can’t blame them; there were no signs in the beginning.
“Descent”. As if they were not obviously and explicitly fascist from day 1. How dumb can you be?
Fuck these fuckers. I’ll forgive them when they start actively sabotaging every single thing they can from the inside.
Employees of Evil Corp wondering if what they’re doing benefits Evil
There are two surprising aspects of this to me. Firstly that the employees feel confident enough to express concern about Palantir’s actions in official channels. I would have thought that the nature of their work was obvious enough that this would be a cultural taboo and therefore self-censored. I guess some of them have limits to suspending disbelief for what they had likely internally framed as “work for the benefit of national security” or “job pays too well to care”.
The second part is that not all of this official channel discussion was immediately wiped by Palantir, but perhaps they also relied on the premise of self-censorship in preventing these conversations at scale.
Either way, I’m somewhat relieved there’s someone at Palantir worried about this at all. The more of them who are worried by this, the more leaks we’ll see.
the last thing thiel wants its his shady company being in the news, he has always tried to prevent that.
Descent?
Exact thing I was thinking.
In order to descend, you have to not start out wanting to enable it. Isn’t “Empower the evil bastards of the world” their mission statement?
the words coming out of my mouth in disbelief are mirrored as the first comment
Fuck around and find out. Goddamn idiots should have known what they’re getting into. Like their boss having moments of megalomania.
Wow, must be bad if even the fascists are seeing the ‘descent’ into fascism as a bad thing.
What descent? There is no descent. They started at bedrock since the beginning. People should have seen it back then.
Sarcasm is rather hard to detect over text, especially when I don’t add sarcastic quote marks…
and a company named palintir too, an objected used by sauron to corrupt people spying.
Sleepy Barney Rubble ruined that.
Or do they mean similar to a plane landing at an airport?
You would think the name was a dead give away that they were cartoonishly evil?
I have no simpathy at all for them at all.
Why would you even name yourself after the Palantiri, they’re literally tainted with bad omens.
They are implied to be made by Fëanor, who in rage perpetuated a mass-slaying of his kin because they refused to give him their boats, which he needed for his crazy revenge quest.
Some were then literally used by Sauron, who literally is the servant of basically Satan, to gain knowledge so he could conquer Middle-earth.
Like why would you think that’d be a good name for a company.
It’s because they’ve read the books, know they’re popular, want to be hip and interesting, and completely miss the morality of the books they think they love.
Look at Musk naming barges after space ships from a society where people can change gender practically at will, yet can’t deal with the fact that his daughter is transgender.
I’d thought it was more active vice signalling, like they want everyone to know they’re evil.
Probably because you have the hubris necessary to believe that if the One Ring were in your hands, you would be strong enough to wield it without becoming corrupted.
Samwise was a fictional character sadly
None of them realized it before? Well then, if you can talk the talk, walk the walk and quit in masse.
Oh they realized. But it was their job. To question it might put them out of work. Can’t take the risk. Can’t do anything about it now - try to blame Theil or Trump - even though they are the ones that built it and looked the other way the entire time. It isn’t descending into fascist. It was being built to enable and protect fascism when it came back out in the mainstream.
Decent? It was always in plain sight. Palantiri, hello?
People are fucking stupid.
well known for 10+years, and the way thiel named the company too.
That’s neat, thanks for the lore
I still have only vague ideas what they even are and do and why they are special. Yeah, marketing, data brokering, spying, PR, social engineering, propaganda, but then how does that differ from Meta and Google.
Werent palantir those shady orbs from LOTR? You know, the backports sauron used to spy on us…
The palantíri were created by elves and weren’t inherently evil. It was only when Sauron captured them and exerted his will over them to make it difficult for anyone to use them without sending straight to him that they became evil.
thiel never getting that far into the context, is only obsessed with spying on people.
Oh he knows. There are several quotes from him acknowledging that he is evil. He does not care as long as it supports his vision for the future.
now delving into peddling the struggling AI system they are using.
This may an overly cynical take, though that seems hard to do these days, but I’ve always believed they are intentionally vague… even to their customers.
They were a tool for good before they were corrupted, though.
Were they, though?
Ungoliant says, “yes.”
No they weren’t?
https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Palantíri
How Are so many people so ignorant and confident at the same time? You’re all acting like you know what you’re talking about…
Oh you mean in fiction!
Palantir was founded—with initial venture capital investment from the CIA—at a moment of national consensus following the September 11, 2001, attacks, when many saw fighting terrorism abroad as the most critical mission facing the US.
You mean the backlash to our constant and brutal meddling with the will and sovereignty of the rest of the world, the pillaging and raping of both the earth and the humans who occupy it for our own monetary gain? Living like kings through acts of evil so we could parade around calling ourselves The Greatest Country, and even going so far as to hide the worst of the worst atrocities from our own citizens, and the things that couldn’t escape the historical record being swept away as “but we’re better now!” and pretending that just by “stopping” (which we almost never actually do, we just hide it better) that we’ve fixed the problems?
That terrorism?
I guess 30% of Americans really did know it, and they voted for the most American man they knew of. God this place sucks.
they knew, you just justified because it was just a job.
Wait…just now!? Lol, even in online tech circles where people are completely willing to throw their morals in the trash in exchange for a job, it’s been well known for quite some time now that Palantir is the tippity top of “sell your soul for money” place to work at. This was long before Thiel was in the news and Palantir was selling data and tech to ICE.
Why would it be surprising that you sold your soul to a bunch of fascists, and if you’re already working there, do you have even the slightest shred of morality left to even say a word about it!? Apparently so, but talk about drinking the company Kool-Aid. Damn…
Really struggling to understand why they thought, “giant spying program indiscriminately gathering data on everyone in the wold,” was ever a good thing.
“But you see, they told me it’s for democracy and freedom!”
Ankh-Morporkian democracy of one man, one vote: the Patrician is the man and he has the vote.
“When I agreed to work for a well known techno-facist to develop exactly the kind of surveillance tool a facist state would kill for, I had no idea this would descend into fascism!”
What did they think they were doing, solving child hunger?
