Newsletters
There’s a story.
It’s the kind that leaves a scratch on the back of your neck and makes you glance over your shoulder. Call it a hum of data and dread, a low frequency of server farms percolating under fluorescent lights.
You’re traveling through another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound but also of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are those of imagination.
That’s a signpost up ahead. Your next stop: Palantir Technologies Inc.
Palantir didn’t begin as a "Twilight Zone" episode or a villain in a pulp novel on existential terrorism. It started in 2003, as a lot of things do in America. Good intentions, big talk, and a couple of smooth boys from Silicon Valley.
One of them, Peter Thiel, helped bankroll what would grow into perhaps the most commanding analytics firm on the planet. Another, Alex Karp, now its chief executive, has a mind like a wolf trap and a tongue that swings like a blackjack in a back-alley bar brawl.
Thiel and Karp built a company that promises to help governments make sense of the world’s data. That’s the sales pitch.
But don’t confuse drama with reality.
From the outside, Palantir’s products are extraordinary pieces of software engineering. They stitch together disparate threads of data and weave them into patterns humans can read. To the military and intelligence agencies that are Palantir’s biggest customers, such decoding is a gift, a “force multiplier” in an era where information is both battlefield and weapon.
But force multipliers are gizmos. Palantir’s devices don’t choose who pulls the trigger. Humans do. That’s where the trouble starts; the conspiracies of dunces begin.
Palantir’s role in government surveillance and enforcement for years has drawn public scrutiny and open dissent from multiple voices inside and outside the tech world.
In 2025, for instance, a group of former employees, folks who walked the corridors of Palantir and saw the company’s military-grade data harvesters and artificial intelligence munitions up close, condemned the company’s work with the U.S., U.K., and Israeli governments, among others.
They maintained Palantir was “increasingly complicit, normalizing authoritarianism under the guise of a revolution led by oligarchs.” According to their statement, this was no mere academic fear but a war-painted reality of contracts and code that seeped into systems with far-reaching consequences.
Ask any veteran of the tech beat, and they’ll tell you this is not the fear and loathing of disgruntled Silicon Valley geeks. Palantir’s so-called Immigration OS project—software designed to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement identify targets for deportation—triggered icy waves of internal protest and at least 13 resignations, according to verified reports.
What’s also certified are Karp’s public boasts about how Palantir’s tools are used to kill enemies. He once said that Wall Street analysts who “tried to screw” the company should be sprayed with “light fentanyl-laced urine.” You could look it up.
Still, a baker’s dozen of resignations is a dusting of a firm that employs some 4,000 workers. Still, much of Palantir’s work is secretive, and few former workers publicly criticize the company after leaving due to non-disparagement agreements most are asked to sign upon departure. Many former employees also hold shares in a company with a nearly $300 billion market valuation that matches Bank of America.
Like it or not, groceries cost money, and there’s no free brunch.
Which leaves the disturbing question of the price of drawing an ethical line in the sand. Some staffers clearly feel Palantir’s dealings amount to aid in a surveillance state rather than the defense of democracy.
And then we have the investors and executives, who embrace government contracts as the lifeblood of an artificial intelligence business built on being indispensable where it matters most.
Which side of that divide you find yourself on says more about personal philosophy than allegiance to a brand name.
Karp, a philosophical contrarian with a taste for big statements and bigger contracts, has become the personification of that divide. He’s not the CEO who blends into the background. He’s the one who talks about Western values and Western defense as though the future of civilization depends on his stack of servers.
He’s also the one whose leadership decisions—from share sales to public spats with critics—are dissected in investor forums and the financial press alike. Some see confidence. Others see a ghoul alone in a room full of mirrors.
But if you’re cowering in the basement of a Kyiv apartment building blitzed by Russian drones, Palantir is a paladin in shining armor. In January, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, in partnership with Palantir, launched Brave 1 Dataroom, a system geared to train AI models for combat applications. In other words, algorithm-driven warfare.
“If the war continues,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said of the deal, “our army must be maximally technological.”
Inside Palantir, the tensions are no less fierce.
“Civil war” is the phrase you hear from people who’ve watched teams of engineers and analysts square off in internal Slack channels over priorities, ethics, and the very soul of the company. These are not melodramatic exaggerations cooked up by tabloids; they’re disputes about whether technology should serve as an extension of liberty or as another instrument of power. Ask yourself, which side of that argument do you want your data on? The one that ensures privacy? Or the one that churns through faces and movements until everything is mapped and traceable?
There’s no magic firewall that stops analytics software from being used in ways its creators never intended. There’s only policy and politics, and they’re both slippery.
Then there’s Thiel. Not content with merely founding one of the world’s most controversial tech companies, Thiel made a reputation as an ideologue as much as an investor. His past musings on democracy and freedom remain on public record and have fueled debate in quarters far beyond the markets. Whether you find his views provocative or perilous, they add context to the ethos that once animated Palantir’s early culture: the notion that Silicon Valley’s future might lie in guiding governments rather than merely entertaining consumers. It’s heady stuff, the kind that sits uneasily next to ideals about privacy and civil liberties.
All of which underscores what’s perhaps the simplest truth of all. Fear is not irrational when power grows unseen.
Of course, Palantir’s defenders will say this is alarmism. They’ll argue that what the critics paint as creeping authoritarianism is actually a necessary, even noble, effort to modernize the machinery of state. But here’s the thing about narratives: power always tells the story that suits it best. And when the tools of that power are as formidable as Palantir’s, skepticism isn’t paranoia. It’s prudence.
The question isn’t whether Palantir is evil. It’s whether society is willing to accept concentrated technological power without enough oversight, debate, and transparency to balance it.
The last time we let fear guide policy, we ended up in wars nobody wanted and surveillance networks nobody fully understood until long after they were built.
So yes, the world should be wary. Not because there’s a single ruthless actor behind the curtain, but because the systems being erected today, in quietly signed contracts and gently whispered internal tensions, will shape freedoms tomorrow.
Don’t confuse drama with reality.
The drama is flashy headlines and corporate speeches. The reality is the slow wiring together of every piece of information about every person into systems that, left unchecked, become the very thing we fear in "Pulp Fiction": an unseen power that knows too much and answers to too few.
In that sense, fear isn’t a luxury. It’s vigilance.
Set as preferred source
Set as preferred source
2 min read
