Palantirs Payback

This piece examines how tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, has collaborated with the United States government to develop the ai-assisted program Gotham, to serve as an automated organizer for a comprehensive databank of publicly available and government held information.

With recent government initiatives to improve data analytic infrastructure with the help of machine learning, billions of dollars have been invested in the project, and the creation of profiles to aid in predicting citizen behaviors, police response/oversight, immigration enforcement, and cataloguing individuals deemed risky is underway.

This practice raises two primary concerns. In privacy, with the possibilities for misuse and operator bias being reinforced through algorithmic decisions based on limited datasets. As well as the ecological, as the cloud centers and data campuses required to process and upkeep this information have extended beyond the city centers to surrounding rural and underdeveloped communities, polluting and displacing those who live there.