I don't know how to feel about Palantir

Normal company or uniquely evil? Let's reason through it.

Peter Thiel, yesterday.

Palantir makes a lot of people mad.

The tech company, co-founded by Silicon Valley billionaire and Trump ally Peter Thiel, is unusual in its approach to public relations.

A few weeks ago, Palantir’s Twitter account posted an excerpt from a book co-written by CEO Alex Karp, setting out the 22 core tenets of a manifesto it calls ‘The Technological Republic’.

And though some of the ideas aren’t obviously objectionable – such as the observation that American power has underscored the long peace since World War II – some of the tenets are pretty spicy. For example:

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Yeah.

What’s more, this isn’t exactly strange behaviour from Palantir. Last year the company paid for digital billboards near a number of American universities claiming that “A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West”, which as an advertising slogan is slightly more provocative than “I’m lovin’ it” or “Just do it”.

So it is perhaps understandable and pretty obvious why Palantir scares people, including many British politicians, who have called for the company to be disentangled from the hundreds of millions of pounds of contracts it has with the British state.

For example, last month LibDem Treasury spokesperson Daisy Cooper called for an investigation into Palantir’s work with the Financial Conduct Authority, and Green MP Sian Berry said the company should have “no place” in UK government systems.

Then a couple of days before the Technological Republic excerpt was posted, a group of MPs urged the government to remove Palantir from a major NHS contract to build the health service’s Federated Data Platform (FDP).

And then most recently, just a few days ago, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan reportedly threatened to block plans for the Metropolitan Police to use Palantir’s software.

If you want a full accounting of Palantir’s reach in Britain, then Carol Cadwalladr’s new outlet, The Nerve, has a somewhat paranoid-looking red-string infographic with the details, but the upshot is that across the board, lots of politicians are unhappy.

So the obvious question to ask is… are they right to be? Do we actually need to worry about Palantir? Is the company really as malevolent as detractors imply? Or is this another Cambridge Analytica-style scandal, where despite the hysterical coverage there isn’t actually much there there?¹

As I’m someone who styles himself as a tech-and-data guy, who writes about government tech projects and the like, I feel like I should know the answer to this, and have a considered opinion on Palantir.

But the reality is that I don’t – at least, not yet.

So this week, let’s have a look at the case for and against Palantir, and work out whether we should worry or not.