Yeah, I guess this "transformation" couldn't be more transparent, but I guess most folks have short memories.

What evidence is there that Palantir is lobbying for Chat Control? I can't find anything online.

I know you said "probably", but is your speculation based on anything? To me that would be considerably worse than just selling surveillance and investigation software to governments.

>Part innovator's dilemma, part lack of ambition, part lack of government support, part the usual UK/Euro VC situ.

I wish I am wrong. Unfortunately agrees with you on everything.

Part innovator's dilemma almost certainly happens to all companies. It is the rest of the sentence that are the problems. Ambition, Government, UK/Euro VC situ, and generally culture.

Those who are Ambition moved to the US. Government, both ruling party and cvivl servant aren't interested to making anything better and I have seen this first hand. UK and Euro VC.

QinetiQ?

Somehow, I have the nagging suspicion that the laws of parliament and it's budgets have more to do with the state of British enterprise than the appointment of a sexually-predatory prince as a trade representative. And that you are well aware of that.

I also suspect that your (*) unwillingness to name the actual reasons for the loss of economic capability is the ultimate cause of what you are describing.

(*) And mine, if I'm to be honest.

But not everything has a killswitch or other sovereign-threatening features

Palantirs are inherently evil, and they deceive those who use them. Sauron was deceived into thinking Pippin had the ring, and this led to his demise. Denethor saw what he thought was Sauron's army, and was driven to suicide.

Data ingestion and visualization. They ingest data from a variety of different sources and make it easier to correlate data that might previously have been separate. As in, workflows that might have involved analyzing one data set, writing stuff in Excel, and then looking at a different data set, and cross referencing that excel spreadsheet manually can be done much more easily in Palantir's products

Here's an example of it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q8bwhAW2Mg

It's hard to describe because each customer usually has some set of customization to their workflow. One palantir customer probably uses the tool in a way unrecognizable to the next customer.

The other, perhaps more significant, asset Palantir has is a team that's gotten really good at interfacing with legacy systems and ingesting data into a more modern one.

One thing to note is, Palantir doesn't collect any data. People so often just assume that it does. The data collection is done by the government. Palantir just builds a fancy browser for data that the government already owns. So if people are angry about data being collected, go blame your government not Palantir.

The way I see it is the web was supposed to transform into the Semantic Web in 2000. What that means is you can give everything an identifier and create any type of relationship, turning the entire web into a database designed for a type of reasoning. On its own this is pretty benign, and I thought it would be a Good Thing because it would engage people past pages, links, and predetermined content. I imagined it becoming interesting for most people to craft meaningful connections. I also thought it would enable people to be more usefully and grounded-ly critical of big orgs, through projects like Sunlight Foundation and eventually Wikipedia (and now Wikidata, which uses the formal Semantic Web).

But the basic idea of "things" and relationships is easy to conceptualize, in fact those physical evidence boards with people and things connected by association have been around for a long time.

But the formal Semantic Web tech proved too complicated, so it's only really used in areas like science and to a limited degree for SEO. However, companies like Google and Facebook saw the value and built their own "knowledge graphs," and eventually companies like Palintir started selling services built on the ability to create knowledge graphs about anything. There are a few companies that do this on a smaller scale, but Palintir has really taken off, and given (and perhaps because of) the personality of the founders and its policing/military focus, and the fact that everyone is incidentally connected one way or another, it has become a very dangerous tool because it ironically does the opposite of what these tools should do on a large scale, enables big orgs to track individuals, starting perhaps legitimately with crooks and terrorists but now expanding into every field and citizen, meaning everyone can be tracked, predicted, and managed (barring good societal rules). If it isn't stopped, it gives absolute control to whoever is on top.

They make trump like you. The best way to get the US state on your side these days is to send money to Oracle, Palintir, or a bitcoin address.

So why hasn’t someone replicated them?

They’re over 20 years old at this point. That makes them a tech dinosaur.

Sophisticated systems plus powerful connections in government and industry plus so much money. That’s hard to unseat.

No, and that is unequivocally a good thing.

Sure but based on the history of the last 125 years or so, that only happens after tens of millions have died and entire countries are leveled. And that was done with… 125 year old technology.

An awful lot of people die before it collapses, and even worse, a generation is corrupted.

Sure the forces that bring down fascist states are still there, but now we also have surveillance technology that can be used to keep control of the populace.

Last time one of the hard problems of fascism was that people weren't willing to do the amount of murder and surveillance required, and this time they're on the verge of murder bots that can do it instead and surveillance is already massively pervasive and penetrating.

While the then newfangled radio was a potent method of disseminating propaganda, today the tool chains for and scientific knowledge about how to efficiently 'manifacture consent', as it is sometimes called, are quite a bit more oppressive.

I have to remind myself Star Trek TNG starts with the crew being put on trial for the crimes of humanity and the terrible fascist court they're in is from the show's vision of a more immediate future than the one we were watching on the rest of the show.

Are there any signs in the movie Gattaca that the society is militaristic or surveils the population at all?

I don't remember any.

> transition from Republic to Empire

That transition happens after civic exhaustion, usually following violence. If Rome is a model, we’d expect to see tens of millions of Americans die.

> ..I'm not excited about the future anymore.

I for one, know I'm creeping into that peculiar fever of Germany's Weimar period. I'm buying redundant outdoor, safari, working vests on ebay. I've never done anything this weirdo this before. Those Volken good people inferred in their guts what was coming. In this escalating refrain of dread and doom, with too much baggage to escape, well then why not, flip your savings into toys, dance and play.

> Thiel's platform suggests that ordinary citizens are too stupid to vote in their own best interest, they just end up stalling progress; which Thiel will then point to MAGA as evidence of this.

I haven’t heard this, and I hope I’m not being given enough rope to hang myself either, but this kind of makes sense. MAGA has pretty completely shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that they will not vote in their own interests, or even the interests of their county, or anyone (as far as I can tell).

Thiel is the US' Zhang Zhidong:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Zhidong

He could also be Shen Buhai, incarnate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shen_Buhai

Either one of these figures could provide us clues as to how to head off Thiels' insanity.

> Thiel's platform suggests that ordinary citizens are too stupid to vote in their own best interest

What gave him that right to conclude it that way? There are plenty of us who think he’s an idiot to decide on other people’s behalf!!

> ordinary citizens are too stupid to vote in their own best interest

And the oligarchs have the best interest of the citizens in mind? If not, I don't understand the argument.

They already have. Look at the coverage of the Epstein case. One of the reporters from a major network was told to shelve it when he was arrested in 2006. Or Julian Assange: hardly covered his release at all, and never said anything about his years of detention without trial.

I see no evidence that we won’t go back there. Our grandparents built an entire world order around curtailing the kind of authoritarian competition that leads to wars between major powers, and we’re already watching it break down. Do you really look at this political world as the harbinger of another 75 years free of major global conflict?

I'm old enough. My own sense is this is much worse.

I have a friend that was afraid a nuclear bomb would eventually drop. I wasn't worried a bit about that though. So perhaps perception or state of mind made a difference.

I'm old enough to remember, and I disagree. I think this is the most frightening period in my lifetime.

Having caught the end of it, it was certainly scarier at the time, when there was direct threat of imminent, unavoidable death at the whim of some other country. We’re not there yet (well, most of us).

I think what’s scary now is the trajectory we’re on and how so many people seem desperate to keep the accelerator pressed hard to the floor.

I can remember the public information ads that advised families to hide under the stairs or under a table until the nuclear attack has ended.

I was. It wasn't great, but it was quite static, speaking for myself only. I'm sure it could depend on where you lived at the time.

Denmark. Of all places given that we currently are at a cold war with the US over Greenland.

Probably pretty similarly to how the people who actually run the world superpowers feel about democracy: a nice illusion for those that live under the military dictatorships that are our current systems.

People should fear Thiel not because his opinion on democracy but because he has no soul. Besides, democracy is overrrated at best, and terrible if large scale.

Link?

That's fair but it's also kind of the point.

There's an awful lot of people declaring themselves and others to be ethnically Jewish or not Jewish when it suits them or suits some political goal. Russian is the third most common spoken language in Israel for a reason: to change demographics from the refuseniks, many of whom were ethnically and religiously Jewish but many who were not.

The character assassination on Corbyn who, in the very least, has Jewish ancestry, was disgusting regardless.

That’s how it is in the defense biz. Just look at how they name fighter jets and missiles.