The insider threat: Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar

Is Sankar right—should the US refocus its entire economy around the Military Industrial Complex and force a tech-driven meritocracy?

Hey y’all, it’s Nick, and I’m Sick of this Shit. I just finished reading Shyam Sankar’s The Defense Reformation. It reads like a technofascist Manifesto dressed as a policy document, with strict isolationism and a heavy emphasis on “tech first” principles…let’s get into it.

Note, this will be the first in a 2 (or 3 parter).

Conway’s Law

Let’s take a quick dive into the tech field and discuss Conway’s Law, it’s one of my favorites, and to be honest Sankar provide’s a concise description in his Manifesto

The core idea is that the way members of an organization communicate and collaborate will shape the design and character of the systems and projects it produces.

We can compare this to Melvin E. Conway’s own definition (How Do Committees Invent?, Conway’s Law Wikipedia)

Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

This principle, in my words is: “Your system is a reflection of how you communicate” and it applies to so many areas of life—if applied appropriately. It is a great way to help bridge communication and functional gaps. Creating a system that is self-reflective, evaluates and iterates, and grows. The critical component is intent.

A System by Design

Sankar and I have one big thing in common—we understand systems design and efficiency. I double as a Senior Software Engineer and Architect, with a passion in bridging gaps between Software Engineering, Product, Operations, and IT teams. I build systems to make my clients lives easier, more reliable, scalable, and dependable.

Sankar’s credentials are much flashier than mine—he’s a leading figure in the defense technology space, a highly influential technologist, well respected, and well spoken. He’s been doing his job for a while and is good at it.

The major difference though? I think technology should be used to make the world safer, not through a proliferation of arms or the escalation of war-first technologies, but through the proliferation of systems and tools which lift up the lowest among us and free people from mundane or medial issues. Sankar has a different approach.

Sankar is a technologist driven by war—he needs war—not because of the death and destruction, those are secondary to him, rather because it gives him the ultimate system, the Military Industrial Complex (MIC). A goldmine of data for a technologist and a perfect testing ground for data analytics, modeling, and aggregation. A perfect place for someone who can disassociate themselves from the true costs of war—seeing it only as numbers or entries in a database rather than people and places—where brilliant minds can come together, iterate quickly, and force technological innovation. His system is one of design—advancement at any cost.

The tech bro

There is a mantra in the tech sector, “move fast and break things”. Sankar has taken that further.

Just as there is no pain-free world class cycling performance, innovation will always be painful, messy, and subject to retrospective bureaucratic critiques from those not in the arena.

That’s an interesting take. Sure, most change brings some form of discomfort, it’s a natural byproduct of effort; however, change doesn’t necessarily need to be painful and messy—the point of most of the bureaucracy is to prevent that issue exactly. It’s a limiting factor. It’s a user requirement. It’s the humanity side of progress. Sankar looks at people through the lens of “meritocracy” where your worth is defined by your output alone. He also uses some interesting religious terminology when discussing the groups around MIC.

The Great Schism has created a religion in government that is unaware or dismissive of power-law outcomes from power-law talent. In Silicon Valley we call them 10x or 100x engineers, meaning they are 10x to 100x as valuable and productive as normal engineers. We once understood this in defense, too…

The tech bros rejoice! Those of us who’ve lived the 10x or 100x life know the truth of that “power-law”, it’s a farce. What it really means is the team gets pushed aside for the ego of the one, ideas are compartmentalized, responsibilities are unfairly shifted, and communication is walled off. It’s intended to create competition—especially by pitting 10x or 100x engineers against each other. It tears teams apart. It’s the way of the tech world. It’s competitive like most, but more ruthless than many—it’s all about the data, zero about the person. Try applying for a job in tech right now. If you don’t match 100% of the criteria you’re not even getting that phone interview. Sankar’s policy manifesto lays clear that the only real metric of success is how quickly you force innovation and technological acceleration.

The technofascist

It’s a popular word these days, technofascist, but what does it mean to be one? It means forcing technological growth with the intent to dominate and control. Think Sankar’s company, Palantir. Think winning at all costs. In Sankar’s own words,

America’s cultural strengths are fundamentally creative and improvisational. The requirements process ensures we play to our weaknesses. In a fight, no one cares about the requirements document. The only requirement is winning. And winning requires engaging in the messy, overlapping, seemingly wasteful but actually efficient process of being better. Validating requirements leads to solving yesterday’s problem without today’s context.

Very isolationist and really far down the “move fast and break things” spectrum. No thought on the consequences, focused solely on the outcome. This works well in the tech world, but not when lives hang in the balance. This mentality was great in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s when the internet was new and ideas were like flies on shit. That was pre-regulations and pre-consequences. We don’t live in that decade any longer and the internet isn’t a toy, it’s life or death.

The technofascist, like all good regressionists, they’re stuck in the past. They believe that anti-regulation is the key to aggressive technological expansion. It’s true, but it’s also dumb. Unfettered innovation isn’t good—it’s easily co-opted and prone to corruption. For Sankar, regulation is the enemy to progress.

Part 2

In part 2, we’ll look into Sankar’s thoughts on a Monopsony and other topics from The Defense Reformation. For now, I’m sick of this shit.