Palantir

Palantir has been a fairly hot topic lately. A strange company, a name taken from Tolkien that evokes malice and surveillance, the manifesto they published recently and a myriad of other reasons that make it one of the most controversial companies of the last few years.

What I want to do today is explore Palantir as a company and as a concept, without stopping at the obvious discussions you can read anywhere online. I thought about titling this piece “You’re wrong about Palantir”, which is a format I use often, but the truth is that you probably aren’t wrong.

The CEO is Alex Karp, while the founder is Peter Thiel - who also “wrote” Zero to One, which I enjoyed - and a person who keeps pulling the strings towards one specific future.

Palantir - the seeing stone

In the cosmology of Middle-earth there are several palantíri, called the Seeing Stones, and they serve to see and to communicate over long distances or into the past.

The important part is that using these stones properly, and being able to direct them, takes extraordinary strength of mind and will; without it the visions are vague.

All the stones are connected to one another, and someone with enough strength can manipulate what the others are able to see. There is no way to show false things, but you can choose what to show or not show in order to deceive whoever, being weaker, looks into the stone. What is not shown might matter far more than what is.

In my mind, and I imagine in the mind of the vast majority of readers, the stones are associated with fog, darkness and one more elvish instrument that bends to the will of the strong over the weak.

Maybe Thiel is not among them, having chosen this name for his surveillance company.

Palantir - Technologies Inc

Palantir, the company, builds data analysis and aggregation platforms. Everything else it does is not particularly interesting. It does one thing only: platforms that analyse and aggregate data.

Something’s off, right?

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Data and metadata

Imagine finding a footprint at a crime scene. The size, the type of shoe and how deep or faint it is are the data. Its position, when it appeared, when it was found are the metadata. Metadata is simply data about data.

A photo = data. Where it was taken, with which camera and at what time = metadata.

At any given moment every human on earth is leaving a moving footprint on several thousand surfaces, and even the absence of a footprint is a footprint.

One feature of our society as it evolves towards the digital is that we are making these footprints easier and easier to collect and process.

Not by chance, many of our habits are only possible through an element of tracking that we accept implicitly or explicitly. The point is that we imagine these data streams as separate: WhatsApp knows about WhatsApp, Telepass knows where you drove on the motorway, your banking app knows what you spend your money on. But they are not really separate, and the whole is worth more than the sum of its parts.

Imagine a hacker who wants to track your every movement: They get into the Telepass database and see every toll booth you passed through. They have access to your bank account and see every transaction you make.

Those two sources, aggregated, are enough to be relatively confident of tracking you at any moment.

Every kind of footprint can be aggregated this way, and even combinations of streams that look unconnected can give us both descriptive and predictive information.

Palantir does this on a global scale. The postal service has the accounts, the police have the number plates, they are different databases and different data systems, and Palantir aggregates them.

In the United States we have seen how simply connecting the police databases with those of the immigration enforcement department and other sources leads to ICE at your door.

The truth is that we have made our world incredibly surveillable, and the only thing separating us from a dystopia is really the inefficiency of state and para-state bodies. And Palantir, or whatever entity might take its place, is trying to close the holes in the net.

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Collected sources