Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Dystopian role, war, and policing

  • Many see Palantir as a “metastasizing” surveillance vendor already enabling a sci‑fi‑style dystopia: “killbots,” mass data aggregation, predictive policing, and “BI for tyranny.”
  • Several comments explicitly accuse it of complicity in war crimes and genocide (e.g., via Israel and other conflicts) and of helping police and intelligence agencies erode civil liberties and “fruit of the poisonous tree” protections.
  • Others argue the real problem is the governments purchasing and using these tools; if Palantir didn’t exist, states would build or buy something similar anyway.

Investing, capitalism, and “voting with your wallet”

  • Debate over whether buying Palantir stock is “supporting evil.”
    • One side: refuse to invest to avoid legitimizing/benefiting from dystopia.
    • Other side: not buying doesn’t stop bad outcomes; if dystopia comes, better to be rich than poor.
  • Some focus purely on financials: high P/E, big revenue growth, recurring beats of analyst expectations; others think it’s overvalued but sticky in government.

What Palantir actually sells and why it wins

  • Several ex‑gov/enterprise folks describe Palantir as:
    • A highly integrated data platform (Foundry, Gotham) with ETL pipelines, ontology/graph layer, lineage, and low‑/no‑code apps (“Workshop”).
    • Strong at integrating siloed, sensitive systems under strict DoD/IC security levels (e.g., IL5), with pre‑cleared staff and ATOs.
  • Its edge is portrayed as: speed to working demo, browser‑based deployment replacing legacy tools, and synergistic integrations that lock in agencies for years.

Product quality vs hype

  • Fans say Foundry is “worth every penny,” uniquely scalable, and the only “source of truth” in their large organizations, outperforming chaotic internal IT and “data barons.”
  • Critics say it’s “SAP with spooky branding,” “lego” ETL and dashboards, no real ontological advantage over a good data warehouse, and inferior to tools like Databricks, Fabric, Power BI, or Tableau.
  • Some note that the “no coding / no scalability worries” messaging is marketing; once off the happy path, you hit Spark tuning, Python, SQL, etc.

Democracy, founders’ ideology, and privatized government

  • A long subthread debates the anti‑democratic statements of a founder, libertarianism as “freedom for the rich,” and growing elite hostility to democracy.
  • Others connect Palantir to broader trends: corporate capture of the state, the “Dark Enlightenment”/neo‑feudalism, and government functions being outsourced to private tech (akin to Blackwater, TRW, Booz Allen).
  • Some argue all major cloud/AI vendors (Microsoft, Google, AWS, Oracle, IBM) similarly empower state power, and Palantir is just today’s most visible symbol.