1. As per usual, the things that make palantir well known not even close to being the most dubious things.
2. I agree that the rank and file of palantir is no different from typical sv talent.
3. The services -> product transition was cool, I didn't weigh it as much as should've, but I did purchase fomo insurance after they ipo'd
4. The shadow hierarchy was so bad, it's impossible to figure out who you actually needed to talk to.
Edit: aha, found. https://doctorow.medium.com/how-palantir-will-steal-the-nhs-...
"Palantir is one of the most sinister companies on the global stage, a company whose pitch is to sell humans rights abuses as a service. The customers for this turnkey service include America’s most corrupt police departments, who use Palantir’s products to monitor protest movements.
Palantir’s clients also include the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency who rely on Palantir’s products for their ethnic cleansing..."
ICE does ethnic cleansing? That sounds like an outrageous claim.
Examples of ethnic cleansing includes the Turkish massacre of Armenians during WWI, the forced displacement and mass killings in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 90s, the Novia Scotia colonial government's removal of the French Catholic Acadian population, the Amhara security forces treatment of Tigrayans in Ethiopia, and of course the one that its perpetrators euphemistically called the Final Solution.
How, exactly, is ICE doing anything remotely like this? If it were true, surely it would be in the headlines and surely people would protest it harder than what is happening elsewhere in the world today?
ICE does things in a horrible way, but like most western government institutions, it's a symptom of a/the problem.
https://theconversation.com/postwar-forced-resettlement-of-g...
Also, Hitler's first planned "initial solution" was, as incredible as it might sound, relocating Jews to Madagascar (which of course would still have caused plenty of misery, since the core issue was that Nazis barely considered them as human beings).
EDIT : Yeah, so after following the rabbit hole for a bit, this seems to be about "Trump's mass deportations". Which I remember him claiming himself (maybe in other words), but one should check how massive exactly they ended to be.
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/26/facebook-data-ice-immigr...
But one of the main gists of that article is about how Palantir is helping law enforcement with data integration. Which, as this blogpost points out, shouldn't be underestimated.
And thankfully at least some of the lawmakers didn't underestimate it : there's a reason why it's illegal to build some national databases, and combine some other less sensitive national databases.
Liberal democracy requires a balance of power, and giving too much power to the policeS (or the state in general) results in a police state (dystopia). (Including through the loophole of private companies like GAFAMs.)
You can also see it as a reminder that tools aren't neutral and scale matters.
The state needs powerful capabilities to provide credible defense. Unchecked, those capabilities can be used to reduce freedoms. The essential work is to build institutions and tools that can systematically navigate that nuance.
Personally, I think this all comes down to building high-quality democracy. The people constrain the leaders at the ballot box. The leaders constrain the institutions via policy. For a practical example, look at Sen Ron Wyden’s work.
If you care about this stuff, support things like FairVote.org