We Already Built Palantir

Building a panopticon one dashboard at a time

If you’re able, please become a paid subscriber today. I can’t do it without you. -Scarlet

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A long time ago, around the time when social media was a new and exciting part of the internet, I heard someone say of these sites, “if the product is free, you are the product”. Many implicitly understood that bargain: I give you my data and attention, you give me the ability to connect with my friends. If we knew then what we know now, I wonder if we would’ve thought this to be a fair deal. Each person created a profile on their favorite social media app, but in doing so, the owners created a profile of you as a consumer. Instead of a living breathing person, you became - to them - a collection of signals, preferences, likes and dislikes, behaviors, that they could package up and sell to ad companies or data brokers. Tracking consumer behavior, of course, seems quaint in comparison to a technology that tracks people for deportation or extermination, but the logic implanted in the former is what has given birth to the latter. A Palantir-type product was always the inevitable end result of technology under capitalism.

As a software engineer with a career spanning a decade plus, I have taken great pains to work at what I like to call “morally neutral” companies. With a full recognition that there is no true moral neutrality under this system, nevertheless I have intentionally avoided or turned down interviews for NewsMax, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and various other corporations that are an overt evil upon society and where I would not want my labor to help them achieve their ends. Despite that, much of what Palantir is and does is quite familiar to me based on systems I have built myself. When reduced to its parts, what is Palantir but yet another collection of metrics and dashboards, insights and analytics, events and signals, but directed at entire populations instead of customers? While consumer or b2b products track what you click, what you buy, where you drop off, what predicts churn, to determine how a company should act on a consumer base, the logic embedded in that is the same as the logic embedded in technofascism. People are transformed into signals that are used to determine how to coerce or control them. To either get them to perform a desired behavior (like complete a purchase), or to predict whether they are a danger to the state. In both cases the human being is mere commodity. It is only logical to see the former “neutral” implementation of technology as merely the nascent expression of one that exists to dominate and repress the masses. Industrial capitalism at its base level is a means by which human labor is extracted and commoditized in order to produce profit, but within platform capitalism it is not just labor, it is human behavior and life itself that becomes the raw material used in order to track, classify, analyze, and surveill the populace, not for direct profit, but as a metafunction of protecting capital via keeping the war machine humming or making mass deportation seamless.

But what is Palantir? Perhaps you’ve heard the name but are unfamiliar with what their product actually is and does. First and foremost they are a technology company and military contractor. What they do is often something even their own engineers can not succinctly describe, however one of their flagship products is described as “operationaliz[ing] data”. Essentially, it sits atop the many existing systems and databases used by agencies like ICE or the LAPD and delivers a single dashboard that aggregates that data and provides “insights”, making connections and inferences that allow analysts to better profile immigrants or citizens. Data collection, aggregation, and analysis is utterly mundane — until it isn’t. According to Buzzfeed News, Palantir’s Gotham program used by the LAPD will make even an uneventful interaction with law enforcement turn you into a point of data, “Maybe a police officer was told a person knew a suspected gang member. Maybe an officer spoke to a person who lived near a crime “hot spot,” or was in the area when a crime happened. Maybe a police officer simply had a hunch. The context is immaterial. Once the LAPD adds a name to Palantir’s database, that person becomes a data point in a massive police surveillance system.” They say the program “[constructs] a vast database that indiscriminately lists the names, addresses, phone numbers, license plates, friendships, romances, jobs of Angelenos — the guilty, innocent, and those in between”

Once you are inside the dashboard, your intrinsic humanity is stripped. The dashboard is not neutral - not in consumer software and not in Gotham; it is instead an attempt at organizing reality that invariably comes with its own biases. Once you have been transformed into a point of data, you are no longer human, but rather a category to be sorted, sifted, filtered, and targeted. Just like a man becomes a unit of labor power, a man is then a row in a database used against all the others to try to paint a picture of what to manage or control. Whether the subject is a consumer or a prisoner, the worldview is the same: people are not people they are objects to be acted upon.

This may not surprise people who have been outspoken about government surveillance since the Patriot Act, but we are now sitting on decades worth of data not only from various governmental agencies but also widely available from consumer products that have spent years collecting metrics from primary and secondary sources. Capitalism in the modern era has made it virtually impossible to “opt out”. Sure, you can never create a social media profile, you can never use a loyalty card or sync your contacts or turn “find my iPhone” on, you can refuse to “check in” or post your vacation on Instagram, but there is a social cost to refusing to participate at all. So while one could contend we give this information away “voluntarily” we only do so in the most limited sense of the word. The disclosure of all these pieces of our lives is under conditions in which we have no say. The tech oligarchs own the phones and the apps and the websites we use every day. And while we pay the toll of online life by these disclosures, we are also unwittingly helping to architect a panopticon used to repress us. The surveillance state instead of being constructed from scratch, is assembled from the many pieces of consumer data being collected from us at every turn.

The inevitability of this may not be immediately clear, but as capital accelerates ever-worsening material conditions on the working class, governments feel it necessary to tighten control of populations and prevent mass unrest. Data that was once used to sell us a product, is now ripe to profile us as a suspect, a protestor, a migrant, a dissident, a military target. We believed that the data collected would only be used to sell us things, but inherent in that understanding is that we are the commodity. Palantir is this rationale brought to its logical extreme: a population who can be immediately legible to state power based on millions of signals produced in our everyday life as workers, consumers, and citizens. Technology itself is indeed neutral in a vacuum, but under a system that has coercion baked into the very fabric of its being, technology will always be a loaded gun. Instead of using the vast amounts of data we collect all around us to keep populations safe, to better lives, or to cooperate, the existing social relations ensure that it will be used for extraction, repression, and control. What is disturbing about Palantir isn’t that they’ve created something new, it’s the fact that what they do is positively unextraordinary. Technological capital mediated the abstraction from human to signal long ago, but seeing that mediation in the hands of a repressive state reveals the latent tendency of a system where human relations are abstracted for profit. The house was already built, Palantir simply turned the key.