The War App ...

Illustration by George Wylesol

Yours truly has waxed poetic about Palantir, the literal Eye of Sauron writ large as the Palantir in Lord of the Rings is ... is one of several indestructible crystal balls from J. R. R. Tolkien's epic-fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings. The word comes from Quenya palan 'far', and tir 'watch over'.[T 1] The palantírs were used for communication and to see events in other parts of Arda, or in the past.

Eye of Sauron

In reality ...

Last year, according to a recent report in The New York Times, Alexander Karp received a total of $6.8 billion for his services as CEO of the data analytics software company Palantir Technologies. This “compensation actually paid”—a metric that takes into account not just salary but also the amount by which stock holdings increase—made Karp, by a large margin, the highest-paid CEO in the United States.

For anyone paying attention to Palantir’s recent fortunes, this was no great surprise. The stock value of the company—whose revenue comes largely from government contracts for data surveillance and the military application of artificial intelligence—is, one might say, negatively indexed to the peace and freedom of humanity. Over the past year the company’s stock has increased in value by a factor of almost six. At the time of writing Palantir was worth $375 billion, making it the twenty-second most valuable company in the S&P 500—just ahead of Coca-Cola and behind Bank of America. “Bad times,” as Karp put it in a recent CNBC appearance, “are incredibly good for Palantir.”

Cofounded in 2003 by Karp and his Stanford friend Peter Thiel, who had recently made serious money from the sale of PayPal to eBay, Palantir Technologies was conceived, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, as a provider of machine learning and data analytics for the purposes of national security and surveillance. The reasoning went like this: if the US government had been able, in September 2001, to collate and analyze disparate data points—flight school enrollments, anomalies in travel patterns, suspicious associations—the Twin Towers might still be standing, and the people who died that day might still be alive. Palantir’s software facilitates the finding of patterns in large datasets, and presents such information in easily searchable and navigable form. In a recent conversation with Maureen Dowd for The New York Times, which introduced Karp to the paper’s readers as a “billionaire man of mystery,” he described the work his company does as “the finding of hidden things.

Tom Shippey suggests that the palantírs' deception says one should trust in providence,
not crystal balls.[3] Painting by J.W. Waterhouse, 1902