This is the same excuse used by armed forces and professional athletes when they engage in lighthearted/traumatizing hazing rituals: "It happened to me and I turned out fine therefore it should continue!" (Narrator: this person did not, in fact, turn out fine and the practice in no way should continue)
At Palantir, there's one or two people who might be a decent hang. Probably 40% of the company are those squishy libs, the ones you mention imagining themselves as "good people" and turning into frothing hateful reactionaries once college protestors demonstrate what a good person is and the distance between them.
But half or more of these people are racist chuds. Its endemic in STEM. Nerdy little twerps who get bullied all through school, building up a curdled, resentful worldview that allows them to revel in being bullies themselves once the powerb structure is reversed. Then in college they receive the gospel of their election to the elite which gives them all the excuse they need to cast themselves as hardworking bootstrap people who 'earned' it.
Neglecting of course that even 100 years ago society had use for probably 1% as many engineers/mathematicians/scientists as it does now and the ability to command high pay and a good job with those skills are historical accidents.
Anyway all that is to say that Tech workers even still with all the layoffs have more ability to select the job they want at the pay they want in the city they want that to choose Palantir is the decision of an open racist of which the STEM field is ripe, or the sort of utterly oblivious child of unquestioned privilege that this article may as well be directed at a tree stump.
Glad you're trying to win them over to the good but my opinion as to what we do with these guys to disrupt the functioning of the carceral state isn't fit for print.
I would not say racist chuds are endemic in STEM. I would say there is a substantial proportion of tech and engineering bros who are racist AF, but science is largely much more resistant to this (at least in my experience).
If you're distinguishing between 'S' and 'E', sure. yes. I switched from engineering to science myself.
But are you arguing that the few math/cs PhDs employed by Palantir are any less self consciously hateful gutter racists than than the software engineers below them?
I honestly don't know too many math people and those I do know are explicitly anti racist but it's a small enough sample to be fairly meaningless. I think the people who seek out work at Palantir are probably pretty different from the academic math people.
I also think there is a big difference between scientists who work in industry vs those who work in academia or at places like NIH (for now), though the difference isn't quite as dramatic. Shockingly (!), I think a lot of it is related to money.
(notably the same thing is true in the arts; we don't think of that field as being full of racist chuds but when you get to the top, where people are making the big bucks and hanging around with billionaires, it absolutely is.
I'm not exactly sure what the point of any of this was. I was talking about the actual nazis building the actual panopticon right now, and you decided I should have been talking about how not how 'not like them' you and your buddies are.
Not calling you a racist but there is an undeniable need among centrists to turn any actual discussion, especially one where people are getting dangerously close to talking about changing a thing, to a discussion about how great THEY are, and surely you don't mean them!
Look pal if you're gonna bird dog me about whether these palantir people are shitheels with insistence about how good you personally are? I'm happy to say you probably suck to close that discussion and get back to focusing on what matters which again, is not you.
Please don't respond. I consider this thread over.
Good article as always. Reminds me of a time back in like 2015 I think, I was in my fancy expensive gym and I saw a techy looking guy in a Palantir shirt, I just said 'oh hey, do you work for palantir?' 'yeah!' 'Well then go fuck yourself!' Never saw him a second time, which is good because I regretted being a jerk to a stranger but come on. Tech workers can do tech work for anyone, there is nobody who 'needs' to work at Evil Inc
I like to think of myself as a mostly decent person. But I was a foolish and self-centered and naive 21 year old, so much so, in fact, that I worked first for McKinsey, then for a crooked investment bank, and finally at an evil hedge fund.
When the guy next to me on the trading floor started loading up on shares in a company that had recently blown up a bunch of coal miners, I knew I had to get out. But up until that point, I never thought much about the actual impact of my job on the world (because, honestly, my job never seemed very significant.) I also didn’t really know what my alternatives were.
Nowadays, I’ll talk to any young person who asks about career stuff, because I want them to know that they don’t have to make the same mistakes I did by serving mammon for a decade. I wish my worldview had been bigger back then, but at least I woke up before the golden handcuffs were inescapable.
(Also, it has been useful to know exactly how the war machines and the scumbags that run them operate.)
"Capitalism does its best to make morality a luxury good." Yeah this sentence just got inserted into my Gen-X silicon valley memoir, credited. Thanks for this entire excellent piece.
I would go even further and say don’t interview at companies that do bad things.
Stop giving talent to petrochemical companies inventing new forever chemicals.
Stop giving talent to water bottle companies that take all the local water away from the people living there and cannot be replenished.
Stop working in prisons. Once they cannot run them all they might HAVE to reform them to allow less prisoners to exist and move away from our current system of too many years for too small a crime.
I appreciate the comment about young people, seen as privileged, renouncing some of that privilege to support humanity -- they could easily take their place as machine cogs, but instead, use their talents & voices when others might not have that luxury. Support, don't condemn, them.
Thank you. Just thank you, Mr Nolan. You gave me a lot to think about.
BDS isn’t just for Palestinian interests. We, the people need to reevaluate every system (and job) that oppresses us. Complicity isn’t cute anymore. Our morality is on the line.
I agree that if systems still can be changed from the inside, it is our moral obligation to fight there. But some workplaces are lost causes, and people should leave and we should divest completely.
“Capitalism does its best to make morality a luxury good.” Brilliant writing.
I’d quibble with your attempt to parse the difference between corporate media. Fox, NYT, WaPo are all swimming in the American Empire propaganda cesspool, imo. Best to follow writers you trust; then you can treat the fish wrap according.
Yes. "Capitalism does its best to make morality a luxury good." Whew! Nailed it, Hamilton. It pisses me off that we are so deeply indoctrinated with the belief that Capitalism is the founding principle of the nation. Far from it, the way I interpret the founding documents. Ah well. Meanwhile, our retirement funds are invested in these companies of pure evil, besides getting our tax money. Ugh
The Founders were concerned about three entities which could undermine their experiment; 1) religious extremism infecting government, 2) foreign entanglement leading to war, endless or otherwise, and, to your point, 3) consolidation of wealth, and specifically, the rise of corporate power.
The revolutionary beef wasn’t with King George, rather, the East India Trading Company.
HJR-54, the We The People Amendment. Contact your congressional representative and demand they co-sponsor. MoveToAmend.org for more info.
We've checked all those boxes. I contactl my representatives on the regular. They're pretty solid blue, so it feels a drop in the ocean. But I will check out HJR-54. Thanks!
I don't think it's a wild statement to say Fox news is a completely different organization than the others. They've admitted as much themselves.
That doesn't mean the others are completely free of the corporate, ruling class propaganda that plagues american media, but I think he was pretty explicit about that fact in the article. There is good and bad journalism in those organizations; it's on you to decide what you give weight to, and it's on the people working there to prioritize the good and fight the Bezos's trying to put their finger on the scale.
On the other hand, nobody working at Fox news is ever going to change the underlying purpose of the organization. It's purpose from inception was to be a conservative ideological tool to keep the party in line.
I would apply the Hedges analysis on the duopoly to the corporate/legacy media. Fox is oligarchical in nature, NYT and WaPo corporatist, though Bezos is pushing the Post towards the former. All are propaganda outlets for Empire; especially as pertains the MIC and corporate capitalism.
As to wild statements, I would argue, like the two parties of the duopoly, to suggest that Fox is a completely different organization is a distinction without a real difference, especially when it comes to end game. The consolidation of the corporate coup, and the national ‘security’ state, is all that matters.
If jobs with horrendous outcomes are off limits to decent people, then only horrendous people will hold these jobs. The only people working there will be the worst people: hopeless sociopaths and others whose values perfectly align with what Palantir and ICE and Fox News want.
Hopeless sociopaths are the ones in charge at Palantir. Just filling a seat with a non sociopath doesn't help if you aren't actively and effectively working to change the course of the whole organization. As workers, our only real weapon is withholding our labor. The 'decent people' who will announce their pronouns at a meeting where they plan out a new iteration of their mass murder software should do that. Fucking quit, get a job that isn't morally compromised. If you aren't stopping them, you aren't making it any better.
"Decent" people continuing to work morally reprehensible jobs just normalizes both the company itself and the sociopaths who work morally reprehensible jobs because they love it. It says to society "yes this is bad, but it makes lots of money so it is still a little good and should remain".
The founders of Palantir have diverse political views, but generally lean towards the right. Peter Thiel, a key founder, is a self-described conservative libertarian. Alex Karp, another founder, has described himself as a socialist and a progressive.
I looked up Alex Karp and read that he calls himself “progressive but not woke,” which is … absurd. Self-delusion is a hell of a drug. Dude, you aren’t fooling anyone, except maybe the mainstream media.
I was never in a position to make a moral or ethical decision regarding my job. I wish I could say I’d have the stones to walk away had that been the case. I can say that I would be influenced by an article like this if I was in that situation. Thanks, Hamilton, for what you do. I know you are making a difference.
I would add that the following people should also quit their jobs:
- staff at police associations/federations (as a union member and union staff I refuse to include those fuckers in the union family)
- corporate & (wealthy) nonprofit lobbyists.
- Anyone working for Rahm Emanuel, Gavin Newsom, James Carville, Andrew Cuomo, Third Way, Brookings, (you get the idea) especially high level campaign staff, political strategists, and data analysts
The great thing about the fact that morality is only easily available to the privileged is that it is specifically the privileged who by definition take up these ‘evil’ positions, and also have the total power to abandon them if they should wish to. There is no person who works at Palantir who ‘has no other choice’. Was it the last place they interviewed? Were they at the end of their rope with the clock ticking to their next rent? Pshhhht.
𝘐 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘮𝘭𝘺 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘤𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘷𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘸𝘦𝘭𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘶𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘳 𝘤𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘴 𝘳𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘢𝘵 𝘤𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘨𝘦-𝘢𝘨𝘦𝘥 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘵𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘨𝘶𝘪𝘭𝘵. 𝘗𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘶𝘴𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘨𝘦 𝘰𝘯𝘭𝘺 𝘵𝘰 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘱𝘶𝘣𝘭𝘪𝘤 𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘢𝘤𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘩𝘢𝘥 𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘪𝘤𝘦.
This is the same excuse used by armed forces and professional athletes when they engage in lighthearted/traumatizing hazing rituals: "It happened to me and I turned out fine therefore it should continue!" (Narrator: this person did not, in fact, turn out fine and the practice in no way should continue)
Been in STEM for decades now.
At Palantir, there's one or two people who might be a decent hang. Probably 40% of the company are those squishy libs, the ones you mention imagining themselves as "good people" and turning into frothing hateful reactionaries once college protestors demonstrate what a good person is and the distance between them.
But half or more of these people are racist chuds. Its endemic in STEM. Nerdy little twerps who get bullied all through school, building up a curdled, resentful worldview that allows them to revel in being bullies themselves once the powerb structure is reversed. Then in college they receive the gospel of their election to the elite which gives them all the excuse they need to cast themselves as hardworking bootstrap people who 'earned' it.
Neglecting of course that even 100 years ago society had use for probably 1% as many engineers/mathematicians/scientists as it does now and the ability to command high pay and a good job with those skills are historical accidents.
Anyway all that is to say that Tech workers even still with all the layoffs have more ability to select the job they want at the pay they want in the city they want that to choose Palantir is the decision of an open racist of which the STEM field is ripe, or the sort of utterly oblivious child of unquestioned privilege that this article may as well be directed at a tree stump.
Glad you're trying to win them over to the good but my opinion as to what we do with these guys to disrupt the functioning of the carceral state isn't fit for print.
I would not say racist chuds are endemic in STEM. I would say there is a substantial proportion of tech and engineering bros who are racist AF, but science is largely much more resistant to this (at least in my experience).
If you're distinguishing between 'S' and 'E', sure. yes. I switched from engineering to science myself.
But are you arguing that the few math/cs PhDs employed by Palantir are any less self consciously hateful gutter racists than than the software engineers below them?
I honestly don't know too many math people and those I do know are explicitly anti racist but it's a small enough sample to be fairly meaningless. I think the people who seek out work at Palantir are probably pretty different from the academic math people.
I also think there is a big difference between scientists who work in industry vs those who work in academia or at places like NIH (for now), though the difference isn't quite as dramatic. Shockingly (!), I think a lot of it is related to money.
(notably the same thing is true in the arts; we don't think of that field as being full of racist chuds but when you get to the top, where people are making the big bucks and hanging around with billionaires, it absolutely is.
I'm not exactly sure what the point of any of this was. I was talking about the actual nazis building the actual panopticon right now, and you decided I should have been talking about how not how 'not like them' you and your buddies are.
Not calling you a racist but there is an undeniable need among centrists to turn any actual discussion, especially one where people are getting dangerously close to talking about changing a thing, to a discussion about how great THEY are, and surely you don't mean them!
Look pal if you're gonna bird dog me about whether these palantir people are shitheels with insistence about how good you personally are? I'm happy to say you probably suck to close that discussion and get back to focusing on what matters which again, is not you.
Please don't respond. I consider this thread over.
tl:dr
Guillotines for anyone even tangentially collaborating with regime
Good article as always. Reminds me of a time back in like 2015 I think, I was in my fancy expensive gym and I saw a techy looking guy in a Palantir shirt, I just said 'oh hey, do you work for palantir?' 'yeah!' 'Well then go fuck yourself!' Never saw him a second time, which is good because I regretted being a jerk to a stranger but come on. Tech workers can do tech work for anyone, there is nobody who 'needs' to work at Evil Inc
I like to think of myself as a mostly decent person. But I was a foolish and self-centered and naive 21 year old, so much so, in fact, that I worked first for McKinsey, then for a crooked investment bank, and finally at an evil hedge fund.
When the guy next to me on the trading floor started loading up on shares in a company that had recently blown up a bunch of coal miners, I knew I had to get out. But up until that point, I never thought much about the actual impact of my job on the world (because, honestly, my job never seemed very significant.) I also didn’t really know what my alternatives were.
Nowadays, I’ll talk to any young person who asks about career stuff, because I want them to know that they don’t have to make the same mistakes I did by serving mammon for a decade. I wish my worldview had been bigger back then, but at least I woke up before the golden handcuffs were inescapable.
(Also, it has been useful to know exactly how the war machines and the scumbags that run them operate.)
"Capitalism does its best to make morality a luxury good." Yeah this sentence just got inserted into my Gen-X silicon valley memoir, credited. Thanks for this entire excellent piece.
I would go even further and say don’t interview at companies that do bad things.
Stop giving talent to petrochemical companies inventing new forever chemicals.
Stop giving talent to water bottle companies that take all the local water away from the people living there and cannot be replenished.
Stop working in prisons. Once they cannot run them all they might HAVE to reform them to allow less prisoners to exist and move away from our current system of too many years for too small a crime.
not the point but are those grown ass people playing duck duck goose
🤣
Fucking corporate HR team building is the tenth circle of hell.
I appreciate the comment about young people, seen as privileged, renouncing some of that privilege to support humanity -- they could easily take their place as machine cogs, but instead, use their talents & voices when others might not have that luxury. Support, don't condemn, them.
Typically sane and clarifying.
Thank you. Just thank you, Mr Nolan. You gave me a lot to think about.
BDS isn’t just for Palestinian interests. We, the people need to reevaluate every system (and job) that oppresses us. Complicity isn’t cute anymore. Our morality is on the line.
I agree that if systems still can be changed from the inside, it is our moral obligation to fight there. But some workplaces are lost causes, and people should leave and we should divest completely.
More to process, but here are my first thoughts.
“Capitalism does its best to make morality a luxury good.” Brilliant writing.
I’d quibble with your attempt to parse the difference between corporate media. Fox, NYT, WaPo are all swimming in the American Empire propaganda cesspool, imo. Best to follow writers you trust; then you can treat the fish wrap according.
Caitlin Johnstone and Assal Rad have been dogged in their critique on NYT malfeasance - https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/zen-and-the-art-of-new-york-times?utm_source=publication-search
Yes. "Capitalism does its best to make morality a luxury good." Whew! Nailed it, Hamilton. It pisses me off that we are so deeply indoctrinated with the belief that Capitalism is the founding principle of the nation. Far from it, the way I interpret the founding documents. Ah well. Meanwhile, our retirement funds are invested in these companies of pure evil, besides getting our tax money. Ugh
The Founders were concerned about three entities which could undermine their experiment; 1) religious extremism infecting government, 2) foreign entanglement leading to war, endless or otherwise, and, to your point, 3) consolidation of wealth, and specifically, the rise of corporate power.
The revolutionary beef wasn’t with King George, rather, the East India Trading Company.
HJR-54, the We The People Amendment. Contact your congressional representative and demand they co-sponsor. MoveToAmend.org for more info.
We've checked all those boxes. I contactl my representatives on the regular. They're pretty solid blue, so it feels a drop in the ocean. But I will check out HJR-54. Thanks!
I don't think it's a wild statement to say Fox news is a completely different organization than the others. They've admitted as much themselves.
That doesn't mean the others are completely free of the corporate, ruling class propaganda that plagues american media, but I think he was pretty explicit about that fact in the article. There is good and bad journalism in those organizations; it's on you to decide what you give weight to, and it's on the people working there to prioritize the good and fight the Bezos's trying to put their finger on the scale.
On the other hand, nobody working at Fox news is ever going to change the underlying purpose of the organization. It's purpose from inception was to be a conservative ideological tool to keep the party in line.
I would apply the Hedges analysis on the duopoly to the corporate/legacy media. Fox is oligarchical in nature, NYT and WaPo corporatist, though Bezos is pushing the Post towards the former. All are propaganda outlets for Empire; especially as pertains the MIC and corporate capitalism.
As to wild statements, I would argue, like the two parties of the duopoly, to suggest that Fox is a completely different organization is a distinction without a real difference, especially when it comes to end game. The consolidation of the corporate coup, and the national ‘security’ state, is all that matters.
If jobs with horrendous outcomes are off limits to decent people, then only horrendous people will hold these jobs. The only people working there will be the worst people: hopeless sociopaths and others whose values perfectly align with what Palantir and ICE and Fox News want.
I want decent people building the bombs that will kill me.
I want nothing but sociopaths building the bombs that will kill me. It seems you've discovered the absurdity of your own argument.
Hopeless sociopaths are the ones in charge at Palantir. Just filling a seat with a non sociopath doesn't help if you aren't actively and effectively working to change the course of the whole organization. As workers, our only real weapon is withholding our labor. The 'decent people' who will announce their pronouns at a meeting where they plan out a new iteration of their mass murder software should do that. Fucking quit, get a job that isn't morally compromised. If you aren't stopping them, you aren't making it any better.
"Decent" people continuing to work morally reprehensible jobs just normalizes both the company itself and the sociopaths who work morally reprehensible jobs because they love it. It says to society "yes this is bad, but it makes lots of money so it is still a little good and should remain".
Doing some research on Palantir. Found this:
The founders of Palantir have diverse political views, but generally lean towards the right. Peter Thiel, a key founder, is a self-described conservative libertarian. Alex Karp, another founder, has described himself as a socialist and a progressive.
I looked up Alex Karp and read that he calls himself “progressive but not woke,” which is … absurd. Self-delusion is a hell of a drug. Dude, you aren’t fooling anyone, except maybe the mainstream media.
I was never in a position to make a moral or ethical decision regarding my job. I wish I could say I’d have the stones to walk away had that been the case. I can say that I would be influenced by an article like this if I was in that situation. Thanks, Hamilton, for what you do. I know you are making a difference.
I would add that the following people should also quit their jobs:
- staff at police associations/federations (as a union member and union staff I refuse to include those fuckers in the union family)
- corporate & (wealthy) nonprofit lobbyists.
- Anyone working for Rahm Emanuel, Gavin Newsom, James Carville, Andrew Cuomo, Third Way, Brookings, (you get the idea) especially high level campaign staff, political strategists, and data analysts
The great thing about the fact that morality is only easily available to the privileged is that it is specifically the privileged who by definition take up these ‘evil’ positions, and also have the total power to abandon them if they should wish to. There is no person who works at Palantir who ‘has no other choice’. Was it the last place they interviewed? Were they at the end of their rope with the clock ticking to their next rent? Pshhhht.