Palantir will do a number of things to gain influence. They'll find out who are the decision makers on the space they want a contract, and they'll target them specifically. For example: if they know you take the train to work every morning, and read the news paper, they'll take a full page advertisement on the paper they know you like and that you'll see. They gain this information by, you guessed it, spying on their targets.
This doesn’t even begin to surprise me. Even on a tiny scale, myself and a couple of the other top students at our university got an unsolicited phone call from palantir about 10 min after we finished our last exams congratulating us on finishing university and encouraging us to apply to Palantir. They had clearly gotten access to our exam timetable so they could call us right after we had finished.
It was deeply creepy, and left a very unpleasant taste in my mouth.
Sounds like a good filter for culture: discourage the people who wouldn't be onboard with company approaches, and simultaneously attract the people who want to be a part of the power that the company just flexed a tiny bit.
(Something about building a company of power-seeking people who don't notice, or aren't bothered by, ethical questionability? Some companies have herded those well enough, and thrived for decades, like that.)
Agreed; I only meant a good cultural filtering approach for a company with poor intentions. (Approach students with an inappropriate flex of power, scaring away the people who'd object to things like that, and attracting the people who want to be part of that.)
They seem sketchy just based off their name from the LOTR object.
From Wikipedia:
"A major theme of palantír usage is that while the stones show real objects or events, those using the stones had to "possess great strength of will and of mind" to direct the stone's gaze to its full capability.[T 2] The stones were an unreliable guide to action, since what was not shown could be more important than what was selectively presented. A risk lay in the fact that users with sufficient power could choose what to show and what to conceal to other stones: in The Lord of the Rings, a palantír has fallen into the Enemy's hands, making the usefulness of all other existing stones questionable. Commentators such as the Tolkien scholar Paul Kocher note the hand of providence in their usage, while Joseph Pearce compares Sauron's use of the stones to broadcast wartime propaganda"
From my understanding, Palantir is mostly successful because of it's utility as a data aggregator within an organization. So yeah, you have to know how to use the tools available but it's not going to stop anyone from coming to the wrong conclusion.
I was mainly saying that if you've watched the LOTR films, the Palantir (where I assume they got the name) has a pretty negative conatation and to willingly take it makes me wonder.
Must respectfully say that this company should not be allowed to exist. We are outsourcing state level powers to a completely opaque private entity with zero accountability. This can only end badly.
I agree with you, but every reason you just listed is a positive from the perspective of their customers.
I think it's practically guaranteed that Palantir is, or will be, blackmailing officials. Even if they never do, any lucid official will be very conscious of stepping on the toes of a private intelligence company.
Or they can go the other direction and offer foreign powers protection for money.
The incentives are aligned that way so it would require surveillance and conspiracy to prevent it from happening.
Furthermore, collecting large amounts of information on your own population creates a lowest effort point of entry for an adversary to gather that info, and it's more useful to them.
What does “state level powers” even mean? And they’re hardly “opaque”, at least not any more than any other publicly traded company is, and held to similar account.
What do you think they do that’s so above-and-beyond what a non-government organization should be able to do? I wonder if you’re falling for a lot of the marketing hype…
In this case espionage and surveillance, traditionally domains of the state.
>What do you think they do that’s so above-and-beyond what a non-government organization should be able to do?
They're not subject to privacy legislation and limitations that the police is. There's a concrete exapmle of this, commercial storage of license plate data in the US is largely unregulated, so police units that have legal limitations on how long they can hold citizen data simply go to the private market and buy that data from those firms. That kind of circumvention of the law and outsourcing of responsibility is probably a large part of the Palantir business model.
Seems kind of insane to take your tax payer money and use it to buy surveillance data on you, a good chunk of which probably isn't even legal to otherwise collect and completely undermine the rule of law and democratic control of policing.
>And they’re not police, so of course they’re not held to that standard
That's a strong claim given that Palantir has sold and deployed so called "predictive policing" technology to the police forces of New Orleans[1] (without city council knowledge, so much for the accountability) and even directly advertises itself as a defense company[2]. Their revenue is overwhelmingly contract with national governments, again mostly for police or defense work. That's not how you, I or most Fortune 500 companies do business.
I know someone who worked in finance HR for approx 20 years. Nearly every time the business hired someone who would have been identified as a poor fit by Meyers Briggs they wouldn't last 12 months.
Growing up in Asia, I've heard similar anecdotes about blood types. Yeah it sounds stupid in 2024, but back in the 90s, the bloodtype-personality theory was endorsed by politicians and business leaders.
Or just answer randomly. You might get rejected for inconsistent answers, but at least no one will have a "personality profile" for you that they can sell.
I'm sure Palantir is up to just as much shit in its sales division as it is in its actual work, but normal human beings just call changing your communication style and content in response to the listener's reactions "having a conversation".
Have you ever been on public transit in DC? There are billboards all over the place (or were a decade ago when I was there last) that are clearly sales efforts targeting like 4 people. It's not that weird.
I have not, though this doesn't surprise me from seeing how lobbyists buy ads on TV and the net. What I'm saying is that the people paying $$$ to communicate with US Senators or Fortune 500 CEOs like that are operating on a different level from regular people.
If you write a letter to the newspaper, you might hope to influence one person, or the general audience of the paper. If you feel so strongly about something that you compose an op-ed, you'll also have to do the work of persuading a feature editor to publish it (although this isn't too hard, if it seems like it fills the news hole). That's a bit less accessible than a letter to the editor. If you're buying full page ads, you're leveraging capital that most people don't have to go outside of regular interpersonal communication channels.
I think they're operating on the level of people who are working to close deals worth 8-9 figures who know exactly where the 4 decision makers they're targeting are going to be at 8:30AM and 5:30PM. There's not much more to it than that; the only real observation to make here is "these deals are worth a lot of money".
I've priced doing billboards just for funsies --- to make a (snarky) point, not to make money. It's not that expensive! Also: how could it be? Look at some of the terrible billboards out there. There are a series of I-55 billboards advertising a single self-published book of poetry.
Your original statement was "normal humans don't try to communicate directly with each other through the media". I think you're using a pretty idiosyncratic definition of "normal" there. The phenomenon you're labeling abnormal is I think actually pretty common.
Extremely accurate. L3Harris pumped so much ad money into the walkways at Dulles I'm surprised they don't have naming rights to a terminal. There was a time not too long ago where you couldn't listen to WTOP without hearing Mitre and ManTech ads with the term "Digital Twin".
Which like, seems entirely rational? You're a sales team pursuing a deal with an 8-9 figure outcome, of course you would buy a billboard on on the decision maker's commute, it's a rounding error expense.
Completely rational. It makes sense that an area with a highest concentration of defense/government contractors would see a ton of ads geared towards the procurement folks. I grew up in the beltway and interned with some bigger defense contractors in college, just pointing out that it's a phenomenon unique to the DMV area (with some more memorable examples).
The thing is, this isn't responding to listener's reaction. It's determining their personality ahead of time through research and then executing a rhetorical strategy. This kind of focused information-gathering about a target before engagement is also the kind of calculus used by serial killers, btw.
I agree it's pseudoscience. But trying to psychologically profile your mark before talking to someone is still weird and creepy. This is far more than seeing if a chick is receptive to being picked up at a bar on a Friday night. It's seeing her at a happy hour a week earlier and then planning for the rest of the week all the strategies to get her to go home with you on Friday, including stalking her social media, following her around to determine her grocery times, etc.
This is tangential, but I would highly recommend watching a show called The Rehearsal, if you haven't already. It's basically exactly what you just wrote, and wholly unsettling yet brilliant.
This is not something new. A good enterprise sales team does the same thing: they learn about the organization, the gatekeepers, the decision makers, how to get past / around the gatekeepers to reach the decision makers, and finally convince the decision makers that they are the best solution. The more information the sales team is able to collect / gather / learn about each person they'll be interacting with, the better chance they'll have of getting them to say, "yes".
Palantir will do a number of things to gain influence. They'll find out who are the decision makers on the space they want a contract, and they'll target them specifically. For example: if they know you take the train to work every morning, and read the news paper, they'll take a full page advertisement on the paper they know you like and that you'll see. They gain this information by, you guessed it, spying on their targets.