Palantir manifesto described as ‘ramblings of a supervillain’ amid UK contract fears

These Silicon Valley people are delusional as hell.

Does Alex Karp ever shut up? He craves attention so voraciously that he’s revealing all of his plans.

Yeah it's all fun and games to call them "supervillains" until you realize they are serious and you already have a handful of contracts with them. We're not in a DC comics movie, superman ain't coming to save us. These people should be shamed and ridiculed out of business, but here we are.

That manifesto is just the ketamine talking.

That book laments a widespread “complacency” among “engineers and founders” who build photo-sharing apps as opposed to collaborating with governments to secure “the West’s dominant place in the geopolitical order” Maybe we should all take a cue from that.Humans want to engage with one another. God forbid we create security from that. Also, this guy and his group cracked me up: “Tim Squirrell, the head of strategy at the campaign group Foxglove.”

Exactly right. Palantir's [22-point post](https://xcancel.com/PalantirTech/status/2045574398573453312) when the word salad is removed: 1. Technology should be invented and used to kill foreigners more 2. Tracking your phone is limiting, please consider a wrongthink-detecting AI brain implant 3. Instead of providing services for pay, we will control your pay, and monitor all you do 4. We will control you with technology instead of persuade you with discourse 5. Fear should drive us to create technology without ethics 6. Your children should be forced to work for the state 7. It's okay to make AI murder tech for the army 8. Pay workers less, but let politicians get rich 9. Let us be bigots and also silence critics of it 10. Voting for respected likeable leaders is bad 11. Always be looking for the next war 12. Develop AI recklessly or you will all die 13. Forget that most of the elites come from rich families 14. Ignore recent wars and give the US credit for the lack of world wars 15. Make our allies adopt war-requiring economies as well 16. Ignore billionaires' political and market manipulation and trust they have good intent 17. Technology should be used to experimentally police citizens in this era of record-low violent crime 18. You should embrace a private and shadowy government of people you would hate if you knew 19. We want to say horrible things and suppress your right to judge and punish that 20. Force people to incorporate the good religions into finance and politics or they're not open minded 21. Our religions are the good religions, we made technology so the religions common here get credit 22. Letting a democracy control a country is bad, a minority of technocratic elites should control you

It's not even in between the lines. Thiel has said: - "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." - "Monopoly is the condition of every successful business." - "Of the six people that started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school." - "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women - two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians - have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron." Personally, I think it's pretty damn obvious that democracies should not pay enemies of democracy to defend democracy.

Its so STRANGE that people who advocate for an unequal society always imagine themselves making out well

> Can you guess where he places himself? I know this one....in the crosshairs when the revolution comes!

It's not so fun to have real life Lex Luthor or Dr Robotnik.. They are a threat to Humanity as a whole and Planet Earth as well.

Thiel and this guy just need to be in jail. They've violated even the concept of privacy, and Palantir should be shut down. 

Spot on. Thankfully so far, there are enough British parliamentarians opposing this and calling it what it is Rachel Maskell MP: ‘It is time that the government seriously understands the culture and ideology of Palantir, and how it will exit from its contracts at the earliest opportunity.’ Martin Wrigley MP: ‘Palantir’s manifesto, which embraces AI state surveillance of citizens along with national service in the USA, is either a parody of a RoboCop film, or a disturbing narcissistic rant’ But money rots people, and Palantir’s got money to burn

Despite its owner SpaceX mostly does what it claims and is beyond useful for the future. The next admin should just tally up all the subsidies SpaceX has received and claim possession based on funds invested and interests of national security.

I'm not a lawyer, but wouldn't a candidate's public pledges to refuse government contracts with a specific person or company be later used in a layup lawsuit to block trying to actually do it when they're in office? Something about interfering in the impartial government contracts bidding process or maybe it being a Bill of Attainder if it's through congress?

Spoiler: none of the front-running candidates will promise that.

My 2028 general midterm election litmus test will be "whichever candidate isn't a religious conservative fascist *aka a Republican*" -- it's going to be super easy.

"We are excited to announce we built the Torment Nexus™ from the famous novel *Never Build a Torment Nexus* and it will be for sale soon"

Unfortunately there’s also several other shitty companies using Tolkien’s work for their company names, it’s crazy how many people are clearly fans of the authors work and completely missed the entire point

The palantiri themselves are not evil, but by their nature they can be used to perform very evil acts. Sarumon was specifically targetted by Sauron because he had access to one of the several Palantiri (and was the most powerful wizard). Natrually, everyone knows them from the movies where they are used for solely evil purposes, but just wanted the nuance captured.

Technicalities I know, but the palantirs weren't evil artifacts, they were the equivalent of video calls for the numenoreans, after the fall of numenor, arnor and most of gondor in the 3rd age we know and love from the films the palantirs were mostly lost or gathered by sauron with the results seen in the movies, so yeah, the palantirs started as tools for the good guys but ended up being co-opted and "corrupted" by the forces of evil

Not to get technical but the "Palantirs" or the Seven Seeing Stones of Numenor were created by the Noldar for communication. They were only "used for evil" by Sauron/Sarumon later on in the same sense a telephone could be used for evil... ok carry on.

Exactly. They said one of their goals is to ‘disrupt’ what they call ‘highly educated women’ in order to ‘empower’ the ‘working-class men’ - aka Trump voting demographic. Interesting how easy it is for a bunch of billionaires owning space companies as a hobby and absolutely demolishing the job market as a day job, to claim that they’re all about the working class. ‘I love the poorly educated’

IBM was the cutting edge in the 40s. They made counting machines for the german death camps. Tech does not beget ethics.

Technology is just a tool. The intentions of the person using them are what matters. A tool designed to suppress, dominate, and subjugate others will nearly always be wielded by a person who's primary interests is doing just that. "When the the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail"

>technologically advanced could be so morally archaic Tends to happen when the company in question is operated by a bunch of maladjusted incels (Karp) and actual Nazis (Thiel) that think anyone who has a net worth below 7 figures who isn't fully on board with being a (sex) slave and/or cranking out future generations of slaves to do manual labor has no right to exist. It also tends to happen when the maladjusted incels and Nazis come from such privileged backgrounds that they never got to experience a chin check or two to adjust their heinous beliefs.

Yeah I think it’s kind of been debunked by this point that technological advancement necessarily goes hand in hand with social advancement (progressive causes).

To slightly paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, the only thing one can’t buy protection from is ridicule. It’s the Andrew Tate principle: they actually not only don’t mind being called sociopathic, dangerous, nasty or scary - they revel in it. The one thing they can’t stand is being laughed at.

>Don't make fun of Peter Thiel when he talks about the anti-christ He is such a narcissist, always talking about himself

You mean the one where he said he considers progressivism to be ‘[a pagan religion’](https://www.wired.com/story/alex-karp-goes-to-war-palantir-big-interview/)?

The absolute cheek to call other ""cultures"" harmful when his own ""culture"" led to the creation of Palantir lmao

The “some cultures and indeed subcultures have produced wonders,” is extremely telling. It means he, for one, believes that “sub” in “subculture” means “less than,” not “a subset of,” and makes it even more clear that when he says “culture” he means race but know he can’t just outright say “subhuman.” This dude is a ghoul

they are weak minded fools who are more comfortable being subjugated. conservatism isn’t about anything beyond making a nice little comfortable space for one specific group.

Sounds like it's more misogynistic/incel ideology once again coming from the right.

Easier to find a sociopath billionaire that Trump didn’t advertise for

nuclear weapons are actually too disruptive to use, AI weaponry would be way more surgical so it would get used a lot more. imagine if trump had access to an AI and just said "kill/imprison every one who doesn't support me" then the AI chooses drones/surgical strikes/targeted civilian disruption that's the world palantir is building. this in turn will recreate the hard ideological world that nukes allowed us to escape from. if having a loose stance on things gets you killed by AI ppl will become a lot more extreme in one direction. humans are NOT compliant by default, we are super aggressive and have to be drugged/lulled into compliance. if you actively make things that poke the bear the bear will wake up.

~~overloads~~ should be *overlords* ... but, the point is taken.

One would guess, right? But we live in a society that does not just condone blatant sociopathy - it encourages it. The tech bros are the best example: the more nasty, forceful and corrupt you are, the higher on the ladder you’ll get.

I don't understand comments like this. How do you want people to respond? Do you think it's better to _not_ report on it or otherwise call out and critique it?

Some people only caught onto Elon like last year.

Once upon a time this individual would have been shunned by the pack for their anti-pack behavior. They’d probably die out in the wild. Now we just give them more $. 

Echo drunk? Bubble brain? I quite like reality drift.

It’s almost like that’s what the writers were going for.

Yea, but that would clash with being a psychotic megalomaniac. It’s like bright colors on a frog.