The Authoritarian Stack: How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America – And Why Europe Is Next [This article is largely a visualization with accompanying text – very well done]. “The Contract That Changed Everything –  In late July 2025, deep within the Pentagon’s bureaucratic machinery, the U.S. Army quietly signed away a piece of its sovereignty. A ten-billion-dollar contract with Palantir Technologies—one of the largest in the Department of Defense’s history—was framed as a move toward “efficiency.” It consolidated seventy-five procurement agreements into a single contract.

A strategic handover of core military functions to a private company whose founder, Peter Thiel, has declared that “freedom and democracy are no longer compatible.”

…The Stack: Five Domains of Privatized Sovereignty Critical state infrastructures are being privatized across five domains—data, defense, space, energy, and money—the foundations of democratic power. These domains form the architecture of privatized sovereignty: a technological regime where power flows through laws, infrastructure and automated platforms….