Palantir CEO Sure Seems Pleased His Tech Is Capable Of Getting People Killed
As if things weren’t terrible enough, the techbros of the world have decided the one-two punch of Donald Trump and Elon Musk will make them even richer than they already are, even if it means making the world a worse place to live… or suddenly die.
Palantir has been on the leading edge of surveillance tech for years, making the world worse by inflicting cities with “predictive policing” and similar “advancements.” Taxpayers are stuck paying the tab for AI-assisted crunching of tainted cop data, ensuring the same old shitty, racist policing will just cost more than it did the last time around.
Palantir is doing the same thing for the US military. And that’s the sort of thing that makes CEO Alex Karp (himself a billionaire) inordinately happy. In a recorded earnings call, Karp bragged about how rich Palantir’s shareholders might be, and how dead other people without a significant amount of Palantir shares will be. Here’s Lucas Ropek with the details for Gizmodo:
“Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them,” Karp said, with a smile on his face. The CEO added that he was very proud of the work his firm is doing and that he felt it was good for America.
It’s one thing to aid and abet in extrajudicial killings. It’s quite another to brag about it on recorded earnings calls while smiling. Just being complicit is ghoulish enough. Celebrating the fact that helping to kill people is making you richer just makes it clear you no longer have a soul.
And that’s not all of it, even though that’s probably the worst of it. The same earnings call featured Palantir’s CEO applauding the ongoing destruction of the federal government by Musk and the Trump Administration.
“We love disruption, and whatever’s good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir,” Karp said, apparently excited about Musk’s effort. “Disruption, at the end of the day, exposes things that aren’t working,” he continued. “There will be ups and downs. There’s a revolution. Some people are going to get their heads cut off. We’re expecting to see really unexpected things and to win.”
While this reference to killing people might have been a bit more metaphorical, the unequivocal support for “disruption” is also ghoulish. Disruption doesn’t only “expose things that aren’t working.” Disruption, by its very definition, is capable of breaking things that are working. Sure, we all want things to work better and more efficiently, but no one ever thinks that’s what’s happening when their power or internet service provider is “disrupted.” A DDoS is a “disruption,” but only its perpetrators would consider that a positive outcome.
We’re being metaphorically bombed into the governance Stone Age (to borrow a mass killing metaphor) by a bunch of billionaires too rich to care what happens to the other 99.9% of people that have the misfortune of sharing this country — and the world beyond it — with them. And they’re so happy they’re going to have even more money and power that they can’t stop themselves from gloating about it in public.