Outstanding expose and mortifying at the same moment!
I’ve been worried about Palantir since I read about Theil but Now it’s worse with this guy.
One of your excerpts (red flags mine):
“A person who fantasizes, in public,
🚩about drone-striking business rivals and sending protesters to North Korea is not a person who should be near the instruments of state violence.
A person who laughs on earnings calls about
🚩heads being cut off in a revolution is not a person whose picture of American civic life is one a republic should entrust with its surveillance infrastructure.
A person whose corporate worldview celebrates “scaring and 🚩killing enemies” as a product feature is not a person whose ethical constraints on targeting decisions can be assumed. “
Mike, this is a masterful exposé of an individual who is truly and presently a real danger to humanity.
I can sense what it cost you to write this. I hope my gratitude offers some small recompense.
I left academia in '97 because I was unable to bear the burden of fighting both misogyny and rampant pseudo-intellectualism (unbearable as I was attempting to pursue a PhD in philopophy and saw first-hand and repeatedly, how easily and confidently self-serving individuals with no moral compass could twist, obscure and invert rational discourse to serve their own vile racist, sexist, capitalist agendas).
I respect your integrity and the work you're doing immensely.
"I respect your integrity and the work you're doing immensely."
I lost a lot of respect for his integrity when I clicked through his "twenty-two excerpts from CEO Alex Karp’s book, The Technological Republic" link, and found he appeared to be misrepresenting or selectively quoting Karp's views.
For example, Mike writes: "The relationship between the speaker and the violence he is describing is not the relationship of a person who has thought carefully about violence and concluded, regretfully, that it is sometimes necessary."
But the Karp book excerpt states:
"Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice."
Mike gives little hint that the book expresses this attitude.
Ironically, another book excerpt states:
"We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret."
I'm no fan of Palantir, but Mike's work looks more like character assassination than journalism.
You say you've lost respect for Mike's integrity after reading this piece because he didn't include any of the reasonable, true, compassionate comments Karp has made but this is an absurd argument for two reasons:
1) there's nothing that obligates an author to produce a balanced portrait of someone who acts in bad faith but hides in plain sight.
Case 1: My mother is a master level covert narcissist. She worked for the church for 55 years and everyone who's ever met her thinks she's the nicest person they've ever met because she says nice things and is polite. When I write about her, I'm under no obligation to tell you all the nice things she's ever said because she's dangerous to everyone around her. I don't owe her or my readers a balanced portrait of her and readers who lose respect for me for not providing that are not my intended audience.
Case 2: Trump is a violent psychopath who has also been known to occasionally say things that are true, reasonable, and seemingly compassionate. If I were to write a piece on how he is a threat to democracy, women, poc, & etc., I would be under no obligation to enumerate his positive attributes, every one of which is performative.
It's intellectually lazy to argue that Karp has also, at times, made statements that are both reasonable and true or even seemingly compassionate because nothing follows from it.
Case 3: Musk's sycophants have been compiling his "inspiring and encouraging" quotes for years. He too, sometimes says things are are true and reasonable.
None of it is evidence that he isn't a megalomaniac fascist intent on shaping the country into his own personal playground at the expense of the US taxpayer.
He, Thiel, Altman, Karp, they're all cut from the same cloth. When you've actually had first-hand experience with such people, you can see the play in all it's grotesque detail.
Mike sees it. And all it is, all it's ever been, is performative truth and reasonableness employed as a means of creating an illusion of credibility and integrity where there is none.
You haven't lost respect for Mike's integrity, you've just failed to see that you're clinging fast to the illusion.
If Mike claimed that Karp says various contradictory things and explained why he felt that one version was the "true Karp", that would be one thing. But just telling a single side of the story is partisan hackery. You've already decided that Karp=bad because he's on the wrong team. That's not high-integrity. That's not journalism. It's character assassination.
Rephrasing and repeating your original point doesn't make it more persuasive. It just shows that you failed to understand any of my points.
Character assassination is defined as "an intentional attempt to spoil the reputation of a person by criticizing them severely, especially unfairly, in the newspapers or on television" (Cambridge Dictionary).
It is not character assassination for me to report the horrible, dangerous, threatening statements someone has made - they made them. It is not character assassination to write about the terrible things they've done and said.
It isn't even unfair to Karp - or to anyone reading Mike's piece - to not give equal time and space to any other comments Karp has made. Karp is a public figure and the comments Mike refers to were all written or spoken for public consumption.
Do you require a compilation of any of the non-threatening, true, seemingly harmless comments Putin has made over the years before you will agree to read about all the horrid things he's said?
Should reports on the Unabomber have included a list of all words of wisdom he ever spoke?
You seem to be trying to apply old principles of professional journalism to a socio-political context in which those standards have been utterly abandoned in favor of a narrative that demands that we continue to extend the same kinds of good-natured fairness, presumption of good faith, and balanced reporting to fascists, billionaires, white supremacists, misogynists, and rapists that is being stripped from every ordinary citizen in the US.
We don't owe them that. Mike doesn't owe them that.
The only thing to be done in this place, in this context, at this historical moment, it to expose them.
How would you feel if someone published a profile of you someday, consisting of all the worst things you've ever said or done, without any other info or context? The fact that you are using a pseudonym suggests you would not like it very much.
2. Because Karp is a public figure, "other info and context" abound and they aren't hard to come by. Look what you found all by yourself.
3. I use a pseudonym because I am a female survivor of abuse and an active resister of fascism. But if you want to assume it's because I'm a coward, I'm cool with that.
4. You are free to believe whatever you like. People remain committed to beliefs without good reason all the time.
There are quite a few "murdery" boys obsessed with death and destruction on the reactionary right. They never matured past that dominate everything to the death, (even things they ostensibly love) stage of childhood. They are IMO a bunch of broken boys with waaaaay too much influence, money and power. Make America Great Again? I'd say make America wise, compassionate and mature. We're definitely not there folks.
When bullying becomes broadly seen as vulgar, we will begin the process of healing. Just like how driving drunk became vulgar - socially unacceptable, worthy of shunning and exile. That's what has to happen with bullies and bullying. THEN the broken boys will not be tolerated and will not have access to power.
Zero tolerance for bullies. Zero tolerance for bullying. It starts there. THAT, I believe, is our highest civic responsibility.
“The architecture that made this possible was not built by hard power alone. It was built by the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, NATO, the nuclear non-proliferation regime, the international humanitarian law framework, the European project, and a web of alliances and norms that Karp dismisses out of hand in favor of a vision of deterrence through better targeting software.” This is spot on, and the direct result of too many smart young men growing increasingly dangerous down in their parents’ basements learning to be cavalier about killing to the point of enjoying it via gaming. Everything you name - the UN, Bretton Woods, NATO, nuclear non-proliferation, international humanitarian law and the alliances and norms built from them - are based on values, humanitarian values like “all men [sic] are created equal”. This is, whether we like it or not, another moment that’s at least LIKE the Civil War, if not an actual Civil War. Yet. Lincoln’s “…new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that ‘all men are created equal’” is once again “…testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.” For me, this is about a culture that very well might be in the process of abandoning the very values - the underlying architecture, as you put it - that made it possible in the first place.
This sort of witness is very valuable. Thank you. P.S. Anyone who attacks your analysis on the basis of your not having clinical certification would be pretending the facts you described don't exist. Those facts are compelling.
"Progressive but not woke"?? Rejections that characterize others as "woke" leverage the history of that word, whose usage comes specifically from Black social progressives. So being too "woke" is implicitly being too Black. The "anti-woke" contingent are trading in racism, akin to calling those who they accuse of being "too woke" "N-lovers."
Only an asshole accuses others of being "woke," and identifies as "anti-woke." A racist asshole. White progressives have never labelled ourselves "woke." It's a Black thing. We've never appropriated it. Instead it was appropriated by racists to use against both Blacks and us.
Once again, you have articulated sharply, poignantly, and with depth that is irrefutable. We are a sick culture that enables such sociopathy to thrive in our midst.
I'm afraid Democrats are not coming to save us from the likes of Karp and Palantir. They are no better than the media, state actors who support whoever has the outstretched hand offering the most money. Sad but true. Congressional hearings are performative. They are not a remedy. They shine a light but they enforce no standards by themselves.
Palantir is very close to being, if not already, unstoppable. The accelerationists have plenty of matches and they've been lighting fires for a long time now. Many people will soon be standing in the conflagration wondering how it got so big. I'm not a pessimist, btw. I haven't given up. I simply name the things I can see clearly.
Sociopathic, malignant narcissist, pathological lying people look at killing as the ultimate pleasure. When Trump, for example, realized he could no longer get off by raping underage women and reveling in his power through the means of violent non consensual sexual behavior he needed a new outlet for his sickness. Then he discovered that with the almost magical help of recently developed technology he could not only kill people almost anywhere on a whim but he could sometimes even watch it happen in real time. What fun. When nothing else satiates, when nothing else can quell that feeling of disquiet and unease, when the noise in their brains won't shut up, when this unexplainable need to be self satisfied is not resolved they need to do more and more to make these feelings go away. Killing any and all life forms but other humans in particular is the last resort of the utterly depraved and emotionally denuded. A very real question for me is why do we keep allowing these people like Alex Karp to amass so much power and wealth and to even rule over us? Clearly as a species we are doing something wrong and if we do not figure it out sooner than later it will be figured out for us by the very monsters our societies have produced.
Outstanding expose and mortifying at the same moment!
I’ve been worried about Palantir since I read about Theil but Now it’s worse with this guy.
One of your excerpts (red flags mine):
“A person who fantasizes, in public,
🚩about drone-striking business rivals and sending protesters to North Korea is not a person who should be near the instruments of state violence.
A person who laughs on earnings calls about
🚩heads being cut off in a revolution is not a person whose picture of American civic life is one a republic should entrust with its surveillance infrastructure.
A person whose corporate worldview celebrates “scaring and 🚩killing enemies” as a product feature is not a person whose ethical constraints on targeting decisions can be assumed. “
I also don’t believe any upstanding progressive would voluntarily be comfortable making Thiel and Lonsdale more powerful and wealthy.
Mike, this is a masterful exposé of an individual who is truly and presently a real danger to humanity.
I can sense what it cost you to write this. I hope my gratitude offers some small recompense.
I left academia in '97 because I was unable to bear the burden of fighting both misogyny and rampant pseudo-intellectualism (unbearable as I was attempting to pursue a PhD in philopophy and saw first-hand and repeatedly, how easily and confidently self-serving individuals with no moral compass could twist, obscure and invert rational discourse to serve their own vile racist, sexist, capitalist agendas).
I respect your integrity and the work you're doing immensely.
"I respect your integrity and the work you're doing immensely."
I lost a lot of respect for his integrity when I clicked through his "twenty-two excerpts from CEO Alex Karp’s book, The Technological Republic" link, and found he appeared to be misrepresenting or selectively quoting Karp's views.
I recommend reading the excerpts to contrast with Mike's coverage of them: https://xcancel.com/PalantirTech/status/2045574398573453312
For example, Mike writes: "The relationship between the speaker and the violence he is describing is not the relationship of a person who has thought carefully about violence and concluded, regretfully, that it is sometimes necessary."
But the Karp book excerpt states:
"Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice."
https://xcancel.com/PalantirTech/status/2045574398573453312
Mike gives little hint that the book expresses this attitude.
Ironically, another book excerpt states:
"We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret."
I'm no fan of Palantir, but Mike's work looks more like character assassination than journalism.
You say you've lost respect for Mike's integrity after reading this piece because he didn't include any of the reasonable, true, compassionate comments Karp has made but this is an absurd argument for two reasons:
1) there's nothing that obligates an author to produce a balanced portrait of someone who acts in bad faith but hides in plain sight.
Case 1: My mother is a master level covert narcissist. She worked for the church for 55 years and everyone who's ever met her thinks she's the nicest person they've ever met because she says nice things and is polite. When I write about her, I'm under no obligation to tell you all the nice things she's ever said because she's dangerous to everyone around her. I don't owe her or my readers a balanced portrait of her and readers who lose respect for me for not providing that are not my intended audience.
Case 2: Trump is a violent psychopath who has also been known to occasionally say things that are true, reasonable, and seemingly compassionate. If I were to write a piece on how he is a threat to democracy, women, poc, & etc., I would be under no obligation to enumerate his positive attributes, every one of which is performative.
It's intellectually lazy to argue that Karp has also, at times, made statements that are both reasonable and true or even seemingly compassionate because nothing follows from it.
Case 3: Musk's sycophants have been compiling his "inspiring and encouraging" quotes for years. He too, sometimes says things are are true and reasonable.
None of it is evidence that he isn't a megalomaniac fascist intent on shaping the country into his own personal playground at the expense of the US taxpayer.
He, Thiel, Altman, Karp, they're all cut from the same cloth. When you've actually had first-hand experience with such people, you can see the play in all it's grotesque detail.
Mike sees it. And all it is, all it's ever been, is performative truth and reasonableness employed as a means of creating an illusion of credibility and integrity where there is none.
You haven't lost respect for Mike's integrity, you've just failed to see that you're clinging fast to the illusion.
If Mike claimed that Karp says various contradictory things and explained why he felt that one version was the "true Karp", that would be one thing. But just telling a single side of the story is partisan hackery. You've already decided that Karp=bad because he's on the wrong team. That's not high-integrity. That's not journalism. It's character assassination.
Rephrasing and repeating your original point doesn't make it more persuasive. It just shows that you failed to understand any of my points.
Character assassination is defined as "an intentional attempt to spoil the reputation of a person by criticizing them severely, especially unfairly, in the newspapers or on television" (Cambridge Dictionary).
It is not character assassination for me to report the horrible, dangerous, threatening statements someone has made - they made them. It is not character assassination to write about the terrible things they've done and said.
It isn't even unfair to Karp - or to anyone reading Mike's piece - to not give equal time and space to any other comments Karp has made. Karp is a public figure and the comments Mike refers to were all written or spoken for public consumption.
Do you require a compilation of any of the non-threatening, true, seemingly harmless comments Putin has made over the years before you will agree to read about all the horrid things he's said?
Should reports on the Unabomber have included a list of all words of wisdom he ever spoke?
You seem to be trying to apply old principles of professional journalism to a socio-political context in which those standards have been utterly abandoned in favor of a narrative that demands that we continue to extend the same kinds of good-natured fairness, presumption of good faith, and balanced reporting to fascists, billionaires, white supremacists, misogynists, and rapists that is being stripped from every ordinary citizen in the US.
We don't owe them that. Mike doesn't owe them that.
The only thing to be done in this place, in this context, at this historical moment, it to expose them.
You don't do that by offering a balanced profile.
How would you feel if someone published a profile of you someday, consisting of all the worst things you've ever said or done, without any other info or context? The fact that you are using a pseudonym suggests you would not like it very much.
"Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime"
1. I am not a public figure.
2. Because Karp is a public figure, "other info and context" abound and they aren't hard to come by. Look what you found all by yourself.
3. I use a pseudonym because I am a female survivor of abuse and an active resister of fascism. But if you want to assume it's because I'm a coward, I'm cool with that.
4. You are free to believe whatever you like. People remain committed to beliefs without good reason all the time.
There are quite a few "murdery" boys obsessed with death and destruction on the reactionary right. They never matured past that dominate everything to the death, (even things they ostensibly love) stage of childhood. They are IMO a bunch of broken boys with waaaaay too much influence, money and power. Make America Great Again? I'd say make America wise, compassionate and mature. We're definitely not there folks.
When bullying becomes broadly seen as vulgar, we will begin the process of healing. Just like how driving drunk became vulgar - socially unacceptable, worthy of shunning and exile. That's what has to happen with bullies and bullying. THEN the broken boys will not be tolerated and will not have access to power.
Zero tolerance for bullies. Zero tolerance for bullying. It starts there. THAT, I believe, is our highest civic responsibility.
I’d settle for make America decent again. Or, as Langston Hughes said, Let America Be America Again.
“The architecture that made this possible was not built by hard power alone. It was built by the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, NATO, the nuclear non-proliferation regime, the international humanitarian law framework, the European project, and a web of alliances and norms that Karp dismisses out of hand in favor of a vision of deterrence through better targeting software.” This is spot on, and the direct result of too many smart young men growing increasingly dangerous down in their parents’ basements learning to be cavalier about killing to the point of enjoying it via gaming. Everything you name - the UN, Bretton Woods, NATO, nuclear non-proliferation, international humanitarian law and the alliances and norms built from them - are based on values, humanitarian values like “all men [sic] are created equal”. This is, whether we like it or not, another moment that’s at least LIKE the Civil War, if not an actual Civil War. Yet. Lincoln’s “…new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that ‘all men are created equal’” is once again “…testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.” For me, this is about a culture that very well might be in the process of abandoning the very values - the underlying architecture, as you put it - that made it possible in the first place.
This sort of witness is very valuable. Thank you. P.S. Anyone who attacks your analysis on the basis of your not having clinical certification would be pretending the facts you described don't exist. Those facts are compelling.
"Progressive but not woke"?? Rejections that characterize others as "woke" leverage the history of that word, whose usage comes specifically from Black social progressives. So being too "woke" is implicitly being too Black. The "anti-woke" contingent are trading in racism, akin to calling those who they accuse of being "too woke" "N-lovers."
Only an asshole accuses others of being "woke," and identifies as "anti-woke." A racist asshole. White progressives have never labelled ourselves "woke." It's a Black thing. We've never appropriated it. Instead it was appropriated by racists to use against both Blacks and us.
Once again, you have articulated sharply, poignantly, and with depth that is irrefutable. We are a sick culture that enables such sociopathy to thrive in our midst.
I'm afraid Democrats are not coming to save us from the likes of Karp and Palantir. They are no better than the media, state actors who support whoever has the outstretched hand offering the most money. Sad but true. Congressional hearings are performative. They are not a remedy. They shine a light but they enforce no standards by themselves.
Palantir is very close to being, if not already, unstoppable. The accelerationists have plenty of matches and they've been lighting fires for a long time now. Many people will soon be standing in the conflagration wondering how it got so big. I'm not a pessimist, btw. I haven't given up. I simply name the things I can see clearly.
When I read Karp’s 22 points I noticed not one made life better for anyone except, perhaps, Alex Karp.
Palantir should not be analyzed as a normal software company.
It is closer to a decision infrastructure company.
The product is not only data analytics.
It is the ability to turn state uncertainty into operational action:
war
logistics
surveillance
border control
intelligence
public health
resource allocation
That is why the debate gets so intense.
The real question is not whether Palantir is “good” or “evil.”
It is what happens when the operating system of the state is increasingly built by private firms.
Power used to control institutions.
Now it may control the dashboards institutions use to see reality.
Sociopathic, malignant narcissist, pathological lying people look at killing as the ultimate pleasure. When Trump, for example, realized he could no longer get off by raping underage women and reveling in his power through the means of violent non consensual sexual behavior he needed a new outlet for his sickness. Then he discovered that with the almost magical help of recently developed technology he could not only kill people almost anywhere on a whim but he could sometimes even watch it happen in real time. What fun. When nothing else satiates, when nothing else can quell that feeling of disquiet and unease, when the noise in their brains won't shut up, when this unexplainable need to be self satisfied is not resolved they need to do more and more to make these feelings go away. Killing any and all life forms but other humans in particular is the last resort of the utterly depraved and emotionally denuded. A very real question for me is why do we keep allowing these people like Alex Karp to amass so much power and wealth and to even rule over us? Clearly as a species we are doing something wrong and if we do not figure it out sooner than later it will be figured out for us by the very monsters our societies have produced.
American politics and business have embraced the disruption ... the "honesty" of psychopaths. As you say.. there is no regretable necessitude.
The market needs ... and everything is in the way.
But this is in the heart of America. Karp and Trump are symptoms. Appealing to your greed worked for Putin.
When psychopathy is the pitch
He’s all in on this
https://substack.com/@jeffreypurdon/note/c-245598518?r=6iskea&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Karp revels in holding wildly immoral beliefs.
https://tdunlop.substack.com/p/the-software-reich