Why you're wrong about Palantir, and TL;DR Tolkien

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1:43Okay, this week on Top Comment, we're going to be talking about Palantir, particularly some of the narrative surrounding it on social media and what we actually know about this company, which I feel like everybody is talking about at the moment. Everyone's talking about Palantir on social media, including, by the way, Taylor Lorenz. And if you haven't heard our bonus episode, we interview the journalist Taylor Lorenz. And it was interesting to get a different perspective on social media. Her argument is kind of social media is largely a good thing and that the regulation could harm the benefits it gives society, especially kind of minorities who use it as a place to gather.

2:19So very interesting to hear someone who may share a different perspective to what you're used to. We're also going to be talking about metaglasses and the ways that they can be abused and misused, as well as the good parts of them as well.

2:37So, you will have heard lots of discourse online about Palantir by now. So Palantir, one of the most evil companies in the world, is starting a PR campaign to get good publicity. How would you feel if Palantir, you know the company that works with military and immigration enforcement, had your entire medical history? I mean, your surgeries, your prescriptions, your DNA level data. So you don't really know what Palantir is and why they're bathing in so much of your personal data. They look like Peter Andre from the mysterious girl music video. They have a multi-hundred million pound contract with the NHS.

3:08Their manifesto recently went viral for, among many other things, making the case for a draft to be reinstated. Their CEO, Alex Karp, appears to be everywhere all of a sudden. There's even parody videos in the style of speedruns, like Scientology speedruns, or at least one video been made where people are pretending to do a speedrun into Palantir. I'm not. No.

3:34Go, go, go, go, go, go. And Palantir's kind of just become this like byword for the deep state, hasn't it? Like mass surveillance, be really worried, et cetera, et cetera. But what actually is Palantir? So the first misconception that a lot of people have about Palantir and this may blow your mind, is they do not store or collect any of your data. They at least claim not to, right? They are more like a software as service company, which means they create the software for other companies, agencies, military contractors, et cetera, like the NHS, to analyze the data that they already have and to make better use of it.

4:11So in a way, they would argue they're like Microsoft Office, for example. You know, they are software that anyone can use. But that doesn't mean that people don't have genuine concerns about them. And we'll get into that in a little bit. If you're surprised about how Palantir kind of markets itself, you know, this is a company that has worked with the Israeli military, with ICE in the US. You may seem to think like, why does this company keep getting into the headlines as apparently evil? But the thing is, they don't really seem to care how evil they're seen as because you are not their target market right their target market is governments and like ai the more evil they seem yeah the more appealing they are and i guess evil is synonymous with powerful right is the idea that like actually they are effective and powerful and they will benefit you as a government or a company or whatever you are in some way but it's so interesting because there aren't many examples of where like a company's name has just become okay just think about the name for a second Palantir, which comes from the Lord of the Rings and is literally an evil - I'm just going to admit, by the way, that I honestly, I've never watched Lord of the Rings and I'm completely disengaged from it, but - So you aren't aware of what a Palantir is?

5:17I didn't until you told me yesterday. In Lord of the Rings, the Palantir isn't neutral. It's a seeing stone of surveillance and control. Even Gandalf wouldn't touch it with his bare hands. This isn't hobbits or Gandalf or eagles building the future. This is Sauron and Saruman level playbooks. Well, we're the hobbits, right, in this metaphor. Palantir is the crystal ball, the software. But who is Sauron, right? That's the question. Is it the NHS? Probably not, most people would agree. But some of the concerns are what happens if, for example, reform gets into power and they have said in their manifesto that they plan to use NHS data to go after immigrants.

5:56So the question is, are we directing our concern at the software or are we directing it at the people using that software to, you know, as some might say, oppress us or whatever? Yeah. And when we're talking about legitimate concerns, questions that people might have, we have already seen some governments express sort of apprehension or approach Palantir with sort of trepidation, say Switzerland or Germany. Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, seems to have blocked this 50 million pound Met Police deal with Palantir. And also when we think about things like the NHS here in the UK, like you can see how a huge sort of public institution that offers us sort of free health care, essentially people like feel a bit weird about, oh, hang on, what are this company and what are they doing with our data and how does it work?

6:41Exactly. I mean, and again, this is a company that named itself after an evil crystal ball from Lord of the Rings. So of course, people are right to have concerns. But I think that that's it's not just the evil crystal ball. Alex Karp, the CEO, he said, Palantir, this exact quote, is here to disrupt and when it's necessary to scare our enemies, and on occasion, kill them. There are two founders of Palantir, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp. And recently they've been playing a kind of good cop, bad cop act in the media. So Peter Thiel is famously a libertarian. He is arguably influenced by Curtis Yarvin, who is the founders of the Dark Enlightenment.

7:17I actually interviewed Curtis Yarvin in Berkeley recently. And he believes, by the way, Curtis Yarvin, that we should replace democracy with a kind of techno monarchy of like a tech CEO running society accountable through a kind of board using like encrypted tech to run the military and police. So you can see how someone might follow that idea to Peter Thiel to volunteer and be worried. On the other hand, Alex Karp claims to be a progressive, a socialist even. So they're politically actually really quite different. Well, the things that they agree on, right, is that Alex Karp, like Peter Thiel, is incredibly immigration skeptic, he would say.

7:59I mean, hence the contract with ICE. He's also, like Peter Thiel, very pro-Israel. But the company itself started in the wake of 9-11. And I think if you... Because wasn't there all these rumors that it was possibly involved in the killing of Osama bin Laden? Yeah. They have encouraged this rumor that their software is used to kill Osama bin Laden. No one's confirmed or denied that. We don't know if it's true. It's very useful, again, as part of their PR narrative. Do you think that's what's so interesting about all of the discourse around Palantir is that people are making up their minds on the company based on whether they agree with the political views of, say, Peter Thiel or Alex Karp, rather than actually based on information about the company?

8:36For example, I see loads of posts from people who don't like Donald Trump very much who are like, I hate Peter Thiel because I see him as a sympathiser towards Donald Trump. And therefore, I'm worried about the company for X, Y or Z. Yeah. Drill down, for example, into the manifesto that was recently released. So this went viral. The Technological Republic, Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West, which is authored by Alex Karp. And it's kind of like the manifesto of Palantir. And people saw this and were kind of terrified because it looks fascist. So first of all, it defends Silicon Valley and it, CARP makes the argument that like, instead of making vacuous social media companies, the smart people in Silicon Valley should be, in his words, kind of making technology that preserves the geopolitical advantage that United States and its allies in Europe and elsewhere have retained over their adversaries.

9:24So he's like, you guys should be making weapons, basically. So they like AI weapons. They like the draft. And it argues that not all cultures are equal, that some are aggressive and harmful. And instead of being pluralistic, like we should be supporting the West. So it's not necessarily fascist, but it is definitely nationalistic. It's very pro-West. Those things are not actually in and of themselves fascist. But you can see how people are then like one and one equals four. And I add all these things together. And that makes me believe there's some kind of ideological agenda here in a way that there might not necessarily be.

9:57And I think many people would agree with the military having technology that allows it to, I don't know, have its tanks like drive across like terrain better. But I think where people get worried is the anti-immigration stance and the idea that for Alex Karp and for Peter Thiel, immigration poses a threat to the West. And this is why people don't like Palantir. And isn't the reason that a lot of these narratives and explanations or theories exist? Because ultimately, a company like Palantir is pretty opaque in terms of how it operates, what it intends to do. And for me, this functions a lot like how conspiracy theories do in general on social media, when people lack information, and they want to kind of make sense of something, often something that makes them feel worried or frightened, they start to kind of like pull at threads and say, Oh, well, maybe it's this, maybe it's that.

10:45And so you've now got this kind of very sort of fortified narrative about the company and the accountability for a company like Palantir feels so different from, say, the social media companies that I spend a lot of time investigating. Because even though there's lots of things that are opaque about them, including like their algorithmic systems, you do like use the interface, like you use your social media feed. So you kind of know like, oh, I got pushed that. I didn't like it very much. Whereas Palantir feel like several steps removed from our real lives. And so it's hard to know exactly what they're doing.

11:13Exactly. They're invisible to the public. But make no mistake, they are everywhere. I mean, we're talking about the NHS. They already have a£240 million deal with the Ministry of Defence. They have a deal with the Department of Health and Social Care in this country, the Home Office, the Cabinet Office, the Financial Conduct Authority, and of course, the military. And I think that, you know, anything involving war and AI, you can see why it concerns people and the kind of dehumanization involved here and everything else, why people are like, oh, I'm not sure how comfortable I feel about that. I think in some ways the concerns around the NHS mirror that as well, because, again, this is like very private, sensitive, personal data, your health.

11:51What it is worth saying, though, is that Palantir have actually spoken about this because people have been worried about the NHS and Palantir. and the executive vice chair, someone called Louis Mosley, actually spoke to the BBC about the NHS and essentially said Palantir have no interest in patient data in the UK and that it's not their business model and not the legal basis on which they operate. And they kind of compare themselves to Microsoft programmes like Excel or Word or email, kind of saying, look, these are all bits of software that the NHS uses to collate, coordinate their data, et cetera.

12:21And Palantir is effectively the same as those things. Think of it in that way. I mean, what Louis Mosley said feels so out of kilter with the narrative on social media about Palantir. And I'd seen some of this stuff about influencers possibly being paid to post in a positive way about Palantir and essentially to smear those who are critical of Palantir. I mean, it gets back to our point about everything is an influence operation. But like, what do we know in terms of if that's actually happening and how? What we know is that at least one NHS worker who's also an influencer was approached by Topham Guarin, who, by the way, we interviewed in one of our earlier episodes.

13:00About like political comms and strategies. Exactly. They're the guys who invented the Boris memes. Shitposting. Yeah, they arguably invented political shitposting. Palantir has hired them and they appear to have approached some doctor influencers to ask them to kind of counter this narrative that Palantir is bad for the NHS. What they didn't realize is one of those doctors worked for something called the Good Law Project, which is a kind of campaign group that has gone after the government for many things, including around trans rights. And she released a video explaining that Topham Guern had approached her and this video went viral.

13:30So it kind of adds to this, again, nefarious idea that Palantir are kind of sinister and influencing us, which, by the way, fits into the magical ability of the Palantiri. our producer just informed me that the plural of Palantir in Lord of the Rings is Palantiri, which is that they don't just spy on you, these crystal balls, but they can also influence you. So it appears Palantir is really living up to its name. Also, a thing that's kind of interesting is, and this is me being like super meta, and maybe I'm overthinking this, or maybe I've got the sleuth disease. But say you are helping Palantir with their social media strategy or comms or whatever, and you get in touch with doctors to say, please post about Palantir or what have you.

14:13But you know that the doctors you're contacting will then actually post saying, this stuff is really shady. Why have I been offered this money? But if Palantir benefit a little bit from that like murky, shady, all seeing, all knowing image that they have online, like in some ways, maybe the intended consequence of contacting some of these doctors could be that you want them to post saying that you're offering to pay them. So we have no evidence to say that's true, but it would be very Topham Guarant if it was, right? This is their mastery of the internet as a PR firm. It's like, get the lefty campaign group to post about Palantir, how evil it is.

14:48That then associates criticism of our company with the hardcore lefties. And it continues to fortify this image. Obviously, this is us being very sleuth disease. Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, we should talk about what they actually do, right? Because no one ever talks about that. And that is kind of the reason for all of these narratives, by the way. Yeah, exactly. Because it's just like Palantir. I honestly feel like if I went and spoke to like five of my friends and said, what is Palantir? They'd be like, I kind of have no idea. It's something to do with data. Well, you know, Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, has said it would be game changing.

15:17Clinicians can access live data of available theater slots, staff availability and individual patient data. And it kind of has a nice UI user interface that allows people to sift through that data automatically. And it has reduced patient waiting lists. It also has been used by local councils and police forces in the UK. So Bedfordshire police have used it to warn a thousand women that their partners had history of domestic violence. Palantir claims that there's been no like murders of women in Bedfordshire since then, which has been disputed. But that's a wild claim. Like a lot of what police do is they create like network maps of criminality.

15:52But this does it for you, right? It has all the mobile phone data, all the CCTV data, all the financial data, number plate records, etc. And it like automatically tells you who's connected to who, which allows you to create a criminal network. So it's like the AI thing that we all dream of when we dream of a sci-fi version of AI. But it just so happens that this company's software is also used to kill people, to track down immigrants. Now, there is some contradiction, I think, in Palantir's messaging as well. When we're talking about the NHS, right? On the one hand, they're very quick to point out that their contract with the NHS does not allow them to share the data with, say, immigration enforcement or what have you, which may be true.

16:31But then they also say, we will do whatever the democratically mandated government wants to do. So if any future government comes in and enacts legislation to do so, they could and would use the data in that way. Yeah, and I think that actually all of this speaks to a wider concern that the general public have, which is that tech companies, social media companies, AI companies, you know, all of these companies are becoming as powerful, if not more powerful than governments. And actually, it almost feels like the political institutions and politicians are sort of serving the companies rather than the other way around.

17:03And the difference is, well, certainly in democracies, we elect our officials and governments. We don't elect people who work for tech companies. And they also aren't required to be as transparent as politicians are. Palantir, though, would obviously disagree with that and probably lots of what we've said. And Palantir have said on the issue of surveillance in particular that Palantir is not and never has been a surveillance company. We do not conduct surveillance. We do not provide surveillance services, nor do we sell our software for the purposes of enabling unlawful surveillance. By the way, this is why Palantir is such a good name for the company, because I know you don't even know who Sauron is.

17:38But like, this is the nerdiest point. I feel like I'm going to get trolled by some Lord of the Rings fans. Yeah, I kind of hate that I'm going to be seen to make this incredibly nerdy point. But the Palantiri were invented by the elves initially, and it was the wizards that misused them. The implication being like the technology isn't itself bad, but that's why the name is so good. And actually, it's one of my best friend's mum's SB Master who named Palantir and PayPal. She's actually one of the best namers in Silicon Valley. We should interview her.

18:12Matt, do you like my new glasses? Yeah. Oh. They're from Metta. They're Metta Ray-Bens. Yeah, they are. For anyone who can't see there, these black glasses, those look like normal glasses. But then when you put them on, it goes, and then you can click. So I can record you. Okay. You can see the light on the front. now that's interesting that you mentioned the light because the light does indicate the white light that you're being recorded which is good for people to know but you can disable that and these glasses you can use to essentially like film what you are seeing in a point of view way this is really weird but what else can you so can you when you're looking at my face like what can you say like who is this man and what is he most known for hopefully it says his award-winning documentaries and top comment podcast i don't think we've like say okay we've got that feature working yet what don't you just say okay meta who's okay meta who is the man sitting in front of me silence i don't think we've got that far yet the reason they won't connect is because it's bbc wi-fi our producer just told me boomer they can't get onto your boomer wi-fi okay so basically this is all over social media because at the unite the kingdom rally an influencer called e dobbin was filming a young girl with his meta ray-ban glasses and saying inappropriate things to her.

19:25Excuse me, my love. Can I get your details and see you? Oh, Mum! Mum, look at that! Fucking hell. You need a warning sign on you. She's got a mother, that's enough. You're too happy to be a barking one. Wolf. People are saying she's 15 or 16. He claims that she isn't. In any case, it's insanely creepy that he is filming this young girl with these glasses And this isn't the first instance of that, right? Like, I mean, I've seen someone on the tube. I've seen a woman say to someone, are you filming me with those things? And he was like, no, no, no, I wasn't, I wasn't. But it's really disconcerting because they genuinely do just look like glasses.

20:06And unless you knew to look out for the light or something covering the light, you wouldn't necessarily realize that someone was filming you. And I think one of the reasons that these glasses exist is because if you're an influencer, for example, it's a kind of brilliant way of filming more content that feels like really, almost like you're in a video game, like point of view, you can see through someone's eyes. It's like a sort of play your own adventure type thing. And you can see why content that's filmed like this is particularly gripping. The issue is, is when people then take that a step too far, particularly because they know that outrageous stuff or provoking other people will get views and likes.

20:39Take, for example, the kind of pranksters going up to people and like being mean to little kids. I know, I saw one of our producers sent this video to me of this guy approaching children in a shopping mall and doing pranks on them, like with the screen camera. And like offering to buy them presents and stuff. and then like not buying it for them. And also like these are obviously minors, kids being filmed. And the other issue is, and we've spoken about the kind of evolution of abuse targeting women on social media. Like there are ways that they can be abused and misused that are actually really concerning.

21:07And then that content, which is like really HD, can be shared on social media without the consent or even the person who was filmed knowing that it's been shared. Exactly. And so, you know, one of the biggest users of this I've seen on social media is pickup artists who use them to kind of approach women and develop and kind of demonstrate their game and their picking up ability and then review it and give that info to their followers. So women are being filmed on dates and just in public without their consent. I mean, I don't know how much you've had this, Matt, but like obviously when we interview a conspiracy theorist or a troll or a manosphere influencer or whoever, you always expect to be filmed.

21:44Like when you're doing an interview from the minute you turn up until the minute you leave, I imagine that everything I'm saying and doing will be recorded. same for phone conversations same for anything else i think that's a very good like it didn't used to be like that by the way this is like in the past this is like a new thing yeah and and particularly if you investigate the kinds of social media stuff that we do but i've also had it happen where i've been like out for dinner or at the pub and often like people in a positive way have like taken a photo or filmed and then posted it online and even though like there's nothing embarrassing at all like it's just me like i don't know having a pint or being normal or chatting there's something about it that does feel quite violating and like you obviously see loads of pictures of like big deal celebrities having you know that they'll have images and videos shared but the idea that someone could like film your entire interaction and you wouldn't even realize like you could just be relaxing with your friends and then all of a sudden you're like wow there's a whole video of my conversation I do think is quite unnerving as a phenomenon exactly and it doesn't feel like there's any safeguards against it really because you can just upload this stuff it can probably go viral before it's then taken down which is again on the companies as per Yeah, but I think a lot of what Meta is doing here is they are gathering data and they're iterating an idea.

22:53And one of the main interests for them, presumably, is that a lot of the footage from your eyes is very useful in training AI models. And you can opt in and out of that when you sign up, we think. Yeah, you can opt in and out of that. And it's not recording when you're not recording. But when you're recording, that stuff does probably go to a huge number of human data analysts who then use it to train AI. There was a Scandinavian newspaper that uncovered that at a Kenyan kind of AI training factory, workers had seen like people having sex, people going to the toilet on footed from these Meta Rayman glasses.

23:29Meta then canceled their contract with this factory, which they said was because, you know, they just didn't meet their standards. Some have questioned whether it's because they leaked the fact that they saw people having sex to the press. so you know just remember that like when you're recording stuff there could be a factory of people in Kenya watching it but then also the harm to the people watching this stuff because like I mean some of it's obviously like a bit embarrassing or silly but you know you could see some really quite graphic either sexual content or otherwise and it really reminds me of lots of the scandals that have unfolded around moderators who work for the major social media companies because there were serious questions over the kinds of content that they were having to trawl through like often very violent content, terror related content, child sexual exploitation content, stuff that is really, really disturbing to watch, particularly if you're watching or reviewing sort of hours of content, footage, etc.

24:25And so this feels like a new iteration of that, which is like, how do you protect the people who are combing through this information, who then also could be psychologically impacted by what they're seeing? Yeah, I think also like the point you just made, and this is perhaps maybe a little bit of a theoretical point to make, but a lot of the tech, the social media apps and the actual technology we use, it feels streamlined and seamless and futuristic, but it's often displacing the kind of messy and bad parts of technology to developing countries and to the global South. So there's often a large factory filled with workers behind the scenes, kind of making your seamless experience seamless.