What does Palantir actually do? I feel like every earnings discussion is vague and goes on about things like “Ontology” without sharing trustworthy details. As far as I can tell they are more like a consulting firm. Why are they not viewed like another IBM?
In East Germany, the Stasi had 90,000 full-time staff deciphering reports from maybe 400,000 regular informants and around 1/6th of the population as occasional informants. They used this to run a totalitarian surveillance state which abducted 250,000 supposed dissidents.
This is a horrendously inefficient system. 90,000? 400,000? In a population of 16 million? The expense! The time! The sensitivity to data irregularities! The friction which the non-dissidents must feel! This is a worse imposition than an occupying army. How many of those 250,000 were actually conspiring against the state in a meaningfully threatening way? 1/10th? 1/100th? How many actual dissidents make it through the sieve, because the security service was unable to cross-reference suspicious entries on three pages in files occupying different filing cabinets in different buildings in the complex?
The US, despite its military might, rapidly hit a manpower limit in the occupation of Afghanistan & Iraq, and was largely unable to effectively fight a collection of counterinsurgencies and "sympathizers".
In the 2020's we have much greater capability to surveil. We have electronics tracking everything, we have phones that listen all the time, we have cameras at every streetcorner, data brokers know more about us than our diary does. But manually checking these things in untargeted surveillance would be almost impossible. It would take our entire population spying on ourselves.
Enter Palantir. Proposition: "We would like to explore if we could make this possible & efficient, using modern database & machine learning techniques. We will collect, categorize, transcribe and cross-reference all the data, of every type, we will generate suspicious activity reports autonomously, we will make follow-up trivial".
This was literally George Orwell's nightmare in 1984 - that looking back at the long history of repression and rebellion, the cycle of violence and freedom, of authority and abuse of authority, that perhaps at some point, eventually, technology gives so much power to the authority that it's simply impossible to overthrow them.
