alt Hacker NewsWasn't that the elevator pitch for Palentir?
Still can't believe people buy their stock, given that they are the closest thing to a James Bond villain, just because it goes up.
I mean, they are literally called "the stuff Sauron uses to control his evil forces". It's so on the nose it reads like an anime plot.
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It goes a bit deeper than that since they got funding in the wake of 9/11 and the requests for intelligence and investigative branches of government to do better and coalescing their information to prevent attacks.
So "panopticon that if it had been used properly, would have prevented the destruction of two towers" while ignoring the obvious "are we the baddies?"
To be honest, while I'd heard of it over a decade ago and I've read LOTR and I've been paying attention to privacy longer than most, I didn't ever really look into what it did until I started hearing more about it in the past year or two.
But yeah lots of people don't really buy into the idea of their small contribution to a large problem being a problem.
> Still can't believe people buy their stock, given that they are the closest thing to a James Bond villain, just because it goes up.
I proudly owned zero shares of Microsoft stock, in the 1980s and 1990s. :)
I own no Palantir today.
It's a Pyrrhic victory, but sometimes that's all you can do.
Stock buying as a political or ethical statement is not much of a thing. For one the stocks will still be bought by persons with less strung opinions, and secondly it does not lend itself well to virtue signaling.
Still can't believe people buy their stock, given that they are the closest thing to a James Bond villain, just because it goes up.
I've been tempted to. "Everything will be terrible if these guys succeed, but at least I'll be rich. If they fail I'll lose money, but since that's the outcome I prefer anyway, the loss won't bother me."
Trouble is, that ship has arguably already sailed. No matter how rapidly things go to hell, it will take many years before PLTR is profitable enough to justify its half-trillion dollar market cap.
To the proud contrarian, "the empire did nothing wrong". Maybe Sci-fi has actually played a role in the "memetic desire" of some of the titans of tech who are trying to bring about these worlds more-or-less intentionally. I guess it's not as much of a dystopia if you're on top and its not evil if you think of it as inevitable anyway.