I sent the following email to Alex Karp, the CEO of @PalantirTech. I doubt he will reply, let alone read it.
Mr. Karp,
You named your mass surveillance company after the seeing stones of Professor Tolkien's lore, and I cannot decide which possibility insults human intelligence more: that you never understood Professor Tolkien’s clear warning regarding the power of the Palantíri, or that you understood perfectly and simply identified with the Eye rather than the Free Peoples. While they were not inherently evil, the Ñoldor’s creations ultimately became instruments of domination that corrupted their users. Despite Saruman being incredibly wise and of strong will, he fell not because he lacked information, but because he gazed too long and found himself corrupted by the power promised him by Sauron. That you would hoist this banner above your own operation suggests either a reading comprehension that would embarrass a high school student, or a confession of intent so candid it requires no further elaboration.
But the insult to literary comprehension pales before your fundamental misconception of liberty itself. Liberty is not a privilege granted from the state’s power to be managed by technocratic efficiency. It is the natural condition of self-owning beings engaging in voluntary exchange. Your entire enterprise proceeds from the opposite premise that human beings and their information are raw material to be harvested, processed, and targeted without meaningful consent.
Your $30 million contract with ICE for the “ImmigrationOS” platform, with its chillingly named ELITE program (Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement), does not merely assist with record-keeping. It generates dossiers on human beings, assigns confidence scores to their locations using HHS data, and manages what your partners call the “immigration lifecycle” of individuals. This is the language of livestock management applied to human souls, and in no way can possibly be limited to the tracking of only immigrants. You have built the infrastructure for predictive policing that treats human choice as an algorithmic glitch to be smoothed away, and will invariably be used against immigrant and nonimmigrant alike, as it likely already is. Additionally, when your company was caught orchestrating a covert influencer campaign to smear critics of your NHS contract, you revealed your true character. You do not merely build tools of surveillance. You actively seek to silence those who question them.
This is the privatization of tyranny, the industrialization of trespass, and the digital automation of rape as it operates entirely outside the realm of legitimate contract and consent. As Lysander Spooner understood, there is a difference between explicit voluntary consent, and “consent” that is coerced. Your platforms operate exclusively in the latter category. Every single bit of data you collect occurs without the legitimate consent of the subjects from whom you gather it. One need not invoke constitutional parchment to recognize that any amount of surveillance without consent violates the basic precondition of a free society.
You are not building the future. You are tightening the invisible bonds of the free-range prison in which we already live, while enriching yourself with contracts paid by property extorted from those you help enslave. That you do so beneath a banner borrowed from a mythology explicitly concerned with the corruption of power suggests either historical ignorance so profound it disqualifies you from managing a lemonade stand, or is simply a confession of your motives.
The Palantíri may have been created as neutral tools, but like the One Ring, no one was truly fit to wield them. As Professor Tolkien himself wrote, “The most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.” The Palantíri should have suffered the same fate as the One Ring. Your abominable entity deserves the same.
In Liberty,
Ancap Air
I will never hide my posts behind a Subscription on 𝕏. Please consider donating.
CashApp - $AncapAir
₿TC ⚡️ - AncapAir@walletofsatoshi.com
#Bitcoin #BTC - bc1q3m2gh3cfmp7hc99eak7qqgxnt9stxfletfe8v6
#BitcoinCash #BCH - bitcoincash:qqkzueur29yl8prkd4vfz3ejnzk6e587zsrkqlmdsu
#Ethereum #ETH - 0xd7C435F772949052CB717162bE1C71989F6917d5
#Monero #XMR - 44oxsY9FkLr3ZAXZfTZXZSXnLFM2eDqrn3annU1DJ53sfNWQZw4e5vf9k6khoJWof7PWTjfV31NnG54KXNmrc9SmULGVfhf