Evening all,

It’s Carole – again – because, as the team’s resident Debbie Downer, I’m here to introduce our tech surveillance special. But first a flavour of what else is in today’s edition, including Julia Raeside on Half Man, Richard Gadd’s “hollow” follow-up to Baby Reindeer; the Welsh-Cornish singer Gwenno sharing her cultural recommendations; and a rave from our film critic Ellen E Jones for Cornish auteur Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada. 

We’ve just hit our six-month birthday and we’re especially proud that, with only a tiny team, we’ve managed to publish public-interest investigations which have had real impact, including a whole series of exposés on Palantir, the Silicon Valley surveillance firm, co-founded by Peter Thiel. 

We’re especially proud because if we hadn’t set up the Nerve, this is work that simply wouldn’t have been done. We’ve seen the company successfully spinning its own press lines via the pages of the Sun and even our old newspaper, the Observer. Not on our watch. 

We've exposed the hidden scale of Palantir’s involvement in the UK’s critical infrastructure and the fact it runs our nuclear weapons programme, the MoD whistleblowers who believe it profoundly compromises our national security, and the UK pension funds that are funding its growth. This week we’re publishing a new investigation. 

All of which to say is that if you’re able to financially support our work, we truly appreciate it. Every paying membership subscription makes a huge difference to our ability to do these investigations (but the £68 annual membership particularly helps with our long-term sustainability). And if you can, please forward this newsletter to a friend, and click on our Proton Mail ad at the end of this message to add to the funding pot.

This week,as we were preparing our new investigation for publication, and I was in a back-and-forth with the company’s head of comms, Palantir’s X account published a 22-tweet post that set out an extraordinary ideological framework that it said underpins all its work. 

This includes 6) “National service should be a universal duty” and 17) “Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime”. I sent another press inquiry to Palantir’s UK comms that included the question: “A number of people have referred to this as a fascist manifesto … does Palantir have any comment to make?” 

It did not. Instead, the irreplaceable Stewart Lee rips it to shreds in his latest must-read column today. “If Palantir were a person, it would be a much worse person than either Peter Mandelson or the deceased paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein,” he notes. Elsewhere, we have Mark Coeckelbergh, a professor of philosophy at Vienna University, analysing the ideology behind the manifesto… and what it means for our world. 

So that’s where we are in 2026: doing an analysis of a company’s fascist manifesto while simultaneously publishing our new investigation into the same company’s relationship with the UK state. In the latest instalment, we expose the revolving door between the company and senior leaders in the Ministry of Defence, NHS and the intelligence services. 

Here are the links for today’s edition:

"Proximity to Mandelson or Epstein can prove politically toxic," reflects Stewart this week, and yet, he points out, the paedophile was an associate of Palantir founder Peter Thiel and, instead of that getting him into hot water, "the Labour government continues to welcome Palantir to manage our NHS, military and financial data, spewing all our personal details into its cauldron of weaponisable knowledge”. "Double standards anyone? We’ve got loads!" Read Stewart's latest column here.

In a new investigation, we uncover the emergence of the “Palantir pipeline” - we found 32 senior officials hired straight out of the UK government and public sector into key roles in Palantir and a further 37 lower-ranking individuals. This poses an “acute risk” of corruption, according to transparency experts. The details are eye-opening. The person who wrote the NHS’s AI strategy? Recruited by Palantir. The person who wrote the MoD’s AI military strategy? Recruited by Palantir. But not before he had nine meetings with the firm during his time in office. Here’s the investigation.

The AI expert, author and philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh condemns Palantir’s de facto manifesto, published on social media last week, as a document “openly hostile to liberal democracy … pluralism, inclusion, and empathy”, and one that chooses to “embrace ‘hard power’ (read: violence) and permanent warfare”. Whereas other companies announce products, he writes, Palantir is announcing a worldview, one that “rings a very specific bell – a fascist one”. Read his piece here.

He's back. The man behind Baby Reindeer, the daring drama about a lonely barman being stalked by an older woman, which shot to the top of the Netflix charts and won a haul of awards, has returned with Half Man. Already garlanded with praise, Richard Gadd's latest lands on BBC iPlayer today, purporting to “examine the dysfunctional and volatile relationship between two men growing up in Glasgow in the 1980s”. But, says TV writer and author Julia Raeside, it doesn't “expose” toxic masculinity so much as simply make a spectacle of it. Read her excellent column here.

The musician Gwenno grew up in a trilingual home and today lives in Cardiff, the town where she was raised, with her husband and kids. Her cultural tips range from a new film that celebrates “one of the great thinkers of our time”, a book highlighting the importance of folk art and the best place to eat in west Wales. Gwenno’s highlights here.

He scooped a Bafta for Bait in 2019 and now, says Nerve film critic Ellen E Jones, acclaimed Cornish auteur Mark Jenkin releases his most audience-pleasing film to date. Rose of Nevada – the name of a fishing vessel which returns mysteriously to port after 30 years lost at sea – stars "Brit-flick matinee idols" George MacKay and Callum Turner. Eerie and disorienting, it has, Ellen says, "a plot that’s pleasingly reminiscent of 80s and 90s Hollywood time-travel classics while also revealing a deeply relevant truth about how gentrification plays out in modern Britain." Read her review here.

The award-winning food writer Georgina Hayden, whose books include the bestsellers Nistisima and Greekish, draws on her Greek-Cypriot heritage to create original, not too difficult and always delicious recipes. Her new book MEDesque, published this week, celebrates food that has its origins in the Mediterranean. “Cooking should never feel like a burden,” she says, “and the beauty of Mediterranean food is that it can be low-key and simple but still packed with flavour.” Here she shares her special recipe for spring meatballs.

Finally, there are still tickets for our upcoming event at the Leicester Square theatre next Thursday with Deborah Frances-White – aka the Guilty Feminist – and Lucia Osborne-Crowley, journalist and author whose dedication to centring the voices of Epstein’s and Maxwell’s survivors has been an inspiring story of trying to hold power to account. I will join them on stage for a conversation about Epstein, Gisèle Pelicot and how women can fight back. Join us for a night of joyful resistance! Also on the bill are  comedian Ria Lina, the rapper/poet Dan Whitlam and music from the soulful duo GeeJay. Buy tickets here. (Note: Nerve members have been sent a 20% discount code.)

Thank you for reading and we’ll be back on Tuesday. Don’t forget to click the ad…

Carole

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