Big Tech is feinting to the left again!
I guess they weren’t the brain geniuses everyone said they were after all, because their asshole plans to take over the world through authoritarianism and open surveillance and Karening out to the feds ushered in a massive blue-wave style convulsion instead, which was a direct response to the deaths and suffering of a lot of innocent people, many of whom were murdered in the street after being tracked down by narc data supplied by Big Tech!
But now, in a true sign of the worms all beginning to turn, they are starting to pretend they were always going to have been against this all along.
Today’s edition of such gaslighting is Alex Caedmon (what the fuck) Karp, who is chief executive officer of tech firm Palantir, everybody’s favorite big data-data integration-analytics-AI-surveillance company, who now says he is a capital-P Progressive, even though he’s been very publicly supporting the Trump administration’s immigration agenda all this time.
Yes! The weirdo CEO in charge of the bloated, secretive tech corporation he co-founded with Peter Thiel, for God’s sake, that tells the government where immigrants are and what they’re doing in order to aid random violence and arrests and detention without cause, goes through health data in order to track people who haven’t done anything wrong, gets involved in predictive policing, pushes mass deportations, and spies on all of us just for funsies, that guy wants us to think he’s a progressive!
It’s just a coincidence that Karp is clarifying that he’s really a progressive right after that massive election, he’s not spinning, you fucking plebes just don’t understand his genius!
“I know more about being a progressive than almost anybody on the planet,” Karp said in an interview with Politico Playbook. “I absolutely believe Palantir — all of our products are essentially progressive.”
The comments come roughly a week after Democrats captured both chambers of Congress — and corporations, including Palantir, are probably preparing for an onslaught of Capitol Hill probes.
So the co-founder (alongside several others, including the extremely creepy and not at all progressive Peter Thiel) of the company that’s currently ratting out everyone’s neighbors so a bunch of jumped-up, poorly-trained racist scum pigs can come beat up and arrest little kids and drag women by their hair from their cars into the street, all in the name of “border security,” of course, is a progressive? How interesting! Surely the company’s political spending reflects this?
During the first two years of Trump’s second term, Karp has sent roughly $1.9 million of his own money into largely Republican-aligned PACs and campaigns, an Emancipator analysis of political spending found.
Palantir was also among the major donors to Trump’s White House ballroom, according to a list obtained by The Washington Post.
Here’s what he told the Washington Post last year, as people were being shot and beaten and kicked to death in the street by Trump’s gangs of heavily-armed secret dipshit police.
“For over two decades, I have implored our political elite to take seriously the truly progressive position on immigration: one of extreme skepticism. To no avail,” Karp said. “Unfettered immigration in Europe, where I lived for well over a decade, has been a disaster — depressing wages for the working class and resulting in mass social dislocation. I remain an economic progressive, isolated among self-proclaimed progressives that are anything but.”
Hmmmm, someone who considers himself very pro-border security but an economic progressive? Sort of a… I’m just spitballing here… nationalist socialist?
“Beware of data miners offering protection,” said the American Civil Liberties Union in 2011, presciently name-checking Palantir, because we all knew that they were trouble all the way back then! The problem was, if you were a journalist raising questions about privacy and potential surveillance before approximately 2020, some dipshit would start cry-bulling you about “terrorism” and how you “hated the troops,” and then everyone would scold you for making dipshits cry! It was a horrible time.
The ACLU report continues:
A major National Research Council report and other experts examining the question have all concluded that pattern-based data-mining — in which suspicious patterns of activity are flagged, cold, by computer algorithms — is very unlikely to be effective against terrorism.
Speaking of fiction, Palantir is named after a device in Lord of the Rings that allows characters to omnisciently see anything, anywhere. Ironically, in the novels, those who peer into a Palantir are often deceived by what they see. But Businessweek quotes the company’s CEO as saying they believe their mission is to “protect the Shire.”
When we at the ACLU hear “we need lots of amazing new powers in order to protect you,” our response is, “watch out.”
Say it louder for the people in the back, ACLU! But also, even back then, not even the tiniest bit progressive, except when they were begging the Democratic Party for money!
Here’s what the Electronic Frontier Federation, which does a lot of privacy-focused work and has an eye on the sorts of surveillance and other abuses going on at the border, said after sending Palantir a query earlier this year about their purported commitment to human rights versus their, you know, actions.
Voluntary corporate human rights policies often function as weak accountability mechanisms: companies can tout principles, publish policies, and answer criticism with polished statements while changing very little on the ground. Palantir’s response fits that pattern all too well.
Hmmmmm… having a poor human rights record isn’t much of a progressive value. And how much of a hand in the Trump administration’s horrifying mass deportation campaign has Palantir had? Well, according to the ACLU last March, a lot!
EFF’s letter asked Palantir to explain how it is honoring its commitments to civil liberties in light of reports linking Palantir-owned systems to facial recognition and other tools used to identify and target people engaged in observing and recording law enforcement, including in connection with the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. The letter also cites an incident in which an officer scanned protesters’ and observers’ faces and threatened to add their biometrics to a “nice little database.”
Palantir denied involvement in any such database, of course.
I wonder if anything else could have motivated this pronouncement, on top of that massive political landslide in favor of Democrats, that is?
Palantir’s leadership, including but not limited to CEO Alex Karp, has exhibited sensitivity to shifting political winds in public messaging over this period. […]
Palantir has a partnership with open-weight champion and chip designer NVIDIA that oversees the use of open-weight models for government and infrastructure customers, emphasizing many of the same themes about AI sovereignty on the product’s promotional page.
NVIDIA, hmmm. Well, no need to check on them. I’m sure they’re doing fine!
OPEN THREAD!
Has he ever advocated for holding employers responsible for exploiting the undocumented? No? Then he can fuck right off.
Fuck this CRETIN AND EVIL MOTHER FUCKER