Palantir Workers Are Finally Noticing The Skulls On Their Caps

Culture

from the hans,-i've-just-noticed-something dept

There’s a famous Mitchell & Webb sketch where two SS officers, mid-conversation on the Eastern Front, suddenly notice something troubling about their uniforms. “Hans,” one asks, peering at his cap, “are we the baddies?” The skulls had been there the whole time. The skulls are kind of a giveaway. But it took a while for the question to surface. You’ve probably seen it:

I thought about that sketch reading Wired’s reporting on the internal turmoil at Palantir, where both current and former employees are starting to ask that question of their own work:

Around that time, two former employees reconnected by phone. Right as they picked up the call, one of them asked, “Are you tracking Palantir’s descent into fascism?”

“That was their greeting,” the other former employee says. “There’s this feeling not of ‘Oh, this is unpopular and hard,’ but ‘This feels wrong.’”

Two weeks ago, we wrote about Palantir going mask-off for fascism, specifically about CEO Alex Karp’s company posting a 22-point manifesto that included some genuinely ugly stuff about how “certain cultures” are “regressive and harmful” and how pluralism is a “shallow temptation.” I argued that this kind of public ideological positioning was both morally bankrupt and strategically suicidal. The moral bankruptcy part should be obvious (if it’s not, go do some soul-searching). But doing so at a time when American-style fascism is historically unpopular basically everywhere, including within the US, just seems like you’ve bet on the losing team at a time when it’s clear they have no chance of coming back to win.

That’s quite a decision for the company, given that Palantir is supposed to be in the business of using technology to predict how strategic decisions will play out.

It turns out a lot of Palantir employees agree that maybe it’s not so good for them or the company to be picking the morally bankrupt, historically unpopular position. Better late than never, I suppose.

There’s a “well, duh” element to all of this that we shouldn’t gloss over. Palantir has been Palantir for two decades. The company is named after the corrupting all-seeing surveillance orb from Lord of the Rings. Its initial venture capital came from the CIA. Peter Thiel co-founded it. The entire pitch has always been mass data aggregation in service of authoritarian state power. If you took a job there at any point in the last twenty years, the skulls were sitting right on top of the cap, plainly visible, and people were pointing at them constantly.

So in one sense, the current employee soul-searching is just the sort of late-to-the-party realization that deserves to be called out. Where, exactly, did people think this was going?

But it’s also a sign of how far Karp is willing to go — stripping away the plausible deniability that let employees tell themselves they were just building tools, not endorsing a worldview. Palantir didn’t just keep doing what it had always been doing. Karp made a deliberate choice to escalate, both in what the company is building and in how openly it’s announcing what it’s building it for.

The Wired piece documents the various moments where things began shifting internally: the deepening ICE deportation infrastructure work, the death of nurse Alex Pretti during anti-ICE protests, the questions about whether Palantir’s Maven targeting system was used in the missile strike on an Iranian elementary school that killed more than 120 children. And then, to top it all off, Karp published a manifesto telling employees and customers and the entire world that the company now believes pluralism itself is a civilizational error.

The most damning revelation in the Wired piece comes from a Palantir privacy and civil liberties (PCL) employee in a recorded internal AMA — and it shows that the entire concept of a PCL team at the company is window dressing, there so Karp and others in management can pretend they’re not quite as authoritarian as they actually are.

At least one of these AMAs was organized independently of PCL leadership by two team leads, including one who worked directly on the ICE contract for a period of time. “This was very rogue,” a PCL employee who worked on the ICE contract said in a February AMA, a recording of which was obtained by WIRED. “Courtney [Bowman, head of the privacy and civil liberties team] doesn’t know that I’m spending three hours this week talking to IMPLs [Palantir terminology for its client-facing product teams], but I think this is the only real way to start going in the right direction.”

Throughout the lengthy call, employees working on a variety of Palantir’s defense projects posed hard questions. Could ICE agents delete audit logs in Palantir’s software? Could agents create harmful workflows on their own without the company’s help? What is the most malicious thing that could come out of this work?

Answering these questions, the PCL employee who worked on the ICE contract said that “a sufficiently malicious customer is, like, basically impossible to prevent at the moment” and could only be controlled through “auditing to prove what happened” and legal action after the fact if the customer breached the company’s contract.

And then the big (if unsurprising) reveal that Karp doesn’t seem to think much of civil liberties and these employees are basically forced to see if they can distract the dictator-wanna-be at the top (does this sound familiar?):

At one point during the call, one of the employees tried to level with the group, explaining that Palantir’s work with ICE was a priority for Karp and something that likely wouldn’t change any time soon.

“Karp really wants to do this and continuously wants this,” they said. “We’re largely at the role of trying to give him suggestions and trying to redirect him, but it was largely unsuccessful and we seem to be on a very sharp path of continuing to expand this workflow.”

So the internal civil liberties function has been reduced to politely suggesting that maybe the CEO not do the worst version of the worst thing, and getting overruled.

Cool cool cool.

What seems to have finally broken the dam, though, was not the deportation work or the missile strike — it was the manifesto. As one employee posted internally after the company published its 22-point screed:

“I’m curious why this had to be posted. Especially on the company account. On the practical level every time stuff like that gets posted it gets harder for us to sell the software outside of the US (for sure in the current political climate), and I doubt we need this in the US?” wrote one frustrated employee. The message received more than 50 “+1” emojis.

The actual harms — the deportations, the surveillance infrastructure, the dead children — generated internal Slack threads and uncomfortable AMAs. The branding embarrassment generated more of a revolt.

The skulls were always on that hat. People only really started pointing at them when management decided to put the hats on billboards.

Two things are worth calling out separately:

Workers who take jobs at companies like Palantir have an obligation to think harder about what they’re building before they build it. The “I was just writing code” defense has always been weak, and it gets weaker the more obvious the application becomes. We wrote recently about how the “bring your whole self to work” era has pretty much ended, and how workers in a tighter labor market are increasingly going to find themselves at companies whose values they can’t fully stomach. That’s part of what’s happening in a labor market where management has way more leverage. But it’s also true that some companies have been waving very large red flags for a very long time, and “hey, I needed a job” excuse only goes so far when the job is building deportation infrastructure and missile targeting software that ends up blowing up schoolchildren. That shit sticks to people. And it should.

The second is that better-late-than-never still matters. The PCL employees pushing back internally, the Slack threads demanding accountability, the rogue AMAs organized without leadership’s blessing — this is the kind of pressure that has, in the past, gotten Google to drop Project Maven (which the amoral Palantir, naturally, swooped in to take over). Internal dissent is one of the only mechanisms that actually constrains what companies like this do. When employees stop accepting the rationalizations, things change. Sometimes the company changes. Sometimes the employees leave and build something better. Either one is better than just letting things continue as they are.

You can argue that Palantir taking on Project Maven when Google dropped it means that internal protest is fruitless, but that’s simply not true. Internal protest makes it more expensive and difficult for companies to get away with doing bad things. It may not stop them all, but it adds real friction. And if, as now, we start to add some real social baggage for being the software devs who were “just coding for a paycheck,” it can definitely make a bigger difference over time.

Which brings us back to why Karp’s manifesto might end up being a strategic disaster even setting aside the moral question. Palantir’s value proposition has always rested on a kind of plausible deniability: yes, we build surveillance tools, but we have a civil liberties team, we care about safeguards, we’re the responsible adults in the room. The manifesto torched that framing on purpose. And now the company’s own engineers are saying, in writing, that the post is making it harder to sell software, harder to recruit, harder to defend the work to friends and family.

These kinds of things should be costly. That’s how society prevents people from just going along with enabling horrendous human rights violations because the pay and perks are decent.

And at Palantir, the skulls are on the cap. Some people are finally noticing.

Hans, are we the baddies? Yeah. You probably are. So, are you going to keep wearing those skulls?

Filed Under: are we the baddies, culture, employment
Companies: palantir