4 ms·

Palantir CEO rips Silicon Valley in letter to investors

27 points by elsewhen 6y ago

thu2111 6y ago
“We have chosen sides, and we know that our partners value our commitment. We stand by them when it is convenient, and when it is not.” I think we will start to see this as a perspective and stated position more and more. Companies are waking up to left wing employee-driven cancel culture being generally poisonous, as it constantly defines arbitrary new thought crimes that are seemingly unpredictable and which almost any company or group could be "guilty" of. This makes partnering with explicitly SJ-focused organisations highly risky. Can any firm say for sure that they will still be welcome on Google Cloud next year (to pick a random example)? Yes? What if they're doing business with the US ICE? What if their service gets widely used by Trump fans? What if the CEO tweets unacceptable things? Some of these organisations are so in-hock to increasingly extreme minorities of employees that it's hard to say that a partnership is really safe, especially if you're only a small customer. By explicitly stating that Palantir will service customers whether (politically) convenient or not, they are not only re-assuring their existing customer base but in addition, putting a stake in the ground that partnerships with Palantir are robust and Twitter-proof. Importantly they recognise that this means "picking sides": that you cannot reach agreement or compromise with the sort of people who now dominate firms like Google, Twitter etc. No matter how much ground is given up they will always want more, because their demands don't seem to be rooted in any coherent political theory (critical theory not being such a thing). The other day unwoke.hr started going around. Its slogan is "Hire thinkers. Not activists". You're going to see more and more of that. Strong SJ/woke/BLM/etc type views are going to start shutting people out of career opportunities, as they will be associated with customer-confidence-killing demands and morale sapping internal conflicts.
uniqueid 6y ago
It's no consolation to me that a company is giving transcripts of my personal conversations and medical records to the American government instead of the Chinese. I don't want you to collect my damned data. Period.
- manfredo 6y ago
  Palantir doesn't collect any data. Palantir builds software tools to browse and analyze data. The government already has that data, and that data stays with the government not Palantir.
  - uniqueid 6y ago
    Close enough. I have ample pique to spread among multiple parties who have a hand in this.
    - chrstphrknwtn 6y ago
      Exactly. Microsoft have a lot to answer for with their ‘tools’ for data analysis. Every single hedge fund was using Excel leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. It’s sickening. /s
      - uniqueid 6y ago
        Has MS worked with government to make it easier to call up records of my hemorrhoids or eczema? If so, I'll reserve some hate for MS, too. With billions of people on this planet, some terrorist kingpin and I might have the same birthmark on our ankle. Thanks to the work Palantir does, that could result in law enforcement swatting me, or worse. That is sickening.
    - michannne 6y ago
      Huh? They build a tool. If it's not Palantir then it'll be someone else, likely the NSA. I'd be surprised if they aren't already investigating ways to analyze without Palantir's help. Your scorn is misguided
      - uniqueid 6y ago
        Not misguided. It's not like Palantir is selling hamburgers to millions of faceless individuals. They themselves want to take the responsibility for their consulting for government agencies. I assign responsibility to them, too. Can you think of examples of amoral company decisions from history? I can... "Our bank just facilitated the deposit of enormous quantities of paper money. We didn't do the drug-smuggling." "Our company simply supplied The Republic of ___ with ammunition. That was our only involvement." "The government needed to sort incoming prisoners by religion. We merely won the bid to do the data-processing." Palantir's arguments are more annoying, though, since the company management is not just amoral, but proud of itself.
everdumb 6y ago
The engineering elite of Silicon Valley may know more than most about building software,” Karp wrote. “But they do not know more about how society should be organized or what justice requires. The utter lack of self awareness is beyond shameful. As far as I can see Palantir wants to do with tech what Blackwater did with the armed forces and Peter Thiel is just a smarter version of Erik Prince.
peter303 6y ago
Karp and Thiel are a pair.

27 points by elsewhen 6y ago

“We have chosen sides, and we know that our partners value our commitment. We stand by them when it is convenient, and when it is not.” I think we will start to see this as a perspective and stated position more and more. Companies are waking up to left wing employee-driven cancel culture being generally poisonous, as it constantly defines arbitrary new thought crimes that are seemingly unpredictable and which almost any company or group could be "guilty" of. This makes partnering with explicitly SJ-focused organisations highly risky. Can any firm say for sure that they will still be welcome on Google Cloud next year (to pick a random example)? Yes? What if they're doing business with the US ICE? What if their service gets widely used by Trump fans? What if the CEO tweets unacceptable things? Some of these organisations are so in-hock to increasingly extreme minorities of employees that it's hard to say that a partnership is really safe, especially if you're only a small customer. By explicitly stating that Palantir will service customers whether (politically) convenient or not, they are not only re-assuring their existing customer base but in addition, putting a stake in the ground that partnerships with Palantir are robust and Twitter-proof. Importantly they recognise that this means "picking sides": that you cannot reach agreement or compromise with the sort of people who now dominate firms like Google, Twitter etc. No matter how much ground is given up they will always want more, because their demands don't seem to be rooted in any coherent political theory (critical theory not being such a thing). The other day unwoke.hr started going around. Its slogan is "Hire thinkers. Not activists". You're going to see more and more of that. Strong SJ/woke/BLM/etc type views are going to start shutting people out of career opportunities, as they will be associated with customer-confidence-killing demands and morale sapping internal conflicts.

uniqueid 6y ago

It's no consolation to me that a company is giving transcripts of my personal conversations and medical records to the American government instead of the Chinese. I don't want you to collect my damned data. Period.

manfredo 6y ago
Palantir doesn't collect any data. Palantir builds software tools to browse and analyze data. The government already has that data, and that data stays with the government not Palantir.
- uniqueid 6y ago
  Close enough. I have ample pique to spread among multiple parties who have a hand in this.
  - chrstphrknwtn 6y ago
    Exactly. Microsoft have a lot to answer for with their ‘tools’ for data analysis. Every single hedge fund was using Excel leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. It’s sickening. /s
    - uniqueid 6y ago
      Has MS worked with government to make it easier to call up records of my hemorrhoids or eczema? If so, I'll reserve some hate for MS, too. With billions of people on this planet, some terrorist kingpin and I might have the same birthmark on our ankle. Thanks to the work Palantir does, that could result in law enforcement swatting me, or worse. That is sickening.
  - michannne 6y ago
    Huh? They build a tool. If it's not Palantir then it'll be someone else, likely the NSA. I'd be surprised if they aren't already investigating ways to analyze without Palantir's help. Your scorn is misguided
    - uniqueid 6y ago
      Not misguided. It's not like Palantir is selling hamburgers to millions of faceless individuals. They themselves want to take the responsibility for their consulting for government agencies. I assign responsibility to them, too. Can you think of examples of amoral company decisions from history? I can... "Our bank just facilitated the deposit of enormous quantities of paper money. We didn't do the drug-smuggling." "Our company simply supplied The Republic of ___ with ammunition. That was our only involvement." "The government needed to sort incoming prisoners by religion. We merely won the bid to do the data-processing." Palantir's arguments are more annoying, though, since the company management is not just amoral, but proud of itself.

everdumb 6y ago

The engineering elite of Silicon Valley may know more than most about building software,” Karp wrote. “But they do not know more about how society should be organized or what justice requires. The utter lack of self awareness is beyond shameful. As far as I can see Palantir wants to do with tech what Blackwater did with the armed forces and Peter Thiel is just a smarter version of Erik Prince.

peter303 6y ago

Karp and Thiel are a pair.