Palantir

In a year-old New York Times interview with Maureen Dowd, Alex Karp described his company’s role as “the finding of hidden things” by sifting through data. Karp is the CEO of Palantir. His comment no doubt wins admiration from national security experts. The company has been credited with helping locate Osama bin Laden so Navy Seals could kill him. This may or may not be true.

But this is true. One year later the New York Times reported “Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans.” In essence, Karp’s company, the anti-terrorist data machine, is now helping to conduct Trump’s war on the American people. At least the ones who disagree with him. Waves of Palantir employees are having second thoughts, but it’s already too late. Palantir is embedded in the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services and agencies across Washington “finding hidden things.”

Palantir

Though Musk and Trump have publicly split, DOGE staffers remain deeply embedded throughout the federal government. Under the newly announced direction of Russell Vought, they are now de facto digital partners of Palantir. No word yet on whether they can play nice together.

And that is the point. In the cut-throat world of digital supremacy, there are winners and losers. In this digital world, there are no kings and kingdoms of yore. There are sovereigns and empires of data and control. According to Karen Hao, author of a fantastic new book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, she writes in a recent OpEd:

“The leading A.I. giants are no longer merely multinational corporations; they are growing into modern-day empires. With the full support of the federal government, soon they will be able to reshape most spheres of society as they please, from the political to the economic to the production of science.”

Finding Hidden Things

We witness tectonic plates shifting every morning, if our stomachs can take it. George Conway recently posted a thread on X about an Australian journalist deported from the United States for his reporting on Columbia University.

“They [ICE] were waiting for me when I got off the plane…I had cleaned up my online presence expecting ad hoc digital sweeps; I was not prepared for their sophistication... Sophistication almost certainly facilitated by Palantir…If you are deleting social media~48 hours before your flight to the US, *it is already too late.*” [You can find this reporter and the full thread on Bluesky @alistairkitchen.bsky.social]

In another report, Palantir appears to have stuck its fingers into elections. As reported in the Substack, This Will Hold, Eaton Corporation, a global power infrastructure conglomerate with byzantine connections to voting systems, has a partnership with Palantir. In Eaton’s press release Palantir’s role includes:

• AI-driven oversight of connected infrastructure

• Automated analysis of large datasets

• And—most critically—“secure erasure of digital footprints”

The article describes the final function as a futuristic “digital janitor” responsible for performing forensic sanitization.

“It was now being embedded into Eaton-managed hardware connected directly to voting systems. Palantir didn’t change the votes. It helped ensure you’d never prove it if someone else did.”

Sounds like a job for Congressional oversight. Right?

Uh-uh.

Of all people, Marjorie Taylor Greene, squealed loudest about the ten-year restrictions on AI oversight buried deep in the president’s “Big Beautiful Bill”—which didn’t stop her from voting for it:

“I am adamantly OPPOSED to this and it is a violation of state rights and I would have voted NO if I had known this was in there. We have no idea what AI will be capable of in the next 10 years and giving it free rein and tying states hands is potentially dangerous. This needs to be stripped out in the Senate.”

And yet, Greene is a Palantir investor. Now wait. Before you jump to conclusions about evil MAGA people investing in the underbelly of data mining, bear in mind that there is a revolving door between tech and government jobs and investments, which includes both democrats and republicans. The tech overlords have done a magnificent job of seducing all parties to partake in their Empire—especially the party in power. What’s a few million bucks here and there? Ironically, Musk’s trajectory was launched by democrats. Sam Altman’s early “non-profit” venture OpenAI is now pulling down billions in venture capital—including massive amounts from the Middle East solicited during Trump’s Gulf Tech Tour in May.

It appears that that State Empires are merging with Tech Empires with a single-minded mission: scale at all costs. Scale for the autocrat. Scale for the oligarchs. Damn the people. Damn the social, environmental, and labor costs that ensue. Winner takes all.

Normally—is there still such a word?—Congress would step in. Those days are over. A few days ago House Resolution 502 was sponsored by democrats on a straight party line vote—and promptly referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The resolution requests information about federal government’s use of centralized data systems, including Palantir, focusing on transparency and privacy concerns.

The bill is currently pending.

It will certainly die.

Peter Thiel, billionaire co-founder of Palantir who has no use for democracy, must be smiling.

According to Roger McNamee, estranged Zuck mentor-turned-tech watchdog, there are as many as 10,000—mostly white—mostly men—in Silicon Valley angling to become Emperors of Tech. That is why the competition is so fierce. Predation is the rule of the jungle. Kill the baby in the crib. The best interests of humanity are eaten alive. Neither tech power nor state power value democracy. The only value is capital and control.

McNamee describes the process:

1. First create an addiction. In most cases the addiction is convenience and low costs to consumers. That’s the bait.

2. Once addiction takes hold, employ “enshittification” a term coined by Cory Doctorow describing the concept of declining product quality over time. The public won’t care. If the online experience is degraded by pop-up ads and annoying messages, they will simply bat them away as they race to check-out with their shopping carts.

3. And finally, monetize. Yes, the sale of goods and services can be profitable. But then there’s data—personal data—to be mined and sold. McNamee calls it “a license to print money.”

[For a fuller discussion on this, listen to this Nerd Reich podcast with McNamee, Karen Hao and hosted by Gil Duran.]

The Camel’s Nose

Back to Alex Karp. Palantir is not merely supplying tools to the government. It is fully embracing the role of doing the bidding of the current administration. Karp positions Palantir as a heroic defender of civilization, even as it profits from enabling state violence and surveillance. When Palantir’s contract expanded to mining personal date of migrants and American citizens authorized by Trump’s March 2025 executive order, it’s not just the camel’s nose that got under the tent. The whole damn camel got inside and there are no congressional restraints to keep the animal from shitting all over.

The Supreme Court won’t restrain the camel either. They’ll feed it. In a recent shadow docket ruling, DOGE was awarded unfettered access to personal data at the Social Security Administration while litigation to determine its legality proceeds. It’s unlikely that they will reign in Palantir now authorized by Trump to merge and sift citizen data from multiple federal agencies. It appears that the Supreme Court is doubling down on the unitary executive theory and giving YOLO passes to private data aggregators. What’s the harm?

The name “Palantir” comes from the J.R.R. Tolkien Lord of the Rings series. A palantir is an indestructible crystal stone bestowing powers to see both past and future. This power could be a force for good or evil. In the wrong hands, the stones could be used to spy, spread misinformation, and even corrupt their users. The name, palantir, couldn’t be more apt.

The reality we face today more closely resembles the bleak irony at the end of Lord of the Flies. William Golding isn’t just showing how stranded children can descend into savagery. He’s exposing how civilization rests on a fragile edge. The boys’ violence horrifies us—but the final twist cuts deeper. The Naval officer who arrives to save the boys cannot offer salvation. He comes by launch from a massive warship—capable of violence of an even more horrifying, more “civilized” scale.

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