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There are certain people who believe that average citizens can be held responsible for the actions of their government, to the point that they are valid militar

by jmyeet 9mo ago

There are certain people who believe that average citizens can be held responsible for the actions of their government, to the point that they are valid military targets. Well, if that's true then employees of the companies that build the tools for all this to happen can also be held responsible, no? I'm actually an optimist and believe there will come a time whena whole lot of people will deny ever working for Palantir, for Clearview on this and so on. What you, as a software engineer, help build has an impact on the world. These things couldn't exist if people didn't create and maintain them. I really hope people who work at these companies consider what they're helping to accomplish.

the_gastropod 9mo ago
I never worked at a company that could broadly be considered unethical, I don't think. But it was always a bit disheartening how many little obviously unethical decisions (e.g., advertised monthly plans with a small print "annual contract" and cancellation fee) almost every other employee would just go along with implementing, no pushback whatsoever. I don't know what it is, but your average employee seemingly sees themselves as wholly separate from the work they're paid to do. I have friends who are otherwise extremely progressive people, who I think are genuinely good people, who worked for Palantir for many years. The cognitive dissonance they must've dealt with...
- throw-qqqqq 9mo ago
  > I don't know what it is, but your average employee seemingly sees themselves as wholly separate from the work they're paid to do. Hannah Arendt coined the term “the banality of evil”. Many people think they are just following orders without reflecting on their actions.
- deaux 9mo ago
  > I have friends who are otherwise extremely progressive people, who I think are genuinely good people, who worked for Palantir for many years. The cognitive dissonance they must've dealt with... There's really nothing different about it than people working for Meta, AWS or Microsoft, and there are likely a dozen of those among us in this thread alone (hi!). Especially pre-Trump. Without the latter two companies gladly committing to juicy enterprise contracts with Palantir (continuing to this day), they would barely exist. Zuckerberg has caused magnitudes more death and destruction in the world than Karp could even dream of. Not for the latter's lack of trying, of course. And with similar amounts of empathy. Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel's combined empathy amounts to zero. None of them have more than any of the others. To be fair, I think at least at Microsoft, Google and indeed Palantir a lot of people have had large degrees of separation to the despicable stuff the companies are responsible for. Working on say, Xbox (Microsoft), or Gmail (Google), or optimizing Airbus manufacturing (Palantir), one can see how it's quite easy to defend at a surface level. In that sense I consider Meta the worst because Facebook/Instagram are effectively the entire business, with a little side of WhatsApp. Almost everyone is working directly on those two products, or is maybe one degree separated. I'm sure this won't be a popular opinion on here, but it may help you give a different point of view about your friends in a way. You should talk with them about it. Pre-MAGA, you'll likely find that ironically the place they worked at was internally more progressive than Meta or Microsoft. Did your friends quit voluntarily or were they booted? This is an interesting article [0]. This comment probably won't be very popular here, but I do invite those who instinctively reach for the downvote button to have a calm think and maybe reply before they do so. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/30/palantir-trump-karp-politics.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/30/palantir-trump-karp-politics...
- scarecrowbob 9mo ago
  I used to work at a company where we did hosting/ maintenance/ etc for large-ish content sites. At some point a project came across my desk where a hard-right propaganda site for college students came across my desk and I needed to migrate it. Folks might quibble about the reality of what that site was doing but that's how I (as a person with an MA in rhetoric) understood the site, so humor me on my assessment of that site. It was a pretty regular site on the Drudge report, though, so that might help with context. It was a very popular site, with multiple millions of unique visitors every month, and was a lot of easy cash for the business. At that point in my career, I felt that not doing that work would be a rather "privileged" pose to strike- it would have negative impacts on my coworkers and the very small business in general, while I would just be "uncomfortable" either way. At some point I was asked to build out a "tracker" for things like "confederate state removals, etc", IIRC sometime around the "Unite the Right" events. I turned the work down, even though it pissed off my boss and forced a different co-worker to do the work. That situation was what helped me understand that the immoral and "privileged" position was to do that kind of work, which wouldn't quickly and directly harm me but was likely to harm other people at some point. However, what I also realized was that doing that work is probably harmful to me, too, as a queer leftist who now wishes I didn't feel like I need to own guns. Almost everyone in that small business was queer or brown or both. At some point after (I am vaguely recalling) an 8-chan related shooter, the boss of the business stopped doing updates or work on the site. All that is to say, I used to feel like "speaking up when I didn't want to do something unethical" was a privileged thing to do but I have come to realize that the inverse is true.
some_random 9mo ago
>There are certain people who believe that average citizens can be held responsible for the actions of their government, to the point that they are valid military targets. Yeah we typically call those people terrorists or war criminals.
- mikkupikku 9mo ago
  Or heroes, if they win.
  - some_random 9mo ago
    No, I will continue to call them terrorists or war criminals. You can feel free to lick their boots though.
Manuel_D 9mo ago
> average citizens can be held responsible for the actions of their government, to the point that they are valid military targets. What do you mean by this? If a government conscripts "average citizens" into its military then they become valid military targets, sure. I'm not why you think this implies that developers working for Palantir or Clearview would become military targets. Palantir builds software for the military. But the people actually using that software are military personnel, not Palantir employees.
- some_random 9mo ago
  You're trying to find claims that aren't there, they are explicitly saying that "certain people" (which may or may not include the original poster) think that deliberately killing civilians is fine if their government is bad enough. They then go on to rhetorically question if those same "certain people" would find terrorist killings of tech workers who work at companies they don't like justified because they help the US government, even if it's in a purely civilian context.

by jmyeet 9mo ago

the_gastropod 9mo ago

I never worked at a company that could broadly be considered unethical, I don't think. But it was always a bit disheartening how many little obviously unethical decisions (e.g., advertised monthly plans with a small print "annual contract" and cancellation fee) almost every other employee would just go along with implementing, no pushback whatsoever. I don't know what it is, but your average employee seemingly sees themselves as wholly separate from the work they're paid to do. I have friends who are otherwise extremely progressive people, who I think are genuinely good people, who worked for Palantir for many years. The cognitive dissonance they must've dealt with...

throw-qqqqq 9mo ago
> I don't know what it is, but your average employee seemingly sees themselves as wholly separate from the work they're paid to do. Hannah Arendt coined the term “the banality of evil”. Many people think they are just following orders without reflecting on their actions.
deaux 9mo ago
> I have friends who are otherwise extremely progressive people, who I think are genuinely good people, who worked for Palantir for many years. The cognitive dissonance they must've dealt with... There's really nothing different about it than people working for Meta, AWS or Microsoft, and there are likely a dozen of those among us in this thread alone (hi!). Especially pre-Trump. Without the latter two companies gladly committing to juicy enterprise contracts with Palantir (continuing to this day), they would barely exist. Zuckerberg has caused magnitudes more death and destruction in the world than Karp could even dream of. Not for the latter's lack of trying, of course. And with similar amounts of empathy. Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel's combined empathy amounts to zero. None of them have more than any of the others. To be fair, I think at least at Microsoft, Google and indeed Palantir a lot of people have had large degrees of separation to the despicable stuff the companies are responsible for. Working on say, Xbox (Microsoft), or Gmail (Google), or optimizing Airbus manufacturing (Palantir), one can see how it's quite easy to defend at a surface level. In that sense I consider Meta the worst because Facebook/Instagram are effectively the entire business, with a little side of WhatsApp. Almost everyone is working directly on those two products, or is maybe one degree separated. I'm sure this won't be a popular opinion on here, but it may help you give a different point of view about your friends in a way. You should talk with them about it. Pre-MAGA, you'll likely find that ironically the place they worked at was internally more progressive than Meta or Microsoft. Did your friends quit voluntarily or were they booted? This is an interesting article [0]. This comment probably won't be very popular here, but I do invite those who instinctively reach for the downvote button to have a calm think and maybe reply before they do so. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/30/palantir-trump-karp-politics.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/30/palantir-trump-karp-politics...
scarecrowbob 9mo ago
I used to work at a company where we did hosting/ maintenance/ etc for large-ish content sites. At some point a project came across my desk where a hard-right propaganda site for college students came across my desk and I needed to migrate it. Folks might quibble about the reality of what that site was doing but that's how I (as a person with an MA in rhetoric) understood the site, so humor me on my assessment of that site. It was a pretty regular site on the Drudge report, though, so that might help with context. It was a very popular site, with multiple millions of unique visitors every month, and was a lot of easy cash for the business. At that point in my career, I felt that not doing that work would be a rather "privileged" pose to strike- it would have negative impacts on my coworkers and the very small business in general, while I would just be "uncomfortable" either way. At some point I was asked to build out a "tracker" for things like "confederate state removals, etc", IIRC sometime around the "Unite the Right" events. I turned the work down, even though it pissed off my boss and forced a different co-worker to do the work. That situation was what helped me understand that the immoral and "privileged" position was to do that kind of work, which wouldn't quickly and directly harm me but was likely to harm other people at some point. However, what I also realized was that doing that work is probably harmful to me, too, as a queer leftist who now wishes I didn't feel like I need to own guns. Almost everyone in that small business was queer or brown or both. At some point after (I am vaguely recalling) an 8-chan related shooter, the boss of the business stopped doing updates or work on the site. All that is to say, I used to feel like "speaking up when I didn't want to do something unethical" was a privileged thing to do but I have come to realize that the inverse is true.

some_random 9mo ago

>There are certain people who believe that average citizens can be held responsible for the actions of their government, to the point that they are valid military targets. Yeah we typically call those people terrorists or war criminals.

mikkupikku 9mo ago
Or heroes, if they win.
- some_random 9mo ago
  No, I will continue to call them terrorists or war criminals. You can feel free to lick their boots though.

Manuel_D 9mo ago

> average citizens can be held responsible for the actions of their government, to the point that they are valid military targets. What do you mean by this? If a government conscripts "average citizens" into its military then they become valid military targets, sure. I'm not why you think this implies that developers working for Palantir or Clearview would become military targets. Palantir builds software for the military. But the people actually using that software are military personnel, not Palantir employees.

some_random 9mo ago
You're trying to find claims that aren't there, they are explicitly saying that "certain people" (which may or may not include the original poster) think that deliberately killing civilians is fine if their government is bad enough. They then go on to rhetorically question if those same "certain people" would find terrorist killings of tech workers who work at companies they don't like justified because they help the US government, even if it's in a purely civilian context.