the world according to karp
With its slogan ‘Software That Dominates’ and extensive use of military jargon instead of more standard office-speak, the US tech firm Palantir is fast becoming one of the most notorious corporations in the western world. But is it really a supervillain or merely a scapegoat and how worrying are its inroads into British systems?
Palantir Technologies, named after Tolkien’s ‘all seeing stones’, is seldom out of the news these days. This is because it operates in controversial sectors: its biggest client is the US military and its software is visible in conflicts from Israel to Ukraine, from Iran to Afghanistan. Following its use in distribution of the Covid vaccine, where the malevolent Mandelson introduced the company for a token one-pound fee, it expanded into healthcare in Britain with an NHS deal worth #330m together with a further #240m MoD agreement. A contract to process criminal intelligence for the Met Police is currently under discussion.
Founded in 2003 by a cabal of right-wing commodores including PayPal’s divisive Peter Theil and Alex Karp, the $350bn organisation’s tech was immediately adopted by the US defence establishment and used in the assassination of the country’s #1 public enemy, Osama Bin Laden. Essentially providing extravagant ‘AI-driven data-plumbing’ its integration software sits atop different (often incompatible) database systems and pulls once-disparate data together in a clear, easy to use interface. So much so that within Project Maven, the US and Nato military’s targeting system, the entire ‘kill chain’, from identification to destruction, consists of just four clicks.
Speeding up these steps is fundamental to modern warfare. In Ukraine, Palantir’s tools have undoubtedly helped to fuse battlefield intelligence, track and destroy drones, even document specific war crimes and the perpetrators. But such systems are not infallible and Maven wrongly identified a primary school in Minah, Iran, in a building used many years before by the Revolutionary Guards, as a military target. 168 people, mostly young schoolchildren, were subsequently killed.
Palantir’s manifesto urges a seamless merger between Big Tech and a nationalistic, militarised state, with Karp going further and arguing for the proactive “defence of the nation” via universal conscription. Idiosyncratically, he also rails against the iPhone and the “post-war neutering of Germany and Japan”. The decision of whether or not they’re the bad guys will be taken by those more wise than I but I will say that if you sleep with dogs don’t be surprised when you’re bitten by fleas.
