There’s a famous Mitchell & Webb sketch where two SS officers, mid-conversation on the Eastern Front, suddenly notice something troubling about their uniforms. “Hans,” one ask…
There’s a famous Mitchell & Webb sketch where two SS officers, mid-conversation on the Eastern Front, suddenly notice something troubling about their uniforms. “Hans,” one asks, peering at his cap, “are we the baddies?” The skulls had been there the whole time. The skulls are kind of a giveaway. But it took a while for the question to surface…
Unlike Graham Platner, who had to be repeatedly called out for his Totenkopf.
Around that time, two former employees reconnected by phone. Right as they picked up the call, one of them asked, “Are you tracking Palantir’s descent into fascism?”
“That was their greeting,” the other former employee says. “There’s this feeling not of ‘Oh, this is unpopular and hard,’ but ‘This feels wrong.’”
Two weeks ago, we wrote about Palantir going mask-off for fascism, specifically about CEO Alex Karp’s company posting a 22-point manifesto that included some genuinely ugly stuff about how “certain cultures” are “regressive and harmful” and how pluralism is a “shallow temptation.” I argued that this kind of public ideological positioning was both morally bankrupt and strategically suicidal. The moral bankruptcy part should be obvious (if it’s not, go do some soul-searching). But doing so at a time when American-style fascism is historically unpopular basically everywhere, including within the US, just seems like you’ve bet on the losing team at a time when it’s clear they have no chance of coming back to win.
That’s quite a decision for the company, given that Palantir is supposed to be in the business of using technology to predict how strategic decisions will play out.
It turns out a lot of Palantir employees agree that maybe it’s not so good for them or the company to be picking the morally bankrupt, historically unpopular position. Better late than never, I suppose.
There’s a “well, duh” element to all of this that we shouldn’t gloss over. Palantir has been Palantir for two decades. The company is named after the corrupting all-seeing surveillance orb from Lord of the Rings. Its initial venture capital came from the CIA. Peter Thiel co-founded it. The entire pitch has always been mass data aggregation in service of authoritarian state power. If you took a job there at any point in the last twenty years, the skulls were sitting right on top of the cap, plainly visible, and people were pointing at them constantly.
But doing so at a time when American-style fascism is historically unpopular basically everywhere, including within the US, just seems like you’ve bet on the losing team at a time when it’s clear they have no chance of coming back to win.
I think people fail to see that this has all been a gamble that has, miraculously, worked out in the favor of the fascists. I have never seen people being this politically educated in my social circles, so we know there’s still a fight that we might win, but we aren’t winning it, and saying we are doesn’t help anyone.
Those dissenting PLTR employees will get sacked, much like Twitter employees core to the spirit of Twitter were sacked to pave way for X. We all mocked X, but it’s still there, radicalizing people towards fascism more and more by the day, so let’s not make the mistake of thinking Palantir is about to lose or that it is on the losing side when everything we see points to them becoming too big and important to lose for governments all over the world. We are on the losing side until fascists don’t hold the highest positions in the most influential government bodies around the globe.
Unlike Graham Platner, who had to be repeatedly called out for his Totenkopf.
Ya think?! 🧐
I think people fail to see that this has all been a gamble that has, miraculously, worked out in the favor of the fascists. I have never seen people being this politically educated in my social circles, so we know there’s still a fight that we might win, but we aren’t winning it, and saying we are doesn’t help anyone.
Those dissenting PLTR employees will get sacked, much like Twitter employees core to the spirit of Twitter were sacked to pave way for X. We all mocked X, but it’s still there, radicalizing people towards fascism more and more by the day, so let’s not make the mistake of thinking Palantir is about to lose or that it is on the losing side when everything we see points to them becoming too big and important to lose for governments all over the world. We are on the losing side until fascists don’t hold the highest positions in the most influential government bodies around the globe.
Astute observation and a wise assessment.