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PALANTIR'S SEEING STONE: SURVEILLANCE AND THE STATE [1]
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Date: 2025-07-04
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s lore, a “palantír” is a seeing stone Sauron uses to manipulate reality (Reich). Its corporate namesake, Palantir Technologies, now stands at a perilous intersection of power. After President Trump signed an executive order for all federal agencies to share data on Americans, his administration quietly put the technological building blocks into place by turning to one company: Palantir (Frenkel and Krolik). This initiative seeks to combine data from Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, Health and Human Services, and the IRS, creating an unprecedented digital architecture (Reich). The consolidation of such power is a cause for alarm. A former Palantir engineer warned, “Combining all that data, even with the noblest of intentions, significantly increases the risk of misuse” (Xia, quoted in The Guardian). This concern echoes across the aisle; Republican Representative Warren Davidson called the work “dangerous,” explaining that when you combine so many data points, “it really essentially creates a digital ID. And it’s a power that history says will eventually be abused” (Davidson, quoted in The Guardian). Palantir's CEO, Alex Karp, bluntly frames the company's mission to, “when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them” (Karp, quoted in Reich). This aggressive posture mirrors the ideology of its founder, Peter Thiel, who wrote that since the 1920s, welfare and women’s suffrage have “rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron" (Thiel, quoted in Reich). Tolkien’s palantír fell to Sauron; Thiel’s Palantir now serves an administration openly hostile to democratic norms.
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