You have arrived at the airport at the crack of dawn. Bleary-eyed and only semi-conscious, you rush towards your gate. Suddenly you’re met with an enormous ad: PALANTIR TECHNOLOGIES. SOFTWARE THAT DOMINATES. There’s a giant abstract logo, which looks like an orb hovering ominously on top of an open book. You were about to embark upon an airplane trip but now you have found yourself on a trip of another kind. And it’s a bad one.
Such was the experience that awaited travelers at San Francisco International Airport this summer. Located in Harvey Milk Terminal 1, across the way from an outpost of Green Apple Books, this massive display ad loomed menacingly over passengers waiting in line for the lounge or walking to the Ritual Coffee. Welcome to San Francisco: we have books, coffee, and domination.
Understanding Palantir
It’s a strange ad, but it makes more sense once you understand Palantir. Despite having a market cap of over $400 billion at time of publication— only a little less than Netflix, and twice that of Uber — Palantir isn't a household name, mainly because it isn’t consumer-facing. It was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, whose previous company, PayPal, had just gone public, providing him with ample startup capital. But where PayPal’s product was for consumers, Palantir's product was targeted at organizations, primarily government agencies and corporations. What the software actually does is notoriously hard to pin down — even former employees struggle to explain it concisely — but it basically involves centralizing an organization’s internal data in order to draw insights. Thiel’s original vision involved adapting PayPal’s fraud recognition system for counterterrorism purposes: “I defined the problem as needing to reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties,” Thiel said to Forbes in 2013.
So what exactly is Palantir dominating? In theory, they are dominating the bad guys. The name Palantir comes from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, in which a ‘palantir’ is a crystal ball used for scrying and divination made by elves. From the name alone you get a glimpse of a whole worldview: the gentle, noble, and conveniently Aryan-looking elves versus the savage orcs who threaten to upset the social order.
Palantir the company, then, is surveillance software to help the good guys protect themselves from the bad guys. At least, that’s the theory. In practice, it is murkier. In a world that is becoming increasingly unequal and militarized, where the definition of terrorism has seemingly expanded to include antifascists and immigrants, Palantir’s software ultimately emboldens a repressive right-wing regime. Their founding mission is explicitly centered on ‘defending the west’. It’s been criticized for its work with the military, with ICE, with the LAPD, and the IDF. Who, exactly, are the bad guys here?
Wendy Liu writes about tech billboards for Bay Area Current. She is the author of Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism (2020). She is currently working on a novel.
