Palantir’s Cynical Ideology

In 1995, dozens of academics and intellectuals descended on Warwick University for the conference “Virtual Futures: Cyberrevolution.” Presided over by the enfants terribles of digital Deluezianism, Nick Land and Sadie Plant, who would found the Cybernetic Culture Research Institute (CCRU) shortly after that, the event featured a who’s who of fashionable theoreticians—Bifo Berardi, Manuel DeLanda, Michael Hardt—and figures from the art world, notably the transhumanist performance artists Stelarc and Orlan.