This whole US investment round in the UK is dreadful, as Nick Clegg is noting.
It's basically we give you money now so you end up paying us back twice and don't develop anything locally either. And we get your data in the mean time.
That said, the UK is clearly desperate, as recent discussions on here attest to.
If Nick Clegg really cared about anything, he wouldn't have become the chief lobbyist for Meta.
Now that he's out of the states and no longer at Meta, he's most likely rehabilitating his career to re-enter politics, just like Rishi did after his stint in high finance.
The Tories are in the midst of a tailspin, and a Nick Clegg-style National Dem candidate has an interesting opportunity to peel away higher income Tories and centrists, as Reform peels away lower income or nativist British voter, and this is a shot at the incumbent Labour party.
He's only 57 so he has plenty of time to wait it out and re-enter the scene, as well as the dry powder.
I wonder why so many governments sign with a company that, even if the contract says they will not leak information to the US government, is required to yield any information to it if the US requests it, without even being able to notify their client—regardless of the location of the servers themselves.
What evidence is there that Palantir is lobbying for Chat Control? I can't find anything online.
I know you said "probably", but is your speculation based on anything? To me that would be considerably worse than just selling surveillance and investigation software to governments.
This is a very bad move. Once again the goverment is putting relationships with foreign businesses ahead of domestic firms. It's just more tech we can't independantly rely on.
Once upon a time I worked for a UK firm which could have been a competitor to Palantir, in fact... if Palantir's product could be framed as "next gen" the UK firm had the "previous gen" product(s). They had existing, reliable, but old product, all the right three letter agency customers, revenues in the several 10s of millions of pounds per year back as far as the early 2000s. Zero management interest in making the next gen product or in drastically improving (rather than incrementally improving) the tech underneath. Some of my brighter colleagues were so aggrieved by this that they quit to build something themselves, some just complained and eventually got bored and quit, some are still in the rusting hulk.
Part innovator's dilemma, part lack of ambition, part lack of government support, part the usual UK/Euro VC situ. All I'll say is I met Karp once, face to face, in Palantir's very early days. The UK firm didn't have a Karp.
>Part innovator's dilemma, part lack of ambition, part lack of government support, part the usual UK/Euro VC situ.
I wish I am wrong. Unfortunately agrees with you on everything.
Part innovator's dilemma almost certainly happens to all companies. It is the rest of the sentence that are the problems. Ambition, Government, UK/Euro VC situ, and generally culture.
Those who are Ambition moved to the US. Government, both ruling party and cvivl servant aren't interested to making anything better and I have seen this first hand. UK and Euro VC.
The problem is the UK tech business scene positively drips in that particular sort of expensively suited sliminess, as the entire HP Autonomy mess epitomized. Other places have this, but in the UK it's like it has killed almost the whole ecosystem.
It hasn't been a country with a remote chance of producing another Arm for well over a decade, and Arm, successful though it is, is not a huge financial success. Maybe that's what using Prince Andrew as a trade representative achieved.
Somehow, I have the nagging suspicion that the laws of parliament and it's budgets have more to do with the state of British enterprise than the appointment of a sexually-predatory prince as a trade representative. And that you are well aware of that.
I also suspect that your (*) unwillingness to name the actual reasons for the loss of economic capability is the ultimate cause of what you are describing.
> Somehow, I have the nagging suspicion that the laws of parliament and it's budgets have more to do with the state of British enterprise than the appointment of a sexually-predatory prince as a trade representative. And that you are well aware of that.
Nope. What kind of culture puts a guy like that as a trade rep? An utterly superficial one, which is what the UK is today, and that is the root problem.
Liz Truss had her stopped-clock-being-right-twice-a-day moment when she asked why it was that all the kids in the country wanted to be pop stars or football players. It's almost like the effort:reward for absolutely anything else just isn't worth it.
And yet, the culture of the realm is probably innocent even there. There are very sound financial reasons why nobody in that island aspires to work in any sort of science and engineering.
Similarly, if you are the sort of person interested in putting their capitals to productive use (as opposed to a downright parasic extraction of rents) , the best decision you could make is to place them across the sea. Or the ocean.
Fairly ignorant of what Palintir actually does, but my layman's understanding is that it should be a thing easy enough to replicate. Why are they uniquely positioned as they appear to be?
Palantirs are inherently evil, and they deceive those who use them. Sauron was deceived into thinking Pippin had the ring, and this led to his demise. Denethor saw what he thought was Sauron's army, and was driven to suicide.
The palentiri aren’t inherently evil. They are mere seeing stones. Sauron’s hubris led him to believe Pippin was the hobbit carrying the ring. Denethor and Saruman were corrupted by Sauron’s influence through the palentiri.
Data ingestion and visualization. They ingest data from a variety of different sources and make it easier to correlate data that might previously have been separate. As in, workflows that might have involved analyzing one data set, writing stuff in Excel, and then looking at a different data set, and cross referencing that excel spreadsheet manually can be done much more easily in Palantir's products
It's hard to describe because each customer usually has some set of customization to their workflow. One palantir customer probably uses the tool in a way unrecognizable to the next customer.
The other, perhaps more significant, asset Palantir has is a team that's gotten really good at interfacing with legacy systems and ingesting data into a more modern one.
One thing to note is, Palantir doesn't collect any data. People so often just assume that it does. The data collection is done by the government. Palantir just builds a fancy browser for data that the government already owns. So if people are angry about data being collected, go blame your government not Palantir.
The way I see it is the web was supposed to transform into the Semantic Web in 2000. What that means is you can give everything an identifier and create any type of relationship, turning the entire web into a database designed for a type of reasoning. On its own this is pretty benign, and I thought it would be a Good Thing because it would engage people past pages, links, and predetermined content. I imagined it becoming interesting for most people to craft meaningful connections. I also thought it would enable people to be more usefully and grounded-ly critical of big orgs, through projects like Sunlight Foundation and eventually Wikipedia (and now Wikidata, which uses the formal Semantic Web).
But the basic idea of "things" and relationships is easy to conceptualize, in fact those physical evidence boards with people and things connected by association have been around for a long time.
But the formal Semantic Web tech proved too complicated, so it's only really used in areas like science and to a limited degree for SEO. However, companies like Google and Facebook saw the value and built their own "knowledge graphs," and eventually companies like Palintir started selling services built on the ability to create knowledge graphs about anything. There are a few companies that do this on a smaller scale, but Palintir has really taken off, and given (and perhaps because of) the personality of the founders and its policing/military focus, and the fact that everyone is incidentally connected one way or another, it has become a very dangerous tool because it ironically does the opposite of what these tools should do on a large scale, enables big orgs to track individuals, starting perhaps legitimately with crooks and terrorists but now expanding into every field and citizen, meaning everyone can be tracked, predicted, and managed (barring good societal rules). If it isn't stopped, it gives absolute control to whoever is on top.
Having a lot of money and having actual connections it's not the same. There a lot of modern billionaires who made their money while barely talking with anyone outside their laptop screen.
Also it's take special kind of people to build right kind of slimy business structures to work with governments.
It's not just about corruption though because people who choose to work for governments have completely different set of motivations vs just making money. So working with them is just harder than working with business structures with simple goal to maximize profit.
I’ve always felt that was the bear case. The bull case may be that their secret sauce is how they get large, difficult, change-resistant organisations to accept their joins and the dashboards.
I'm already starting to long for the simpler times of the Cold War; it's pretty clear we're not heading for post-scarcity Star Trek or Culture, but rather technofascism into technofeudalism. Some would argue we're already there, but I say it can (and will) still get a lot worse.
Now where did I put that Mutant Chronicles rulebook...
The only positive is that fascism is an unstable state. It will eventually collapse as it runs out of a scapegoat. Fascism doesn't solve the problems of society so someone needs to be blamed for it to have continued support. Once you have removed all the low hanging fruit people will start infighting and eventually the whole thing falls apart.
Sure but based on the history of the last 125 years or so, that only happens after tens of millions have died and entire countries are leveled. And that was done with… 125 year old technology.
If it devolves into a dictatorships it can stay stable for awhile. Look at Dubai, one of the richest places per capita with no real "rule of law" (only in theory) but stabilized through a ruthless theocratic dictatorship that has brought peace and prosperity in a region of the world where democracy (and indeed -- other dictatorships) has so often brought the people untold terror, violence, and suffering.
> that only happens after tens of millions have died and entire countries are leveled
That levelling, darkly, does solve the problem. Nazism ultimately turned Western Europe into an American protectorate. And under Pax Americana, it thrived. One can similarly point to Imperial Japan having laid the groundwork for the Asian miracle, at the cost of millions of lives.
Maybe fascism has a purpose: it lumps together a generation’s horrific and emotionally stunted and combusts them against an innocent population. That’s horrible. But it leaves better cinders than it came to.
(For the avoidance of doubt, I neither think fascism is good nor inevitable.)
Sure the forces that bring down fascist states are still there, but now we also have surveillance technology that can be used to keep control of the populace.
Last time one of the hard problems of fascism was that people weren't willing to do the amount of murder and surveillance required, and this time they're on the verge of murder bots that can do it instead and surveillance is already massively pervasive and penetrating.
While the then newfangled radio was a potent method of disseminating propaganda, today the tool chains for and scientific knowledge about how to efficiently 'manifacture consent', as it is sometimes called, are quite a bit more oppressive.
I have to remind myself Star Trek TNG starts with the crew being put on trial for the crimes of humanity and the terrible fascist court they're in is from the show's vision of a more immediate future than the one we were watching on the rest of the show.
From a surveillance perspective, genetic testing at birth, routine DNA testing, fingerprint and retina scans are commonplace, more or less constant and routine background and identity checks even at the roadside. Although I admit I do not recall any military element to it.
I mean, the lower castes in the movie seem pretty oppressed to me? Just not in the obvious "Sovietpunk" way usually used to describe oppression on the screen.
Yeah I'm not excited about the future anymore. I used to have hopes America would try to usher in a better era but the opposite is happening where the shift is towards profits over people. A select few at the top who break laws is accepted while the rest are forced with even less rights. This goes beyond politics now but it is impossible for people to stop the infighting and look up who is causing all the problems.
It will absolutely get worse. We're still in the beginning stages. The amount of information on this plan from Peter Thiel, Vance, Curtis Yarvin, etc is abundant by now. They talk about their "vision" for a technofeudalism society openly, it's not a secret. This deal with the UK is a harbinger for what's to come around the entire globe.
This take will be controversial I'm sure and possibly bring me downvotes, but I predict folks like Gavin Newsom - who currently appear to be rising against this movement - will be joining their ranks in the long run. Thiel's platform suggests that ordinary citizens are too stupid to vote in their own best interest, they just end up stalling progress; which Thiel will then point to MAGA as evidence of this. It's an oversimplification of course, but I guarantee things will transpire along those lines to convince other powerful folk to join their cause.
> Thiel's platform suggests that ordinary citizens are too stupid to vote in their own best interest, they just end up stalling progress; which Thiel will then point to MAGA as evidence of this.
I haven’t heard this, and I hope I’m not being given enough rope to hang myself either, but this kind of makes sense. MAGA has pretty completely shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that they will not vote in their own interests, or even the interests of their county, or anyone (as far as I can tell).
Yeah you can't assume Thiel is competent either. Running a country is completely different from running a business. The most I'd be inclined is give them Mississippi for a decade or two let's see what happens.
I believe in Thiel's eyes, MAGA and "the left" are equally inferior groups of society. He's simply using MAGA as a vehicle to implement his plan and convince other like-minded elites to support him. If you listen to some of his interviews in podcasts, you can actually hear a bit of surprise and excitement in his voice in how rapidly he's making movements on the back of the current political environment.
I don't think they care about the citizens either. That's not the point. I'm sure others have their own interpretations, but everything I gather from Thiel's books, podcasts, interviews, etc suggests that he believes he's part of a group of intellectuals that are actively working towards technological advancement for the benefit of himself and others like him. We - as ordinary citizens - are in his way. He's totally fine with "leaving us behind" so to say and that's his sell to other powerful elites: they can usher in his grand vision or rot with the rest of us.
They already have. Look at the coverage of the Epstein case. One of the reporters from a major network was told to shelve it when he was arrested in 2006. Or Julian Assange: hardly covered his release at all, and never said anything about his years of detention without trial.
Hate speech? I think the system is working as designed. You the the right to say whatever inflammatory rhetoric you want. What the 1A doesn't give you is the freedom from consequences of the hate speech. As we've seen this past week.
The founders didn’t envision speech being policed with guns. That is absolute nonsense. The system is clearly broken.
That requires debate as to whether norms are failing to adequately police speech in an era of social media, and if the First Amendment’s idealistic vision of lawless self-regulation has failed. (Alternatively, how we can bring non-violent shame back into the envelope of norms.)
Many of the founding fathers engaged in duels. I do t think they particularly wanted violent politics but they certainly lived in a world where what you said could get you killed by a gun.
I agree with your overall point of view, but is this defense contract really the best example? If the UK is sliding into technofeudalism it's not because we've only just started forking some of our defense budget over to morally dubious companies.
So I mean, yes, it's fair to describe Thiel as a technofeudalist of some sort, but this contract isn't suddenly going to upend the UK's political, social and economic systems.
I see no evidence that we won’t go back there. Our grandparents built an entire world order around curtailing the kind of authoritarian competition that leads to wars between major powers, and we’re already watching it break down. Do you really look at this political world as the harbinger of another 75 years free of major global conflict?
I'm old enough. My own sense is this is much worse.
I have a friend that was afraid a nuclear bomb would eventually drop. I wasn't worried a bit about that though. So perhaps perception or state of mind made a difference.
Well here in Estonia we already are getting bunker test drills and flyers in our mailboxes on what to do in case of a bombing / nuclear attack. Sad thing is that since we don't really have any underground places, and Estonia is as wide as the current Russian occupied line in Ukraine, we're all pretty much going to evaporate no matter what we do.
Having caught the end of it, it was certainly scarier at the time, when there was direct threat of imminent, unavoidable death at the whim of some other country. We’re not there yet (well, most of us).
I think what’s scary now is the trajectory we’re on and how so many people seem desperate to keep the accelerator pressed hard to the floor.
I used to push / campaign for all government funded software projects to be OSS by default, and to be small enough in size (millions not billions) that the SME market could still compete.
In my view that’s two simple procurement changes …
This isn’t the answer you want to hear, but the truth is that Palantir is just leagues better than the next best local option. It’s in a completely different category, in fact
The UK already uses palantir. Clearly they value it to continue and extend the relationship. But what do they know?
"Jumps into bed" gives a pretty good idea of what the author wants you to think. But I'm going to give the people signing the deal the benefit of the doubt that they might know a bit more.
Probably pretty similarly to how the people who actually run the world superpowers feel about democracy: a nice illusion for those that live under the military dictatorships that are our current systems.
People should fear Thiel not because his opinion on democracy but because he has no soul. Besides, democracy is overrrated at best, and terrible if large scale.
Aristocratic monarchy or tribal leadership with chosen consuls is also bad but preferable. It is much harder to buy off a king than democratic representatives. Also a king takes care of his property but temporary rulers of democracy loots. Best is decentralized city states with elite rulers. Because scale matters. This provides mobility if ruler, taxes or laws are not for you.
> Best is decentralized city states with elite rulers.
Didn't we already have that, with constant wars being the result? Why would these competing city states allow freedom of movement?
We need to make democratic decision-making better, not get rid of it. Good dictators and kings are temporary, you always get a bad one eventually and the system collapses.
People like Thiel think it's the techno nobility that should run the world. There are more "evolved" and intelligent than the riff raff who aren't billionaires. It's really just neo-eugenics
A lot of Europeans like to (with good cause) laugh at the rapid decline of the US and the rise of fascism, of which they are objectively correct.
But there is one person in the UK who is almost singlehandedly responsible for the now near-inevitable rise in fascism in the UK and that's Keir Starmer.
Keir Starmer rose to power because Brexit split Labor and Jeremy Corbyn failed to have a good position on Brexit, which opened the door to antisemitic slander against Corbyn (who, as an aside, is Jewish). Starmer's Labor got fewer votes than in either of the 2 previous elections. All that happened was the Conservative vote got split by Reform, which made it an accidental Labor landslide that won't be repeated.
Starmer has done nothing to address the cost of living crisis. All he's done is ensure a post-politics career by being Israel's #1 defender and supporter as well as criminalize free speech and protest (as "terrorism") because somebody threw paint on a plane.
So yeah, Britian getting in bed with one of the most evil companies on Earth [1][2] is the least surprising thing I've read all week.
UK had a really good shot at defying fascism if Labour didn't have these right wing group of people who are afraid to even look like left. Corbyn was really really close and the result could have been a UK without a cost of living problem. Alas..
There's an awful lot of people declaring themselves and others to be ethnically Jewish or not Jewish when it suits them or suits some political goal. Russian is the third most common spoken language in Israel for a reason: to change demographics from the refuseniks, many of whom were ethnically and religiously Jewish but many who were not.
The character assassination on Corbyn who, in the very least, has Jewish ancestry, was disgusting regardless.
>There's an awful lot of people declaring themselves and others to be ethnically Jewish or not Jewish when it suits them or suits some political goal.
Ironically that's exactly what you're doing here (i.e. making the misleading claim that Corbyn is Jewish in an attempt to defuse allegations of antisemitism against him).
Everything they sell is related to ending privacy, promoting surveillance, and support of slow frog boil fascism to replace democracy in the west and as a means to enriching Thiel and the other owners of Palantir; how can you not single it out as Evil Corp? As least google and facebook aren't directly aimed at bringing fascism to the fore. They're mostly just doing what they can within their realms that causes general chaos without any concern about the social damage they do; Palantir is planned obsolescence of privacy and democracy
I mean, it was named for fictional spying orbs that could break people's minds based on the will of a powerful individual with access to the system. Maybe that's not them telling on themselves, but I am not surprised that some people wind up suspicious.
This whole US investment round in the UK is dreadful, as Nick Clegg is noting.
It's basically we give you money now so you end up paying us back twice and don't develop anything locally either. And we get your data in the mean time.
That said, the UK is clearly desperate, as recent discussions on here attest to.
If Nick Clegg really cared about anything, he wouldn't have become the chief lobbyist for Meta.
Now that he's out of the states and no longer at Meta, he's most likely rehabilitating his career to re-enter politics, just like Rishi did after his stint in high finance.
The Tories are in the midst of a tailspin, and a Nick Clegg-style National Dem candidate has an interesting opportunity to peel away higher income Tories and centrists, as Reform peels away lower income or nativist British voter, and this is a shot at the incumbent Labour party.
He's only 57 so he has plenty of time to wait it out and re-enter the scene, as well as the dry powder.
Yeah, I guess this "transformation" couldn't be more transparent, but I guess most folks have short memories.
Yep. He's fairly young by political standards, and can wait it out for a political comeback by 2029.
Worst case, he'll probably take an appointed peerage eventually.
Does Palantir fall under the Cloud Act[0]?
I wonder why so many governments sign with a company that, even if the contract says they will not leak information to the US government, is required to yield any information to it if the US requests it, without even being able to notify their client—regardless of the location of the servers themselves.
[0]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/4943...
Not just governments, Europol as an European wide police. [0]
Palantir is also likely one of the major lobbyists in pushing for Chat Control to the European Commision.
[0] (warning pdf) https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2022-00095...
What evidence is there that Palantir is lobbying for Chat Control? I can't find anything online.
I know you said "probably", but is your speculation based on anything? To me that would be considerably worse than just selling surveillance and investigation software to governments.
Usually these laws exclude military and police work. (Meaning the cloud act does not apply here.)
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This is a very bad move. Once again the goverment is putting relationships with foreign businesses ahead of domestic firms. It's just more tech we can't independantly rely on.
Once upon a time I worked for a UK firm which could have been a competitor to Palantir, in fact... if Palantir's product could be framed as "next gen" the UK firm had the "previous gen" product(s). They had existing, reliable, but old product, all the right three letter agency customers, revenues in the several 10s of millions of pounds per year back as far as the early 2000s. Zero management interest in making the next gen product or in drastically improving (rather than incrementally improving) the tech underneath. Some of my brighter colleagues were so aggrieved by this that they quit to build something themselves, some just complained and eventually got bored and quit, some are still in the rusting hulk.
Part innovator's dilemma, part lack of ambition, part lack of government support, part the usual UK/Euro VC situ. All I'll say is I met Karp once, face to face, in Palantir's very early days. The UK firm didn't have a Karp.
>Part innovator's dilemma, part lack of ambition, part lack of government support, part the usual UK/Euro VC situ.
I wish I am wrong. Unfortunately agrees with you on everything.
Part innovator's dilemma almost certainly happens to all companies. It is the rest of the sentence that are the problems. Ambition, Government, UK/Euro VC situ, and generally culture.
Those who are Ambition moved to the US. Government, both ruling party and cvivl servant aren't interested to making anything better and I have seen this first hand. UK and Euro VC.
QinetiQ?
The problem is the UK tech business scene positively drips in that particular sort of expensively suited sliminess, as the entire HP Autonomy mess epitomized. Other places have this, but in the UK it's like it has killed almost the whole ecosystem.
It hasn't been a country with a remote chance of producing another Arm for well over a decade, and Arm, successful though it is, is not a huge financial success. Maybe that's what using Prince Andrew as a trade representative achieved.
Somehow, I have the nagging suspicion that the laws of parliament and it's budgets have more to do with the state of British enterprise than the appointment of a sexually-predatory prince as a trade representative. And that you are well aware of that.
I also suspect that your (*) unwillingness to name the actual reasons for the loss of economic capability is the ultimate cause of what you are describing.
(*) And mine, if I'm to be honest.
> Somehow, I have the nagging suspicion that the laws of parliament and it's budgets have more to do with the state of British enterprise than the appointment of a sexually-predatory prince as a trade representative. And that you are well aware of that.
Nope. What kind of culture puts a guy like that as a trade rep? An utterly superficial one, which is what the UK is today, and that is the root problem.
Liz Truss had her stopped-clock-being-right-twice-a-day moment when she asked why it was that all the kids in the country wanted to be pop stars or football players. It's almost like the effort:reward for absolutely anything else just isn't worth it.
And yet, the culture of the realm is probably innocent even there. There are very sound financial reasons why nobody in that island aspires to work in any sort of science and engineering.
Similarly, if you are the sort of person interested in putting their capitals to productive use (as opposed to a downright parasic extraction of rents) , the best decision you could make is to place them across the sea. Or the ocean.
That's how the world works. No country produces everything.
But not everything has a killswitch or other sovereign-threatening features
Fairly ignorant of what Palintir actually does, but my layman's understanding is that it should be a thing easy enough to replicate. Why are they uniquely positioned as they appear to be?
Palantirs are inherently evil, and they deceive those who use them. Sauron was deceived into thinking Pippin had the ring, and this led to his demise. Denethor saw what he thought was Sauron's army, and was driven to suicide.
The palentiri aren’t inherently evil. They are mere seeing stones. Sauron’s hubris led him to believe Pippin was the hobbit carrying the ring. Denethor and Saruman were corrupted by Sauron’s influence through the palentiri.
They make trump like you. The best way to get the US state on your side these days is to send money to Oracle, Palintir, or a bitcoin address.
aka Corruption.
Data ingestion and visualization. They ingest data from a variety of different sources and make it easier to correlate data that might previously have been separate. As in, workflows that might have involved analyzing one data set, writing stuff in Excel, and then looking at a different data set, and cross referencing that excel spreadsheet manually can be done much more easily in Palantir's products
Here's an example of it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q8bwhAW2Mg
It's hard to describe because each customer usually has some set of customization to their workflow. One palantir customer probably uses the tool in a way unrecognizable to the next customer.
The other, perhaps more significant, asset Palantir has is a team that's gotten really good at interfacing with legacy systems and ingesting data into a more modern one.
One thing to note is, Palantir doesn't collect any data. People so often just assume that it does. The data collection is done by the government. Palantir just builds a fancy browser for data that the government already owns. So if people are angry about data being collected, go blame your government not Palantir.
Right, IBM had no blame for the Holocaust, they just supplied the machines that enabled it, we should just blame the government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
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The way I see it is the web was supposed to transform into the Semantic Web in 2000. What that means is you can give everything an identifier and create any type of relationship, turning the entire web into a database designed for a type of reasoning. On its own this is pretty benign, and I thought it would be a Good Thing because it would engage people past pages, links, and predetermined content. I imagined it becoming interesting for most people to craft meaningful connections. I also thought it would enable people to be more usefully and grounded-ly critical of big orgs, through projects like Sunlight Foundation and eventually Wikipedia (and now Wikidata, which uses the formal Semantic Web).
But the basic idea of "things" and relationships is easy to conceptualize, in fact those physical evidence boards with people and things connected by association have been around for a long time.
But the formal Semantic Web tech proved too complicated, so it's only really used in areas like science and to a limited degree for SEO. However, companies like Google and Facebook saw the value and built their own "knowledge graphs," and eventually companies like Palintir started selling services built on the ability to create knowledge graphs about anything. There are a few companies that do this on a smaller scale, but Palintir has really taken off, and given (and perhaps because of) the personality of the founders and its policing/military focus, and the fact that everyone is incidentally connected one way or another, it has become a very dangerous tool because it ironically does the opposite of what these tools should do on a large scale, enables big orgs to track individuals, starting perhaps legitimately with crooks and terrorists but now expanding into every field and citizen, meaning everyone can be tracked, predicted, and managed (barring good societal rules). If it isn't stopped, it gives absolute control to whoever is on top.
So why hasn’t someone replicated them?
They’re over 20 years old at this point. That makes them a tech dinosaur.
Sophisticated systems plus powerful connections in government and industry plus so much money. That’s hard to unseat.
Literally everyone can do what they do. Their superpower has always been inside sales.
So why doesn’t literally everyone else have the contracts?
Their software is powerful and their FDEs make it valuable for customers. Every person in the billionaire class has high inside sales leverage.
Having a lot of money and having actual connections it's not the same. There a lot of modern billionaires who made their money while barely talking with anyone outside their laptop screen.
Also it's take special kind of people to build right kind of slimy business structures to work with governments.
It's not just about corruption though because people who choose to work for governments have completely different set of motivations vs just making money. So working with them is just harder than working with business structures with simple goal to maximize profit.
Is there a UK-based company offering a comparable service?
No, and that is unequivocally a good thing.
Palantir mostly sell SQL joins and dashboards...
I’ve always felt that was the bear case. The bull case may be that their secret sauce is how they get large, difficult, change-resistant organisations to accept their joins and the dashboards.
Of course, yes. This is what consultants are for.
Forward deployed engineers was a big breakthrough for them
I'm already starting to long for the simpler times of the Cold War; it's pretty clear we're not heading for post-scarcity Star Trek or Culture, but rather technofascism into technofeudalism. Some would argue we're already there, but I say it can (and will) still get a lot worse.
Now where did I put that Mutant Chronicles rulebook...
The only positive is that fascism is an unstable state. It will eventually collapse as it runs out of a scapegoat. Fascism doesn't solve the problems of society so someone needs to be blamed for it to have continued support. Once you have removed all the low hanging fruit people will start infighting and eventually the whole thing falls apart.
Sure but based on the history of the last 125 years or so, that only happens after tens of millions have died and entire countries are leveled. And that was done with… 125 year old technology.
If it devolves into a dictatorships it can stay stable for awhile. Look at Dubai, one of the richest places per capita with no real "rule of law" (only in theory) but stabilized through a ruthless theocratic dictatorship that has brought peace and prosperity in a region of the world where democracy (and indeed -- other dictatorships) has so often brought the people untold terror, violence, and suffering.
> that only happens after tens of millions have died and entire countries are leveled
That levelling, darkly, does solve the problem. Nazism ultimately turned Western Europe into an American protectorate. And under Pax Americana, it thrived. One can similarly point to Imperial Japan having laid the groundwork for the Asian miracle, at the cost of millions of lives.
Maybe fascism has a purpose: it lumps together a generation’s horrific and emotionally stunted and combusts them against an innocent population. That’s horrible. But it leaves better cinders than it came to.
(For the avoidance of doubt, I neither think fascism is good nor inevitable.)
An awful lot of people die before it collapses, and even worse, a generation is corrupted.
Sure the forces that bring down fascist states are still there, but now we also have surveillance technology that can be used to keep control of the populace.
Last time one of the hard problems of fascism was that people weren't willing to do the amount of murder and surveillance required, and this time they're on the verge of murder bots that can do it instead and surveillance is already massively pervasive and penetrating.
While the then newfangled radio was a potent method of disseminating propaganda, today the tool chains for and scientific knowledge about how to efficiently 'manifacture consent', as it is sometimes called, are quite a bit more oppressive.
Feel like we're doing pretty well on the Star Trek timeline, tbh. Got to get through the Eugenics Wars
I have to remind myself Star Trek TNG starts with the crew being put on trial for the crimes of humanity and the terrible fascist court they're in is from the show's vision of a more immediate future than the one we were watching on the rest of the show.
The future was always going to be Gattaca not Star Trek.
Are there any signs in the movie Gattaca that the society is militaristic or surveils the population at all?
I don't remember any.
From a surveillance perspective, genetic testing at birth, routine DNA testing, fingerprint and retina scans are commonplace, more or less constant and routine background and identity checks even at the roadside. Although I admit I do not recall any military element to it.
Me neither. The story focused more on acute classism than pure authoritarianism, although the two go well hand in hand.
If anything, it was pretty optimistic that humans would focus on exploring space instead of oppressing each other.
I mean, the lower castes in the movie seem pretty oppressed to me? Just not in the obvious "Sovietpunk" way usually used to describe oppression on the screen.
The transition from Republic to Empire.
> transition from Republic to Empire
That transition happens after civic exhaustion, usually following violence. If Rome is a model, we’d expect to see tens of millions of Americans die.
Yeah I'm not excited about the future anymore. I used to have hopes America would try to usher in a better era but the opposite is happening where the shift is towards profits over people. A select few at the top who break laws is accepted while the rest are forced with even less rights. This goes beyond politics now but it is impossible for people to stop the infighting and look up who is causing all the problems.
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It will absolutely get worse. We're still in the beginning stages. The amount of information on this plan from Peter Thiel, Vance, Curtis Yarvin, etc is abundant by now. They talk about their "vision" for a technofeudalism society openly, it's not a secret. This deal with the UK is a harbinger for what's to come around the entire globe.
This take will be controversial I'm sure and possibly bring me downvotes, but I predict folks like Gavin Newsom - who currently appear to be rising against this movement - will be joining their ranks in the long run. Thiel's platform suggests that ordinary citizens are too stupid to vote in their own best interest, they just end up stalling progress; which Thiel will then point to MAGA as evidence of this. It's an oversimplification of course, but I guarantee things will transpire along those lines to convince other powerful folk to join their cause.
> Thiel's platform suggests that ordinary citizens are too stupid to vote in their own best interest, they just end up stalling progress; which Thiel will then point to MAGA as evidence of this.
I haven’t heard this, and I hope I’m not being given enough rope to hang myself either, but this kind of makes sense. MAGA has pretty completely shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that they will not vote in their own interests, or even the interests of their county, or anyone (as far as I can tell).
Yeah you can't assume Thiel is competent either. Running a country is completely different from running a business. The most I'd be inclined is give them Mississippi for a decade or two let's see what happens.
Completely agree with that point.
I believe in Thiel's eyes, MAGA and "the left" are equally inferior groups of society. He's simply using MAGA as a vehicle to implement his plan and convince other like-minded elites to support him. If you listen to some of his interviews in podcasts, you can actually hear a bit of surprise and excitement in his voice in how rapidly he's making movements on the back of the current political environment.
MAGA is one example of the stupidity of the collective godhead.
The average US citizens' compliant wilfulness and irresponsibility with regards to the US' war crimes, yet another.
It doesn't just have to be about what Americans do to themselves. This phenomenon is just as easily observable in what Americans do to other nations.
So, if there is hope, it lies in the proles. The ones that live outside the US' borders.
Thiel is the US' Zhang Zhidong:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Zhidong
He could also be Shen Buhai, incarnate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shen_Buhai
Either one of these figures could provide us clues as to how to head off Thiels' insanity.
> Thiel's platform suggests that ordinary citizens are too stupid to vote in their own best interest
What gave him that right to conclude it that way? There are plenty of us who think he’s an idiot to decide on other people’s behalf!!
> ordinary citizens are too stupid to vote in their own best interest
And the oligarchs have the best interest of the citizens in mind? If not, I don't understand the argument.
I don't think they care about the citizens either. That's not the point. I'm sure others have their own interpretations, but everything I gather from Thiel's books, podcasts, interviews, etc suggests that he believes he's part of a group of intellectuals that are actively working towards technological advancement for the benefit of himself and others like him. We - as ordinary citizens - are in his way. He's totally fine with "leaving us behind" so to say and that's his sell to other powerful elites: they can usher in his grand vision or rot with the rest of us.
I'm currently more worried about the government taking control over the media, tbh.
They already have. Look at the coverage of the Epstein case. One of the reporters from a major network was told to shelve it when he was arrested in 2006. Or Julian Assange: hardly covered his release at all, and never said anything about his years of detention without trial.
> Look at the coverage of the Epstein case
Incessant.
For true muzzling, it’s a honest debate about intentionally provocative political speech in the wake of Charlie Kirk. (TL; DR we learned nothing.)
Hate speech? I think the system is working as designed. You the the right to say whatever inflammatory rhetoric you want. What the 1A doesn't give you is the freedom from consequences of the hate speech. As we've seen this past week.
> the system is working as designed
The founders didn’t envision speech being policed with guns. That is absolute nonsense. The system is clearly broken.
That requires debate as to whether norms are failing to adequately police speech in an era of social media, and if the First Amendment’s idealistic vision of lawless self-regulation has failed. (Alternatively, how we can bring non-violent shame back into the envelope of norms.)
Many of the founding fathers engaged in duels. I do t think they particularly wanted violent politics but they certainly lived in a world where what you said could get you killed by a gun.
> The founders didn’t envision speech being policed with guns. That is absolute nonsense
That's an absolute strawman. No provision in our government allows the use of force to counter ideological disagreement. What a bizarre thing to say.
> That's an absolute strawman
What did you mean when you responded to a comment about what happened to Charlie Kirk by talking about “the system…working as designed”?
I agree with your overall point of view, but is this defense contract really the best example? If the UK is sliding into technofeudalism it's not because we've only just started forking some of our defense budget over to morally dubious companies.
So I mean, yes, it's fair to describe Thiel as a technofeudalist of some sort, but this contract isn't suddenly going to upend the UK's political, social and economic systems.
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Were you actually old enough to remember those days? It was a lot scarier
I see no evidence that we won’t go back there. Our grandparents built an entire world order around curtailing the kind of authoritarian competition that leads to wars between major powers, and we’re already watching it break down. Do you really look at this political world as the harbinger of another 75 years free of major global conflict?
I'm old enough. My own sense is this is much worse.
I have a friend that was afraid a nuclear bomb would eventually drop. I wasn't worried a bit about that though. So perhaps perception or state of mind made a difference.
I'm old enough to remember, and I disagree. I think this is the most frightening period in my lifetime.
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I can remember the public information ads that advised families to hide under the stairs or under a table until the nuclear attack has ended.
Well here in Estonia we already are getting bunker test drills and flyers in our mailboxes on what to do in case of a bombing / nuclear attack. Sad thing is that since we don't really have any underground places, and Estonia is as wide as the current Russian occupied line in Ukraine, we're all pretty much going to evaporate no matter what we do.
Having caught the end of it, it was certainly scarier at the time, when there was direct threat of imminent, unavoidable death at the whim of some other country. We’re not there yet (well, most of us).
I think what’s scary now is the trajectory we’re on and how so many people seem desperate to keep the accelerator pressed hard to the floor.
I was. It wasn't great, but it was quite static, speaking for myself only. I'm sure it could depend on where you lived at the time.
I used to push / campaign for all government funded software projects to be OSS by default, and to be small enough in size (millions not billions) that the SME market could still compete.
In my view that’s two simple procurement changes …
It’s for this reason I joined Defense Unicorns[1] last year - the team behind the airgap Kubernetes tool, Zarf[2] (which is OSS).
[1]: https://defenseunicorns.com
[2]: https://zarf.dev
The funny thing is that no one realizes that palantir is shitty java that still need Java 1.1 for AWT, etc
This should scare you immensely more...
#rewrite_it_in_ada
It is wild that various European countries keep handling Palantir contracts for work that could have been done by local companies.
This isn’t the answer you want to hear, but the truth is that Palantir is just leagues better than the next best local option. It’s in a completely different category, in fact
Are there any others besides UK? I have heard from a reliable source that Austria banned Palantir but I haven't confirmed it.
Denmark. Of all places given that we currently are at a cold war with the US over Greenland.
This Thiel-Verse product is exactly what privacy concerned people always warned about but worse.
We're delivering tools of surveillance to a world where freedom loving countries turn into oppressive regimes.
Really ugly times ahead of us...
Hydra won at the last election. This is project insight creeping into everyday life.
Our tax dollars hard at work.
How in practice their products work? For example Palantir Gotham. What for they use it? I wonder if it’s like Tableau for military?
The military boots on the group consider it a mapping tool, intelligence like ‘bomb here’.
There are demo vids of most their software on YouTube.
The UK already uses palantir. Clearly they value it to continue and extend the relationship. But what do they know?
"Jumps into bed" gives a pretty good idea of what the author wants you to think. But I'm going to give the people signing the deal the benefit of the doubt that they might know a bit more.
Before, they were just fooling around on the couch.
The lineage is interesting:
Robert Maxwell allegedly sold a backdoored version of the PROMIS software to many governments, including the US government.
Christine Maxwell, founder of the Magellan search engine, co-founded the Chiliad data analysis software that was used in the FBI post 9/11.
Her co-founder was Alan Wade, who then went to the CIA in the role of CIO when In-Q-Tel founded Palantir.
Epstein invested in Thiel's Valar fund after 2008.
some leaked emails show they where quite close https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45043807
More and more are feeding the beast, I am starting to get a bit worried
Wait til you find out what Thiel believes about democracy.
Probably pretty similarly to how the people who actually run the world superpowers feel about democracy: a nice illusion for those that live under the military dictatorships that are our current systems.
Nope. He believes it is a threat to freedom. And not in the way you presented it
Presumably most of those you refer to want the system to continue as is, Thiel wants to break it completely.
People should fear Thiel not because his opinion on democracy but because he has no soul. Besides, democracy is overrrated at best, and terrible if large scale.
But what’s the alternative to democracy?
Dictatorship? Monarchy without parliament/senate?
It’s actually an honest question.
Aristocratic monarchy or tribal leadership with chosen consuls is also bad but preferable. It is much harder to buy off a king than democratic representatives. Also a king takes care of his property but temporary rulers of democracy loots. Best is decentralized city states with elite rulers. Because scale matters. This provides mobility if ruler, taxes or laws are not for you.
> Best is decentralized city states with elite rulers.
Didn't we already have that, with constant wars being the result? Why would these competing city states allow freedom of movement?
We need to make democratic decision-making better, not get rid of it. Good dictators and kings are temporary, you always get a bad one eventually and the system collapses.
People like Thiel think it's the techno nobility that should run the world. There are more "evolved" and intelligent than the riff raff who aren't billionaires. It's really just neo-eugenics
Agree. Democracy is the worst form of Government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time
Maybe not his opinion on democracy but certainly on what he thinks should replace it.
"jumps into bed" - gotta love that totally unbiased reporting at The Register.
Not content with having microsoft at the heart of the airforce's logistics, now they want palantir to do the decionmaking and targeting.
Peter Thiel was very close with Epstein : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45043807
so it's unsurprising that the UK, which wants to befriend Pres Trump, would also like to befriend the VP (who owes his entire career to Thiel).
thiel and sacks have an old book where they try to make date rape (and intolerance for diversity) sound ok
Link?
https://www.amazon.com/Diversity-Myth-Multiculturalism-Polit...
A lot of Europeans like to (with good cause) laugh at the rapid decline of the US and the rise of fascism, of which they are objectively correct.
But there is one person in the UK who is almost singlehandedly responsible for the now near-inevitable rise in fascism in the UK and that's Keir Starmer.
Keir Starmer rose to power because Brexit split Labor and Jeremy Corbyn failed to have a good position on Brexit, which opened the door to antisemitic slander against Corbyn (who, as an aside, is Jewish). Starmer's Labor got fewer votes than in either of the 2 previous elections. All that happened was the Conservative vote got split by Reform, which made it an accidental Labor landslide that won't be repeated.
Starmer has done nothing to address the cost of living crisis. All he's done is ensure a post-politics career by being Israel's #1 defender and supporter as well as criminalize free speech and protest (as "terrorism") because somebody threw paint on a plane.
So yeah, Britian getting in bed with one of the most evil companies on Earth [1][2] is the least surprising thing I've read all week.
[1]: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
[2]: https://www.business-humanrights.org/es/%C3%BAltimas-noticia...
Jeremy Corbin is as Jewish as Elizabeth Warren is Native American
And besides, not sure what is the point of putting this reference in, as he should be judged by his actions, not his ancestors.
Not too different than justifying many of Clarence Thomas’s decisions by saying, by the way, he is black
UK had a really good shot at defying fascism if Labour didn't have these right wing group of people who are afraid to even look like left. Corbyn was really really close and the result could have been a UK without a cost of living problem. Alas..
Jeremy Corbyn isn't Jewish in any straightforward sense. He's said that he has some distant Jewish ancestry:
https://www.thejc.com/news/jeremy-corbyn-my-jewish-ancestry-...
It's not my job to decide who's Jewish or not, but I think it's inaccurate to just describe him as 'Jewish' without qualification.
That's fair but it's also kind of the point.
There's an awful lot of people declaring themselves and others to be ethnically Jewish or not Jewish when it suits them or suits some political goal. Russian is the third most common spoken language in Israel for a reason: to change demographics from the refuseniks, many of whom were ethnically and religiously Jewish but many who were not.
The character assassination on Corbyn who, in the very least, has Jewish ancestry, was disgusting regardless.
>There's an awful lot of people declaring themselves and others to be ethnically Jewish or not Jewish when it suits them or suits some political goal.
Ironically that's exactly what you're doing here (i.e. making the misleading claim that Corbyn is Jewish in an attempt to defuse allegations of antisemitism against him).
Crazy, the UK is signing up to what I believe is a scheme to transfer $ from taxpayers to the extreme wealthy in the US. That includes Trump.
I personally believe Palantir provides no real benefit except to enrich the fascist rich in the US.
If that buggy Java ridden UI thinks it's "enriching the fascist rich", somebody gonna be pissed fr
Lol
I don’t know why Palantir is always singled out as some sort of EvilCorp.
There are plenty of companies in the defense sector but those aren’t usually considered “tech” so for some reason they’re out of the discussion.
And besides, these US companies build things that the US and US-approved governments buy, so any criticism should be pointed at the governments.
Personally I don’t even think that criticism is deserved. What do you expect UK to do for example, not sign any defense contracts?
Everything they sell is related to ending privacy, promoting surveillance, and support of slow frog boil fascism to replace democracy in the west and as a means to enriching Thiel and the other owners of Palantir; how can you not single it out as Evil Corp? As least google and facebook aren't directly aimed at bringing fascism to the fore. They're mostly just doing what they can within their realms that causes general chaos without any concern about the social damage they do; Palantir is planned obsolescence of privacy and democracy
I mean, it was named for fictional spying orbs that could break people's minds based on the will of a powerful individual with access to the system. Maybe that's not them telling on themselves, but I am not surprised that some people wind up suspicious.
That’s how it is in the defense biz. Just look at how they name fighter jets and missiles.
Typically named after things that corrupt, control, mislead the person trying to use them?
No, much worse!