After I published this piece on Palantir, a friend sent me an image. It was a screenshot from an anonymous forum, one of those really old ones, containing an analysis so sharp it cut like a razor. The text was about Harry Potter. In short, it said that Harry never believed in anything, that the real force for change in the wizarding world was Voldemort, and that Harry's struggle was only about restoring the status quo. And it ended with a dry blow: “that is how liberals see the world.”
I kept the image. And I couldn't get it out of my head.
Because, all of a sudden, I saw the same thread running beneath three very different stories: Peter Thiel's Palantir, the saga of Luke Skywalker, and the journey of Harry Potter. A myth from the past, a pop narrative, and a real surveillance company. Different registers, different ontologies — but the same ideological logic running underneath all of them. What interests me here is not to equate fiction and reality; it is to show how fiction reveals the limits of political imagination, and how reality sometimes fulfills those limits with frightening precision.
The anonymous text: Harry Potter and the cowardice of restoration¶
The forum's argument is this: the wizarding world is a society full of fractures — elf enslavement, racism, corrupt bureaucracy, stratified social class. But Harry doesn't care. The only injustice that truly moves him is racism against half-bloods, and even that rarely knocks him off the track of passivity. When Hermione tries to free the house-elves, she becomes a joke. The narrative treats her as a nag, a Soapbox Sadie.
Years later, cultural critic Mark Fisher gave this phenomenon a name: capitalist realism — the widespread sense that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine an alternative to the existing system. Harry Potter lives immersed in this realism. He cannot conceive of a different world. He can only conceive of defending what is there.
Meanwhile, the great force of transformation in the wizarding world is Voldemort. He is the one who challenges the order, who wants to rewrite the rules. And Harry? Harry and his own fight to preserve what exists. Harry's dream, after all, is to become an auror — the FBI of the magical world, the ultimate defender of the system he never questioned.
And the final victory? An anticlimax. Voldemort dies because he violated an obscure technicality about the ownership of the Elder Wand. Harry does not overcome Voldemort. Harry proposes nothing better. The magic ricochets.
The anonymous author closes with a phrase that echoes to this day: "This is the struggle of liberals. They live in a world full of conflicts, but only get bothered by threats to pluralistic multiculturalism. They see change as something negative. And they can only act within the legal and ideological frameworks of their society."
Star Wars: the Republic that never was¶
When I looked at Star Wars, the mold was there, intact.
Luke Skywalker is the Harry Potter of a galaxy far, far away. He wants to be a Jedi, like his father. The Jedi were the guardians of the Old Republic — a Republic that the prequel trilogy showed to be corrupt, bureaucratic, and paralyzed. But none of that matters. Luke does not question the Jedi. He wants to restore them.
The Empire, like Voldemort, is the agent of change. A brutal, authoritarian change, yes — but the only alternative the narrative offers. The Rebel Alliance fights to bring the Republic back. And the final victory, in Return of the Jedi, is as technical as Harry's: Luke destroys the second Death Star by hitting an impossible target, while Han and Leia take down a shield. The moral triumph — Vader's redemption — is a private act, between father and son, that does not reorganize the galaxy. The Empire falls because its weapon explodes.
The epilogue is the same as Harry Potter's. Thirty years later, in The Force Awakens, the New Republic is wiped off the map in five minutes of screen time. The First Order takes the Empire's place. The restoration failed because it was only a restoration.
Palantir: the containment spell¶
Now, look at Palantir.
The company sells a technical victory to the liberal Empire. Its software does not ask why terrorism exists, why immigration became a “security problem,” why Latin America is ablaze. It simply says: I identify the enemies for you. Where the system has failed, Palantir fixes the system — but never beyond it.
Like Harry and Luke, Palantir is an auror, a Jedi, a guardian of order. Its contracts with the CIA, the Pentagon, ICE, and the Israeli military are real-world versions of the Elder Wand and the lightsaber: tools that solve immediate problems without ever touching the causes.
And the terrorist — the “Voldemort” on duty — is always the force of change. Whether Hamas, the PCC, or a Mexican cartel. They are the villains who want to flip the table. We, the heroes, are the ones keeping the table standing. The table may be rotten, bloodstained, crooked — but it is our table.
CEO Alex Karp knows this. In April 2025, during an event in Washington, a protester confronted him: “Your technology kills Palestinians.” Karp replied: “Mostly terrorists, that's true.” That sentence is the epitome of the technical logic: deaths are validated by the “terrorist” category, which the system helps to define. Collateral damage is the house-elf of our era — an uncomfortable footnote, but acceptable.
On elves and ourselves¶
And here I need to pause for a moment. Because, if we're honest, the position of the house-elf is the one that most resembles our own.
The house-elf sees everything. He serves at tables, listens to conversations, knows who is plotting what. He has more information about how power really works than many wizards. But his response to injustice is not revolt — it is loyalty to a system that mistreats him. He has internalized servitude. He cleans, cooks, organizes and, at most, punishes himself when he disobeys.
We, sitting in front of our screens, receiving ever more brutal feeds, are increasingly resembling house-elves. We know the surveillance machine is growing. We know the war on terror has no end. We know about the deportations, the drones, the corporate palantíri mapping the planet. But the response rarely goes beyond weariness, cynicism, a ready-made joke — or yet another post. We are too aware to be naive, but also too tired to revolt. The voluntary servitude of the 21st century is not ignorance. It is fatigue.
And it is precisely this fatigue that the liberal imagination exploits. If the most we can wish for is restoration — of a Republic that didn't work, of a corrupt Ministry, of an order that produces the very enemies it claims to fight — then the machine has already won before it even presses the button.
The fear of change¶
What unites these three stories is a worldview that cannot imagine a future different from the past. The liberal imagination, as the anonymous forum user said, is limited to defending what exists. It does not create. It preserves. It does not propose a new world — it offers a more efficient, more surveilled, more heavily armed version of the current world.
Tolkien understood this long before all of us — even though, ironically, he too was a thinker of restoration. Aragorn restores the kingdom. The Hobbits rebuild the Shire. But Tolkien knew that the tool which allows seeing also corrupts those who see. He wrote a mythology of order, yes, but he also wrote a warning: the palantír, in the wrong hands, does not reveal the truth — it projects the will of power. Peter Thiel's Palantir took the warning as an instruction manual.
Harry Potter is the fantasy that fed the generation that now operates this stone. Star Wars is the myth that justifies the cyclical restoration of the same order. And we, trained by decades of narratives that taught us to fear change as synonymous with evil, now face an impasse. The real Voldemorts are there, and they are genuinely dangerous. But the institutions that fight them are often rotten. And between the fear of the villain and the fear of imagining something new, the system keeps spinning — powered by exhausted elves who know too much and do too little.
Now, as I refresh the news aggregator and watch the planet being mapped in surveillance grids, I remember the anonymous commenter from the forum. He wasn't just talking about Harry Potter. He was talking about us. And the question hanging in the air is as simple as it is painful: if we believe in nothing, what will we do when change knocks at the door — and change, for the first time, is not a villain?
Sources¶
Anonymous text¶
- Post on an anonymous forum, dated 08/17 (Thu) 11:36:36, No. 1745693, file "IMG0326.JPG." The text critiques the politics of Harry Potter as a metaphor for centrist liberalism. (Received as a screenshot.)
Palantir — Alex Karp quote (verified)¶
- The National — “Palantir CEO says most Gazans killed are ‘terrorists’” (May 6, 2025)
- Israel Hayom — Coverage of the Hill and Valley Forum (September 1, 2025)
- Consortium News — “The ‘Left’ Love Affair with Alex Karp's War Machine” (June 6, 2025)
- Spanish Revolution — Quote of the same statement in Spanish (September 4, 2025)
Palantir — Contracts with Israel and military use¶
- The Indian Express — “How a US tech firm filled its coffers by helping Israel bomb Gaza…”
- Middle East Eye — “Israel used Palantir technology in its 2024 Lebanon pager attack, book claims”
- Amnesty International UK — Denunciation of the 2024 strategic partnership
- Gigazine — “It turns out that Israel used technology from Palantir in the pager explosion…”
Palantir — ICE and domestic contracts in the U.S.¶
- Newsweek — “ICE To Get New Technology To Track Illegal Migrants: Report”
- CorpWatch — “Palantir Documents Expose How Trump Administration Tracks Migrants for Deportation”
- Military.com — “Pentagon Expands Use of Palantir AI in New Defense Contract” (Project Maven)
On the liberal imagination, capitalist realism, and narratives¶
- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009) — Coined the concept of "capitalist realism" and analyzed the paralysis of postmodern political imagination.
- Mark Fisher, “Harry Potter and the Death of the Political” (via k-punk and posthumous collections) — Argues that the series expresses a refusal of the political.
- The reading of Star Wars as a restorationist myth is explored in various essays in outlets such as Jacobin and Los Angeles Review of Books.
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