The Metaphysics of Palantir
Total Mobilization in the Information War
There come times when everyone in a society must do their part. Everything is at stake. The enemy could turn the tide at any moment. Do your part or risk losing everything. Sacrifice pleasures, sacrifice free time. The war must be won.
This was the prevailing ethos in the first half of the 20th century. In World War I, entire societies contorted themselves to perform optimally in the advent of highly mechanized warfare. It was all against all; a natural outgrowth of liberalism, which had infected all governments, even if not explicitly. The state is of the people, so state against state means all the people against all the people. In the U.S., civilians mobilized to ration, work in factories, and purchase Liberty Bonds, blurring the distinction between the home front and the battlefield.
Ernst Jünger, a German soldier, witnessed the mechanized carnage firsthand, detailing it in his war memoir Storm of Steel. Influenced by his experience in the Great War, Jünger published The Worker in 1932. He gave a philosophical account of the transformation in technology and the embrace of total mobilization. It is easy to think that the era of total mobilization has concluded. There is no world war going on at this time, and people live lives of comparative luxury and ease in the West.
While the material circumstances may have changed, total mobilization has not. Instead, total mobilization has transformed in the information age. Now, we are mobilized in service to the information war. This trend is only beginning. It will intensify.
The Worker
In The Worker, Jünger argued that bourgeois liberalism was on the verge of collapse, soon to be replaced by a new metaphysical force: the Worker. The Worker emerges as a product of industrialization, technological progress, and the total mobilization of World War I. Jünger describes the Worker as a new anthropological form, defined by discipline, will, efficiency, and technical mastery, embodying work as a metaphysical principle. War, labor, and even leisure become subordinated to collective effort and discipline.
Jünger sharply rejects liberalism, modernity, and bourgeois values. He does so not out of personal bias or philosophical complaint, but because of a Nietzschean belief in the unavoidable transformation of the world. The way the Worker, together with technology, shapes the world is a matter of destiny. Total mobilization, complete technological control, and the destruction of liberalism are inevitable and must be accepted. The new world he foresees will be anti-liberal, anti-democratic, and anti-individualist. The bourgeois world of comfort, commerce, and freedom declines. It is replaced by disciplined heroism, hierarchy, and sacrifice.
He made this argument nearly a century ago. During World War II, industrialization and total mobilization intensified, especially in Europe. However, liberalism did not end, at least not immediately or clearly. Instead, the form of total mobilization changed. Europe was devastated, and all old forms disappeared as American-style liberal capitalism collided with communism. Communist regimes allowed the metaphysical concept of the Worker to persist in a distorted form, but in Western capitalism, the Worker was replaced.
The Consumer
American capitalism replaced the Worker with the Consumer. The 1950s imagery of luxury and consumption is emblematic of this transformation. Work itself stops being a matter of duty and service to a greater cause, but instead is done in service to consumption. Consumerism continues to operate as the dominant metaphysical principle throughout the rest of the century. The specifics of total mobilization in the age of consumerism are reflected in trade and banking policies, which manipulate aggregate demand and other macroeconomic factors to optimize consumer markets and boost the green line. The last vestiges of the old form of the Worker slowly disappeared as the Soviet Union decayed and collapsed.
Just as the Worker blurred the boundary between war and work, so did the Consumer. This was seen most clearly in the aftermath of 9/11, in which President Bush encouraged the American people to fight back against the terrorists by going out and buying things. Of course, this had the economic impact of keeping the market afloat in the face of great tragedy, but it also signaled the metaphysics of the time. We, the American people, fight against evil terrorists by spending money on consumer goods. This became the metaphysical duty of the American people in the age of the Consumer.
However, things started to change again during the 2010s.
The Phantom
During the 2010s, development in industry and the effort to maximize access to consumers led to the acceleration of data analytics. Maximizing profits remained important, but capturing as much data as possible became a priority. Big data grew and developed as people increasingly turned to social media. The new structure of big data optimized everything from advertising to logistics and governance. The growth and acceleration of big data mirrored the total mobilization of industrialization that Jünger observed in the early 20th century.
Now, total mobilization harvests user behavior for predictive systems.
The 2008 financial crisis marked the beginning of the end of the consumerism that dominated the late 20th century. Data became the primary focus. Of course, data was in service to giving the consumer what they want. The end goal of the data drive was to increase consumption. However, big data has progressed past simple consumer service and is now a critical component of every aspect of industry. The most valuable companies in the world are now more concerned with some aspect of the data pipeline than they are with consumer goods. NVIDIA once targeted gamers. Now it is synonymous with the AI boom.
The 2020 pandemic cemented the new age of big data. Everyone was trapped inside, so interaction with the external world was exclusively online. Data-driven companies, such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon, surged. 2020 was the year that the Phantom completely supplanted the Consumer as primary metaphysical form.
The Worker and the Consumer are both metaphysical forms inhabited by the human being. The Phantom is distinguished from both in that the shadow of the human inhabits it. The Phantom is the form of the traces of data left by an individual online. It is the echo of the person that persists in the digital dimension after the user steps away from the device. The Phantom is now the chief subject and driver of total mobilization.
The Phantom is the amalgamation of all of one's profiles, strewn throughout data lakes and warehouses, waiting to be taken up in an algorithm. TikTok algorithms harvest the doomscroll for personalized feeds. The user’s Phantom predicts behavior better than the users themselves. Jünger’s Worker exemplified physical heroism in service to the factory lines. The Consumer maximized material pleasure in the shopping malls. The Phantom maximizes intangible extraction, manifesting itself in the digital corridors of the internet.
Information War
Total mobilization is deeply connected to warfare. The Worker’s mobilization was tied to the World Wars. The mobilization of the Consumer was in service to the Cold War. The mobilization of the Phantom is in service to the information war, which is progressing into the AI arms race between the US and China.
Information warfare has taken many forms over the last decade. It can be between warring political factions within a nation or between different countries that seek to shape the perceptions of another. The former instance includes Cambridge Analytica using Facebook data for political mobilization in 2016 and the systematic censoring of the Biden laptop in 2020. The latter instance includes Palantir using graph networks and predictive analytics to help the US military hunt down terrorists, translating data mobilization into meat-space warfare intelligence.
The world is currently undergoing a multipolar struggle for supremacy in data. The US and China are directly competing in the information war, with China seeking to extract as much data as possible from the United States. United States-based companies and intelligence services also focus on collecting data on US citizens, with China remaining closed off from America’s corporate panopticon. This gives them a distinct advantage. The speed at which China could create (or has made) profiles on Western subjects would (or has) far outpaced the capability of the United States to do the same on Chinese subjects. Population size difference is a minor factor. No US company is mass-producing data-harvesting Roombas to send to China.
The EU’s GDPR further cripples American dominance in the information war. American companies will abide by European regulations to access their market, thus hindering data collection on American citizens. Chinese products, on the other hand, shamelessly harvest data from inside American homes.
The total mobilization in the age of the Phantom is mass information harvesting. While the Worker was motivated by duty in service to his country, the Phantom was forcefully extracted. American data harvesting through social media networks feeds back into the networks to optimize their addictive capacity. The Phantom is motivated by what it wants, with the doomscroll algorithm constantly promising a little treat if the user scrolls a little bit further.
Total mobilization in this age culminates in the artificial intelligence arms race. AI is the ultimate mobilization tool, with states racing for dominance in autonomous weapons and intelligence. Additionally, many see the possibility of AI to make groundbreaking improvements in mathematics, science, medicine, economics, and more. Google’s DeepMind has already applied artificial intelligence in multiple domains to make improvements in hardware, system architecture, and mathematics beyond what the creators had imagined.
After the second inauguration of President Donald Trump, Alex Wang penned a letter to the President, urging him to increase American AI capabilities rapidly. Wang warned that the CCP's investment in AI was ten times that of the United States. President Trump started his administration by undoing the Biden-era executive orders that hindered AI and establishing the new Manhattan Project: Stargate. The Big Beautiful Bill also halted state-level regulation of AI, and Trump’s AI action plan aims to build American dominance in the AI space.
China has also accelerated AI development. They are developing AI-driven drones with lethality as the primary concern and safety as the second concern. Additionally, they are focusing on using AI for cognitive warfare:
The PLA defines AI-driven cognitive warfare as the systematic use of artificial intelligence, big data analytics (大数据分析), and psychological operations (心理战) to manipulate enemy perceptions, degrade decision-making capabilities, and control information flows before and during conflict. Unlike traditional warfare, which prioritizes kinetic force, cognitive warfare seeks to influence the adversary’s strategic thinking, sow discord within societies, and create operational advantages by shaping the information domain.
PLA military theorists emphasize that cognitive warfare is an extension of the “Three Warfares” (三战) doctrine, which consists of psychological warfare (心理战), public opinion warfare (舆论战), and legal warfare (法律战). By integrating AI into these domains, the PLA is enhancing its ability to automate disinformation campaigns, conduct large-scale social media manipulation, and employ deepfake technology (深度伪造技术) to distort reality. Reports suggest that the PLA increasingly sees AI-powered psychological warfare as a key enabler for securing strategic objectives.
China and the US are not the only players in the AI arms race. India is investing in autonomous AI weapons. Russian President Putin stated in 2017, "Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia but for all humankind... Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world." AI has been used extensively on both sides of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, both for intelligence gathering and autonomous weapons. Additionally, Israel has successfully deployed AI systems to identify and eliminate low-ranking Hamas militants.
Information warfare is composed of operations used to gain an information advantage by controlling information flows for your team and exploiting the information flows of the other team. Successful information warfare is dependent on big data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to gain better insights from the data and exploit the opponent more effectively. Dominating the AI arms race will shape the outcome of the information war because it gives the superior actor a decisive advantage for offense and defense.
Currently, no single country has dominated. The U.S. leads in generative AI and commercial applications, while China excels in deployment scale and state-backed integration into military systems.
AI supremacy directly translates into weapons supremacy. Every image and video contributes to the training data of autonomous drones and turrets. Every imprudent outpouring of the heart on a public forum contributes to a psychological warfare capable AI. So does every split-second pause on the doomscroll. Additionally, many expect the economic benefits derived from cutting-edge AI to accelerate economic development. The country that has the best models and best applications of the technology first gets a head start.
These are the aims we are mobilized toward. We are haunted by our own Phantoms, mobilized by government and tech to surrender as much information as possible to gain the edge in the information war. This is our metaphysical form at this stage in human history.
Amor Fati
At this junction in an article like this, the reader may expect me to put forward some call to action for flimsy resistance. Use your phone less, use Brave Browser, ask for your data to get taken down, etc. The truth is that none of it will matter. Making a personal decision to stay on the sidelines during total mobilization is always available to some degree. Stay out of the war machine, stay out of the consumer mania. The total mobilization of the Worker and the Consumer fluctuated regardless of any individual acts of spiritual resistance.
In his essay, Total Mobilization, Jünger argues that World War I births an amor fati toward the impersonal forces of annihilation, death, and horror, experienced as the metaphysical frenzy of total mobilization. He predicts that the age continually advances toward a uniform, machine-centered mass regime that crushes the old liberal order and eventually destroys itself.
Jünger distinguished himself from other German conservatives. He rejected the idealized romanticism of other German conservatives who harkened back to pre-modern traditionalism. Jünger and peers like Spengler and Moeller embraced and accepted the destiny-driven transformations that mass technology wrought on the world. Jünger’s project in Total Mobilization and The Worker was to uncompromisingly grapple with Nietzsche’s ideas in the midst of drastic societal transformations. Much like Spengler, Jünger recognized inevitability and the rule of destiny in the changing of the world. Both of them were inspired by Nietzsche, as was Heidegger, who was also profoundly inspired by Jünger’s writings in The Worker.
Nietzsche states in Ecce Homo:
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it.
Nietzsche’s stoic idea of the embrace and affirmation of reality as it is, which is a critical component of greatness, is reaffirmed in The Worker. Jünger states in the conclusion:
We are moving towards astonishing things here. Beyond the democracy of work, in which the contents of the world we know are recast and reworked, the outlines of state orders are sketched which are beyond any possibility of comparison… We see that the peoples are at work, and we welcome this work, wherever it is carried out. The actual rivalry concerns the discovery of a new and unknown world – a discovery that is more annihilating and richer in consequences than the discovery of the Americas…
To take part and to serve: that is the task that is expected of us.
Participating in the metaphysical demands of the age is not optional. It is especially not optional if one is pursuing greatness. The domination of big data and artificial intelligence is forging the new metaphysics of our age, one in which we are mobilized not as Workers or Consumers, but as data Phantoms. To exist in the form that our age demands, we must accept our station as Phantom and affirm it.
The information war is at hand. The battlefield is diverse, with political parties battling one another, corporations doing the same, and nuclear powers vying for global supremacy. Much like the total mobilization of World War I eliminated the distinction between the battlefield and the factory line, the information war eliminates division between every domain in which information flows.
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This article made me think about Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream” for some reason.
Excellent essay. It's fascinating how you frame the progression from Worker to Consumer to Phantom. It seems that the mode of national patriotism and participation is increasingly passive. Do you foresee that this will culminate in a Wall-E-esque future of passivity and quietism, or do you think that man will arise from this condition and begin to exert a more active influence over his fate?