Roger Marshall is a computer scientist, a newly minted Luddite and a cynic
DH Illustration
If you are a fan of sci-fi, no doubt you have read JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (LOTR). I’m sure some of the Silicon Valley billionaire entrepreneurs are also familiar with the book, if only because the companies that these people have founded are named after the artifacts that Tolkien created in his novel. For example, ‘palantir’ as in Palantir Technologies, the world’s largest surveillance company co-founded by billionaire investor and Trump supporter Peter Thiel. More on Palantir later.
On the other hand, if you are not into books but more into gaming, perhaps you own Oculus, a virtual reality (VR) headset which enables you to immerse yourself in Meta’s multiverse and leave your day-to-day problems behind. At the ripe old age of 21, Palmer Luckey, the inventor of Oculus, sold his invention to Zuckerberg for $2 billion. Luckey, also a Trump supporter, is the founder of Anduril Industries, a defence technology company named after ‘anduril’, another one of Tolkien’s artifacts.
Palantir and Anduril belong to a small group of Silicon Valley companies known as Little Tech, companies whose market capitalisation is only in the billions of dollars, whereas the market capitalisation of Big Tech companies is in the trillions.
Though Big Tech has monopolised the business, industry and consumer markets, yet when the Pentagon awards multi-year, multi-billion dollar contracts, the principal recipients are once again Big Tech companies -- Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon -- and not Little Tech. Since national security and the war on terror are big business in the US, by focusing on military applications, Little Tech hopes to obtain a significant share of the Pentagon’s contracts, thereby levelling the playing field somewhat. A familiar David versus Goliath story but with a twist -- neither party loses.
That Thiel and Luckey would consider Palantir and Anduril, both billion-dollar companies, to be Little Tech beggars belief. The $60 billion market valuation of Palantir exceeds the nominal GDP of 91 countries in the world.
In LOTR, the word ‘palantir’ refers to an indestructible crystal ball with the ability to see faraway events as well as peer into the past. Thiel’s Palantir specialises in selling actionable intelligence (a lovely euphemism for the visitation of violence upon peoples and nations) generated by analysing data obtained from the company’s unmanned aerial vehicles which are fitted with a variety of sensors and fly over ‘hostile’ terrain across the globe. Palantir’s system has been used in aiding Ukraine in its ongoing war with Russia, the Israel Defence Force in killing Hamas fighters in Gaza, predictive policing in Norway, and the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in rounding up illegal immigrants, adults and children alike. The company failed in its attempts to privatise the National Health System in the UK.
A question that rarely comes up is why and how unelected individuals like Thiel have managed to insert themselves into the affairs of nation-states. Elon Musk prevented Ukrainian troops from accessing the internet by shutting down his Starlink satellite system in the country.
Also in LOTR, ‘anduril’ refers to a special sword, quite possibly patterned after King Arthur’s Excalibur, the mythical sword with magical powers. Much like Palantir, Luckey’s Anduril specialises in collecting/analysing data from unmanned vehicles which operate under water. Incidentally, Luckey is also the creator of a gaming system which kills the player in real life (hidden explosives attached to the gaming console do the trick) when the player’s avatar loses its life in the virtual game being played.
The word ‘libertarian’ as defined in the Cambridge English Dictionary is a person who believes that people should be free to think and behave as they want and should not have limits put on them by governments. By his own admission, Thiel is a libertarian. Like many IT executives in Silicon Valley, he supports right-wing causes and does not believe in democracy. However, he does expect the government to support his company by granting lucrative defence contracts. Ironic, to say the least.