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Gary Tan, and even Mark Zuckerberg himself actively concealed their real beliefs.
The friendly liberal face of tech helped sell the dream of a wealthy future for all, a dream which these figures turned into money most of all for themselves. That money went, not to helping create more community or connection or even Thiel’s vaunted flying cars, but a political regime that gratifies its supporters’ erotic lust to punish anyone less isolated and miserable than they are.
Disregard for human life comes naturally for the techies, thanks not only to their god-like egos, but the engineering and predictive biases of the values instilled in the entire community by its roots in militarism.
·
August 25, 2024
But Silicon Valley has also contributed to the broader decline of democratic care with its indirect impacts on everyday Americans. I know a few Trumpists too well, and they are most of all bitter about the disappointments of their own lives. Nothing is likely to engender that useful cynicism more than the constant parading of people like Sam Altman as world-changing geniuses, when what Americans are actually experiencing on the ground is wild swings in electricity prices, ugly data centers, and global labor exploitation.
Silicon Valley’s main export these days is the clear message that America is controlled by a cabal of corrupt elites who don’t have to actually produce or create anything useful to become billionaires - and in turn, to be treated as leaders on any subject they care to opine about.
Silicon Valley has opened the door for fascism in a dozen ways, and quite intentionally. But perhaps their most insidious contribution is the bait-and-switch of promising a better future, then delivering practically nothing at all.
Dark Markets is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Subscribe
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