Palantir: breaking the big data mould

For fans of The Lord of the Rings, a Palantir is a “seeing stone”, or crystal ball, that can be used to see events and communicate with other stones. For the followers of technology companies, Palantir is a US company that specialises in big data analytics. One of its co-founders is Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who was Facebook’s first outside investor. This begs the question: why would a software company, which boasts the US and UK governments among its clients, need defending? The answer lies in the strange values of Big Tech, Silicon Valley and Western progressives (or rather American progressives, whom every other Western progressive seems to ape).

Palantir Technologies, to give the company its full name, stands out for several reasons. Tech companies tend to have meaningless names (Microsoft, for example), or names reflecting what they do: Netflix stands for internet films. The literary origin of Palantir’s name makes it stand out. The company is run by Alex Karp. With a PhD in philosophy from Goethe University, Frankfurt, Karp is highly intelligent, but not your typical tech boss. In journalistic terms, Karp is outspoken. In other words, he tells you what he thinks and does not hide behind corporate PR.

One recent example is Karp’s comments on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Sunday Times reported him as saying the risk of nuclear war is higher than most people think. He also pointed out that the firm had problems with investors, as Palantir would not sell to US adversaries. He noted as a result Palantir had never entered the Russian market, so they have no business to close down there due to sanctions.

It is this clear embrace of Western values that points to the controversy among progressives. Whereas other Big Tech firms have shied away from working for the CIA and the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Palantir has embraced such work. It sees itself as the contrarian amongst technology firms and explicitly rejects “progressive values”.

The irony for Silicon Valley progressives is that they are obsessed with diversity of race, gender and nationality, but diversity of thought sends them into a meltdown. This hostility to anyone who varies from progressive groupthink led to protests outside Palantir’s Palo Alto headquarters and may well have led to the company’s decision to move its headquarters to Denver, Colorado.

The irony is that if it was not for defence spending, there would probably be no Silicon Valley. For Big Tech progressives, history seems to begin in the 1970s with the founding of Apple Computers. In the real world the area around San Francisco has been an area of research for the US Navy for at least the last hundred years. From the 1950s to the 1980s, the largest employer was Lockheed, famous for its US military jets. Palantir is completely in the historic mainstream by seeking to work for the US government. In an era when China has its own tech champions, in the form of Tencent and Alibaba, America needs companies like Palantir more than ever.

The controversy over Palantir is not just limited to the United States. When Palantir began working with the NHS in March 2020 to improve data collection related to the pandemic, the progressive response was predictable. There was a lawsuit from Open Democracy (which was later withdrawn), plus a “No Palantir in our NHS” campaign established by 50 self-proclaimed “healthcare, anti-racist, human rights groups”. What is Palantir’s crime in their book? It was Peter Thiel, not Palantir, who gave $1 million to Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016. Of course, they don’t mention that Alex Karp actually voted for Hillary Clinton and gave money to Joe Biden’s campaign.

When Huawei, founded in 1987 by a former Chinese People’s Liberation Party officer, opened offices in the UK, no progressives said or did anything about it. When Russian firms were listing on the London Stock Exchange, there were no mass protests. The double standards at work don’t need a Palantir programme to identify them.

So next time you read a hostile article in the New York Times or a news report on the BBC about Palantir, you might want to ask yourself: if these guys are so sinister, why were they not working for the Russian government or cosying up to the Chinese Communist Party, unlike so many other Western firms and Big Tech companies? I, for one, am thankful that there is one tech firm out there that proudly stands up for Western values. Long Live Palantir.

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