Alex Karp, the “supervillain” CEO of the spy tech firm Palantir, isn’t known for his sense of style. Scan the internet for photos of him at defence tech conferences and you’ll find him in an unremarkable blue suit; out on the street, you might see him in a logo-covered gilet, the unofficial uniform of Silicon Valley investors. On the outside, he’s just another boring tech bro – there’s not much to suggest he’s a key figure enabling genocide in Gaza and turning the US into a right-wing technocracy, or a man who jokes about spraying his critics with “fentanyl-laced urine”. But that’s probably not by mistake. Palantir understands the importance of aesthetics.

Case in point: at the end of the month, the company will drop the latest in its line of branded merch, a lightweight chore coat in blue and black. (Bad luck, every straight man at Broadway Market – you’re a technofascist now.) As Eliano Younes, who oversees “vibes” at the US software company, writes in an announcement on X, the jacket is “great for activities” and made in America (although, as the viral menswear critic Derek Guy pointed out, it’s actually modelled after traditional French workwear, so perhaps not as patriotic as it might seem).

The merch drop does, however, reflect a recent obsession with “taste” in the US tech industry. Beginning somewhere around Mark Zuckerberg’s swaggy glow-up in 2024, this preoccupation has been stated more openly in recent months, with big names at companies including OpenAI and a16z declaring things like: “taste is a new core skill.” As Kyle Chayka recently wrote in the New Yorker, this makes sense. “AI companies need to associate themselves with taste precisely because their tools are not very palatable, much less cool, to anyone outside of Silicon Valley,” he explained. “We might call what’s going on now ‘taste-washing,’ an attempt to give anti-humanist technologies a veneer of liberal humanism.”

“Taste-washing” has gone way beyond quoting Rick Rubin and obsessing over typography, though, when a company like Palantir – which reportedly creates “kill lists” for the Israeli military, and mines US citizens’ data for ICE – encourages people to wear its logo like they’re repping their favourite sports team. This is a company that, just days ago, issued a 22-point manifesto that’s been described by critics as “technofascist” and the “ramblings of a supervillain”. Titled The Technological Republic, and based on a book of the same name, this manifesto calls for the US to accelerate the AI arms race and dismisses the cultures it doesn’t like as “dysfunctional and regressive”. Overall, it advocates folding technologies like Palantir’s into government to exert a new form of “hard power” with a distinctly authoritarian, white supremacist edge.

For Palantir, this mission is going well. Besides supporting the genocidal actions of the US and Israel, the company is increasingly embedded in the UK government, via deals worth some $600 million with the NHS, military, and local councils. Despite widespread backlash, it’s also poised to provide spy tech to the Metropolitan Police. Needless to say, it doesn’t need to flog merch just to stay afloat. So what are we actually looking at here?

After the Palantir chore coat hit the timeline, a post by fashion commentator and critic Chloe Iris Kennedy resurfaced. Referencing a December 2025 streetwear drop by Lockheed Martin (yes, another US defence firm), she wrote: “in the early 2000s, camo print was strategically placed in the fashion zeitgeist as a means of aligning the western world with the war on terror.” But today, she adds, the aesthetic comes from the top down: “Nowadays, war machines can simply release merchandise, label it gorpcore, and the public will willingly fund their acts of terror. This is the consequence of decades of denying the politics of fashion.”

But again, Palantir doesn’t exactly need public funding. What it does need is cultural capital, or at least a way to whitewash its influence over some of the worst atrocities of the 21st century so far. And why not look to the playbook of past movements, like the Nazi party or Italian Futurists, for inspiration? All the way back in 1935, the critical theorist Walter Benjamin identified aesthetics as a key ingredient of these fascists’ rise to power, as well as a way to maintain the illusion that people can “express themselves” while their rights are stripped away.

OK, so Palantir is selling a jacket, alongside its previously-released t-shirts, ‘Silicon Valley dropout’ crew necks, and patches. Is it really that deep? Well, let’s take a look at how far its cultural influence has spread so far. On social media, you can find starter packs for guys who “support the Thiel thing” (unhinged venture capitalist Peter Thiel is a co-founder of Palantir, naturally) alongside The Devil Wears Prada chore coat memes, and fake Palantir ads starring the likes of Sydney Sweeney, Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, and Margaret Qualley. (Who is making these? Is it safe to say they’re on the Palantir payroll?) Relatedly, we’ve seen a proliferation of weapons across the cultural landscape, from magazine covers, to cult fashion collections, to one of the year’s most talked-about films (iykyk).

Of course the tone of these cultural references is often ironic, but for Palantir they arguably serve a similar purpose to the kitsch art and far-right slop that’s being churned out by the US government. The more we’re exposed to the brand and its military associations, the easier it gets to normalise its (very abnormal) activities in our minds. It doesn’t even really matter if you like Palantir’s merch or not, whether you care if it’s all-American or inspired by French workwear – the point is cultural saturation. Just as Palantir infiltrates national infrastructure with its software, each meme and merch drop sees it sneak even deeper into our brains.

If camo was meant to taste-wash the War on Terror on the down-low, Palantir’s imperialist end goals seem much more out in the open. See point six of the company manifesto: “National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.” At least we know what Younes meant when he said the chore coat was “great for activities” – when they hit the frontlines in World War III, every American will be dressed in 100 per cent cotton ‘relaxed fit’ workwear with a French twist.