The point of this newsletter is decolonial relational reasoning, that I pointed out in the closing statement of my previous newsletter (Neither capitalism, nor Communism). Relational reasoning is neither a property nor a privilege of decolonial thinking. Relational reasoning is decolonial as far as the overall frame is the colonial will to power and the colonial matrix of power, the instrumentalización of the will.

Some things arrive even when we are not looking for them. On May 28, 2026, in Istanbul, Alex Mignolo (Alejo) and I set out for Topkapi Palace.  What first caught our attention was the crowd in the ancient Roman Hippodrome,   especially around the Obelisk of Theodosius  and the Walled Obelisk,  where tour groups clustered around the old monuments. By 10 a.m., as we approached Hagia Sophia —which we had visited the day before—the crowd had thickened, and the flow toward Topkapi only grew heavier. We followed it to the ticket area and then to the entrance, some thirty meters away. The serpentine lines, airport-like in scale, quickly defeated both my historical enthusiasm and Alejo’s patience. So we turned back, moving against the current toward a pleasant coffee place we had noticed on the way.

The place was shady, airy, and inviting. It stood beside the historic Ayasofya Hürrem Sultan Hamamı, also known as the Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamamı, a bathhouse associated with one of the most powerful women of the Ottoman court. There was no line for the famed Turkish bath. Then a group of five or six middle-aged couples arrived, most likely headed there themselves, and the scene subtly shifted. Alejo began reflecting on the tourist imagery and the cultural fare offered to the crowd, of which we were also a part. My own thoughts moved elsewhere, toward Juri Lotman’s semiosphere.

For those unfamiliar with Lotman’s concept, the semiosphere is the sphere of all semiotic processes: the space where signs, meanings, and communication occur and interact. Much as the biosphere contains living organisms, the semiosphere contains forms of cultural expression, language, and sign systems.

What matters most in Lotman’s concept is that the semiosphere is not just a collection of signs or languages. It is a living, interconnected environment in which meaning is made, translated, and circulated. Different cultures, languages, and codes meet at its boundaries, and those encounters generate new possibilities for interpretation. In that sense, culture is not a fixed archive but an active field of sign-making, one that can extend beyond the human world.

If culture is not the exclusive property of what Western vocabularies call “humans,” then birds and bees also belong to this story. Birds’ nests and beehives are not simply natural objects set apart from meaning; they can also be read as products of patterned, sign-bearing life. Rather than dwell on that larger question here, I want to concentrate on the living beings named “humans” in Western vocabulary, “ren” in Mandarin, “runa” in Quechua, and “bashar” in Persian, as Ali Shariati reminds us.

From there our conversation turned to the need to rethink semiotics and semiology, fields whose public visibility began to fade in the 1980s. Why that happened is a subject for another newsletter. What mattered that morning was the turn to AI. I thought of Norbert Wiener and Humberto Maturana; Alejo brought Yuval Harari’s Homo Deus into the conversation. In the end, our failed attempt to visit Topkapi yielded its own reward, even if the carrot juice in that lovely café beside the Hürrem Sultan Hamamı cost twelve dollars!

I.

What follows is that conversation, now arranged in a more orderly form.

Norbert Wiener’s 1948 book The Human Use of Human Beings  helped shape how we understand the social consequences of technology and automation. Wiener imagined a world in which machines, guided by cybernetic principles, would increasingly interact with people and influence social structures. He also warned of dehumanization and the loss of agency if we allowed machines to make decisions without careful oversight.

In the same year, Wiener published Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine,  a groundbreaking work that helped launch the digital age. It introduced cybernetics as the study of how systems—biological or mechanical—use feedback and communication to regulate themselves. His ideas laid intellectual groundwork for modern computing, automation, and artificial intelligence by showing how information could be processed and controlled in both living organisms and machines.

The impact of Cybernetics was profound across engineering, biology, psychology, and management. It offered a shared language for discussing feedback loops, self-regulation, and adaptive behavior—principles that became central to automated systems and computing. The book shaped academic inquiry and also helped inspire early computer design and the architecture of digital networks, setting the stage for the sweeping technological changes of the second half of the twentieth century and beyond.

That shared language connects directly to Humberto Maturana’s idea of autopoiesis.  In the 1970s, Maturana became a major figure in second-order cybernetics, sometimes called the “cybernetics of cybernetics.” While first-order cybernetics examined how systems are controlled and regulated, second-order cybernetics shifted attention to the observer and to the ways systems observe and describe themselves.

Maturana extends Wiener’s account of feedback and regulation by asking what distinguishes living systems from machines and what role the observer plays in describing them. That is the key move of second-order cybernetics: the observer is not outside the system, neutrally recording it, but participates in the process of observation itself. His answer was autopoiesis: living beings do not merely react to external signals; they continually produce and sustain themselves. Regulation, then, is not only a matter of control but part of the way life preserves its organization and coherence.

From there, Maturana moved toward what he later called cultural biology. Human beings, he argued, do not live by biological survival alone but through language, emotion, and coordination with others. Culture is not something added to biology from the outside; it is one way human life organizes itself collectively. That is why Maturana remains so useful in conversations about AI: he reminds us that cognition and regulation are never abstract operations alone but are always tied to living worlds.

Readers familiar with the colonial matrix of power may notice a parallel here: the observer is never outside the system being observed. That helps explain Maturana’s movement toward cultural biology and the biology of cognition. Observation is always embedded, and the living organism extends the biosphere into the realm of culture and signification.

II.

Today, Wiener’s concerns feel more urgent than ever. Artificial intelligence is now woven into daily life, from workplace automation to personalized algorithms on social media. His warning still stands: AI should remain a tool that strengthens human capacities rather than one that quietly displaces them. The central challenge is to balance technological change with the preservation of human dignity.

Wiener’s early reflections now resonate across government, healthcare, finance, and other domains in which AI influences consequential choices. His work remains a reminder that ethical oversight, human agency, and dignity cannot be treated as secondary concerns amid rapid technological change.

Many AI systems now operate with a degree of autonomy, learning from vast datasets and shaping recommendations or decisions that affect millions. That reality gives new force to Wiener’s concerns about machine-led judgment. Questions of bias, privacy, surveillance, and accountability make his call for transparent governance and continuing public debate all the more necessary.

That question becomes sharper when we consider the influence of Peter Thiel and firms such as Palantir, whose data-driven systems have helped shape how institutions classify, monitor, and act on human behavior. From there, the path to Harari is short.

III.

Enter Yuval Harari, with a sharper, more unsettling provocation.

Where Wiener warned about the loss of human agency, Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus pushes readers to consider a future in which artificial intelligence may not simply assist humanity but could begin to dominate the terms on which human life is organized. In Harari’s telling, algorithms become powerful enough to surpass familiar human limits and to challenge older assumptions about judgment, authority, and purpose.

This outlook works both as prediction and provocation. It asks whether society will simply accept that trajectory or whether it will actively shape the relation between technology and humanity, as Wiener insisted it must. The contrast between them frames one of the central debates of our time: how much agency people should retain in an AI-saturated world.

The difference between the two thinkers is philosophical as much as practical. Wiener’s stance is one of caution and stewardship: technology should enlarge human well-being, but only under ethical oversight and with human agency preserved at the center. He feared that unchecked automation could erode freedom and diminish the human spirit.

Harari, by contrast, pushes the argument further. In Homo Deus, he imagines a future in which artificial intelligence and data-driven systems do not merely assist human decision-making but begin to overtake it. The question for him is less whether that shift is desirable than how far it may go and what it would mean for human self-understanding.

Placed side by side, Wiener and Harari reveal a central tension in contemporary thinking about AI. Should technology remain a tool firmly under human direction, or is it inevitable that some forms of agency will be ceded to intelligent systems? Wiener urges vigilance and ethical responsibility; Harari asks us to imagine a world in which the boundary between human and machine agency grows increasingly unstable. It is precisely at that threshold that companies like Palantir come into view.

IV.

We finally get to Peter Thiel mentioned in the subtitle.  In the light of what i have been arguing, it is not surprising thatPalantir Technologies emerged as a company specializing in big-data analytics and intelligence systems. Founded in 2003, Palantir built its structure around platforms such as Gotham and Foundry, designed to integrate, manage, and analyze large volumes of data drawn from disparate sources. Its clients include government agencies, financial institutions, and major enterprises seeking tools for decision-making, operational coordination, and actionable insight.

Seen through Harari’s Homo Deus, Palantir is more than a software company. It becomes a concrete sign of the world he describes, one in which data flows, predictive systems, and algorithmic models increasingly shape decisions. The promise is clear: enough information, processed quickly enough, may reveal patterns that escape ordinary perception and guide institutions more effectively than individual judgment alone. It is the reversal of Wiener caution and a confirmation of Harari prediction or design.

This is where the conversation returns to Wiener. For Harari, systems like Palantir suggest that data-driven governance may already be taking shape. For Wiener, the same turn would call for vigilance, because the more decisions are delegated to systems of classification and prediction, the greater the risk that human beings become legible chiefly as data points to be managed. Palantir therefore stands at the intersection of two futures: one that celebrates algorithmic intelligence as a new horizon of power, and another that asks what becomes of agency, privacy, and dignity when regulation increasingly passes through code.

Palantir’s stated aim is to help organizations use complex data for security, intelligence, and operational efficiency. Its platforms support collaboration across departments, policy analysis, pattern detection, and resource coordination through advanced analytics and artificial intelligence.

Thiel’s involvement in Palantir underscores both the promise and the danger of folding advanced analytics and surveillance into public management. Such tools may improve efficiency and security, but they also intensify questions about privacy, autonomy, and institutional overreach. When people are governed through these systems, the stakes of ethical oversight become especially high.

V.

Decolonial relational reasoning forms the axis of this newsletter. I believe it allows us to confront the ontological reasoning of Platonic root that, for a long time, has oriented Western epistemology (e.g., the question of Being) and that today extends its effects into the sphere of technology. I am referring to a logic of denotation according to which words do not merely name the things of the world, but point to supposedly stable, superior, and immutable essences, converted into the ultimate foundation for classifying, ordering, and governing. Seen from this perspective, the technological question cannot be reduced to a problem of technical capacity or instrumental innovation; it requires us to ask about the values, cosmologies, and structures of power that make its operation possible and legitimize its expansion.

Wiener rightly reminds us that human agency and dignity must not yield their place. But the decolonial option pushes the question even further: it asks what conception of the human, what way of giving world to life, and what authority to name, classify, and govern are safeguarded within those systems. From there it becomes possible to better understand the figure of Peter Thiel and the role of Palantir, not only as an expression of technological innovation, but as the contemporary crystallization of that same ontological reason in the forms of calculation, prediction, and management.

In that light, Peter Thiel becomes a revealing figure: throughPalantirand the broader horizon of data-driven governance, he represents not simply innovation, but the consolidation of a powerful Western ontological reason that turns people, populations, and territories into objects of calculation, prediction, and management. Open debate, transparent governance, and sustained attention to social consequences are therefore necessary, but not sufficient, unless they are also accompanied by a decolonial reorientation of the very terms in which intelligence, order, and the human are defined. The question is no longer only whether those systems will organize our lives, but from what epistemic horizon, in the service of whose worlds, and with what resources to confront visions as materially powerful as Thiel’s

In the end, not spending several hours inside Topkapi produced a more rewarding detour. It carried us out of the tourist current and into the layered history of this extraordinary part of Istanbul, where Byzantium, Constantinople, and the Ottoman world remain visibly entangled. Hagia Sophia itself bears those layers. The first church on the site was built in 360 CE, likely under Constantius II, and served as the great church of the Byzantine capital.

The structure known today took shape under Justinian I in the sixth century, remained a cathedral until 1453, and was then converted into a mosque under Mehmed II. That turn did not erase the building’s earlier life; it added another historical layer to a structure that still commands the skyline. Perhaps that is also the lesson of the morning: systems, like cities, do not simply replace what came before. They accumulate, absorb, and reorder meanings—and we live inside the consequences.