I’ve never worked at Palantir, but once you get past the noisy leadership’s villain virtue signaling, every report I’ve read about the platform itself gives me strong “typical enterprise vendor” vibes. A lackluster software offering that is overhyped to institutional purchasers, then shoved down frontline employees’ throats because the vendor is good at navigating the sales and compliance labyrinth to secure deals.
The goals and motivation for using these tools, and their broad allowance of access to what should be highly controlled data (or in some cases even not collected at all) is the problem. Don’t give Palantir the bad-boy street cred they crave, focus on the policy decisions that are leading to agencies wanting tools like this in the first place.
This is my understanding of Palantir too: it's a consultancy with a map, a graph database, and some "AI" nonsense. They sell expensive "forward deployed engineers" (aka, consultants) to customize this map and graph database to specific use cases.
I'm not trying to argue Palantir is an ethical company; my views on "company ethics" are nuanced but I wouldn't put them anywhere near my "places I want to work" bucket. But (contrary, perhaps, to their name), they're not some weird deep demonic trove of personal information; that's supplied to them by their customers, which is where change needs to happen.
I think Palintr ought to be nationalized and placed under the jurisdiction of several competing watchdog agencies - it can generate automatically our annual, quarterly and etc datasets for specific, selected things.
Anyone in disagreement needs to read about Palintr and what has intentionally been said about it
> expensive "forward deployed engineers" (aka, consultants)
Well, at least they're paying those consultants a lot of money, since they're charging a lot for them... right? Right?
Yes. If you worked at pltr as a FDE you are now wealthy.
no i think you and the people you are replying to are getting it completely backwards
people think Palantir makes a lot of money. did Palantir make a lot of money? No. Accenture Federal Services, Leidos Defense Civil IT & Services, Booz Allen Hamilton Gov Consulting & Cyber, General Dynamics Technologies, SAIC, and CACI combined made $61.9b in 2024, compared to all of Palantir which made $2.9b. so if you just look at some IT and defense companies' gov IT sales segments - we're not even including Raytheon or Lockheed Martin or Boeing where calculating such a thing is complex - Palantir's revenue looks very, very small.
people think Palantir makes vanilla "consultants" and “typical enterprise vendor vibes" products. does the thing that Palantir make work? we're talking about it! I think the reason we don't talk about Raytheon's version of this app is that Raytheon's (or Accenture's or...) version doesn't work haha
Referring to engineers with top secret+ security clearances as "consultants" seems reductionistic.
In what way? I'm genuinely curious; I would describe an engineer who is provided to build a customer product alongside a customer as either a "contractor" or a "consultant," depending mostly on their employer. A security clearance just changes what customers and products they work for.
Contractor makes sense, consultant is a bit weird because the typical understanding is that a consultant comes in to share knowledge, not build product.
Then you're not familiar with software consultancy because that's exactly what they do.
Ah ok then let’s just call them contractors because that’s what exactly what they do.
Ok they are "consultants" with a federally guaranteed moat.
The fact that there is a demand for fake evil, functioning like fake piety did in the 1600s, is a flaw of difficult-to-encompass proportion. Our culture is totally bankrupt if companies are now pretending to be worse than they're in reality able to be.
Of course, in contrast to piety all fake evil is also real evil.
The kind of vice-signaling Palantir employees do on this board is more pathetic than the guy who peaked in high school bragging about the time he woke up hungover in a pool of his own vomit.
"No really, I do consequential stuff! See, I met CCP premiers and shit, I supply analytics to help North Koreans assassins kill exiles living in the US! Trust me bro"
I've trolled so many Palantir employees since my freshman year in undergrad that if even 1% of their claims about their power and connections held any water, I would have been audited by the IRS at least once in my life and a "clerical error" would have happened with my car title leading to a weekend in jail for stealing my own car.
I only know 2 Palantir employees in real life, and they are both at least as lame as you would expect someone who says their uncle works for Nintendo to be.
One of them is married to a furry who cheated on him before they got married and supports "consensual love between adults and children", and the other displayed all the outward signs of an incel. The former looks like the old "Carl the Cuck" meme guy (Drew Pickles haircut and Frank Grimes glasses), and the latter told me some copypasta-tier story about how he was friends with "Chinese Princesses". I wish I had my screen caps of this conversation back in 2014, but I deleted Facebook a decade ago. It was bombastic compared to even the Navy Seal copypasta.
If I had to sum it all up, imagine a sysadmin for the Worcester, MA police department pretending to be Lex Luthor on HN for clout.
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> Our culture is totally bankrupt if companies are now pretending to be worse than they're in reality able to be.
I mean, yeah - it’s “he’s not hurting the right people” turned into a product or enterprise and then sold specifically to people who really like that message, and which employs people who desperately want to be in charge of hurting those people as much as possible.
It doesn’t even have the plausible deniability of being a social media company.
I do not agree at all. The problem is both Palantir AND their customers. You have a choise not to make the tools and you have a chiose not to use the tools.
Totally. Responsability is not, in general, mutually exclusive. When it happens to be, that's an organisational convenience, not a moral law.
Governments using Palantir services as a loophole to enable mass surveillance by linking data is the evil part.
How is Palantir a loophole?
I see this theory a lot (sometimes to justify their valuation, sometimes as a moral judgement, sometimes as an alarmist concern) but I genuinely don't see how this line of thought works in any of these dimensions. My understanding is that they're consultants building overpriced data processing products. As far as I know there isn't even usually a separate legal entity or some kind of corporate shenanigan at play; my understanding is that they send engineers to the customer to build a product that the customer owns and operates under the customer's identity as the customer. I certainly see how businesses like Flock are a "loophole;" they collect data which is unrestricted due to its "public" nature and provide a giant trove of tools to process it which are controlled only by what amounts to their own internal goodwill. But this isn't my understanding of how Palantir works; as far as I know they never take ownership of the data so it isn't "laundered" from its original form, and is still subject to whatever (possibly inadequate) controls or restrictions were already present on this data.
> How is Palantir a loophole?
The big legal loophole is that the government needs a particularized warrant (per the 4th Amendment) to ask for any user data, but if the government buys commercial data, well, there's no warrant needed.
I would also submit that it's possible that sending everything through a giant computer-magic-bullshit-mixer allows you to discriminate on the basis of race while claiming plausible deniability, but SCOTUS has already constructively repealed the 14th Amendment between blessing Kavanaugh stops and the Roberts Court steadily repealing the Voting Rights Act, Bivens claims, etc.
> I would also submit that it's possible that sending everything through a giant computer-magic-bullshit-mixer
See also: Parallel Construction (i.e. evidence tampering) and most of the times a "drug-sniffing" dog is called to "test" something the police already want to search.
Which has what, exactly, to do with Palantir?
On a somewhat related note, it always bothers me that the discussion is about whether it’s appropriate for the government to buy this sort of data as opposed to whether it is appropriate for anyone to sell, or for that matter collect, that data.
I would prefer if neither the government nor any data brokers or advertisers had this data.
> The big legal loophole is that the government needs a particularized warrant (per the 4th Amendment) to ask for any user data, but if the government buys commercial data, well, there's no warrant needed.
Right; but as far as I know Palantir don't sell commercial data. That's my beef with this whole Palantir conspiracy theory. I am far from pro-Palantir but it really feels like they're working as a shield for the pitchforks in this case.
Pretty sure GP is saying that the data Palantir sells are commercial because they're being sold by Palantir.
Right, and what I’m saying is that to the best of my knowledge, Palantir don’t sell data at all, which is the fundamental misunderstanding people seem to have about them.
There are two really two major concerning issues with Palantir:
1. They provide tech that is used to select targets for drone strikes and apparently also for targeting violent attacks on US civilians. I don't know too much about how the algorithm works but simply outsourcing decisions about who lives or dies to opaque algorithms is creepy. It also allows the people behind the operations to avoid personal responsibility for mistakes by blaming the mistakes on the software. It also could enable people to just not think about it and thus avoid the moral question entirely. It's an abstract concern but it is a legitimate one, IMO.
2. I don't know if this is 100% confirmed but we have heard reports that Elon Musk and DOGE collected every piece of government data that they could get their hands, across various government departments and databases. These databases were previously islands that served one specific purpose and didn't necessarily connect to all the other government databases from other departments. It's suspected that palantir software (perhaps along with Grok) is being used to link all of these databases together and cross reference data that was previously not available for law enforcement or immigration purposes. This could enable a lot of potential abuse and probably isn't being subjected to any kind of court or congressional oversight.
We agree, I think these are the more valid concerns than the "they are operating a data warehouse with all of the data in the entire universe" conspiracy theory that seems popular.
I certainly think that Palantir has ethical issues; as I stated in my parent comment, it wouldn't be high on my list of choices for places to work.
But, when it comes to things like (2), this is a failure of regulation and oversight and needs to be treated as such. Note that this doesn't make Palantir "right" (building a platform to do things that are probably bad is still bad), but there's no reason anyone with basic data warehousing skills couldn't have done this before or after.
Essentially, I think people give Palantir specifically too much credit and in turn ignore the fundamental issues they're worried about. Panic over "dismantle Palantir" or even the next step, "dismantle corporate data warehousing" is misguided and wouldn't address the issues at hand; worry about government data fusion needs to be directed towards government data fusion, and worry about computers making targeting decisions needs to be directed at computers making targeting decisions.
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They sell data derived from the data. But it's not, like, a hash function - you can absolutely deduce the source data from it. In fact, that's the entire purpose. You use the aggregation and whatnot bullshit to find individuals, track them, gain insight into their living situation and patterns, and acquire evidence of crimes. Typically that requires a search warrant.
If you couldn't go backwards Palantir wouldn't have a market. So, I would consider that a loophole.
> They sell data derived from the data.
Do they? I don't think they even do this, either.
I have really strong knowledge of this from ~10 years ago and weak knowledge from more recently. I'm happy to be proven wrong but my understanding is that they don't sell any data at all, but rather just consulting services for processing data someone already has.
One of those consulting services is probably recommending vendors to supply more data, but as far as I know Palantir literally do not have a first-party data warehouse at all.
They also used Google, Facebook, etc... as a loophole for suppressing freedom of speech in the past (and could still be for all I know).
>because the vendor is good at navigating the sales and compliance labyrinth to secure deals.
it's not just that. Alexandr Wang from Scale AI once said in a talk that they had to compete against Palantir for a gov contract. Palantir's salesmen have a high closing rate because they sell the software as if it were written by God itself. It's one hell of a sales strategy
> It's one hell of a sales strategy
What happens when there's a bug in the software? Would that mean God is fallible after all? Could this be the plot line of Dogma++?
What exactly is the incredible sales strategy here, overhyping to the point of blatant dishonesty? That's hardly unique...
> The goals and motivation for using these tools, and their broad allowance of access to what should be highly controlled data (or in some cases even not collected at all) is the problem ... focus on the policy decisions that are leading to agencies wanting tools like this in the first place.
That's how Karp seems to justify these things. Palantir's job is to (in theory) make government better at doing government things. It's up to voters to keep the government in line.
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I mean you can say stuff like that but the reality is they purposefully named themselves after a super villains magical spy apparatus so I'm not inclined to take his word about them being ethically neutral. Like I'm not really sure what they could name themselves after that would be more ominous
The palantirs were made by the elf lord prince Fëanor of Valinor, one of the good guys. The one we see in the film was given to the kings of Gondor and then pilfered by Saruman. (elvish palan 'far', tir 'watch over')
This almost makes it funnier? As if it’s the folly of creators to believe that their creations are by virtue untethered to morals and ethics, and it’s only through their use by amoral or unethical actors that they become so.
Tools are always neutral. The hammer doesn't become evil merely because you used it to bash someone's brains in. Tools do not make choices; humans do.
This is reductionist. Surely you’ve heard of the Torment Nexus?
This is along the lines of “If I don’t do it, someone else will get paid to, so it might as well be me that gets paid to do it” which I personally find morally abhorrent.
The "torment nexus" is just as reductionist a claim. It is almost always an ad hominem selectively invoked under arbitrary standards. If one consistently follows the argument raised in the meme to its ultimate conclusion, then nothing should ever be invented or accomplished for fear of some speculative harm at some undefined point in the future.
Good thing following memes to their ultimate conclusion is a ridiculous proposition. I also don’t see the connection to its reference being an attack on character.
> Good thing following memes to their ultimate conclusion is a ridiculous proposition.
If the conclusion of a meme is ridiculous, it stands to reason that the claim it makes is similarly so. Memes are not substantial enough to be considered as evidence or proof of moral pronouncements any more than other popularly-invoked and contextless aphorisms are.
> I also don’t see the connection to its reference being an attack on character.
The character attack comes from the implied framing of the invention of the so-called "torment nexus" as the direct product of a person or people exhibiting moral failure through action or inaction. What that particular moral failure is or whether it is a moral failure one at all isn't even given a cursory examination by those crying torment nexus.
> Torment Nexus
You’re bringing in something that’s (vaguely and poorly, for no one knows what it actually could be) defined as something that fits the narrative and present it: “see, if we think up a tool that’s inherently evil by definition of it, it cannot be neutral”. We might, but could such tool actually exist?
(And before we joke about building it, we can think up of its polar opposite too, something unquestionably good that just cannot be evil in the slightest. Again, I suspect, no such thing can exist in reality.)
Isn’t the purpose of all thought experiments to define something that is relevant to what you’re trying to philosophize about? “Fitting a narrative” is a thought-terminating cliché.
If we agree that there exists at least one thing theoretically whose invention would be unequivocally evil - without a morsel of moral justification, then surely there exists a moral spectrum on which all inventions lie, and the inventors (and builders) are not absolved of their sins by virtue of not having actually used their inventions. Maybe you disagree that even in the case of the Torment Nexus the inventor has no moral reckoning (yikes). Maybe you disagree that it’s a spectrum, and rather binary: Torment Nexus immoral, everything else moral (weird).
That’s why I invoked the Torment Nexus.
> If we agree that there exists at least one thing theoretically whose invention would be unequivocally evil
My issue is that your use of the phrase "exists ... theoretically" quietly steps across the boundary between ideal (where anything is possible), and real (where only some things are possible).
In other words, I think that Torment Nexus doesn't exist. Only its idea does, and I don't see how that's possibly sufficient. Kinda like faster-than-light travel - it would change a lot of things - but only it if would be a real thing. AFAIK to best of our understanding it's not. Even though the idea surely exists.
I rather think that it's the meme of Torment Nexus is the actual thought-stopper, because exploring what it could possibly be is what the meme warns one about.
It’s really not that difficult to come up with a Torment Nexus that, given enough money, could be built today. I’m not sure why you’re convinced it could not exist. Just browse a bunch of Wikipedia articles about torture and ethnic cleansing and general injustice and connect some dots.
Another point of the Torment Nexus is that it’s dark humor that science fiction writers especially will ideate something in their writing, and spend great lengths discussing the inevitable harm it unleashes, only to wait a few years and watch as someone actually builds the thing they basically warned everyone about. It’s a placeholder for “thing so bad that I don’t actually want to describe it lest some psychopath actually builds it.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7DjEsFTlic it's also settler logic
Let say someone creates a tool, an android which is designed to kill everyone that believes in a religion the creator does not like. Is that tool neutral?
Only way to repurpose that tool is to destroy part if the tool and replace parts. It is now a different tool.
I say intention of the tool design dictates if the tool is "neutral". That hammer analogy is tool simplistic to the tools we can now create and are attempting to create.
This is an incredibly silly thing to say. If someone makes a knife that is terrible at carving wood or cutting food but is the perfect shape for, say, clitorectomies... then maybe that tool is bad and we should probably stop making it.
Yes, people choose to make it and people choose to use it. But, like... stop those people, right?
This hypothetical knife that you've invented still doesn't make any choices. A person still makes the choice of how and when to use it. That's all that matters. Only things that can choose to act can be judged as ethical or unethical.
The tool is a lump of metal apart from ethics, but making the cliterectomy-knife was a choice someone made. We can judge that decision.
Morality requires agency and conscious agreement. A machine/device doesn't choose to be made or operated nor can it act against its maker/operator any more than rocks can act against the Earth. Regardless of motive, a moral conclusion can't be reached about the object.
> prince Fëanor
> one of the good guys
Uhhhh...
Feanor drew his sword on his half-brother and threatened to kill him because he was paranoid Fingolfin was trying to usurp his power. He compelled all of his sons to swear an oath to slay any man, elf or being in possession of the silmarils (which led to subsequent needless bloodshed).
Then he ordered and carried out the mass-murder of relatively unarmed Teleri in order to rob them of their ships.
Such actions does not a good guy make.
And yet even Feanor was a “good guy” at one point in time. It wasn’t until many years after the invention of the palantiri that he went off the rails, and that was only after talking to Sauron for a while.
But I think that Feanor’s character is irrelevant. An evil person could create a tool that ends up being useful for good purposes. Tools are neutral; they don’t inherit the character of their creator or their user.
So it's literally the Elvish word for "television"...
Telescope, not television.
And more particularly, any remaining telescope after an apocalypse which caused all of them to be controlled and by a mind-destroying superhuman force of literal evil incarnate.
One can't just ignore that kind of subtext...
It’s not the palantir’s fault that Sauron exists. You might notice that there are several other psychic tools lying around that nobody is using because Sauron will enslave anyone who does. The Throne of Amon Hen, certain magic rings, etc, etc. The danger is Sauron, not the tools themselves.
So what? This was never about the moral culpability of the inanimate object itself. (Charitably ignoring, for the moment, that the One Ring was instead a part of Sauron, infused with his own life force. )
This is about the morality and judgment of any person who'd consciously choose to found "One-Ring Controls" (ORC inc.) selling the "Ringraith 3000" that spies on employees and punishes them for not working hard enough.
"Don't criticize me for my branding because fictional crystal-balls and rings are just objects" is not a credible defense.
I haven’t defended Palantir the company at all. I don’t know anything about them. I was merely correcting misstatements about the fictional devices called palantiri.
Frankly the name is amazingly great branding. It makes the customers think, even if only subconsciously, that they have bought a literal crystal ball. That’s genius marketing. Once you’ve got your customers thinking magically about your product you can bamboozle them until the end of time.
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palantíri * (sorry, couldn't resist)
that it takes following the... (charitably) uncommon view that Fëanor was a "good guy" in spite of being a psychopathic thieving mass murderer to excuse the actions of Palantir (the company) should be an indicator that they're Bad, Actually.
> that it takes following the... (charitably) uncommon view that Fëanor was a "good guy" in spite of being a psychopathic thieving mass murderer to excuse the actions of Palantir (the company) should be an indicator that they're Bad, Actually.
While I agree with your assessment of Fëanor I don't think anything in Tolkien's texts indicate that there were nefarious intents for palantiri creation.
> they purposefully named themselves after a super villains magical spy apparatus…
Worse, that spy apparatus inherently corrupts its users.
That's a common misunderstanding. The Palantir never corrupted anyone. They only became dangerous to use once Sauron got his hands on one. You know, that immortal demon god who always uses mind control to get what he wants? If you use a Palantir he’ll notice and start working you over. If he is stronger than you are then he can force your Palantir to show you things of his choosing.
When Denethor used Gondor’s Palantir he saw orc armies marching and pillaging, foundaries forging weapons, Southrons marching north with Oliphants, corsairs raiding the coast, wildmen pillaging Rohan, etc, etc. Sauron never let him see allies coming to his aid, or his own troops winning battles.
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> If he is stronger than you are then he can force your Palantir to show you things of his choosing.
I mean, that's worse.
No, that’s normal. See also newspapers, radio news, television news, cable news, Facebook, Twitter, The Algorithm, etc, etc. It’s not like Tolkien invented a new thing here; the wicked Vizier who tells the King selective truths is a trope practically as old as time.
Even if they’re the most evil corpo ever, the buyer is still the government. If a democratically elected government buys this products, I would assume, in large scale of things, the general population wants the most evil corpo.
It’s not like they are overthrowing South American countries for favorable terms in pineapple and banana trade *cough*Dole*cough*Chiquita*cough*
Yet.
This works is if-and-only-if you assume everyone involved is a good actor. In fact, many if not most in politics are bad actors, and voters largely believe said bad actors.
Palantir reminds me of IBM 85 years ago, only following requirements and requests from the government, never an accomplice. Extracting shareholder value from human suffering should not be criticised because the effect is one step removed from the engineering and company leadership. Why do the ethical thing when instead you can become rich?
the commercial company I worked at had a contract with Palantir - https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220817005178/en/Bet... .
From what I understood they were to read our data and provide some kind of insights. I don't think any of this happened, at least while I was there.
They talk about government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) - it's most likely the reason the company got into this contract, so Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac get some kind of data that they need in their systems.
I’ve used their products extensively, and this is pretty much what you get along with a bunch of “forward deployed engineers” doing ETL all day.
Palantir also supports folks like CDC's DCIPHER
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cdc-and-palantir-pa...
When it's a government system, your issue is not really with the vendor, your issue is with the policymakers.
Sorry, but Palantir doesn’t get off that easy. They know full well how their technology is used. Just because a market exists that doesn’t mean you need to fill it. The tech industry could have taken a moral stand like the chemical industry did with execution drugs.
If you watch any entrepreneur-focused channels, the entire premise of Palantir was "what if we just didn't care about what people think is ethically dubious? What if we went into business in all the places that people have traditionally shied away from for moral reasons?" It's part of Thiel's "Monopoly is good/You want to build the 0 to 1, not jump into a crowded market" mantra.
I started a company in that market 10 years ago. We compete with palantir. It’s a competitive market with lots of actors.
On of their strengths is the ability of thiel to raise lots of money, and win huge gov contracts by convincing everyone that what he built is magic. it is not.
palantir is regular enterprise software. morally, they are vilains for sure, but their superpower is being excellent at marketing themselves.
What I meant is that they espoused that attitude in the Silicon Valley world, which traditionally has not really invested in Defense. I imagine that's also why they're able to raise lots of money and build hype trains, they have one foot still in SV and SV VC.
This is just an inversion of culpability. We know that theres virtually no relationship in our Republic with popularity of an initiative and it's passing into law.
But don't people elect their representatives? oh of course!
If your issue is with policymakers, then it is with the people.
This is also very stupid because - essentially when the government is evil you become skeptical of your neighbors, not 538 people who really control your life.
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I've worked at a company using it. Wrote this below. > Probably mostly just people who work at companies that bought their software and know it's not special. It's a souped up version of Databricks. If you've worked with it it's always a laugh to see both their supporters on X who drank their koolaid, bought their stock and think it's some kind of one-of-a-kind magic, as well as people on places like HN who think they're data brokers. I guess HN is 90% people who have only worked in pure play tech plus academia. If you have any friends at Boeing, Airbus, Citibank, ask them if they've used it. Ironically most of it runs on the clouds from the average HNer's workplace, big enterprise contracts with AWS and Azure.
What you wrote here was accurate:
> the vendor is good at navigating the sales and compliance labyrinth to secure deals.
The main advantage they had over other platforms was really granular permissioning, which execs love the idea of and always scores great on box-ticking exercises.
You know who's collecting all this data the gov is shoving on Palantir's platform? Flock (YC S17) - of this very platform everyone in this thread is currently commenting on and boosting engagement of. Having most of these comments on news.ycombinator.com is peak irony.
What other Databricks providers are designing “daddy’s home” style apartment complex bombing target solutions, in order to have AI provide 100x more targets per day than human processes were able to achieve? I understand such tech is not magical to achieve but I don’t believe that’s the accusation
I think its kind of a conspiracy/"Open Secret" that Palantir was funded by the government to side skirt any "Government cannot...." rules. It's not the government breaking privacy regulations, its a private company doing it....just under contract of the government.
Thats the rhetoric on good ole r/WallSteetBets, atleast. Theil and Karp definitely play into this angle as well, but that doesn't really prove anything other than they're hungry for investors
Yeah, I don’t have any evidence for this but it certainly would make sense. It seems likely that the US government was catching wise to the data brokering loophole around the same time as the PayPal mafia was cashing out and Thiel would have been in the right circles to run into any well-connected gov’t types sniffing around for the most morally flexible big names in the valley. But it seems equally likely that Thiel just wanted to continue accumulating wealth and power to pursue his other authoritarian projects and the government had the biggest bag of cash around so he worked backwards from that.
If next I hear he’s planning to build a fabulous underwater city in international waters, I won’t be surprised. He enjoys his biblical themes, perhaps he can name it Rapture.
At least the underwater city would be useful.
Karp put out a whole book about how "Silicon Valley needs to be more willing to work with the government" too, post launch of Palantir.
Idk...any and every of these companies fielding government contracts with a name from LOTR seem off to me. Palantir, Anduril, Erebor....
You’re missing the point. The villainy and noise is the superpower of the company.
Operating Palantir in the way ICE is illegal, full stop. Just the IRS integration alone makes most users in a position where they are committing felonies.
Basically, there is little difference between what they do and what Enron did. It’s all based on criminality, and instead of strippers and cocaine, they signal with weird faux Orthodox Christianity and crazy behavior. The “orthodox” selection is deliberate as it feels exotic but is not catholic, so the modern evangelical types somehow are ok with it.
"Banality of evil." This does seem to be obliquely whitewash the company as it's adjacent to so much of tech. I don't think this exempts them from the hostile intent of their work.
There’s a lot of weird hype around Palantir, and I suspect bots that are propping them up in social media. For example look at how many meaningless comments on Twitter/X or YouTube videos mention Palantir’s “ontology”, whatever that means. Many of these comments literally will just say the word “Ontology” and nothing else, as if it is some mysterious superpower that Palantir has discovered. I suspect it is, as you said, just basic software but from a company that has no moral limits to what their software does.
the thing about supervillains is that you expect technical seriousness but thats just Hollywood not showing that psychopaths and narcissists are lazy and sell BS
Yeah, this is no different from IBM setting up punch card tabulating machines to help Nazi Germany track its victims.
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> I'll also remind everyone that it's estimated that under Obama 3.1 million illegals were deported.
And with no gestapo needed! That's the difference.
a person cannot "be illegal". they can perform acts which are illegal, sure, but to call them "illegals" is just dehumanizing rhetoric that adds absolutely nothing to the discussion.
If you ever drove over the speed limit can you be called "an illegal?"
Does US have such a lack of space to fail to absorb 2-5% increase over years?
What's so hard about naturalizing or legalizing them, so that they can more easily interact with current power structures on the territory?
Capital city in the country where I live got a 25% population bump over a few months a few years back, of people who didn't even speak the language. Barely anything appretiably negative overall happened.
In another comment, I referenced Eichmann. A train is not a good thing or a bad thing. A rail car is not a good thing or a bad thing. Having an app that aggregates multiple different data sources and puts them together is not a good thing or a bad thing. It's the morality behind the hands into which we put that tools that matters. The more capable the tool, the more good or evil you can do with it. Maybe we should ask ourselves if this kind of a tool should exist at all, or there should be some level of process before it can be used. But the engineer at Palantir is just as guilty or not guilty in your eyes as the engineer fixing the trains or laying new track.
any opinions on the german WW2 engineer laying neutral tracks toward Auschwitz
EDIT: sorry, that was glib. However I want to make the argument that the argument of doing "neutral" physical work is not absolutely morally absolving.
There wasn’t anything built there until well after the tracks were laid, if I understand the logistics of that area correctly.
Yes. It's not, and I agree. There's no bright line that says you're morally culpable or you are not morally culpable for what you do. But all of us should think about our roles in that light. If Palantir uses Git, does that mean new Git contributions are part of what is arguably an ethnic cleansing? I wouldn't be able to sleep at night and work on this project. (I do not work at Palantir).
But the point is also that maybe we should take one step back and think about the morality of the people we put in decision making roles. The technology is morally neutral, but the intention is not. And helping to realize that intention is not. And sometimes the things we build can be used in horrible ways unless we also think about safeguarding their use.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. It is my very real fear that a lot of information has been aggregated into Palantir and other applications and is usable with no restraint. And that even if you just run the build system, across hundreds of apps, you might be culpable as well.
Well that's clearly an example of putting the cart before the horse. You should be able to sleep at night so long as you remember that Git isn't what enables Palantir to power an army of federalized brownshirts; it's the people making the tools explicitly for an army of federalized brownshirts with Git that are morally culpable.
Okay, that's where you draw the line. But someone provides power to their data center and their offices. Someone provides hand-held devices. Someone provides network connectivity. Someone has a contract to house and feed these agents. Someone has the logistical and fleet services for their vehicles. Someone is likely the landlord to their buildings. Someone has a contract to clean the buildings. Someone is a deciding to buy a block of Palantir stock versus some other software company. Someone runs the private prison into which people are herded. An attorney has a choice to file a charge or not file a charge. A judge has the choice to bend over backward to give ICE/CBP the benefit of the doubt, or be skeptical.
Baking a roll of bread is not immoral. Baking bread as part of a contract to feed the gestapo, is.
Mmmmhhhhhh it depends on what the engineer knows about the realistic uses of the tool. As a sibling comments, fixing the railroads to Auswichz might me morally wrong.
Eichmann knew what he was doing and, in any case, forcing dozens of thousands of people to move with less than a week's notice does not soynd quite "amoral".
If you're working at Palantir, you know what you're working on.
Producing Cyclon B is a doing a neutral thing apparently? So is building a system cataloguing all Jews and socialists in Berlin also a neutral thing? The officer ordering the legal building of large ovens and carpenter doing the bidding are not guilty? The soldier following the rules written by law that he should coral the ”visitors” and ”workers” is doing no good or bad thing because he has instructions and is not taking judgement on his work?
My point was, if you do invent something like Zyklon B, you need to consider its uses. While the gas itself is just a molecule, devoid of morality, not everyone who employs it will be a moral person.
In the case of Palantir, should we allow the federal government to combine databases (which may have been hoovered up by DOGE and held in a private sector company that isn't subject to FOIA)? Should there be judicial review, like for FISA warrants before you can field an application? Should we allow the government to buy that kind of app in the first place? I don't give Palantir a free pass.
But it's not the engineer at Palantir that decides to send poorly vetted and trained people into a home, fully stoked, believing your have complete immunity, and full of anabolic steroids, and praying any of the occupants shows an iota of resistance. 79 million voters chose this. This is the morality of the people employing the tool.
A thing clearly has no intention and it's impossible for us to know every possible use for a product. But at some level we need to feel responsible for what we create, we need to feel responsible for our choices, and we need to see the responsibility others have because of their choices.
I think there is no significant disagreement between the two of us, perhaps only on the topic of intentionality of things and degrees of involvement.
A gun has the intent of projecting violence at a distance. No matter if it is used within the frame of the law or not.
A vaccine has the intention of protection against disease. No matter if it is used within or outside the law.
A fence contains the intent of separating things.
A system built to deeply and widely track and catalogue and eavesdrop on people has the intention of being intrusive.
The purpose of a system is what is does. If a system does help the violent actions towards civilians and citizens then that is the purpose of what the engineers at Palantir built.
(I also think I was a bit too confrontational in my earlier reply, sorry about that)
I think you're right and it's possible to have something that exists with no other purpose than to cause harm. And it's not moral to make that thing. I also don't think it's fruitful to find the specific circumstances it's moral to eat babies (go down philosophical rabbit holes until you find the one time that doing something despicably immoral is actually the moral thing to do). But I would say the technology is the least important part of the problem. A moral person uses dangerous tools sparingly and intentionally harmful tools never. If Palantir did not exist, would they perform the raids? I think so.
>Producing Cyclon B is a doing a neutral thing apparently?
Without searching for references, it's my understanding that Fritz Haber developed this decades before the war, in conjunction with making synthetic fertilizer. It was later used for the purpose you referenced.
I consciously used the word ”produce” rather than ”develop” or ”invent” to try to be clear that I meant ”[produce] from a factory”.
Fair enough. In that case I agree.
Germany has a system today cataloguing all the Jews in Berlin (the address registration includes your religion for the purpose of charging church tax), and everyone I've mentioned this to seems to feel it's neutral.
Germany in its constitutional law has protections against that data being used for any other purpose or government agencies. Does that help if a new antisemitic party would take over? Not likely for long, but hopefully long enough for other constitutional protections (like banning the party), anti-fascists or people working there themselves to intervene. On the other hand folks like the CCC or other data protection NGOs have been trying to teach politicians data minimalism for a while, but in this particular case religious conservatives don't want the state to get out of collecting church tax and the churches don't want the state to get out of it. In particular, Jewish communities could request the state not to collect taxes, tell their members to not enter that data into the tax forms and collected tithes/donations/similar on their own.
IBM designed and serviced such a system when it was known to be used by a genocidal government as the customer
You're missing the part where they named their train after a iconic artifact of evil famously used to do evil train stuff with for this metaphor to work